Source: NPR
MOSCOW — It’s been more than a month since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and Sergei Opalev is still trying to wrap his head around the chaotic end to America’s 20-year war.
It’s not the defeat that confounds him — he understands that part all too well. Opalev served as a captain in the Soviet armyas it was gradually humbled by Afghan mujahedeen fighters during a decade of war in the 1980s.
The problem, he says, is how U.S. forces left.
Source: Guardian
The deeply partisan US Congress is rarely a conducive place for national introspection and Tuesday’s Senate hearing on the Afghanistan withdrawal did not provide an exception.
In the midst of the point-scoring and blame-shifting on display in the senators’ questions to the nation’s military leadership, it was clear that it was a contest to apportion shares in failure.
And behind the debacle of the pullout that left tens of thousands of vulnerable Afghans behind, there were fleeting references to the far deeper failure of the preceding two decades – a reckoning that has only just begun for the Pentagon and the US foreign policy establishment.
Source: Task&Purpose
One digit on a single piece of paper separated Zee and his family from an uncertain fate. A month ago, the former Afghan interpreter escaped Kandahar, Afghanistan where the Taliban seized his home. They were looking for him, according to his brother who later sent him a video of several men loitering around his backyard. Zee dressed his family in worn and dirty clothes, hoping to disguise them as beggars, then boarded a bus with 50 other escapees at midnight. The bus headed toward Kabul and stopped six or seven times at Taliban checkpoints along the way. Zee said that armed men entered the bus and questioned the occupants: “What do you do? What was your job?” He sunk back into the seat with his family, hoping the disguises helped. No one questioned them.
Source: Guardian
The collapse of the Afghan government and its security forces can be traced to a 2020 agreement between the Taliban and the Trump administration that promised a complete US troop withdrawal, senior Pentagon officials have told Congress.
Gen Frank McKenzie, the head of central command, told the House armed services committee that once the US troop presence was pushed below 2,500 as part of President Joe Biden’s decision in April to complete a total withdrawal by September, the unraveling of the US-backed Afghan government accelerated.
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Source: France24/AFP
The Taliban on Thursday violently cracked down on a small women’s rights demonstration, firing shots into the air and pushing back protesters, AFP journalists witnessed.
A group of six women gathered outside a high school in eastern Kabul demanding the right for girls to return to secondary school, after the hardline Islamist group excluded them from classes earlier this month.
Source: Screen Daily.com
Afghan filmmaker Shahrbanoo Sadat, well known internationally for her Cannes features Wolf & Sheep and The Orphanage, escaped Kabul one month ago with her family to come to Europe.
Speaking at the Zurich Film Festival’s Zurich Summit on Sept 25, she said she hopes to keep her passion for filmmaking going despite the turmoil in her homeland, wanting to show the many “colours” of Afghanistan.
Source: flightglobal.com
Afghanistan’s Taliban-run government is urging airlines to restore services to the Central Asian state, insisting that the main international airport at Kabul is open.
Foreign ministry spokesman Abdul Qahar Balkhi, through his official social media feed, states that the airport is “fully operational for domestic and international flights”, and problems at the facility “have been resolved”.
Source: France24
An Afghan business leader who employs hundreds of women on her saffron fields has vowed to speak up for the rights of her workers, and “not remain silent” under Taliban rule.
The hardliners have increasingly excluded women from public life since sweeping to power in mid-August, pushing many female entrepreneurs to flee the country or go into hiding.
Source: The Guardian
One of Afghanistan’s most prominent psychiatrists has been abducted on his way home from work by a group of armed men.
Dr Nader Alemi, 66, who opened the country’s first private psychiatric hospital in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, was stopped by seven men in a white car last week, said his family.
Source: BBC
Before the Taliban took power in Afghanistan last month, there were numerous influential social media users in the country who were strong opponents of the group’s policies.
But since 15 August, Afghans have been deleting photos and tweets from their past – and many have turned away from social media altogether for fear of being targeted by Taliban forces.