“There will be no democratic system at all because it does not have any base in our country,” Hashimi said. “We will not discuss what type of political system should we apply in Afghanistan because it is clear. It is sharia law and that is it.”
The Taliban has a particularly strict interpretation of sharia law. It has said that women’s rights will be respected under the framework of the religious code and Hashimi told Reuters issues like what women can wear will be determined by a council of Islamic scholars.
Here’s what to know
Trump’s pledge to pull out of Afghanistan was a ‘play,’ says his last defense secretary
Former president Donald Trump didn’t intend to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan, according to Trump’s last acting defense secretary.
Christopher C. Miller told Defense One that Trump’s promise to pull out troops by May 1 was a “play.” Instead the previous administration purportedly intended to convince Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to resign or accept a power-sharing deal with the Taliban. The United States would also have kept a counterterrorism presence in the country, he said.
Miller said that war games he oversaw in 2019 while serving as a top counterrorism official suggested the United States could conduct such missions with just 800 military personnel in the country. At least one other former senior Trump administration official questioned Miller’s version of events, Defense One reported.
Another former Trump defense secretary, Mark T. Esper, has blamed both President Biden and Trump for the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan.
During an interview with CNN late Tuesday, Esper faulted Biden for the chaotic execution of the U.S. withdrawal. Biden could have postponed the Sept. 11 deadline he had set for the pullout of all American forces, or pressured the Taliban to better adhere to a pact that obliged the militants to pursue peace talks with the U.S.-backed Afghan government, Esper said.
Esper also said that Trump’s attempts to accelerate the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan helped embolden the Taliban.
In an abrupt tweet in October 2020, Trump expressed hope for bringing back by Christmas the 5,000 or so American troops in Afghanistan at the time. The announcement — made a month before Trump was voted out of office — drew criticism from Esper and senior military officers. They feared that such a move would precipitate the events unfolding now.
Esper was fired shortly after the November election, and Miller, who replaced him as defense secretary, announced a drawdown of American forces that cut the troop level to 2,500 by mid-January.
Afghanistan under the Taliban could look much like the last time
Afghanistan is likely to be run by the Taliban under a comparable system to the last time the Islamist militant group was in power, with a senior commander ruling out a democracy and saying that Islamic scholars will decide on the rights of women.
Waheedullah Hashimi, a high-ranking Taliban commander, told Reuters that the country would probably be governed by a council of the group’s leaders. The Taliban supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, is likely to remain in charge, above the head of the council, whose role he likened to a president.
“There will be no democratic system at all because it does not have any base in our country,” Hashimi said. “We will not discuss what type of political system should we apply in Afghanistan because it is clear. It is sharia law, and that is it.”
The last time the Taliban was in power from 1996 to 2001, a council made operational decisions, with then-Supreme Leader Mohammad Omar overseeing their directives.
Hashimi, in the Reuters interview, hinted at a regime that could be as oppressive toward women as when the militants last ran Afghanistan. He said the right of women to education and work, and how they dress, would be decided by a council of Islamic scholars. It wasn’t immediately clear if this council was the same group that could be appointed to run the country.
In a news conference earlier this week, a Taliban spokesman pledged the militant group would refrain from retaliatory violence and respect women’s rights. But many world leaders and analysts are skeptical about whether the group will stick to those promises once international troops withdraw. Afghans are already being physically attacked at Taliban checkpoints as they attempt to make it to Kabul airport to board evacuation flights, according to numerous reports and an eyewitness account. Women have begun retreating from public life.
“Our [scholars] will decide whether girls are allowed to go to school or not,” he said. “They will decide whether they should wear hijab, burqa, or only [a] veil plus abaya or something, or not. That is up to them.”
Aid groups warn of possible refugee crisis in Afghanistan far beyond Western evacuation plans
As the Biden administration surges more evacuation personnel to Kabul’s international airport, aid groups are warning that a much larger refugee crisis looms because of the displacement of half a million Afghans in the past eight months of fighting between the Taliban and Afghan National Army.
Analysts say the size of the refugee outflow of those and potentially tens of thousands more will depend heavily on how the Taliban governs and whether an insurgency emerges to challenge its rule, resulting in further bloodshed and displacement.
Just as millions of Afghans fled their country when the Taliban first took power in 1996, the reemergence of the militants on the streets of Kabul and other cities has already sent thousands fleeing to the closest border they can find.
Taiwan’s leader addresses the fall of Afghanistan’s government
Taiwan must be wary of relying too heavily on others for protection, President Tsai Ing-wen said Wednesday while addressing the Afghanistan crisis for the first time.
“The only option for Taiwan is to make itself stronger, more united and more determined to defend itself,” Tsai said in a televised speech. It is not an option for the self-governing island, which is claimed by China as its territory, to depend “on the momentary goodwill or charity” of others, she said, adding that Taiwan must “make its presence meaningful” on the international stage by upholding liberal and democratic values.
Amid scenes of chaos from the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, state-backed news outlets and pundits in China have attempted to tie American policy in Afghanistan to its alliance with Taiwan. The state-run Global Times said in an editorial that U.S. “abandonment” of Afghanistan could serve as an “omen of Taiwan’s future fate,” even as experts have stressed that the two geopolitical situations are vastly different.
Beijing has recently amplified calls to seize Taiwan and “realize China’s complete reunification,” with incursions into the island’s airspace intensifying in scale and frequency.
Taiwan has had a security relationship with the United States for more than seven decades and is among America’s top trading partners. Unlike Afghanistan, it has a robust and stable government that is widely supported by its citizens and serves as a key partner to Washington in the face of rising competition with China, noted political scientist Kharis Templeman.
Canada to resume military evacuation flights, defense minister says
TORONTO — Canada’s defense minister said Wednesday that Canadian Armed Forces flights to Kabul would “resume shortly” to evacuate people fleeing the Taliban, though it remained unclear how many evacuees they would carry as militants restrict access to the airport.
Harjit Sajjan said in a tweet that two CC-177 Globemasters — aircraft often used in humanitarian and peacekeeping missions — had been assigned to Canada’s evacuation efforts and would be “flying regularly” to and from the Afghan capital.
“These flights will continue as long as the security situation on the ground permits,” Sajjan said, adding that they “will focus on evacuating Canadians and Afghan nationals who have an enduring relationship with Canada’s mission in Afghanistan.”
The announcement came the same day that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau again faced questions about what critics charge is red tape hampering efforts to evacuate Afghans who supported Canada’s war effort and who are at risk of Taliban reprisals.
Trudeau defended his government’s response, saying that the “limiting factor” was not Canadian bureaucracy, but the Taliban, which he said was blocking access to Kabul airport.
“We just need people to be able to get to the airport,” Trudeau told reporters in Vancouver, B.C. “Right now, the Taliban are preventing people from doing so, which is why we’ve seen a number of the planes airlifting people out have not been full.”
Ninety-two people arrived in Canada on Tuesday, Trudeau said, adding that all of the Gurkha troops supporting Canada’s mission in Afghanistan have also been evacuated.
Canada has announced it will resettle about 20,000 Afghan refugees, including approximately 6,000 Afghans who aided Canada’s war effort. Most of them, Trudeau said, will be Afghans who have escaped to third countries, rather than people coming directly from Kabul.
Under U.S. pressure, IMF withholds hundreds of millions from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan
The International Monetary Fund will suspend a plan to provide hundreds of millions of dollars to Afghanistan after pressure from the Biden administration to withhold financial resources from the Taliban regime now in power.
The IMF had been set to provide the country with approximately $460 million in Special Drawing Rights next week, as part of a broader program to boost the finances of developing economies suffering from the coronavirus pandemic. The SDRs can be converted into different currencies.
“The IMF is guided by the views of the international community,” Gerry Rice, a spokesman for the IMF, said in a statement. “There is currently a lack of clarity within the international community regarding recognition of a government in Afghanistan.”
No governments have formal diplomatic relations with the new regime in Kabul.
The United States, whose military withdrawal helped speed up the fall of the Western-backed government in Kabul, is the largest cumulative contributor to the IMF. Washington has enough voting power that it can effectively veto major decisions.
The Biden administration is taking numerous measures to ensure that money doesn’t fall into the hands of the Taliban. Washington on Sunday froze billions of dollars worth of Afghan government reserves held in U.S. bank accounts. GOP lawmakers had been urging the administration to tighten the fiscal screws on the Taliban, citing the militant group’s history of supporting acts of terrorism against the United States.
Afghanistan is already one of the poorest countries in the world and is highly dependent on American aid that is now in jeopardy, The Washington Post has reported. The Biden administration will face difficult decisions over how to manage existing sanctions on the Taliban, which may make it difficult to deliver international humanitarian assistance to a population facing ruin, experts say.
Analysis: Democrats offer some harsh reviews of Biden on Afghanistan
President Biden on Monday detailed a defense of his administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan that basically boiled down to this: Withdrawal was still the right thing to do, but it was complicated by others, including President Donald Trump and Afghans who refused to fight the Taliban or take our advice.
But, increasingly, that explanation isn’t satisfying some top Democrats.
Democrats as a whole have largely hued to the Biden administration’s key talking point — on the rightness of the withdrawal. But that’s not really what the current debate is about; it’s about whether a long-planned withdrawal with long-standing bipartisan support was executed appropriately. And some Democrats are speaking out about the latter issue — including three key Senate committee chairmen and some military veterans in the House.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiV2h0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS93b3JsZC8yMDIxLzA4LzE5L2FmZ2hhbmlzdGFuLWthYnVsLXRhbGliYW4tbGl2ZS11cGRhdGVzL9IBAA?oc=5
2021-08-19 08:02:53Z
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar