Monday, August 23, 2021
Taliban takeover could open new chasm in US-Pakistan ties
By SHAUN TANDON
Pakistani ex-envoy says Islamabad wants credit for bringing Afghan insurgents to negotiating table but is remembered in Washington for its ‘role in allowing the Taliban to survive’.After the September 11 attacks, the United States gave Pakistan a harsh ultimatum to break with the Taliban. Pakistan offered help but insisted that it would not be abandoned again, as in the 1990s, after Washington lost interest in Afghanistan. Twenty years later, the Taliban has retaken Afghanistan from a US-backed government — and it looks likely that Pakistan will be abandoned again. “Pakistan is too important to be permanently ignored by the US, but this time Americans will take longer to determine the depth of their relationship with Pakistan,” said Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s former ambassador to Washington. The two-decade US war in Afghanistan has been accompanied by a turbulent relationship between the United States and Pakistan, whose then-military ruler Pervez Musharraf vowed “unstinting support” after September 11. Hoping to woo a skeptical Pakistani public, then-senator John Kerry in 2009 spearheaded a civilian aid package of $1.5 billion a year. But US suspicions that Pakistan’s powerful military and intelligence were playing a double-game came into stark relief when Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted man, was found and killed by US commandos inside Pakistan in 2011. The United States finally cut military aid in 2018, under president Donald Trump. Haqqani, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, said Pakistan sought credit for bringing the Taliban to the table with the Afghan government as part of the US withdrawal. But in Washington, “what everyone remembers is what Americans see as Pakistan’s role in allowing the Taliban to survive the blow the Americans inflicted on the Taliban after 9/11,” Haqqani said. While many Pakistanis feel “scapegoated,” Haqqani said Pakistan’s case was not helped by the “triumphalism” of Pakistanis, including Prime Minister Imran Khan. Khan said that the Taliban have “broken the chains of slavery,” while his climate minister, in a since-deleted tweet, hailed the Taliban’s sweep as a “gift” to historic rival India. India lens Pakistan, a Cold War ally of the United States, worked with Washington in the 1980s to back Islamic guerrillas who fought out Soviet troops. Afghanistan stayed mired in war as US interest waned and Pakistan openly backed the Taliban, who imposed a draconian version of Islam under their 1996-2001 regime. Pakistan has long seen Afghanistan through the lens of India, which remembers how the Taliban welcomed virulently anti-Indian militants and has pumped in $3 billion in aid since 2001. Madiha Afzal, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that the Pakistani establishment nonetheless did not likely want a complete Taliban win. “This sort of total military victory of the Taliban puts Pakistan in a position where it’s probably less able to control the Taliban because the Taliban feels it’s victorious,” she said.Islamabad privately also fears “terrible security implications” as Afghanistan could embolden Pakistan’s Taliban in their own violent campaign, she said.US President Joe Biden withdrew troops from Afghanistan, arguing in part that the grinding conflict was a distraction from the greater challenge of a rising China.Amid talk of a Cold War-style rivalry between the world’s two largest economies, Islamabad has emerged as one of the closest allies of Beijing, which is investing heavily in an “economic corridor” in Pakistan at a time that Washington sees India as a leading partner.Afzal said China will also be reliant on Pakistan’s Taliban ties, as it seeks to take advantage of Afghanistan’s mining riches, such as lithium used in electric vehicles. Other ties limited Michael Kugelman, a South Asia expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said the United States could still decide Pakistan is the avenue to influence the Taliban or, if Islamabad agrees, to base counterterrorism operations. If Washington “seeks engagement and wants to get Taliban assurances on issues of rights and governance, then the familiar pressure game will return” on Pakistan, Kugelman said. Visiting Washington shortly before the Taliban takeover, Pakistan’s national security adviser, Moeed Yusuf, called for a long-term relationship that looks beyond single issues. But even though Pakistan has the world’s fifth largest population, it was the 56th trading partner of the United States in 2019 at just $6.6 billion. “The non-security relationship is not strong enough to make up for the lack of a security relationship,” Haqqani said. Afzal said that if the United States steps back, it “will just confirm Pakistan’s existing notions that the US is only using Pakistan opportunistically when it needs it.” “If there isn’t an abandonment and disengagement this time around, I think Pakistanis might take a step back and say, okay, something has changed,” she said.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/taliban-takeover-could-open-new-chasm-in-us-pakistan-ties/
Naila Amin, 31, was a child bride in Pakistan - She was forced to wed at 13. Now she’s helped make child marriage illegal in New York
MAYA BROWN
Naila Amin, 31, was a child bride in Pakistan at the age of 13; she now has a law named after her that bans the practice in New York state.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently signed a bill into law raising the age of marriage consent to 18 in New York. Called “Naila’s Law,” it went into effect Saturday.
Child marriage is when someone under the age of 18 becomes legally married to an adult. Such minors, more likely girls than boys, are often forced into marriage because of socioeconomic factors by families who want to minimize their economic burden or earn income as a result of the marriage, according to UNICEF. Religious and cultural norms also contribute to its ongoing practice. The practice is technically still legal in 44 U.S. states, as most allow marriage before 18. Cuomo signed legislation in New York in 2017 that raised the age of consent to marry from 14 to 18, but 17-year-olds could be married with parental and judicial consent. Amin, an activist, founded the Naila Amin Foundation to help victims of child marriage and has been pushing U.S. states to end it for years. In 2018, she helped New Jersey raise the minimum marriage age to 18, making it the second state to do so. Shortly after, Amin went to New York state Assemblyman Philip Ramos’ office in Brentwood on Long Island and told him about being a former child bride. “This story just touched my heart and it moved me to come up with legislation to outlaw child marriage,” Ramos said. Because of the pandemic, Amin saw the proposed bill start to “slip through the cracks.” “I emailed every Assembly member and every senator in New York state with my story and said please support this bill,” Amin said. “I think it was about 150 Assembly members and it took me days, but I did it. We can’t let this happen to our children anymore." Once she found out the bill had cleared unanimously, she called Cuomo’s office daily to urge him to sign it, leaving her with a feeling of anxiety. She partnered up with Unchained At Last, an organization dedicated to ending forced and child marriage, which promised to begin protesting outside Cuomo’s office weekly if the bill wasn’t turned into a law. “I am so sick of crying over this because it’s like repeating myself all over again. Why can’t we just end it?" Amin said. When Cuomo finally signed the bill, making New York the sixth state to ban child marriage, Amin said it felt "almost surreal, a very happy feeling." “When I found out about it, I was laying on a couch and I just started crying tears of happiness,” she said. Amin says this is only the beginning, as her goal is to end child marriage in all 50 states. She is currently working on a federal bill to have U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services raise the spousal sponsorship to 18. Her goals stem from personal experience, as she never got to experience childhood. During a trip to her cousin’s wedding in Pakistan, Amin found out that she was engaged at 8 years old to her first cousin Tariq. Five years later, she found herself at a Nikah ceremony, a traditional Islamic marriage that is done without an official marriage license. She married her 21-year-old cousin against her will. During her marriage, Amin lived in constant fear, finding herself curled up on the floor waiting to be beaten or raped. Her father applied to legalize the marriage and for an American spousal visa so that Tariq could become a U.S. citizen. About a year later, she returned to the U.S. and once her parents found out she had started a relationship there, they beat her. Amin was taken away by Child Protective Services and put into foster care. She later ran away and returned home. She was eventually sent back to Pakistan right before she turned 15 to consummate the marriage. Three months later, she was rescued by the U.S. Embassy and brought back to New York, where she was no longer considered Tariq’s wife. The fact that Amin was still technically a ward of the foster care system in the U.S. saved her life. The Pew Research Center says asking for judicial consent or presenting parents’ permission are ways to bypass the minimum age to marry in many states. Unchained At Last recently released a study that found that Citizenship and Immigration Services approved 8,868 petitions involving minors for spousal or fiancé entry into the U.S. from 2007 to 2017. The younger party was a girl in 95 percent of the petitions. “The age of marriage needs to be higher to eliminate child marriage,” Fraidy Reiss, Unchained's founder and executive director, said. “We’re talking about that rare legislation that harms no one except child rapists — it costs nothing. This simple commonsense legislation ends a human rights abuse and we can do this right here today; legislators just need to step up.” The survivor-led organization provides free legal and social services to help individuals resist or escape. “Our ultimate goal is to help all the survivors we work with to achieve full financial and emotional independence, and we have been able to help more than 700 people in this way,” Reiss said, who is a victim of a strictly Orthodox forced marriage that took her 15 years to get out of. As of 2020, there were an estimated 285 million child brides in South Asia. About 59 percent of girls are married before the age of 18 in Bangladesh, 27 percent in India and 18 percent in Pakistan, according to data from Girls Not Brides. The Women’s Refuge Commission says South Asian families force their daughters into child marriage as it is perceived to be the best means to provide economic and physical security. Even though almost half of all women in South Asia aged 20-24 reported being married before the age of 18, the rates of child marriage are currently decreasing in the region. Amin stressed that child marriage does not happen only to South Asian women, but it also affects women in other countries. In Latin America and the Caribbean, about 1 in 4 women are married before 18. Most of the top 20 countries with the highest prevalence rates of child marriage are in Africa, with Niger having the highest child marriage rate in the world. In west and central Africa, about 41 percent of girls in the region marry before reaching the age of 18. It also greatly affects women in the U.S., as approximately 40 children are married each day in America. Nearly 300,000 minors under the age of 18 were legally married in the U.S. from 2000 to 2018, according to a recent study. States with the highest per-capita rates of child marriage include Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Nevada and Oklahoma. Child marriage in the U.S. is typically driven by poverty or social and cultural norms. “People need to get that out of their head that this is a Muslim issue because it’s not. It’s American,” Amin said. Casey Swegman, the Forced Marriage Initiative project manager at the Tahirih Justice Center, said child marriage can have physical, economic, social and mental impacts, including depression and a loss of education. Amin still endures those effects today as she suffers from an anxiety disorder and has developed psoriasis. “It’s a trauma response and it’s just been really hard,” Amin said. “But I know that my two-and-a-half years of work was really worth it. This is one of the proudest moments of my life.” Amin says her past has taught her resiliency and how to survive. “I’ve been surviving for the past 31 years,” she said. “It made me realize that there is a fire inside of me that can’t be extinguished. It made me realize women can do anything, we can do anything.”
Child marriage is when someone under the age of 18 becomes legally married to an adult. Such minors, more likely girls than boys, are often forced into marriage because of socioeconomic factors by families who want to minimize their economic burden or earn income as a result of the marriage, according to UNICEF. Religious and cultural norms also contribute to its ongoing practice. The practice is technically still legal in 44 U.S. states, as most allow marriage before 18. Cuomo signed legislation in New York in 2017 that raised the age of consent to marry from 14 to 18, but 17-year-olds could be married with parental and judicial consent. Amin, an activist, founded the Naila Amin Foundation to help victims of child marriage and has been pushing U.S. states to end it for years. In 2018, she helped New Jersey raise the minimum marriage age to 18, making it the second state to do so. Shortly after, Amin went to New York state Assemblyman Philip Ramos’ office in Brentwood on Long Island and told him about being a former child bride. “This story just touched my heart and it moved me to come up with legislation to outlaw child marriage,” Ramos said. Because of the pandemic, Amin saw the proposed bill start to “slip through the cracks.” “I emailed every Assembly member and every senator in New York state with my story and said please support this bill,” Amin said. “I think it was about 150 Assembly members and it took me days, but I did it. We can’t let this happen to our children anymore." Once she found out the bill had cleared unanimously, she called Cuomo’s office daily to urge him to sign it, leaving her with a feeling of anxiety. She partnered up with Unchained At Last, an organization dedicated to ending forced and child marriage, which promised to begin protesting outside Cuomo’s office weekly if the bill wasn’t turned into a law. “I am so sick of crying over this because it’s like repeating myself all over again. Why can’t we just end it?" Amin said. When Cuomo finally signed the bill, making New York the sixth state to ban child marriage, Amin said it felt "almost surreal, a very happy feeling." “When I found out about it, I was laying on a couch and I just started crying tears of happiness,” she said. Amin says this is only the beginning, as her goal is to end child marriage in all 50 states. She is currently working on a federal bill to have U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services raise the spousal sponsorship to 18. Her goals stem from personal experience, as she never got to experience childhood. During a trip to her cousin’s wedding in Pakistan, Amin found out that she was engaged at 8 years old to her first cousin Tariq. Five years later, she found herself at a Nikah ceremony, a traditional Islamic marriage that is done without an official marriage license. She married her 21-year-old cousin against her will. During her marriage, Amin lived in constant fear, finding herself curled up on the floor waiting to be beaten or raped. Her father applied to legalize the marriage and for an American spousal visa so that Tariq could become a U.S. citizen. About a year later, she returned to the U.S. and once her parents found out she had started a relationship there, they beat her. Amin was taken away by Child Protective Services and put into foster care. She later ran away and returned home. She was eventually sent back to Pakistan right before she turned 15 to consummate the marriage. Three months later, she was rescued by the U.S. Embassy and brought back to New York, where she was no longer considered Tariq’s wife. The fact that Amin was still technically a ward of the foster care system in the U.S. saved her life. The Pew Research Center says asking for judicial consent or presenting parents’ permission are ways to bypass the minimum age to marry in many states. Unchained At Last recently released a study that found that Citizenship and Immigration Services approved 8,868 petitions involving minors for spousal or fiancé entry into the U.S. from 2007 to 2017. The younger party was a girl in 95 percent of the petitions. “The age of marriage needs to be higher to eliminate child marriage,” Fraidy Reiss, Unchained's founder and executive director, said. “We’re talking about that rare legislation that harms no one except child rapists — it costs nothing. This simple commonsense legislation ends a human rights abuse and we can do this right here today; legislators just need to step up.” The survivor-led organization provides free legal and social services to help individuals resist or escape. “Our ultimate goal is to help all the survivors we work with to achieve full financial and emotional independence, and we have been able to help more than 700 people in this way,” Reiss said, who is a victim of a strictly Orthodox forced marriage that took her 15 years to get out of. As of 2020, there were an estimated 285 million child brides in South Asia. About 59 percent of girls are married before the age of 18 in Bangladesh, 27 percent in India and 18 percent in Pakistan, according to data from Girls Not Brides. The Women’s Refuge Commission says South Asian families force their daughters into child marriage as it is perceived to be the best means to provide economic and physical security. Even though almost half of all women in South Asia aged 20-24 reported being married before the age of 18, the rates of child marriage are currently decreasing in the region. Amin stressed that child marriage does not happen only to South Asian women, but it also affects women in other countries. In Latin America and the Caribbean, about 1 in 4 women are married before 18. Most of the top 20 countries with the highest prevalence rates of child marriage are in Africa, with Niger having the highest child marriage rate in the world. In west and central Africa, about 41 percent of girls in the region marry before reaching the age of 18. It also greatly affects women in the U.S., as approximately 40 children are married each day in America. Nearly 300,000 minors under the age of 18 were legally married in the U.S. from 2000 to 2018, according to a recent study. States with the highest per-capita rates of child marriage include Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Nevada and Oklahoma. Child marriage in the U.S. is typically driven by poverty or social and cultural norms. “People need to get that out of their head that this is a Muslim issue because it’s not. It’s American,” Amin said. Casey Swegman, the Forced Marriage Initiative project manager at the Tahirih Justice Center, said child marriage can have physical, economic, social and mental impacts, including depression and a loss of education. Amin still endures those effects today as she suffers from an anxiety disorder and has developed psoriasis. “It’s a trauma response and it’s just been really hard,” Amin said. “But I know that my two-and-a-half years of work was really worth it. This is one of the proudest moments of my life.” Amin says her past has taught her resiliency and how to survive. “I’ve been surviving for the past 31 years,” she said. “It made me realize that there is a fire inside of me that can’t be extinguished. It made me realize women can do anything, we can do anything.”
https://www.aol.com/she-forced-wed-13-now-183258041.html
Opinion: The Pakistani media faces a new crackdown
A new law could mark the beginning of the end for Pakistan’s hard-won media freedoms.
In 2009, I set out to broadcast a live show direct from the Swat Valley in northern Pakistan — right after the government had signed a peace deal with the Pakistani Taliban, which controlled the area at the time. But only a few hours before the show, one of my reporter friends, Musa Khan Khel, was gunned down by unknown people in Taliban territory. That evening I led a rally to protest his death. One of the people who came was an 11-year-old blogger by the name of Malala Yousafzai.
She was supporting the right to an education for girls, which was denied by the Taliban. I suggested that she come on my live show and speak her mind. Malala agreed. Within hours, she became a media star. Back then, thanks to the efforts of many defenders of our democratic institutions, it was possible for the Pakistani media to take a strong, public stand even in places dominated by the Taliban. Consider the contrast with the present. Today, Malala is a global celebrity. Yet recently the local authorities in Punjab province seized seventh-grade textbooks because they contained pictures of her. Today, though, the Pakistani media is no longer in a position to stand behind Malala — even though Punjab province is not ruled by the Taliban. It is ruled by the party of Prime Minister Imran Khan. Unfortunately, his government is showing its contempt for media freedom and working to suppress dissenting voices — just like the Taliban used to do in Swat. Although Pakistan is a democracy, journalists now fear that a crackdown on the media is in the offing. The government of Imran Khan is moving ahead with a law to create a new media regulator, to be called the “Pakistan Media Development Authority,” to oversee mainstream and social media. The body will have draconian powers. All the major media organizations have rejected this proposed “reform” with a single voice; some are calling it “media martial law.” The million-dollar question is this: Why does Imran Khan need a new regulatory body for the media, and why is the journalistic community so united against it? Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry has said the government plans to table the bill in parliament in the next few days, and that it will be imposed within 45 days after passage. The proposed law is just the latest stage of an effort to impose state control over all segments of the media by creating an overcentralized body to be headed by a top bureaucrat of the information ministry. According to the new law, all media outlets including social media platforms will require an annual waiver from the government to remain operational. Failure to comply will result in suspension and other penalties. For the first time in Pakistan’s history, special media regulatory authority will be introduced to punish “offenders” from the media with three years’ imprisonment and fines amounting to 25 million Pakistani rupees ($152,000 in U.S. dollars). When I asked Minister Chaudhry why his ministry wanted to establish media tribunals, he said: “We have only proposed fines for violating journalistic ethics.” He claimed: “The media tribunals will decide disputes between the media workers and the owners.” Yet, journalists can hardly be blamed for suspecting that this law is yet another attempt to legalize censorship. Many analysts think that the new proposed law does not bode well for democracy and that the Pakistani media is entering a new dark age. Many independent journalists as well as social media commentators are already facing false cases registered by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) under cyber laws. The most recent incident in this regard was the arrest of two vocal journalists from Lahore, Amir Mir and Imran Shafqat. Journalists have good reason to worry that the new law will only create new problems for the already brutalized and terrified media. The Afghan Taliban has captured Kabul, and their Pakistani allies are also returning to the Swat Valley and other parts of the country. A few days ago Prime Minister Khan praised the Afghan Taliban for, as he put it, “breaking the shackles of slavery.” And that raises an obvious question: So why is he making new shackles for the media in Pakistan? Pakistan needs a strong and free media to fight growing threat of extremism. “Media martial law” will only help those who can’t tolerate the pictures of Malala in our schoolbooks and who don’t want to see democracy in Pakistan flourish. The talk of an impending dark age for the media looks more justified by the day. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/23/pakistani-media-faces-new-crackdown/
She was supporting the right to an education for girls, which was denied by the Taliban. I suggested that she come on my live show and speak her mind. Malala agreed. Within hours, she became a media star. Back then, thanks to the efforts of many defenders of our democratic institutions, it was possible for the Pakistani media to take a strong, public stand even in places dominated by the Taliban. Consider the contrast with the present. Today, Malala is a global celebrity. Yet recently the local authorities in Punjab province seized seventh-grade textbooks because they contained pictures of her. Today, though, the Pakistani media is no longer in a position to stand behind Malala — even though Punjab province is not ruled by the Taliban. It is ruled by the party of Prime Minister Imran Khan. Unfortunately, his government is showing its contempt for media freedom and working to suppress dissenting voices — just like the Taliban used to do in Swat. Although Pakistan is a democracy, journalists now fear that a crackdown on the media is in the offing. The government of Imran Khan is moving ahead with a law to create a new media regulator, to be called the “Pakistan Media Development Authority,” to oversee mainstream and social media. The body will have draconian powers. All the major media organizations have rejected this proposed “reform” with a single voice; some are calling it “media martial law.” The million-dollar question is this: Why does Imran Khan need a new regulatory body for the media, and why is the journalistic community so united against it? Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry has said the government plans to table the bill in parliament in the next few days, and that it will be imposed within 45 days after passage. The proposed law is just the latest stage of an effort to impose state control over all segments of the media by creating an overcentralized body to be headed by a top bureaucrat of the information ministry. According to the new law, all media outlets including social media platforms will require an annual waiver from the government to remain operational. Failure to comply will result in suspension and other penalties. For the first time in Pakistan’s history, special media regulatory authority will be introduced to punish “offenders” from the media with three years’ imprisonment and fines amounting to 25 million Pakistani rupees ($152,000 in U.S. dollars). When I asked Minister Chaudhry why his ministry wanted to establish media tribunals, he said: “We have only proposed fines for violating journalistic ethics.” He claimed: “The media tribunals will decide disputes between the media workers and the owners.” Yet, journalists can hardly be blamed for suspecting that this law is yet another attempt to legalize censorship. Many analysts think that the new proposed law does not bode well for democracy and that the Pakistani media is entering a new dark age. Many independent journalists as well as social media commentators are already facing false cases registered by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) under cyber laws. The most recent incident in this regard was the arrest of two vocal journalists from Lahore, Amir Mir and Imran Shafqat. Journalists have good reason to worry that the new law will only create new problems for the already brutalized and terrified media. The Afghan Taliban has captured Kabul, and their Pakistani allies are also returning to the Swat Valley and other parts of the country. A few days ago Prime Minister Khan praised the Afghan Taliban for, as he put it, “breaking the shackles of slavery.” And that raises an obvious question: So why is he making new shackles for the media in Pakistan? Pakistan needs a strong and free media to fight growing threat of extremism. “Media martial law” will only help those who can’t tolerate the pictures of Malala in our schoolbooks and who don’t want to see democracy in Pakistan flourish. The talk of an impending dark age for the media looks more justified by the day. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/23/pakistani-media-faces-new-crackdown/