Video Report - Colin Powell dies at 84

Video - Full Interview: President Vladimir #Putin - #Russian Energy Week

Video Report - #COVID19 #superimmune Immunity to all forms of the coronavirus may be closer than we thought

Zalmay Khalilzad, Biden’s Envoy for Afghanistan, Steps Down

By Michael Crowley

An Afghan American and a rare Trump appointee who survived into the Biden administration, Mr. Khalilzad played a central role in the U.S. exit from the country.

Zalmay Khalilzad, President Biden’s envoy for Afghanistan and a rare Trump appointee to remain in the new administration, is departing from the government, the State Department said on Monday. Mr. Khalilzad, 70, who was born in Afghanistan and grew up in the capital, Kabul, was a veteran of past Republican administrations who helped President George W. Bush plan the overthrow of the Taliban in 2002, and then negotiated with Taliban leaders the terms of America’s humbling and ultimately tumultuous exit from the country nearly 20 years later. After President Donald J. Trump appointed him in September 2018 to pursue peace negotiations with the Taliban, Mr. Khalilzad spent much of the following 18 months in Doha, Qatar, meeting with Taliban representatives to craft an agreement, signed in February 2020, under which the Trump administration committed to the full withdrawal of American troops that Mr. Biden completed in August.

To his critics, Mr. Khalilzad enabled a peace process that was little more than a fig leaf for Mr. Trump’s determination to exit Afghanistan swiftly, with little regard for the fate of its government or people. In recent interviews, Mr. Khalilzad has argued that he did not set overall U.S. policy and extracted as many concessions as he could from Taliban leaders.

In an Oct. 18 resignation letter to Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, in which he said he would step down on Tuesday, Mr. Khalilzad said that he was asked to join the Trump administration “after the decision had been made to substantially reduce or end the military and economic burden of the Afghan engagement on the U.S. and to free those resources for vital priorities, including domestic needs and the challenge of dealing with issues related to China.” Mr. Khalilzad, who long supported the vision of a more modernized, pluralistic and democratic Afghanistan, lamented in his letter that “the political arrangement between the Afghan government and the Taliban did not go forward as envisaged.” “The reasons for this are too complex and I will share my thoughts in the coming days and weeks, after leaving government service,” he wrote. As the Taliban stormed through the country in August, capturing city after city, Mr. Khalilzad continued to negotiate with its leaders, urging them to negotiate a peaceful political transition and political power-sharing agreement with the Afghan government. He was unable to do so before President Ashraf Ghani fled the country on Aug. 15, saying he feared for his life. After the Taliban captured Kabul, Mr. Khalilzad helped facilitate safe passage for American civilians and at-risk Afghans. In all, 120,000 people were evacuated from the country.

A naturalized American citizen, Mr. Khalilzad had a lifelong personal investment in the country he first left for the United States as a high school exchange student. He served as envoy for Afghanistan during the Bush administration and then U.S. ambassador, and even once considered seeking the Afghan presidency.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Mr. Khalilzad introduced Mr. Trump before a foreign policy speech hosted by the Center for the National Interest, with which Mr. Khalilzad was affiliated, and was rewarded with the Afghanistan envoy post under Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Many Democrats assumed that Mr. Khalilzad would leave government at the end of the Trump administration, but Mr. Blinken asked him to remain in his job, with the official title of special envoy for Afghanistan reconciliation.

Mr. Blinken valued Mr. Khalilzad’s deep familiarity with Taliban leaders as the Biden administration continued to negotiate the terms of America’s military exit. Mr. Khalilzad also benefited from his relationship with Mr. Biden, whom he hosted during visits to Afghanistan when he was ambassador and Mr. Biden a senator. In a statement on Monday, Mr. Blinken thanked Mr. Khalilzad for his “decades of service to the American people.” Mr. Blinken said that Mr. Khalilzad’s deputy, Tom West, would become the State Department’s special representative for Afghanistan. Mr. Khalilzad has already begun to ruminate in public on how the U.S. project in Afghanistan failed so badly. In an interview with Foreign Policy magazine published last month, he said the notion that he made the decision to withdraw all American troops from the country “boggles the mind,” and joked that he was flattered at the idea that he was the mastermind of the U.S. exit. He said important questions he would ponder included whether America’s “ambitions were too large compared to the strategy and resources” and whether Washington “should have pushed harder for a political settlement earlier.”

And he ultimately pointed a finger at the Afghan government for failing to come to terms with a growing reality over the past several years.

“I think that the grand miscalculation of the Afghan leadership was this: that we were not going to leave,” he said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/18/us/politics/zalmay-khalilzad-afghanistan.html

Afghan Taliban's victory boosts Pakistan's radicals

KATHY GANNON

In Pakistan’s rugged tribal regions along the border with Afghanistan, a quiet and persistent warning is circulating: The Taliban are returning.

Pakistan’s own Taliban movement, which had in years past waged a violent campaign against the Islamabad government, has been emboldened by the return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan. They seem to be preparing to retake control of the tribal regions that they lost nearly seven years ago in a major operation by Pakistan’s military. Pakistani Taliban are already increasing their influence. Local contractors report Taliban-imposed surcharges on every contract and the killing of those who defy them. In early September, for example, a contractor named Noor Islam Dawar built a small canal not far from the town of Mir Ali near the Afghan border. It wasn’t worth more than $5,000. Still, the Taliban came calling, demanding their share of $1,100. Dawar had nothing to give and pleaded for their understanding, according to relatives and local activists. A week later he was dead, shot by unknown gunmen. His family blames the Taliban. Pakistan’s Taliban, known as the Tehrik-e-Taliban or TTP, is a separate organization from Afghanistan’s Taliban, though they share much of the same hardline ideology and are allied. The TTP arose in the early 2000s and launched a campaign of bombings and other attacks, vowing to bring down the Pakistani government and seizing control in many tribal areas. The military crackdown of the 2010s managed to repress it.

But the TTP was reorganizing in safe havens in Afghanistan even before the Afghan Taliban took over Kabul on Aug. 15. “The Afghan Taliban’s stunning success in defeating the American superpower has emboldened the Pakistani Taliban...They now seem to believe they too can wage a successful jihad against the Pakistani ‘infidel’ state and have returned to insurgency mode,” said Brian Glyn Williams, Islamic history professor at the University of Massachusetts, who has written extensively on jihad movements.

The TTP has ramped up attacks in recent months. More than 300 Pakistanis have been killed in terrorist attacks since January, including 144 military personnel, according to the Islamabad-based Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies. The events in Afghanistan have also energized the scores of radical religious parties in Pakistan, said Amir Rana, executive director of the Islamabad-based Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies. These parties openly revile minority Shiite Muslims as heretics and on occasion bring thousands on to the street to defend their hardline interpretation of Islam. One party, the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan, has a single agenda: to protect a controversial blasphemy law. The law has been used against minorities and opponents and can incite mobs to kill simply over an accusation of insulting Islam. Already buffeted by a growing religiosity, Pakistani society is at risk of transforming into one similar to Taliban-run Afghanistan, Rana warned. A Gallup Pakistan poll released last week found 55% of Pakistanis would support an “Islamic government” like the one advocated by Afghanistan’s Taliban. Gallup surveyed 2,170 Pakistanis soon after the Taliban takeover in Kabul.

Pakistan has shied away from offering unilateral recognition to the all-Taliban government in Afghanistan, but has been pushing for the world to engage with the new rulers. It has urged the United States to release funds to the Afghan government, while urging the Taliban to open their ranks to minorities and non-Taliban. Pakistan’s relationship with the Afghan Taliban is a constant source of angst in America, where Republican senators have introduced a law that would sanction Islamabad for allegedly working against the U.S. to bring the Taliban to power. The charge has angered Pakistan, whose leaders say it was asked and delivered the Taliban to the negotiation table with the U.S., which eventually led to an agreement paving the way for America’s final withdrawal.

Pakistan’s ties to many of the Afghan Taliban go back to the 1980s when Pakistan was the staging arena for a U.S.-backed fight against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. In particular, the Haqqani group, possibly Afghanistan’s most powerful Taliban faction, has a long relationship with Pakistan’s intelligence agency, ISI. Pakistan has turned to Sirajuddin Haqqani, the interior minister in Afghanistan's new Taliban government, for help in starting talks with the Pakistani Taliban, said Asfandyar Mir, a senior expert at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Some TTP figures in North Waziristan -- a rugged area the group once controlled -- are ready to negotiate. But the most violent factions, led by Noor Wali Mehsud, are not interested in talks. Mehsud’s Taliban want control of South Waziristan, said Mir. It’s not clear whether Haqqani will be able to get Mehsud to the table or whether Afghanistan’s new rulers are ready to break their close ties with Pakistan’s Taliban. In the attempts to put together negotiations with Islamabad, the TTP is demanding control over parts of the tribal regions and rule by its strict interpretation of Islamic Shariah law in those areas, as well as the right to keep their weapons, according to two Pakistani figures familiar with the demands. They spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media and because they fear retaliation.

Bill Roggio of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a U.S.-based think tank, said Pakistan is opening talks with the Taliban to stop the increasing attacks on its military, but he warned that “the government is opening Pandora’s box.” “The TTP will not be satisfied with ruling a small portion of Pakistan, it will inevitably want more than what it is given,” Roggio said. “Like the Afghan Taliban wanted to rule Afghanistan, the TTP wants to rule Pakistan.”

https://news.yahoo.com/afghan-talibans-victory-boosts-pakistans-060652186.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAABrZpe2PtaVJiZ73OXeGwC_UCZf-VcGTkwIxFwkuY9N7Pivt-LrM1oEarSWCsHeN3BFEm4CGaH_qWhis9DNXK0Gpih6BiJTgU6VCkGAoTn_6v8sXUHX4rwh24AusQNVtQmrNw5ysgOKpj9YRHtpKXNcIrEk7NudYyQ2tQ02oCu7K