Afghan Women Lose Hope

 At WSJ, "After Taliban Return, Afghan Women Face Old Pressures From Fathers, Brothers":

KABUL—When Marjan Amiri marched for women’s rights on the streets of Kabul in September, Taliban gunmen called her a prostitute, kicked her and threatened to shoot her in the head. But what scared the 24-year-old Afghan civil servant most was her father’s reaction when she returned home.

Furious that she defied his orders against attending the protest, he repeatedly hit her “like a ball on the ground,” she said. Ms. Amiri’s younger sister, who witnessed the violence, confirmed her account. Her father couldn’t be reached for comment.

“Nothing scares me more than my father. Not even the Taliban,” said Ms. Amiri, who worked at the ministry of interior and like almost all Afghan female government employees lost her job after the Taliban takeover on Aug. 15. “I am standing against the Taliban because of what I went through with my father,” she said.

Even in Afghanistan’s patriarchal society, women used to be able to carve a path to independence for themselves, at least in relatively more liberal cities such as Kabul. Despite her family’s opposition, Ms. Amiri earned a university degree, found a job and aspired to become a diplomat.

Now those aspirations are gone.

The Taliban, who follow the ultraconservative rural traditions of Afghanistan’s Pashtun belt, have gone beyond what Islamic scholars elsewhere in the world consider to be appropriate, including restricting women’s education and work. While Afghan men in cities such as Kabul generally consider those views too extreme, many do believe that women are better off at home. Emboldened by the Taliban comeback, these men are telling their daughters, sisters and wives to adapt their lifestyles to the new regime and let go of the liberties they enjoyed until August.

As a result, young urban women such as Ms. Amiri find themselves largely confined to their homes. The United Nations’ women’s agency said this month that the reversals of women’s freedom had been immediate and dramatic. “Families are also self-censoring and imposing restrictions on the mobility of women and girls as a protection measure,” the agency said, pointing to how the fear of the Taliban transcends specific prohibitions on what women can and can’t do.

Empowering women was a key objective during the 20 years of American-led international involvement in Afghanistan. The change was especially visible in places such as Kabul, where women pursued careers in sectors from politics to journalism to law, and were often their family’s breadwinners.

Since August, women have been barred from many workplaces. Schools for girls over sixth grade are shut in most of the country. The Ministry of Women’s Affairs has been disbanded, as have shelters for victims of domestic violence. Fearing harassment by Taliban fighters—who often demand women to be accompanied by a male guardian—many women are too scared to go outside.

Afghan women say other men on the streets have become more aggressive as well, scolding them for their choice of clothes.

Hila, 25, is one of the few Afghan women still employed, working at one of the foreign embassies that remained in Kabul after the Taliban takeover. She says she has financially supported her parents and younger siblings for years. Even so, her younger brother, who is unemployed, welcomed the Taliban’s policy on women.

“He says: ‘What the Taliban say is good for women. It is good for girls because it’s based on Islamic rules and we should obey that.’ But I don’t think these are Islamic rules,” Hila said. “The men who are like my brother, they are happy that the Taliban are back. They think the power is now in their hands.”

Hila considers herself lucky: She says her cousin, a law graduate, was pressured by her in-laws to quit her job as a third-grade teacher when the Taliban took over Kabul. But she is worried that if she loses her job she will have to get married to a man of her parents’ choice. “Girls who have their own salaries can protect themselves,” she said.

In a society where many believe women have no place in public life, women’s rights were often fragile. Most women who served in the Afghan armed forces, for instance, tried to keep their profession secret from family and friends.

Fahima, a 24-year-old Afghan Air Force officer, said that her best friend stopped seeing her when she found out she was in the military. When her brother-in-law found out, he threatened to kill her.

She and other female officers say they were never truly accepted by their male colleagues. When the Taliban arrived on Kabul’s doorstep, these colleagues turned even more hostile.

Fahima was still at the Air Force headquarters on the morning of Aug. 15, the day of the Taliban takeover, when her male colleagues started mocking her: “From now on you have to either wear a burqa or sit at home,” she recalls them saying.

Now living in hiding after selling many of her possessions for food, Fahima worries she could be hunted down by the Taliban, who have killed some former members of the armed forces despite promises of an amnesty.

Nargis Nehan, who served as a cabinet minister and as an adviser to ousted President Ashraf Ghani, said the U.S. used the issue of women’s rights to persuade other countries to join them in Afghanistan. “The moment they decided to leave Afghanistan, women were left behind. If helping women was a real objective they would not have given up so easily.”

The U.S. and its Western allies say they are committed to supporting Afghan women, and consider the Taliban’s respect of women’s rights as a precondition to recognizing their government as legitimate...

 

Facing Economic Collapse, Afghanistan Is Gripped by Starvation

This is going to be biblical, and the world won't care.

No "Concerts for Kabul" to raise the tens/hundreds of $millions needed to save nearly an entire population.

At NYT, "Facing Economic Collapse, Afghanistan Is Gripped by Starvation":

SHAH WALI KOT, Afghanistan — One by one, women poured into the mud brick clinic, the frames of famished children peeking out beneath the folds of their pale gray, blue and pink burqas.

Many had walked for more than an hour across this drab stretch of southern Afghanistan, where parched earth meets a washed-out sky, desperate for medicine to pump life back into their children’s shrunken veins. For months, their once-daily meals had grown more sparse as harvests failed, wells ran dry and credit for flour from shopkeepers ran out.

Now as the crisp air grew colder, reality was setting in: Their children might not survive the winter.

“I’m very afraid, this winter will be even worse than we can imagine,” said Laltak, 40, who like many women in rural Afghanistan goes by only one name.

Nearly four months since the Taliban seized power, Afghanistan is on the brink of a mass starvation that aid groups say threatens to kill a million children this winter — a toll that would dwarf the total number of Afghan civilians estimated to have been killed as a direct result of the war over the past 20 years.

While Afghanistan has suffered from malnutrition for decades, the country’s hunger crisis has drastically worsened in recent months. This winter, an estimated 22.8 million people — more than half the population — are expected to face potentially life-threatening levels of food insecurity, according to an analysis by the United Nations World Food Program and Food and Agriculture Organization. Of those, 8.7 million people are nearing famine — the worst stage of a food crisis.

Such widespread hunger is the most devastating sign of the economic crash that has crippled Afghanistan since the Taliban seized power. Practically overnight, billions of dollars in foreign aid that propped up the previous Western-backed government vanished and U.S. sanctions on the Taliban isolated the country from the global financial system, paralyzing Afghan banks and impeding relief work by humanitarian organizations.

Across the country, millions of Afghans — from day laborers to doctors and teachers — have gone months without steady or any incomes. The prices of food and other basic goods have soared beyond the reach of many families. Emaciated children and anemic mothers have flooded into the malnutrition wards of hospitals, many of those facilities bereft of medical supplies that donor aid once provided.

Compounding its economic woes, the country is confronting one of the worst droughts in decades, which has withered fields, starved farm animals and dried irrigation channels. Afghanistan’s wheat harvest is expected to be as much as 25 percent below average this year, according to the United Nations. In rural areas — where roughly 70 percent of the population lives — many farmers have given up cultivating their land.

Now, as freezing winter weather sets in, with humanitarian organizations warning that a million children could die, the crisis is potentially damning to both the new Taliban government and to the United States, which is facing mounting pressure to ease the economic restrictions that are worsening the crisis.

“We need to separate the politics from the humanitarian imperative,” said Mary-Ellen McGroarty, the World Food Program’s country director for Afghanistan. “The millions of women, of children, of men in the current crisis in Afghanistan are innocent people who are being condemned to a winter of absolute desperation and potentially death.”

In Shah Wali Kot, a barren district in Kandahar Province, the drought and economic crash have converged in a perfect storm.

For decades, small farmers survived the winters on stored wheat from their summer harvest and the income from selling onions in the market. But this year yielded barely enough to sustain families during the fall months. Without food to last the winter, some people migrated to cities hoping to find work or to other districts to lean on the help of relatives.

Inside one of the two mud huts of the clinic, which is run by the Afghan Red Crescent and supported by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Laltak clutched her granddaughter’s gaunt frame as if steeling herself for the hardships she knew this winter would bring.

Her family has no wheat left, no wood to make fires for heat, no money to buy food. They have exhausted the support of nearby relatives who cannot even feed their own families.

“Nothing, we have nothing,” Laltak said in an interview at the end of October.

She and most of the mothers interviewed did not own cellphones or have phone service in their villages, so The Times could not follow up with them on the health of their children.

The humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Afghanistan comes as hunger has steadily risen around the world in recent years, driven by the coronavirus pandemic, conflict and climate-related shocks.

Thirty percent more Afghans faced crisis-level food shortages in September and October compared with the same period last year, according to the United Nations. In the coming months, the number of Afghans in crisis is expected to hit a record high.

“It was never this bad,” said Sifatullah Sifat, the head doctor at the Shamsul Haq clinic on the outskirts of Kandahar city, where malnutrition cases have doubled in recent months. “Donors are shipping in medicine, but it’s still not enough.”

By 10 a.m. each morning, a throng of mothers carrying skeletal children masses in the hallway of the malnutrition unit.

Inside an examination room in October, Zarmina, 20, cradled her 18-month-old son while her 3-year-old daughter stood behind her, clutching her blue burqa. Since the Taliban seized power and her husband’s work as a day laborer dried up, her family has survived on mostly bread and tea — meals that left her children’s stomachs gnawing with hunger.

“They are crying to have food. I wish I could bring them something, but we have nothing,” said Zarmina, who is six months pregnant and severely anemic...

 

For a Taliban-Ruled Afghanistan, and the Rest of the World, a Crisis Looms

A year-end review, at WSJ, "The new Taliban administration is struggling with a devastated economy. The fallout likely will extend well beyond the country’s borders":

Afghanistan is heading into one of its most difficult years.

The new Taliban administration, devoid of international recognition and cut off by the U.S. from the global financial system, is struggling to restart an economy that has shrunk by more than 40% since the American withdrawal in August. The worst drought in decades, combined with the suspension of many foreign-aid projects, means that millions of Afghans could face starvation in coming months.

“We are on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe that is preventable,” says the United Nations representative to Afghanistan, Deborah Lyons.

Capitalizing on growing discontent, particularly in eastern and northern Afghanistan, the extremist Islamic State group already is launching nearly daily attacks that target the Taliban and the country’s Shiite minority. That terrorism threat, combined with the Taliban’s so-far unyielding position on issues such as women’s education, means that most Western embassies that escaped the country in August won’t be returning soon.

The only question amid this bleak landscape is to what extent Afghanistan’s crisis can be contained within Afghanistan in 2022. Will the looming famine prompt millions of Afghans to try to reach Europe on foot, the way millions of Syrians did in 2014-2015? Will Islamic State garner enough strength to start launching attacks on Western targets from within Afghanistan? And will the year see a record-breaking outflow of opium and other illicit drugs, now the main livelihood of desperate farmers in many parts of the country?

Past experiences suggest that the fallout will inevitably spread beyond Afghanistan’s immediate neighborhood.

Historical lessons

Historically, Afghanistan has gone through cycles of intense American interest, followed by years of neglect that produced dramatic consequences down the line. In the 1980s, Washington invested great effort and capital into fostering the mujahedeen resistance against the Soviet-backed government in Kabul. Then, it turned away when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Backed by regional proxies, victorious mujahedeen engaged in a long and bloody civil war that eventually spurred the Taliban’s rise and led to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Now, after two decades of intense military and diplomatic engagement, the temptation in Washington—and other Western capitals—is to tune out once again. Maintaining the status quo policy of sanctions on Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and minimal engagement with Kabul’s new authorities requires little immediate expenditure of political capital, even though it may be the riskiest approach over the long term. “The West wants to punish the Taliban, but the economic chokehold is self-defeating,” says Graeme Smith, co-author of a recent report on Afghanistan by the International Crisis Group conflict-resolution organization. “History shows that ignoring Afghanistan allows problems to fester and grow. Migration, terrorism, drugs: All of these issues could destabilize the region and spill over into Europe.”

The Taliban, of course, are playing up such concerns to win a reprieve from sanctions, and to persuade Washington to unfreeze more than $9 billion in Afghan central-bank assets.

“The suffering of a child from malnutrition, the death of a mother from lack of health services, the deprivation of a common Afghan from food, shelter, medicine and other primary needs has no political or logical justification,” the Taliban government’s foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, wrote in a recent open letter to the U.S. Congress...

Very sad. 

At one photo, "Wazir Nazari was shot in the face, taking both of her eyes, by Taliban fighters going door-to-door in her village in the Malistan district of central Afghanistan’s Ghazni province in early July, her father said."

Taliban Covert Operatives Seized Kabul, Other Afghan Cities From Within

Foreign policy is rarely the driving factor in voter choice, but Afghanistan needs to stay in the news, and G.O.P. candidates need to run campaign spots reminding voters of Biden's debacle in Kabul. 

Democrats are quite vulnerable on this issue, and with 11 months until the 2022 midterms, Biden's currently underwater in every single battleground state.

In any case, the Wall Street Journal continues its excellent coverage, here, "Success of Kabul’s undercover network, loyal to the Haqqanis, changed balance of power within Taliban after U.S. withdrawal":

KABUL—Undercover Taliban agents—often clean-shaven, dressed in jeans and sporting sunglasses—spent years infiltrating Afghan government ministries, universities, businesses and aid organizations.

Then, as U.S. forces were completing their withdrawal in August, these operatives stepped out of the shadows in Kabul and other big cities across Afghanistan, surprising their neighbors and colleagues. Pulling their weapons from hiding, they helped the Taliban rapidly seize control from the inside.

The pivotal role played by these clandestine cells is becoming apparent only now, three months after the U.S. pullout. At the time, Afghan cities fell one after another like dominoes with little resistance from the American-backed government’s troops. Kabul collapsed in a matter of hours, with hardly a shot fired.

“We had agents in every organization and department,” boasted Mawlawi Mohammad Salim Saad, a senior Taliban leader who directed suicide-bombing operations and assassinations inside the Afghan capital before its fall. “The units we had already present in Kabul took control of the strategic locations.”

Mr. Saad’s men belong to the so-called Badri force of the Haqqani network, a part of the Taliban that is designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. because of its links to al Qaeda. Sitting before a bank of closed-circuit TV monitors in the Kabul airport security command center, which he now oversees, he said, “We had people even in the office that I am occupying today.”

The 20-year war in Afghanistan was often seen as a fight between bands of Taliban insurgents—bearded men operating from mountain hide-outs—and Afghan and U.S. forces struggling to control rural terrain. The endgame, however, was won by a large underground network of urban operatives.

On Aug. 15, after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled Kabul, it was these men who seized the capital city while the Taliban’s more conventional forces remained outside.

Mohammad Rahim Omari, a midlevel commander in the Badri force, was working undercover at his family’s gasoline-trading business in Kabul before he was called into action that day. He said he and 12 others were dispatched to an Afghan intelligence service compound in the east of the city, where they disarmed the officers on duty and stopped them from destroying computers and files.

Other cells fanned out to seize other government and military installations and reached Kabul airport, where the U.S. was mounting a massive evacuation effort. They took control of the airport’s perimeter until better-armed Taliban troops arrived from the countryside in the morning. One agent, Mullah Rahim, was even dispatched to secure the Afghan Institute of Archaeology and its treasures from potential looters.

Mr. Omari said the Badri force had compartmentalized cells working on different tasks—armed fighters, fundraisers and those involved with propaganda and recruitment.

“Now these three types of mujahedeen have reunited,” he said. Mr. Omari himself is now deputy police chief in Kabul’s 12th District.

Their success has helped boost the influence of the Haqqanis within the overall Taliban movement. Badri was founded by Badruddin Haqqani, who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan in 2012. It now is under the ultimate command of his brother, Sirajuddin Haqqani, who is in charge of Afghanistan’s internal security as its new interior minister.

Named after the Battle of Badr that was won by Prophet Muhammad in 624, the Badri force includes several subgroups. The best known is its special-operations unit, Badri 313, whose fighters in high-end helmets and body armor were deployed next to U.S. Marines at the Kabul airport in the two weeks between the fall of Kabul and the completion of the American airlift.

Kamran, who didn’t want his surname to be used, was tasked with taking over his alma mater, Kabul University, and the Ministry of Higher Education.

A 30-year-old from Wardak province west of Kabul, he said he became a Taliban recruiter when he was pursuing a master’s degree in Arabic at the university in 2017. He estimates that, over the years, he persuaded some 500 people, mostly students, to join the insurgency. To maintain his cover, he shaved his chin, wore sunglasses and dressed in suits or jeans.

“Many of our friends who had beards were targeted,” he recalled. “I was above suspicion. While many of our low-ranking friends were arrested, I wasn’t. Even though I was their leader.”

Many of his acquaintances—former classmates, teachers and guards—first realized he was a member of the Taliban when he showed up with a gun on Aug. 15, he said. “Many employees of the ministry and the entire staff of the university knew me. They were surprised to see me,” said Kamran, whose new job is head of security for Kabul’s several universities.

Kamran has since adopted the Taliban’s trademark look: a black turban, a white shalwar kameez and a long beard. As for his suits and jeans, they are gathering dust in his closet. “Those aren’t our traditional outfits,” he said. “I don’t think I will have to wear them again.” Similar Taliban cells operated in other major Afghan cities. In Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest metropolis, university lecturer Ahmad Wali Haqmal said he repeatedly asked Taliban leaders for permission to join the armed struggle against the U.S.-backed government after he completed his bachelor’s degree in Shariah law.

“I was ready to take the AK-47 and go because no Afghan can tolerate the invasion of their country,” he recalled. “But then our elders told us no, don’t come here, stay over there, work in the universities because these are also our people and the media and the world are deceiving them about us.”

The Taliban sent Mr. Haqmal to India to earn a master’s degree in human rights from Aligarh Muslim University, he said. When he returned to Kandahar, he was focused on recruitment and propaganda for the Taliban. After the fall of Kabul, he became the chief spokesman for the Taliban-run finance ministry.

Fereshta Abbasi, an Afghan lawyer, said she had long been suspicious about a man who worked alongside her at a fortified compound, Camp Baron near the Kabul airport, that hosted offices for development projects funded by the U.S. and other Western countries.

But it wasn’t until the day after the fall of Kabul—when the man appeared on television clutching a Kalashnikov rifle—that she discovered he was in fact a Taliban commander. “I was shocked,” said Ms. Abbasi, who is now based in London. The commander, Assad Massoud Kohistani, said in an interview with CNN that women should cover their faces...

 

As Afghanistan Sinks Into Destitution, Some Sell Children to Survive

At WSJ, "U.N. warns that 95% of Afghans aren’t getting enough to eat as winter approaches":

HERAT, Afghanistan—Desperate to feed her family, Saleha, a housecleaner here in western Afghanistan, has incurred such an insurmountable debt that the only way she sees out is to hand over her 3-year-old daughter, Najiba, to the man who lent her the money.

The debt is $550.

Saleha, a 40-year-old mother of six who goes by one name, earns 70 cents a day cleaning homes in a wealthier neighborhood of Herat. Her much older husband doesn’t have any work.

Such is the starkness of deepening poverty in Afghanistan, a humanitarian crisis that is worsening fast after the Taliban seized power on Aug. 15, prompting the U.S. to freeze $9 billion in Afghan central-bank assets and causing a halt in most foreign aid.

Already, 95% of Afghans aren’t getting enough to eat, according to the United Nations’ World Food Program, which has warned that “people are being pushed to the brink of survival.” Almost the entire Afghan population of 40 million people could fall below the poverty line in coming months, according to the U.N.

Behind these statistics lie countless personal tragedies of families like Saleha’s. She and her husband used to work on a farm in the western province of Badghis, but two years ago lost that income because of fighting in the area and drought. So they borrowed money just to get food. Hoping to find employment, they ended up moving to a giant encampment of people displaced from other provinces, known as Shahrak Sabz, in Herat.

With the financial system and trade paralyzed after the Taliban takeover, prices for basic food items like flour and oil have doubled since mid-August. The lender offered early this month to write off the debt if she hands over her little girl.

They have three months to provide the money. Otherwise, Najiba will be doing household work in the lender’s home and be married off to one of his three sons when she reaches puberty. They are not sure which one. The oldest is now 6.

“If life continues to be this awful, I will kill my children and myself,” said Saleha, speaking in her tiny two-room home. “I don’t even know what we will eat tonight.”

“I will try to find money to save my daughter’s life,” added her husband, Abdul Wahab.

The lender, Khalid Ahmad, confirmed he had made the offer to the couple.

“I also don’t have money. They haven’t paid me back,” said Mr. Ahmad, reached by phone in Badghis. “So there is no option but taking the daughter.”

They have three months to provide the money. Otherwise, Najiba will be doing household work in the lender’s home and be married off to one of his three sons when she reaches puberty. They are not sure which one. The oldest is now 6.

“If life continues to be this awful, I will kill my children and myself,” said Saleha, speaking in her tiny two-room home. “I don’t even know what we will eat tonight.”

“I will try to find money to save my daughter’s life,” added her husband, Abdul Wahab.

The lender, Khalid Ahmad, confirmed he had made the offer to the couple.

“I also don’t have money. They haven’t paid me back,” said Mr. Ahmad, reached by phone in Badghis. “So there is no option but taking the daughter.”

Following the Taliban takeover, neighboring Pakistan and Iran, where many men from this community used to work as laborers, closed their borders, bracing for a flood of refugees. All that is left as work is collecting plastic bottles and other trash to sell for recycling. Other families in the area have had to surrender children to repay debts, residents say.

Growing destitution could undermine the Taliban’s so-far solid hold on power and serve as a recruiting tool for the local branch of Islamic State, their only significant rival. A Taliban official in the west of the country said that Afghans would have to get used to a meager existence.

“We suffered for 20 years fighting jihad, we lost members of our families, we didn’t have proper food, and in the end, we were rewarded with this government. If people have to struggle for a few months, so what?” said the official. “Popularity is not important for the Taliban.”

Taliban officials have repeatedly said they welcome international aid for Afghanistan but wouldn’t compromise on their Islamic beliefs to secure assistance...

 

Afghanistan Mosque Bombing Kills at Least 38 Shiite Worshippers in Kanduhar

The news for Biden is so-bad all-around there's not enough room for above-the-fold headlines in the nation's newspapers. The bad news is packing it, overwhelming everything else. 

I hate to predict elections (because really, you never know until voters actually vote), but if historical precedent is any clue, 2022 is going to be an electoral tsunami like we've never seen. I feel like we're back in the 1970 and Jimmy Carter is whining about the "malaise" he couldn't fix. 

I'll be surprised if Biden doesn't mandate thermostats lowered to 65 degrees this winter and tell regular folks to put on a cardigan sweaters.

At WSJ, "Afghanistan Mosque Bombing Kills at Least 38 Shiite Worshippers":

A complex suicide attack on a Shiite mosque in southern Afghanistan’s main city of Kandahar killed at least 38 worshipers Friday, breaking two months of relative peace in the Taliban’s historic stronghold and highlighting the threat posed by a spreading presence of Islamic State.

While nobody took immediate responsibility, Friday’s attack followed a suicide bombing claimed by Islamic State that killed some 100 people on Oct. 8 at a Shiite mosque in the northern city of Kunduz. The extremist group’s regional affiliate, Islamic State Khorasan Province, or ISKP, has repeatedly targeted Afghanistan’s Shiite minority in recent months.

Kandahar’s main hospital, Mirwais, said it received 38 fatalities and 72 people who were injured in the blast. Mohammad Qasam, the chief doctor at the hospital, warned that the death toll could rise.

“The prayer had ended. We were preparing to leave the mosque when we heard gunfire outside. A few seconds later, there was a blast inside. I was close to the entrance and managed to escape quickly,” said the witness. He said two suicide bombers detonated outside the mosque and a third blew himself up inside.

While both the Taliban and Islamic State adhere to a strict interpretation of Sunni Islam, the two groups have profound ideological differences and consider each other enemies. Though the Taliban persecuted Shiites in the past, they have since softened their position and say that, under their rule, the religious freedom of Afghanistan’s Shiite community will be safeguarded. Islamic State considers all Shiite Muslims infidels who should be killed. The Taliban condemned the attack and directed their security forces “to find the perpetrators as soon as possible and bring them to justice,” according to a statement released by the group’s chief spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid.

The recent series of deadly bombings present a challenge to the Taliban government. Since the Taliban toppled the U.S.-backed Afghan republic on Aug. 15 and proclaimed a restored Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, improved security has been a key source of legitimacy for Afghanistan’s new rulers. Yet ISKP—the only significant militant group currently operating in Afghanistan—has struck many high-profile targets since then, including a bombing outside Kabul airport that killed 200 Afghans waiting to be evacuated and 13 U.S. service members.

Friday’s blast shows that the Taliban are struggling to guarantee security even in Kandahar, their historical stronghold.

“The Taliban have been dismissive of the Islamic State’s threat—and it is showing how wrong they are,” said Asfandyar Mir, an Afghanistan expert at the United States Institute of Peace. “Carrying out this attack in the Taliban’s heartland is a clear signal that the Islamic State wants to take the fight to the Taliban, bleed their legitimacy and sovereignty over Afghanistan.”

The mosque bombing interrupted a period of unusual peace in southern Afghanistan, home to some of the deadliest battlegrounds of the 20-year war waged by the U.S.-led coalition and its Afghan allies.

“When the Taliban took over the country, I thought we would be rid of war but now I think the situation may get even worse in the future,” said Navid, a resident of Kandahar city who didn’t want his surname to be used. “The harsh truth, which we all have to accept, is that there is no peace in Afghanistan. We will never be able to live peacefully, neither under the previous government nor the current Islamic Emirate,” he added.

Afghanistan has largely avoided the kind of sectarian strife that plagues much of the Muslim world. ISKP, which was formed by spinoff factions of Afghan and Pakistani Taliban in 2014, was the first group to systematically target Shiite Muslims, who make up around a fifth of Afghanistan’s population...

 

U.S. Spent Billions on Afghanistan and Failed to Build a Sustainable Economy

Afghanistan update.

At WSJ, "Country faces economic collapse with the withdrawal of foreign assistance under Taliban rule":

KABUL—The U.S. spent $145 billion over two decades in Afghanistan to turn one of the poorest nations on earth into a self-sustaining economy—the boldest effort this century at Western nation-building. That project has largely failed.

Afghanistan’s economy did grow, and millions of Afghans gained access to education, healthcare and jobs. But the economy that the U.S. helped build relies overwhelmingly on foreign aid, most of which evaporated overnight. Afghanistan’s economy—and the welfare of its people—is on the verge of collapse following the U.S. exit last month and the Taliban takeover, international experts say.

KABUL—The U.S. spent $145 billion over two decades in Afghanistan to turn one of the poorest nations on earth into a self-sustaining economy—the boldest effort this century at Western nation-building. That project has largely failed.

Afghanistan’s economy did grow, and millions of Afghans gained access to education, healthcare and jobs. But the economy that the U.S. helped build relies overwhelmingly on foreign aid, most of which evaporated overnight. Afghanistan’s economy—and the welfare of its people—is on the verge of collapse following the U.S. exit last month and the Taliban takeover, international experts say.

An Afghan farmer who took part in the soybean project in Balkh province said there wasn’t enough water to grow the crop, the proper seeds weren’t available locally, and there was no market for any harvested crops. “It was a big failure,” the farmer said. Sigar agreed.

ASA spokeswoman Wendy Brannen disputed that. She said the project had achieved “successes in line with or exceeding its original objectives.” She added, “Our acceptability and sensory analyses showed that Afghans eat and like soy and that it could be a viable source of protein in a very protein deficient country.”

The U.S. sought to introduce alternative crops to opium poppies. But Afghan farmers were reluctant to give up poppies, one of their few cash crops. Others, such as saffron, pine nuts and cotton were far less lucrative, and rutted roads and poor storage infrastructure made exports difficult.

The U.S. Agency for International Development spent $335 million building the Tarakhil diesel power plant to supply Kabul with electricity...

 

Trapped in Kabul, Prominent Afghan Women Fear Retribution Under Taliban Rule

The fate of women (and girls) in Afghanistan ... I can't.

At WSJ, "Lacking documents and unable to flee, high-profile women are at risk because of their past roles":

KABUL—Nabila, a 31-year-old Afghan judge, used to grant divorces to the wives of militants while their husbands languished in prison. Two days after the Taliban captured Kabul on Aug. 15 and emptied prisons across the country, she received threatening calls from several of these men.

She broke her SIM card, packed light and went into hiding.

“They’ve promised to kill me,” said Nabila, who asked to be quoted by her first name. “My husband and I now change our house every four days.”

Some 200 other female Afghan lawyers and judges, unemployed and vulnerable to Taliban retribution, remain stuck in Kabul alongside her, she said.

President Biden touted last month’s two-week airlift from Afghanistan, which evacuated some 120,000 people, as an “extraordinary success.” Yet many thousands of Afghans who invested lives and careers to further a U.S.-backed political order after 2001, promoting democracy and the rule of law, remain stuck.

Women like Nabila are most at risk both because of their past roles and the Taliban’s harsh new restrictions on women’s rights.

They face an additional, and often insurmountable, hurdle to leaving Afghanistan: the lack of any official government ID, let alone a passport.

Some 52% of Afghan women don’t have a national ID, known as tazkeera, compared with just 6% of Afghan men, according to the World Bank. That discrepancy is largely due to conservative cultural norms, which impede Afghan women from going to a government office to get identification papers, or keep them at home where they rarely need one. The U.S. has usually required a tazkeera or a passport from the Afghans it airlifted from Kabul, and IDs are needed to process visa applications.

“We’re talking about the most highly educated Afghan women who don’t have documents,” said Kimberley Motley, an international human-rights attorney who has worked on Afghan issues for more than a decade.

“We absolutely have an obligation to legal professionals who were part of these programs. We sold them the idea that rule of law is the foundation for building up a ‘democratic and civilized’ society,” Ms. Motley said.

Nabila, who worked for six years as a judge in Afghanistan’s family court, only applied for an electronic ID card, a precondition for a passport, 10 days before Kabul fell. She didn’t receive it before the Taliban took control of the state bureaucracy.

Nabila and her colleagues are far from the only prominent Afghan women who are stuck. An employee of Women for Afghan Women, a grass-roots civil-society organization that promotes and protects the rights of disenfranchised women, said she and 43 colleagues had been in hiding since the Taliban went to their offices the day Kabul fell. None of the staff have been able to leave the country, she said. Most don’t have passports.

Even for women with the right papers, getting to an evacuation flight was often not an option. Without the ability to line up for hours or days in a male-dominated scrum outside Kabul airport, and afraid to pass through checkpoints manned by Taliban fighters possibly looking for them, many women in prominent legal, cultural and political positions watched as the last American evacuation flights departed at the end of August.

Since then, four chartered Qatari flights have departed from Kabul, carrying around 680 Americans, holders of other foreign passports and their dependents. Afghans without permanent residency abroad weren’t allowed to board.

The August airlift included several daring, successful escapes, including Afghanistan’s women’s national soccer team and thousands of Afghans freed through a two-week rescue operation run by a group of American volunteers.

Yet many more remain, including 34 female volleyball players and staff of the women’s adult and youth national teams. The Taliban have indicated they will ban female participation in sports. “We have no clear future after years of struggling against hurdles to have a place in our beloved sport,” said one of the players. “I have not been outside the house since the Taliban took over. It is very difficult.”

Two-hundred-eighty students, staff and teachers from the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, which included girls, failed to get out after an evacuation attempt crumbled 100 yards from the airport in the final days of the U.S. airlift.

The institute regularly received threats from the Taliban and was in 2014 hit by a suicide bombing during a concert that killed a German citizen.

“Musical diversity, Western music, girls and boys in music, music for social change,” said Ahmad Sarmast, the founder and director of the institute, which housed Zohra, Afghanistan’s first all-female orchestra and for years received funding from the U.S. Embassy. “Everything we did was against the Taliban’s ideology,” added Mr. Sarmast, who partially lost his hearing as a result of the 2014 bombing.

One of the most significant gains for women’s rights since 2001 has been the ability of women to get a divorce and protection from abusive husbands. Nabila, the judge, said the Taliban’s conquest of Afghanistan has already put at risk the lives of the women who benefited from the post-2001 family law and women’s courts...

Still more.

 

Americans Stretch Across Political Divides to Welcome Afghan Refugees

This is fine with me, though, of course, not for most Trump supporters. 

As always, my concern is that jihadi terrorists will be admitted to the country along with Afghans who helped the U.S., and along with the tens of thousands of regular Afghans fleeing totalitarian terrorism. 

At NYT, "'Even the most right-leaning isolationists' are coming forward to help those fleeing Afghanistan, a pastor said. A mass mobilization is underway":

Wow.

Just one poll, but “Welcoming Afghan translators to the US” looks like the most popular and bipartisan policy idea I’ve seen in a long, long time pic.twitter.com/o09sWjrnXE

— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) August 22, 2021

PHOENIX — The hundreds of parishioners at Desert Springs Bible Church, a sprawling megachurch in the northern suburbs of Phoenix, are divided over mask mandates, the presidential election and what to do about migrants on the border. But they are unified on one issue: the need for the United States to take in thousands of Afghan evacuees, and they are passing the plate to make it happen.

“Even the most right-leaning isolationists within our sphere recognize the level of responsibility that America has to people who sacrificed for the nation’s interest,” said Caleb Campbell, the evangelical church’s lead pastor.

Last weekend, the church inaugurated a campaign to raise money for the dozens of Afghan families who are expected to start streaming into greater Phoenix in the next several weeks. Already, thousands of dollars have flowed into the church’s “benevolence fund.”

“This is a galvanizing moment,” said Mr. Campbell, 39.

Throughout the United States, Americans across the political spectrum are stepping forward to welcome Afghans who aided the U.S. war effort in one of the largest mass mobilizations of volunteers since the end of the Vietnam War.

In rural Minnesota, an agricultural specialist has been working on visa applications and providing temporary housing for the newcomers, and she has set up an area for halal meat processing on her farm. In California, a group of veterans has sent a welcoming committee to the Sacramento airport to greet every arriving family. In Arkansas, volunteers are signing up to buy groceries, do airport pickups and host families in their homes.

“Thousands of people just fled their homeland with maybe one set of spare clothes,” said Jessica Ginger, 39, of Bentonville, Ark. “They need housing and support, and I can offer both.”

Donations are pouring into nonprofits that assist refugees, even though in most places few Afghans have arrived yet. At Mission Community Church in the conservative bedroom community of Gilbert outside Phoenix, parishioners have been collecting socks, underwear, shoes and laundry supplies.

Mars Adema, 40, said she had tried over the past year to convince the church’s ministries to care for immigrants, only to hear that “this is just not our focus.”

“With Afghanistan, something completely shifted,” Ms. Adema said.

In a nation that is polarized on issues from abortion to the coronavirus pandemic, Afghan refugees have cleaved a special place for many Americans, especially those who worked for U.S. forces and NGOs, or who otherwise aided the U.S. effort to free Afghanistan from the Taliban.

The moment stands in contrast to the last four years when the country, led by a president who restricted immigration and enacted a ban on travel from several majority-Muslim countries, was split over whether to welcome or shun people seeking safe haven. And with much of the electorate still deeply divided over immigration, the durability of the present welcome mat remains unknown.

Polls show Republicans are still more hesitant than Democrats to receive Afghans, and some conservative politicians have warned that the rush to resettle so many risks allowing extremists to slip through the screening process. Influential commentators, like Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, have said the refugees would dilute American culture and harm the Republican Party. Last week, he warned that the Biden administration was “flooding swing districts with refugees that they know will become loyal Democratic voters.”

But a broad array of veterans and lawmakers have long regarded Afghans who helped the United States as military partners, and have long pushed to remove the red tape that has kept them in the country under constant threat from the Taliban. Images of babies being lifted over barbed-wire fences to American soldiers, people clinging to departing planes and a deadly terrorist attack against thousands massed at the airport, desperate to leave, have moved thousands of Americans to join their effort.

“For a nation that has been so divided, it feels good for people to align on a good cause,” said Mike Sullivan, director of the Welcome to America Project in Phoenix. “This country probably hasn’t seen anything like this since Vietnam.”

Federal officials said this week that at least 50,000 Afghans who assisted the United States government or who might be targeted by the Taliban are expected to be admitted into the United States in the coming month, though the full number and the time frame of their arrival remains a work in progress. More than 31,000 Afghans have arrived already, though about half were still being processed on military bases, according to internal government documents...

 

Years of Miscalculation in Withdrawal from Afghanistan

All sides bear blame.

A close buddy of mine, who served years in the U.S. Army and Army reserve, told me that once we booted the Talbiban in 2001, we at most should've stay a few more years, leaving the Afghans to build their own country. 

At NYT, "Taliban Sweep in Afghanistan Follows Years of U.S. Miscalculations":

WASHINGTON — President Biden’s top advisers concede they were stunned by the rapid collapse of the Afghan army in the face of an aggressive, well-planned offensive by the Taliban that now threatens Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital.

The past 20 years show they should not have been.

If there is a consistent theme over two decades of war in Afghanistan, it is the overestimation of the results of the $83 billion the United States has spent since 2001 training and equipping the Afghan security forces and an underestimation of the brutal, wily strategy of the Taliban. The Pentagon had issued dire warnings to Mr. Biden even before he took office about the potential for the Taliban to overrun the Afghan army, but intelligence estimates, now shown to have badly missed the mark, assessed it might happen in 18 months, not weeks.

Commanders did know that the afflictions of the Afghan forces had never been cured: the deep corruption, the failure by the government to pay many Afghan soldiers and police officers for months, the defections, the soldiers sent to the front without adequate food and water, let alone arms. In the past several days, the Afghan forces have steadily collapsed as they battled to defend ever shrinking territory, losing Mazar-i-Sharif, the country’s economic engine, to the Taliban on Saturday.

Mr. Biden’s aides say that the persistence of those problems reinforced his belief that the United States could not prop up the Afghan government and military in perpetuity. In Oval Office meetings this spring, he told aides that staying another year, or even five, would not make a substantial difference and was not worth the risks.

For Mr. Biden, the last of four American presidents to face painful choices in Afghanistan but the first to get out, the debate about a final withdrawal and the miscalculations over how to execute it began the moment he took office.

“Under Trump, we were one tweet away from complete, precipitous withdrawal,” said Douglas E. Lute, a retired general who directed Afghan strategy at the National Security Council for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “Under Biden, it was clear to everyone who knew him, who saw him pressing for a vastly reduced force more than a decade ago, that he was determined to end U.S. military involvement,” he added, “but the Pentagon believed its own narrative that we would stay forever.”

“The puzzle for me is the absence of contingency planning: If everyone knew we were headed for the exits, why did we not have a plan over the past two years for making this work?”

A Skeptical President From the moment that news outlets called Pennsylvania for Mr. Biden on Nov. 7, making him the next commander in chief for 1.4 million active-duty troops, Pentagon officials knew they would face an uphill battle to stop a withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan. Defense Department leaders had already been fending off Mr. Biden’s predecessor, Donald J. Trump, who wanted a rapid drawdown. In one Twitter post last year, he declared all American troops would be out by that Christmas.

And while they had publicly voiced support for the agreement Mr. Trump reached with the Taliban in February 2020 for a complete withdrawal this May, Pentagon officials said they wanted to talk Mr. Biden out of it.

After Mr. Biden took office, top Defense Department officials began a lobbying campaign to keep a small counterterrorism force in Afghanistan for a few more years. They told the president that the Taliban had grown stronger under Mr. Trump than at any point in the past two decades and pointed to intelligence estimates predicting that in two or three years, Al Qaeda could find a new foothold in Afghanistan.

Shortly after Lloyd J. Austin III was sworn in as defense secretary on Jan. 22, he and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recommended to Mr. Biden that 3,000 to 4,500 troops stay in Afghanistan, nearly double the 2,500 troops there. On Feb. 3, a congressionally appointed panel led by a retired four-star Marine general, Joseph F. Dunford Jr., publicly recommended that Mr. Biden abandon the exit deadline of May 1 and further reduce American forces only as security conditions improved.

A report by the panel assessed that withdrawing troops on a strict timeline rather than how well the Taliban adhered to the agreement heightened the risk of a potential civil war once international forces left.

But Mr. Biden, who had become deeply skeptical of American efforts to remake foreign countries in his years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as vice president, asked what a few thousand American troops could do if Kabul was attacked. Aides said he told them that the presence of the American troops would further the Afghan government’s reliance on the United States and delay the day it would take responsibility for its own defense.

The president told his national security team, including Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, that he was convinced that no matter what the United States did, Afghanistan was almost certainly headed into another civil war — one Washington could not prevent, but also, in his view, one it could not be drawn into...

Still more.

 

Breaking: U.S. Prepares to Evacuate Afghanistan

Breaking news, but not surprising.

It's getting grim over there.

A.P. has a detailed report this morning, "Taliban take Afghanistan’s third-largest city in onslaught."

And at NYT, "Marines Prepare for Possible Evacuation of Americans in Afghanistan":

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Pentagon is moving thousands of Marines into position for a possible evacuation of the American Embassy and U.S. citizens in Kabul as the Biden administration braces for a possible collapse of the Afghan government within 30 days, administration and military officials said.

The sharply deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, as the Taliban rapidly advance across the north and Afghan security forces battle to defend ever shrinking territory in the south and west, has forced the Defense Department to accelerate plans to get Americans out of the country. Officials say any evacuation will involve a robust use of American military force to move people to Hamid Karzai International Airport to waiting military transport planes and to protect them en route.

American negotiators are also trying to extract assurances from the Taliban that they will not attack the embassy if they overrun the capital, two American officials said.

The 30-day estimate is one scenario and administration and military officials insist that the fall of Kabul might still be prevented if Afghan security forces can muster the resolve to put up more resistance. But while Afghan commandos have managed to continue fighting in some areas, they have largely folded in a number of northern provincial capitals.

The Taliban seized the strategic city of Ghazni, about 90 miles south of Kabul, on Thursday, putting the group in a better position to attack Kabul after its recent string of victories in the north.

And as Ghazni fell, Taliban fighters broke through multiple front lines in Kandahar, pushing deep into the city. As Afghanistan’s second-largest city, Kandahar is historically and strategically important. The Taliban, led by Mullah Mohammad Omar, began their insurgency there in the 1990s.

Herat, a city in western Afghanistan near the Iranian border, was also in an increasingly dangerous position as Taliban fighters flooded in.

A senior official in the Biden administration said in an interview that the Taliban might soon take Mazar-i-Sharif, the capital of Balkh Province and the country’s economic engine, which is now effectively surrounded by the Taliban. The fall of Mazar-i-Sharif and Kandahar, which has all but collapsed, the official said, could lead to a surrender of the Afghan government by September. Another senior U.S. official described the mood in the White House as a combination of alarm and resignation — at the rapid pace of the Taliban offensive and the collapse of Afghan national forces, and over how the situation could continue to worsen. There has been a constant stream of video teleconference calls every day this week, the official said.

Three contingents of Marines are preparing for the possible evacuation of the American Embassy, officials said. A Marine battalion of several hundred is already on the complex grounds, responsible for evacuating the embassy, which has 4,000 employees, including 1,400 Americans, officials said.

In addition, the Pentagon is moving a Marine expeditionary unit, with more than 2,000 Marines, into position closer to the air route over western Pakistan, known as the “boulevard,” where it can dispatch its forces into Afghanistan as a rapid response team that would be able to begin an embassy evacuation within a day of orders, officials said. And as a contingency plan in case any embassy evacuation turns into a fight with the Taliban, Defense Department officials have tasked thousands of Marines to begin a training exercise that can, if necessary, quickly be turned into an evacuation deployment, the officials said. The Marines in the exercise have been told that they may need to be ready to deploy next week within 96 hours, officials said.

Asked during a news conference on Wednesday whether the Pentagon was speeding up any evacuation of people from the embassy, a spokesman for the Defense Department, John F. Kirby, demurred.

“We’re focused on the security situation that we face now, which again we’ve acknowledged is deteriorating,” he said. “We are certainly mindful of the advances that the Taliban have made in terms of taking over yet an increased number of provincial capitals.”...

Who lost Afghanistan? Why, Joe Biden, of course. *Shrug.*

And is it possible? I'd argue it's inevitable. While withdrawal is the zeitgeist right now, one the Taliban take over, it's going to be a bloodbath. 

 

Pentagon Report: Taliban Jihadists 'Breached Walls' of Camp Integrity in Latest Kabul Attack

Following-up from Sunday, "Scores Dead in Wave of Suicide Attacks in Afghanistan."

Looks like a pretty extreme deterioration of security over there.

At Twitchy, "Pentagon reports that insurgents made it inside Camp Integrity, Kabul during Friday’s attack."

Scores Dead in Wave of Suicide Attacks in Afghanistan

The Taliban claimed responsibility for Saturday's attack, in Afghanistan's northern Kunduz.

At WSJ, "Afghanistan Attacks Kill at Least 77":

KABUL — Violence surged in Afghanistan over the weekend including three separate bombings in the capital Kabul in one day—a wave of attacks that left at least 77 people dead.

It was the first spate of attacks on the capital since deep divisions emerged within the Taliban leadership over who should succeed their spiritual leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar. The insurgents, however, have sought to dismiss talk of any rift after the Afghan government and the Taliban revealed last week that Mullah Omar had been dead for more than two years.

The latest attack struck the northern province of Kunduz on Saturday night. A suicide bomber targeted members of an irregular anti-Taliban militia, killing 25 people, according to a local police spokesman.

The Taliban, who have been battling Afghan forces for control of Kunduz for months, claimed responsibility.

On Friday, three separate attacks jolted Kabul, leaving more than 50 dead in less than 24 hours, according to Afghan and foreign officials. It was the deadliest day in years in the capital. The Taliban claimed responsibility for two out of the three attacks.

Friday’s violence ended a period of relative calm in the Afghan capital, where there hadn’t been a major security breach in more than a month.

The spike in attacks further complicates efforts led by Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to broker a peaceful resolution to the 14-year conflict with the Taliban.

“We are still committed to peace but we will respond to such terrorist attacks with full force,” Mr. Ghani said in a statement on Saturday.

The Taliban have formally named a new leader, Mullah Mohammad Akhtar Mansour, who had been effectively in charge of the group for years.

But the appointment was immediately opposed by several senior Taliban, and religious scholars close to the movement are seeking to mediate between the rival factions, say people close to the extremist group.

The series of attacks on Friday began with a truck bomb that exploded near an Afghan military intelligence compound. Fifteen people were killed and around 300 wounded in one of the most powerful explosions to have ever shaken the Afghan capital. It left a deep crater, and caused residential and commercial buildings to collapse, a scale of destruction rarely seen in the city.

Scores of women and children were among the victims.

“Kabul, as the capital, should be an example for security in the country—but that’s not the case,” said Luca Radaelli, the country head of Emergency, an Italian nongovernmental organization that runs three hospitals in Afghanistan.

“The situation is just getting worse.”

No one claimed responsibility for the truck bomb. A Taliban spokesman said the group was assessing whether its fighters were involved...

More.

Also at AP, "Security Tight After Devastating Kabul Attacks," and Reuters, "Suicide attack kills 29 in northern Afghanistan."

PREVIOUSLY: "Afghanistan: At Least Six Dead in First Major Taliban Attack Since Leadership Transition (VIDEO)."

Afghanistan: At Least Six Dead in First Major Taliban Attack Since Leadership Transition (VIDEO)

As many as nine may be dead, according to additional reports.

See the Telegraph UK, "Six dead in first major Afghan Taliban attack since power transition."

And from AFP, "Nine dead in Afghan Taliban's first major attacks since power change."

Pakistan Heatwave Leaves Hundreds Dead as Government Cuts Electrical Power

This is an astonishing loss of life.

At the BBC, "Pakistan heatwave: Death toll crosses 700 people in Sindh":

There is anger among local residents at the authorities because power cuts have restricted the use of air-conditioning units and fans, correspondents say.

Matters have been made worse by the widespread abstention from water during daylight hours during the fasting month of Ramadan.

Wouldn't want to get Allah pissed off or anything, and no doubt the government's cutting power to appease the gods of global warming.

Sad.

More at Euronews, "Anger at Karachi power cuts as hundreds die in Pakistan heatwave."

Scores of Children Among 130 Dead in Taliban Attack on Pakistan School

The Taliban are warming up for retaking Afghanistan as President Obama declares an end to combat operations in that country.

At Blazing Cat Fur, "Massacred in their classroom: More than 100 children killed as Taliban gunmen storm Pakistani school."

And at LAT, "Gunmen wearing uniforms of security forces, some strapped with suicide vests, go from classroom to classroom, firing at children as some students cower under their desks."

Thailand Puts Capital on Lockdown

At WSJ, "Thailand Declares State of Emergency for Bangkok: Measure Takes Effect Wednesday and Will Continue for 60 Days":

BANGKOK—The Thai government declared a state of emergency in its capital in response to antigovernment protests that have paralyzed the city and stirred up increasingly violent attacks.

The decree was set to be imposed Wednesday and last 60 days, but protest leaders vowed to defy it and carry on with demonstrations aimed at forcing Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra from office.

Over the past week, unknown assailants have launched attacks on the protesters, killing one and injuring dozens. The unrest is also dragging on the economy, with Japanese auto companies, some of Thailand's most important investors, raising a red flag that future investment could be affected.

If the political upheaval persists, it will have an "increasingly significant impact" on foreign investors, according to Rajiv Biswas, chief economist, Asia-Pacific, for IHS Global Insight, a forecasting firm.

"Most investors feel that the political risks are so deep that there's no solution in sight," Mr. Biswas said. "They're unable to make decisions about long-term investment if they don't know who is going to be in power."

Officials said they would disclose details of the security measures Wednesday. Generally, emergency decrees give authorities powers to detain suspects without charge, censor media, impose curfews and ban political gatherings of more than five people, among other things.

The imposition of the emergency decree is the government's latest attempt to ensure that elections set for Feb. 2 will go ahead, and to restore control in parts of Bangkok that have been occupied, said Yuttaporn Issarachai, a political scientist at Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University.

"People's rights are being threatened and it appears like the authorities are doing nothing about it," Mr. Yuttaporn said.

The protests have stretched on for two months, with numbers reaching as high as 150,000, mostly from Bangkok's middle classes. They have long opposed the populist policies and family dynasty of Ms. Yingluck and her brother, billionaire businessman Thaksin Shinawatra, who was deposed as prime minister in a coup in 2006.

Continue reading.

U.K.'s Lost Girls: Sex-Selective Abortion Industry Leaves Thousands of Missing Girls

I can hardly stand reading about this, but it's so vital. This gendercide must stop.

At the Independent UK, "The lost girls: Illegal abortion widely used by some UK ethnic groups to avoid daughters 'has reduced female population by between 1,500 and 4,700'":

The illegal abortion of female foetuses solely to ensure that families have sons is widely practised within some ethnic communities in Britain and has resulted in significant shortfalls in the proportion of girls, according to an investigation by The Independent.

The practice of sex-selective abortion is now so commonplace that it has affected the natural 50:50 balance of boys to girls within some immigrant groups and has led to the “disappearance” of between 1,400 and 4,700 females from the national census records of England and Wales, we can reveal.

A government investigation last year found no evidence that women living in the UK, but born abroad, were preferentially aborting girls. However, our deeper statistical analysis of data from the 2011 National Census has shown widespread discrepancies in the sex ratio of children in some immigrant families, which can only be easily explained by women choosing to abort female foetuses in the hope of becoming quickly pregnant again with a boy. The findings will reignite the debate over whether pregnant women should be legally allowed to know the sex of their babies following ultrasound scans at 13 weeks.

Some experts have argued that the baby’s sex should be withheld automatically until much later in pregnancy, when abortions are more difficult to obtain – as some NHS hospitals have already started to do.

About 10 per cent of the 190,000 abortions carried out in England and Wales in 2011 took place after 13 weeks of pregnancy, when the sex organs of the foetus are clearly visible from ultrasound scans – which are available privately – and doctors can predict gender with an accuracy of more than 99 per cent.

Abortions based solely on gender are illegal in Britain and in many other countries, even those where the practice is widespread. In parts of India and China there are now as many as 120 or 140 boys for every 100 girls despite a ban on sex-selective abortion.

Amartya Sen, the Indian-born economist and Nobel laureate who warned 25 years ago about the tens of millions of “missing women” in the world, said gender-based abortions are a new form of sex discrimination. “Selective abortion of female foetuses – what can be called ‘natality discrimination’ – is a kind of high-tech manifestation of preference for boys,” Professor Sen said.

More at the link.

Plus, "The lost girls: Thousands of 'missing' girls revealed by analysis of UK's 2011 census results."

The families with the highest ratios favoring boys are from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangledesh. The widespread availability of abortion and gender testing means that immigrant populations can easily sex-select their children, wreaking horrific gendercide on a generation of the unborn.

More, "The lost girls: It seems that the global war on girls has arrived in Britain." The piece estimates that in India alone probably 10 million baby girls have been aborted in the last two decades.

Philippines Survivors Begin Odyssey for Families

At the Wall Street Journal, "Typhoon Haiyan Survivors Begin Odyssey to Find Their Families":

CEBU CITY, Philippines—Just after nightfall, three men jostled with hundreds of other people for spots aboard a rust-stained ferry leaving this port for an island where they hoped to find loved ones alive—or prepare to bury them.

Typhoon Haiyan ripped across the Philippines a week earlier, focusing much of its wrath on Samar Island. A few hundred of those on the Cebu dock found their way aboard the Samar-bound 34-year-old ferry, the Blessed Stars.

The Blessed Stars' passengers—and thousands of others boarding ferries on the docks during a tropical downpour—were part of a mass migration of people from the Philippines and beyond who are converging on their devastated home islands.

As the engine kicked in and fumes mixed with the salty breeze, stars began to emerge. Passengers lighted cigarettes and, as the 15-hour journey began, told of the people they were traveling to find.

One was Angel Cillo, who boarded with his wife to find out whether his family in his hometown was alive, including his 75-year-old mother. He last spoke to them by phone just before the typhoon hit, and his brother had sounded nonchalant. Calls now always produced one response: "The person you are trying to call is out of the coverage area."

Another, Rayanaldo Casas, knew his 22-year-old son, an apprentice on a cement ship, died when the storm surge hit off the Samar coast.

His body was in a mass grave, Mr. Casas said. He wanted to return the remains to his home on another island.

"I will bring him home, but I don't know how," he said.

Passenger Eduard Amanigos, a worker in Kuwait, lost touch with his wife, son and daughter when the typhoon hit their home along the eastern Samar coast. The last thing his wife said before the phone went dead: "The water has risen to the ceiling in just five minutes."

He said he later saw her alive on television, but he didn't know much about her situation.

Continue reading.

Grim Toll Rises in Philippines

At WSJ, "Grim Toll Rises Amid Ruin and Chaos: Death Toll Above 1,700 Is Likely Much Higher":

People covered their faces with towels and scarves against the stench of death Monday, clogging the typhoon-ravaged roads of the hardest hit part of the Philippines in a traffic jam of desperation.

Headed into one center of devastation were Filipinos frantic to find loved ones, or help, or both; fleeing in the other direction were battered and fearful survivors of the howling winds and raging waves of supertyphoon Haiyan.

As the death toll surged and food and water became scarce three days after the storm, tens of thousands of refugees struggled to find their way to aid. With the return of cellphone signals and as rescuers cut their way toward isolated communities on Monday, the depth of the loss of lives became clearer. The government put the death count at 1,744—and it was expected to rise much further. Thousands remained missing.

On the streets of Tacloban, capital of the shattered province of Leyte, stiffened animal carcasses and human bodies were a common sight, some out in the open, others partly covered by tarps or sheet metal.

The road to Tacloban's airport was jammed with people trying to get out as limited commercial service restarted. At the same time, the road into town was also snarled by motorbikes and cars—even as humanitarian workers warned that both food and water were rapidly running out.

Continue reading.