Day: May 18, 2022

He regularly meets foreign diplomats and speaks in public but is also the FBI’s most wanted man in Afghanistan.

Sirajuddin Haqqani, the Taliban’s acting interior minister, even appeared on CNN on Tuesday with a conciliatory message for Americans. “In the future, we would like to have good relations with the United States,” he told CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour, who donned a green headscarf for the rare interview.

Last week, Tomas Niklasson, the European Union’s special envoy for Afghanistan, met Haqqani in Kabul and urged him to reopen secondary schools for girls. Last month, Haqqani spoke with Martin Griffiths, the United Nations’ under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, about the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan.

Haqqani’s public appearances stand at odds with a U.S. call for information about his whereabouts. Reward for Justice, a U.S. Department of State program aimed at combating international terrorism, offers $10 million for information that will lead to Haqqani’s arrest.

“The bounty on Siraj[uddin] Haqqani at this point is meaningless,” Asfandyar Mir, a senior analyst at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), told VOA. “Haqqani is now one of the main — if not the main — interlocutors for the international community in Afghanistan.”

The U.S. government does not recognize the Taliban’s de facto government and has closed the U.S. embassy in Kabul indefinitely. There is no indication U.S. officials have met with Haqqani.

U.S. officials have, however, met with Haqqani’s younger brother, Anas Haqqani — who is not wanted — during talks with Taliban representatives in Qatar. In addition to Sirajuddin Haqqani, the U.S. government is offering a $5 million bounty on Abdul Aziz Haqqani, another younger brother of Sirajuddin, and $3 million for Khalil Haqqani, Sirajuddin’s uncle and a current Taliban cabinet minister.

Heirs to insurgent commander

The three most wanted Haqqanis are heirs to Jaluluddin Haqqani, the late Afghan guerrilla commander who allegedly received U.S., Saudi and Pakistani support to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan in 1980s. Jaluluddin died from an unspecified illness in 2018 at age 78.

While functionally part of the Taliban group, the Haqqanis run a distinct terror, kidnapping and criminal enterprise known as the Haqqani network, or HQN. In 2012, the U.S. government designated the HQN as a foreign terrorist organization, accusing it of perpetuating terrorist attacks against U.S. personnel and Afghan allies in Afghanistan.

“Siraj[huddin] Haqqani is very powerful in the Taliban government,” Graem Smith, a senior analyst at International Crisis Group (ICG), told VOA, adding that under restructuring, the Taliban have brought in the Afghan government and that the administration of all of Afghanistan’s more than 300 districts fall under Haqqani’s writ.

The HQN reportedly enjoys strong backing from Pakistan. In 2011, Michael Mullen, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described the HQN as “a veritable arm of Pakistan’s” intelligence agency — a charge Pakistani officials dismissed immediately.

Both the Taliban and the Haqqanis have denied the very existence of the HQN as an independent group.

As one of the two deputies to the Taliban’s supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, Siraj Haqqani is in line to be the Taliban’s next top leader.

A political tool?

“The Rewards for Justice program has been very successful,” a State Department spokesperson told VOA. “Since its inception in 1984, the program has paid in excess of $200 million to more than 100 people across the globe who provided actionable information that helped prevent terrorism, bring terrorist leaders to justice, and resolve threats to U.S. national security.”

In 1997, the program paid for information that led to the arrest of Aimal Kansi in Pakistan. Accused of killing two Central Intelligence Agency employees and wounding three others in Virginia in 1993, Kansi was tried in the U.S. in 1997 and subsequently executed in 2002.

Despite other successful prosecutions, some analysts question the validity and overall effectiveness of the program.

“The Rewards for Justice program has long been a way to make a political point against high-value individuals — and not a real law enforcement, intelligence collection or targeting tool against them,” said Mir of USIP.

In addition to setting monetary rewards for their arrest, the U.S. government imposes strict sanctions on designated terrorist individuals and entities.

With the Taliban’s return to power, the U.S. and the U.N. have extended strict financial sanctions over Taliban-controlled Afghan state institutions, and against the designated terrorist groups themselves, including the Taliban and HQN.

But some observers say the sanctions alone don’t do enough to keep the groups in check.

“The stigma of sanctions is not hurting the Haqqanis, who enjoy power in Kabul, but the sanctions continue to affect the Afghan economy,” said the ICG’s Smith.

Afghanistan’s per capita income has fallen by more than one-third since the Taliban seized power last year, prompting one of the worst humanitarian crises the landlocked country has experienced, according to aid agencies.

Source: Voice of America

An official U.S. agency report has blamed the sudden demise of Afghan security forces in August 2021 mainly on Washington’s decision to rapidly withdraw the American military, leading to the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), tasked to monitor events in the war-torn nation, on Wednesday released what it said was the first U.S. government report on how and why the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) fell apart abruptly.

The 300,000-member ANDSF, which had received billions of dollars in U.S. training and equipment over two decades, crumbled without offering any significant resistance in the face of a lightning, 11-day insurgent offensive that brought almost the entire country, including the capital, Kabul, under the Taliban control on August 15.

“(The) SIGAR found that the single most important factor in the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces’ collapse in August 2021 … was the decision by two U.S. presidents to withdraw U.S. military and contractors from Afghanistan, while Afghan forces remained unable to sustain themselves,” the report said.

President Joe Biden and his predecessor, former President Donald Trump, who reached a deal with the Taliban in February 2020 to withdraw U.S. and allied troops and end the longest U.S. war, not only announced deadlines for the troop exit but the U.S. military significantly reduced its battlefield support of Afghan forces, leaving them without the crucial backing of American airstrikes. The SIGAR assessment is based in part on interviews with U.S. and former Afghan government officials and military leaders.

“We built that army to run on contractor support. Without it, it can’t function. Game over … when the contractors pulled out, it was like we pulled all the sticks out of the Jenga pile and expected it to stay up,” a former U.S. commander in Afghanistan told SIGAR.

Former Afghan generals told the agency that most of the U.S.-made UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters were grounded shortly after American contractors withdrew in spring 2021, including those who performed maintenance on the helicopters.

“In a matter of months, 60 percent of the Black Hawks were grounded, with no Afghan or U.S. government plan to bring them back to life,” one Afghan general told the U.S. monitor. As a result, Afghan soldiers in isolated bases were running out of ammunition or dying for lack of medical evacuation capabilities, according to the report. It noted that the U.S.-Taliban deal and subsequent withdrawal announcement degraded ANDSF morale, with some Afghan army officials denouncing the pact as “a catalyst for the collapse.”

In 2019, the U.S. military conducted 7,423 airstrikes against insurgents, the most in a decade. In 2020, the U.S. conducted 1,631 airstrikes, with almost half occurring in the two months before the U.S.-Taliban agreement. A former Afghan special operations’ commander told SIGAR that “overnight … 98 percent of U.S. airstrikes had ceased.”

Afghan military officials were quoted as saying that the agreement’s psychological impact was so great that the average soldier switched to “survival mode and became susceptible” to accepting other offers, knowing they were not the winner. The deal also introduced tremendous uncertainty into the U.S.-Afghan relationship, according to SIGAR findings.

Afghans share blame

The report also blamed successive U.S.-backed Afghan governments for not doing their part to address the long-running problems facing ANDSF and affecting their determination to keep fighting. SIGAR identified low salaries, poor logistics that led to food, water and ammunition shortages; and corrupt commanders who colluded with contractors to skim off food and fuel contracts. It was not until Biden’s April 14, 2021, announcement of the final troop and contractor withdrawal date that deposed Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s inner circle said they realized that the ANDSF had no supply and logistic capabilities. Although the Afghan authorities had operated in this way for nearly 20 years, their realization came only four months before its collapse, the report said. A former Afghan interior ministry official told SIGAR that Ghani and his aides had been dismissing the impending foreign troop withdrawal as “a U.S. plot” until early that April, believing it was merely intended to pressure the embattled president as opposed to being official U.S. policy.

“The U.S. and Afghan governments share in the blame. Neither side appeared to have the political commitment to doing what it would take to address the challenges, including devoting the time and resources necessary to develop a professional ANDSF, a multigenerational process,” the SIGAR concluded. “In essence, U.S. and Afghan efforts to cultivate an effective and sustainable security assistance sector were likely to fail from the beginning. The February 2020 decision to commit to a rapid U.S. military withdrawal sealed the ANDSF’s fate,” the report said.

The U.S.-led Western military alliance invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 to punish the then-Taliban government in Kabul for harboring the al-Qaida leaders who Washington said were behind the deadly terrorist attacks against U.S. cities in September of that year. The Islamist group, however, quickly regrouped in alleged sanctuaries in neighboring Pakistan before unleashing a deadly insurgency against international forces and their Afghan allies. U.S. and Afghan officials accused the Pakistani spy agency of covertly helping the Taliban sustain and expand their insurgency.

Islamabad rejected the charges and blamed several million Afghan refugees on its soil for sheltering insurgents. The allegations strained Pakistan’s relationship with the U.S. but did not rupture it, mainly because Pakistani ground and air routes were playing a crucial role in ferrying supplies to the foreign military mission in landlocked Afghanistan for nearly 20 years until the last American and allied troops flew out of Kabul on August 30.

Source: Voice of America

Pakistan and United States have reaffirmed the strong determination to strengthen broad-based longstanding bilateral relations.

This was discussed at meeting between Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari and US Secretary of State Antony J Blinken in New York on Thursday.

Speaking on the occasion, the Foreign Minister said Pakistan will work with the U.S administration to improve trade relations between the two countries and create opportunities for American investors and Pakistani investors to work together.

He briefed the Secretary of State Antony J Blinken about the endeavours being made by Pakistan to stabilize its economy. In response, the Secretary of State assured US government support for Pakistan’s efforts in that direction.

Bilawal Bhutto Zardari said that conflicts can be very traumatic for nations as is evident from the prolonged struggle against international terrorism, which had affected our region and beyond.

The Foreign Minister stressed that Pakistan remains extremely concerned over the rising Islamophobia and gross human rights violations in IIOJK as well as against the minorities which was threatening regional peace and stability.

He maintained that the immediate challenge in Afghanistan is how to avert dire humanitarian crisis and stressed it is essential to consider additional ways to facilitate banking channels to spur economic activity.

He underlined the importance to the adherence by all member States to the Charter Principles of non-use or threat of use of force, respect for sovereignty of states, and pacific settlement of disputes.

Bilawal Bhutto Zardari said Pakistan is facing challenges in food security, water security and energy security because of a whole host of issues ranging from climate change and global developments.

Referring to Pakistan’s current Chairmanship of Group of 77, Secretary of State Antony J Blinken said that the US looks forward to strengthening its relations with that Group through dialogue and communication. The Foreign Minister welcomed the proposal and said that Pakistan would fully engage with the U.S for promoting dialogue between the G77 and the US.

The Foreign Minister and the Secretary of State covered the full spectrum of Pakistan-U.S relations and discussed global and regional situation.

The two sides expressed satisfaction over the ongoing bilateral engagement in the areas of trade and investment, climate, energy, health and education and underlined the need to further reinforce cooperation through dialogue and decisions at a higher level.

The Foreign Minister and Secretary Antony J Blinken noted the recent growth of the tech sector in Pakistan. Secretary Antony J Blinken said the U.S would support Pakistan to make its tech industry more productive.

The Foreign Minister and Secretary Antony J Blinken expressed their resolve to work on their shared objectives of a peaceful and stable Afghanistan.

The Foreign Minister underscored the importance of inclusivity, protection of human rights, especially of women and girls, and timely humanitarian relief in Afghanistan. He further stressed the importance of effective ways to address the threat of terrorism, now and in the future.

Source: Radio Pakistan

Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban confirmed Wednesday they hosted fresh peace negotiations between Pakistan and fugitive leaders of an outlawed militant group waging cross-border terrorist attacks against Pakistani forces out of Afghan sanctuaries.

Highly-placed sources told VOA a top Pakistani army commander, Lt. Gen. Faiz Hameed, led his team in this week’s meeting with representatives of the extremist group Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or the Pakistani Taliban, in the Afghan capital, Kabul. The two-day discussions were held in secrecy. Pakistani officials have not publicly commented on the talks but TTP has confirmed them.

Zabihullah Mujahid, the chief spokesman for the host government, while sharing a few details of the talks for the first time Wednesday, said they were mediating the dialogue process.

The negotiating teams have agreed to temporarily cease hostilities to move the talks forward, Mujahid wrote on Twitter. He said without elaborating that “significant progress on related issues” was also made.

“The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, in good faith to promote peace, strives for the negotiating process to succeed and expects both sides to be tolerant and flexible,” stressed Mujahid, using the self-styled name of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

The TTP issued a statement to media Wednesday, saying the “negotiations are underway” with the mediation of the Kabul rulers. A 10-day truce previously agreed to for the Muslim festival of Eid has been extended until May 30, said the militant statement.

Militant and security sources close to the talks said they had resulted in the freeing of dozens of TTP prisoners from Pakistani jails. The men included two key commanders, namely Muslim Khan and Mehmood Khan.

The prisoners were released to their families and they had either served out their sentences or gone through government-run de-radicalization centers in Pakistan.

Security sources stressed that there would be no “blanket amnesty” for “hardcore” militants and they would have to face the legal process if the peace process eventually encourages them to return from Afghanistan and resume a normal life.

TTP attacks have spiked in Pakistan since last August when the Taliban took over Afghanistan. The violence has killed scores of Pakistani security forces, straining Islamabad’s relations with Kabul.

Pakistan has been urging the Taliban to meet their pledges to the outside world that they would not allow Afghan soil to be used against other countries by terrorist groups, including the TTP.

The United States also lists the Pakistani Taliban as a terrorist organization.

Last month, Taliban officials said Pakistani airstrikes in eastern Afghanistan killed dozens of people, fueling mutual tensions. Kabul lodged a diplomatic protest over what it denounced as a “cruelty” and warned of a retaliation to any such actions in future. It did not elaborate.

Islamabad did not comment on the strikes and in turn urged Kabul to strengthen border security on its side to deter deadly militant attacks against Pakistan.

The Afghan Taliban late last year also hosted talks between the TTP and Pakistan, leading to a monthlong cease-fire. But the militant group refused to extend that truce, alleging Pakistani authorities were refusing to free dozens of TTP prisoners in violation of the deal.

Critics say the Afghan Taliban are reluctant to forcefully evict the TTP from their country because both share the same ideology and maintain close ties.

For years, the TTP sheltered the Afghan Taliban on the Pakistani side and provided them with recruits to wage insurgent attacks against the now-defunct Western-backed Kabul government and its U.S.-led foreign military partners.

Pakistani officials have long maintained that any discussions with the TTP would be held for the militants to “surrender to Pakistan’s constitution and lay down their arms.” These “red lines” would have to be respected for advancing any peace effort, the officials insisted.

The TTP demands the Pakistani government withdraw troops from northwestern districts on the Afghan border that once served as strongholds for local and foreign militants, including the Afghan Taliban.

The militant group also wants restoration of the traditional semiautonomous status of the districts in question and calls for implementing an Islamic system in Pakistan in accordance with the TTP’s own interpretation of Islam. But Islamabad rejects as unacceptable those demands, ruling out any talks on the constitution and the status of the troops or the border districts.

Source: Voice of America