SCA MORNING PRESS CLIPS
Prepared for the U.S. Department of State
Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs
TO: | SCA & Staff |
DATE: | Thursday, September 12, 2024 6:30 AM ET |
Afghanistan
On 9/11 anniversary Afghan opposition leader warns country once again a ‘safe haven for terrorists’ (FOX News)
FOX News [9/11/2024 12:00 PM, Chris Massaro, 48844K, Negative]
Three years since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and 23 years since the 9/11 terror attacks that led to the U.S. invasion, Afghanistan finds itself in a worse position now than it was on that fateful day.
"This country has become once again a safe haven for terrorism. It will become a battlefield once again," Afghan National Resistance Front (NRF) leader Ahmad Massoud told Fox News Digital in a rare interview.
According to Massoud, the threat emanating from Afghanistan is much greater today than it was on 9/11, and the U.S. failed to achieve its number one objective of rooting out terrorists when it hastily pulled out of Afghanistan in August 2021.
The threat of terrorism from Afghanistan has spread from the U.S. to Europe and recently to Russia. It is just a matter of time, Massoud fears, for it to reach America’s shores again.
"I know for a fact the time will come," Massoud said.
Massoud is not giving up on his vision of a free and democratic Afghanistan despite the odds, and he believes that Americans and Afghans hold intimate bonds over shared values of fighting for freedom against terrorists.
"I feel very much the same feeling with all those victims of 9/11 and the people of the United States and Afghanistan are very much connected to each other because those attacks were carried out by the same team, those who attacked Americans on 9/11 killed my father," Massoud said.Twenty-three years later and four U.S. presidential administrations since, Afghans live under the same threat of Islamic extremism and with the same pain and oppression as they did on 9/11.
Almost immediately after the Taliban regained power, anti-Taliban forces quickly fled to Afghanistan’s northern Panjshir Valley and announced their opposition to the new regime.
Massoud, the leader of the NRF, vowed to continue the fight against the Taliban.
"I didn’t want to leave my people alone in the hands of evil," Massoud told Fox News Digital.
Massoud is the son of Afghan resistance hero Ahmad Shah Massoud. The younger Massoud was only 12 years old when his father was assassinated by al Qaeda two days before the 9/11 terror attacks. Shah Massoud was integral to the rebels who fought against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s and became a leading figure in the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance that resisted the Taliban’s reign from 1996 to 2001.
As a young boy growing up in war-ravaged Afghanistan, it was not clear at the time that he would follow in the same footsteps as his legendary rebel father.
"My father never wanted me to walk in the same path," Massoud recounted.
His father did not want him becoming a rebel leader because of the pain that it causes, Massoud remembered, and the enormous pressure and the high expectations it has is unbearable.
Massoud is not doing this for his late father or because he is his son.
"I’m just doing it because I’m madly in love with my people, and I cannot see them in this situation."
As the years and memories of that sunny, cloudless and traumatic Tuesday morning in September fade away, Massoud is trying to remind America and the world not to forget about the threat from terrorism in Afghanistan.
"Today, al Qaeda is much stronger and entrenched in Afghanistan than it has ever been," the resistance leader said.
The 2020 Doha Agreement negotiated under former President Donald Trump laid the groundwork for the withdrawal of all U.S. forces in exchange for a pledge from the Taliban to prevent any terrorist organization from using Afghan soil to threaten or attack the United States or its allies.
Taliban spokespersons made assurances that they would not allow any terror group to plan an attack from Afghan territory. Although it is true that al Qaeda and other terrorist groups have yet to stage any attacks on the U.S. or its allies, groups like al Qaeda still operate within Afghanistan and have deeply rooted ties with the Taliban.
Numerous United Nations reports note that since their return to power, relations with al Qaeda remain close, and the group that carried out the 9/11 terror attacks is "strategically patient, cooperating with other terrorist groups in Afghanistan and prioritizing its ongoing relationship with the Taliban."
Al Qaeda operates at least eight training camps across Afghanistan but does so covertly in order to create the image that the Taliban is adhering to the Doha Agreement, according to U.N. monitoring.
While the U.S. was negotiating with the Taliban, Massoud knew all along they were not negotiating in good faith.
"It is going to fail, and it will also show the world the true face of the Taliban," Massoud said.
The leader of the NRF said the international community believed the lies of the Taliban that they had fundamentally changed from the group that previously ruled Afghanistan prior to 9/11.
"Women have been degraded to nothing but property of men and education has been completely destroyed by the Taliban," Massoud said angrily.
The elder Massoud, according to his son, warned against an international presence in Afghanistan, saying that the U.S. came to him and proposed operating military bases in the country and to help jointly fight against terrorism.
Shah Massoud was very clear in his vision.
"My father said boots on the ground in Afghanistan will never work," Massoud recounts his father saying. "We fought against the invasion of the Russians. And really, he did not want the presence of another foreign force in Afghanistan," he added.
The U.S. did not heed these warnings when they went into Afghanistan.
Massoud wants to continue his father’s policy of no foreign troops on Afghan soil and wants to fight terrorism with his own forces based in the country. What he is looking for is the logistical and financial support to carry on the fight.
"We indeed need help and support from the world," Massoud said, but he also understands the frustration in the United States over "forever wars" and respects U.S. policy opposing further wars. The U.S.-Afghan relationship should continue its efforts to fight terrorism, Massoud believes, and that Afghans should not feel betrayed while the same group that killed Americans and Afghans is in power.
Three years later, and with the Taliban cementing their power, the U.S.-Afghan partnership that emerged after 9/11 remains nonexistent.
"We are on our own and there is no external support."
Massoud believes if the U.S. and international community throw their support behind the NRF, it could make a huge difference."Even the slightest of external support, you would see the liberation of a big chunk of Afghanistan. Because the people are very much against the Taliban, the slightest bit of hope and the slightest of opportunities for the people of Afghanistan, and we would see a crack in the armor of the Taliban," he explained.
Massoud did not mince words when talking about U.S. policy and was critical of the period immediately after 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan when the War on Terror expanded to Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s regime.
"The expansion of this war to Iraq completely diverted attention from Afghanistan and Afghanistan for a while [was] the second priority." Massoud argued that more attention was needed to help build Afghan institutions and make the new government more stable and therefore harder to overthrow.
Massoud was also critical of early U.S. strategy, including the endeavor to create an Afghan army in the image of the U.S. armed forces.
"We did not have American resources or American technology. It was a recipe for disaster."
Massoud also said that the U.S.’ conflicting strategies of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency over the years failed to fully defeat the Taliban and create a stable Afghan government.
"It means that, unfortunately, the Afghans could not make the Americans understand that these strategies don’t work in Afghanistan, and they failed to come up with a proper strategy."
However critical Massoud is of American and international leadership and strategy in Afghanistan, he still placed 70% to 80% of the blame on the Afghan leadership and their flawed thinking that the U.S. and coalition partners would remain in Afghanistan forever like on the Korean Peninsula. The false sense of security did not allow Afghan leaders to focus on national trust, and corruption and criminality ran rampant.
"Unfortunately, the inside political game and personal agendas and not having the capability to see that this situation could never last very long, or that it was not a forever perk," hurt Afghanistan’s ability to fight terrorism threats it faced or build a stable democracy.
"They missed all of those opportunities," Massoud said.
The resistance leader is not unaware of the complicated nature of international politics and realizes that many conflicts are currently raging on, which require U.S. attention and resources.
"There’s a fatigue in the U.S. and the West, and they have been stretched from Ukraine to Taiwan to Gaza. So that stress is also another factor for them not to actually pay attention to Afghanistan," Massoud lamented. Banned from school, Afghan girls turn to TV classes (Reuters)
Reuters [9/11/2024 9:02 AM, Emma Batha and Orooj Hakimi, 88008K, Neutral]
Every morning after breakfast, Afghan teenager Prina Muradi turns on the television - not to watch films or cartoons, but to study maths, science and literature.Muradi, 16, has not been to school since 2021 when the Taliban seized the country and barred girls from secondary education.But now she is racing to catch up, thanks to a satellite television channel that is broadcasting the entire Afghan curriculum from France for girls who are shut out of school."I’ve regained hope," Muradi said from her home in the capital Kabul. "This is a battle against ignorance."Begum TV is the brainchild of Swiss-Afghan media entrepreneur Hamida Aman, founder of the Begum Organization for Women (BOW), a non-profit supporting girls and women in Afghanistan.Last November, BOW launched the Begum Academy, a digital platform hosting some 8,500 videos covering Afghanistan’s secondary school syllabus in both Dari and Pashto, the country’s official languages.But most girls do not have internet access so Aman set up Begum TV in March to reach a broader audience."The most powerful medium in Afghanistan is television," Aman told the Thomson Reuters Foundation."We’re not here to interfere in politics or bring down the regime. Our mission is to help our sisters in their daily struggles and to support our kids in education."Afghanistan is the only country in the world that excludes girls from school.The Taliban have also barred women from university and most jobs, and curbed their freedom of movement, echoing the harsh restrictions imposed when they first took power in 1996.New laws banning women from speaking or showing their faces in public have sparked fresh international outrage.UNDERGROUND SCHOOLSGirls’ education made major strides after the first Taliban rule ended in 2001, with increasing numbers pursuing degrees and careers - progress that has now been eroded."We were completely heartbroken," said Muradi, recalling the day she was turned away from school."I’d wanted to become a lawyer or journalist. But with the collapse of Afghanistan, it felt as if my dreams collapsed as well."The school ban has already impacted about 1.4 million girls, according to UNESCO, the United Nation’s educational and cultural agency, with the number soaring every year as more students finish primary level.In 2022, Muradi’s family moved from northern Afghanistan to Kabul so she could attend underground schools secretly operating in the capital.But her parents were always worried she might get caught.The launch of Begum TV has provided a lifeline, allowing her to study at home.As her two brothers head off to school, Muradi takes notes in front of the television.She follows the same national curriculum as her brothers - although lessons are often interrupted by power outages.Her favourite subjects are maths and Dari literature.PRESSURE ON MEDIAUNESCO media expert Antonia Eser-Ruperti said that while the media could never replace a classroom, it was playing an increasingly important role in plugging educational gaps.A number of radio and TV stations run some educational content, but Begum is the only outlet broadcasting the full curriculum specifically aimed at girls.Ironically, the inspiration came from the Taliban themselves, Aman said.Five months before the former insurgent group’s return to power, BOW had launched Radio Begum, an FM station for women and girls that included educational and entertainment programmes.Although the Taliban have not criticised Radio Begum’s educational output, they have put pressure on the station for some of its other content.A government official told Aman the authorities had to act, but mentioned that if Begum were a satellite broadcaster, they could do nothing."That’s how the idea came to me," she said.Begum TV, which is funded by international organisations and private philanthropic foundations, is run from Paris by 10 Afghan women journalists and presenters now living in France.In the evening, it broadcasts entertainment, including a dubbed Bollywood drama - a favourite with Muradi’s family - as well as music and talk shows.The latter cover everything from health to women’s rights, including sensitive issues such as domestic violence."This is the freedom we have through satellite," Aman said. "Afghan media is under very close scrutiny now, but satellite TV allows us to bypass censorship."She said the entertainment shows were important for supporting girls and women’s mental health, which had been severely impacted by the increasing constraints on their lives.CHILDREN QUIT PRIMARY SCHOOLMore than half of Afghans have access to satellite TV, according to a 2023 report by BBC Media Action.Anecdotal evidence suggests it is gaining in popularity as the Taliban crack down on entertainment and free information.Although most Begum TV viewers are in Afghanistan, some are in Pakistan and Iran, where many Afghan refugees live.Begum Academy plans to launch an app in December allowing students to access lessons offline and interact more easily with teachers.It is also organising exams that will help the best students join online universities.Aman said the American University of Afghanistan, now based in Doha, and Arizona State University had agreed to recognise the academy’s exam certificate and hoped others would follow.Preparations are also underway to launch primary school lessons, answering demand from parents and students.Although schools remain open for younger girls, UNESCO said the quality of education had deteriorated and many children - both girls and boys - had dropped out.Factors include deepening poverty and a dire shortage of teachers made worse by the Taliban’s ban on women teaching boys.But there are wider challenges too.Aman, who frequently travels to Afghanistan, said it was frightening to see how fast the ban on girls’ education had become normalised."These girls are desperate because the only alternative that remains is to get married," she added.Back in Kabul, Muradi says many young teenagers have been married off following the school ban, including her best friend, who wed at 15.Muradi herself has other plans."No matter what, I have to continue my education," she said."I’m determined to show the world that Afghan girls and women can achieve great success." Women Stage Small Demonstration In Kabul To Demand Rights (Radio Free Europe)
Radio Free Europe [9/11/2024 1:54 PM, Staff, 1251K, Negative]
A small group of Afghan women took to the streets of Kabul on September 11 in a rare protest to demand their rights and call on the international community to denounce Taliban rule. More than 10 women participated in the demonstration, advocating for the restoration of basic freedoms that have been severely curtailed under the Taliban-led government since the group seized power three years ago. The protest was organized by the Afghan Women’s History Transformation Movement. Ruqiya Sa’i, head of the movement, said the women ended the protest after 30 minutes because of the possibility of a violent attack by the Taliban. The severe restrictions on women ban education beyond the sixth grade and bar them from working in many offices. Afghan women meet in Albania in ‘act of defiance’ against Taliban crackdown (The Guardian)
The Guardian [9/11/2024 8:28 AM, Annie Kelly, 92374K, Neutral]
More than 130 Afghan women have gathered in Albania at an All Afghan Women summit, in an attempt to develop a united voice representing the women and girls of Afghanistan in the fight against the ongoing assault on human rights by the Taliban.
Some women who attempted to reach the summit from inside Afghanistan were prevented from travelling, pulled off flights in Pakistan or stopped at borders. Other women have travelled from countries including Iran, Canada, the UK and the US where they are living as refugees.
The summit, which has been two years in the making, is being hosted by the Albanian government in Tirana after multiple other governments across the region refused, said the organisers.
Fawzia Koofi, the women’s activist and former Afghan MP, whose organisation Women for Afghanistan arranged the summit, said: "In these three days, the women of Afghanistan from all backgrounds come together to unite their efforts on scenarios to change the current status quo at a time when women in Afghanistan say they are being completely erased from the public sphere.
"We aim to achieve consensus and strategise on how to make the Taliban accountable for the human rights violations they are perpetrating and how to improve the economic situation for women inside the country."
The summit comes a few weeks after the Taliban published new "vice and virtue" laws that banned women’s voices being heard in public and made it mandatory for women to completely cover their bodies outside the home.
"Us being here together is an act of defiance. We will not be silenced," said Seema Ghani, a former minister under the government of Hamid Karzai and now a women’s rights activist who has remained in Afghanistan to carry out humanitarian work. "Women and girls inside Afghanistan are living lives that are dominated by fear, every day. Just leaving the house is an ordeal.""The world is moving on but we are here, all of us together, to try to make sure that we are not forgotten. We are not all here to agree with each other, but we are here to talk, debate and hopefully end with a united voice," said Ghani.
At the end of the three-day summit, the organisers hope to publish a set of demands or guidelines for the international community that sets out how Afghan women want to respond to the systematic attack on their rights and freedom by the Taliban.
In the three years since the Taliban have taken control of Afghanistan, women have been barred from most forms of paid employment, prevented from walking in public parks and shut out of the criminal justice system, and girls have been stopped from going to secondary school or university. The Taliban have also resumed the stoning of women for crimes such as adultery.
A campaign for the Taliban’s treatment of women to be recognised as "gender apartheid" and a crime against humanity under international law was launched last year in an attempt to hold the group to account. How 9/11 Changed – and Didn’t Change – Afghanistan (The Diplomat – opinion)
The Diplomat [9/11/2024 10:54 AM, Freshta Jalalzai, 1198K, Negative]
On 9/11, I lived in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.
Our neighborhood in eastern Kabul, Microryan, stood like a forgotten relic-a gray, unremarkable five-story housing complex built during the Soviet invasion.
By 2001, the Taliban controlled roughly 90 percent of Afghanistan, with the remaining areas, primarily in the north, held by the Northern Alliance, a coalition of anti-Taliban forces, particularly in northern regions like the Panjshir Valley. The Northern Alliance was primarily composed of remnants of the Mujahideen factions that had fought against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. However, after the collapse of the pro-communist regime in April 1992, they unleashed a devastating civil war that lasted from 1992 to 1996.
The civil war had reduced Kabul to ashes. Windows shattered during the fighting were patched with plastic, and the walls of burned apartments remained blackened by fire, riddled with bullet holes - a haunting reminder of the violence that had ravaged the ancient capital city.
In 1996, after the Taliban takeover and the escape of the Mujahideen, Afghanistan slipped from the chaos of civil war, warlord cruelty, and anarchy into the malaise of poverty, isolation, and disease.
Back then, only the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia recognized the Taliban government. This abandonment left us, the Afghan people, sanctioned and almost cut off from the rest of the world while the Taliban authorities were unchecked and unaccountable. Living in Kabul at the time, it felt as if, for the rest of the world, we didn’t exist. We might have starved if not for the daily aid of five loaves of bread from a United Nations relief agency - our sole lifeline during those desperate times.
There were almost no jobs, the Taliban authorities were barely able to pay the monthly wages of government employees, and international aid agencies had limited operations in the country.
Clean drinking water was scarce. Every few days, we lined up at old Soviet-era water pipes that ran in the basements to collect what we perceived as clean water, storing it in pots and barrels to last until the next opportunity.
To keep warm, we placed a small, portable coal-burning oven in the middle of our living room, using it to cook as well. It was tragically common for people to die from coal smoke due to carbon monoxide poisoning. One of our neighbors, for example, put her 4-year-old son to sleep in a room heated by a coal oven. Within a few hours, her cries echoed through the entire building - her son had died. In another heartbreaking incident, an entire family was found dead, victims of the same silent killer. Despite these tragedies, people continued to burn coal - the cheapest available fuel - in their homes, desperate to stay warm in the harsh winters.
Education had become foreign to Afghan girls. Women were barred from working. Hence, families were streaming into neighboring countries, primarily Iran and Pakistan, while those who remained were effectively trapped in a city devastated by poverty, disease, and drought
During their first rule, the Taliban also banned television, music, and all forms of visual arts. But my family had an old, nearly broken Sony ICF-7601 radio, a 1980s model from the Japanese brand that my parents perhaps had bought at a flea market in Kabul.
The radio was held together in the middle by a plastic band to keep it from falling apart. My father would carefully take it out of the cloth case my mother had sewn to protect it from dust, placing it delicately on the edge of our living room table to turn on the BBC Pashto news broadcast. He would listen in a hushed voice, as we didn’t want to attract any unwanted attention to our home.
That radio was our sole connection to the outside world.
My parents would kneel before the radio at around 8:00 p.m. Kabul time, when the broadcast began. Looking back, I would guess it was a half-hour of programming, after which my parents would give us their own analysis of the day’s events. That was the wrap-up of our daily lives. We’d go to bed right after to conserve the oil in the lantern.
It was during this nightly ritual that my family learned of the 9/11 attacks on the United States.
My father was away, and it was my mother who followed the routine. That night, she turned off the radio and told us, "Something huge has happened." We didn’t grasp the full extent of it, but it was clear that my mother was very worried.
My mother’s brief summary - "America has been attacked. Innocent people are killed. Something bad is going to happen" - was a stark reflection of our helplessness.
But we were too weak, too distant, too impoverished to think beyond it. Afghanistan’s name was coming up as the news developed, but it was a relief that none of the attackers or those directly involved were Afghans. "They were all Arabs," my mother said.
However, Osama Bin Laden - the Saudi orchestrator of the September 11th attacks - and the head of al-Qaida were hiding in Afghanistan, and the United States demanded that the Taliban hand him over. The Taliban leadership refused.
It took us nearly a month to fully understand the impact of that refusal.
On October 7, 2001, as the United States began its military campaign in Afghanistan, then-President George W. Bush addressed the nation. He declared, "The oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America and our allies. As we strike military targets, we will also drop food, medicine, and supplies to the starving and suffering men and women and children of Afghanistan."
Bush framed the invasion as a dual mission: to combat terrorism and to bring freedom to the Afghan people under Taliban rule. The U.S.-led coalition invaded Afghanistan and promised to liberate us, build a democracy, and establish a government in our name.
The coalition soldiers entered Kabul on November 12, 2001, during the initial phase of the military campaign aimed at dismantling al-Qaida and removing the Taliban from power. Our neighbor, an elderly man whom we called Baba, brought flowers to the soldiers. It was perhaps the first time an Afghan elder had welcomed a foreign invader.
Suddenly, we had a newfound freedom. Young men danced in the streets of our neighborhood, and cars blared music with their windows down, letting the sound echo through our somber surroundings. Schools reopened immediately, and all the girls were urged to return to class. Universities resumed as well.
It was as though a new life had been breathed into the hearts and souls of the people. Families who had fled to Pakistan and Iran began returning. Kabul felt as if a great wave had swept through, transforming everything.
We were supposedly rescued, with the Taliban cast as our enemies and the new Afghan government that the West sat up as our saviors.
Unfortunately, our democracy perished from the beginning, when the United States and its allies chose our tormentors to bring us a better life. Most of the figures ushered into the new government were the same people who had inflicted civil war upon the Afghan people just a few years earlier.
These individuals were now being presented as new, polished alternatives - but we saw them as mere repackaged versions of the war criminals and human rights abusers who had once been notorious for atrocities such as skinning people alive, rape, and mass murders. They were now being paraded as champions of human rights. Upon coming to power, their campaign of brutality on the defenseless began right from the start, with systemic rapes, torture and revenge killings rural areas.
We placed our hope in Hamid Karzai, a man with a background in the Jihad against the Soviet invasion but no personal involvement in the civil war or in leading militias or drug dealing. Yet, reality soon dispelled the illusion of a clean slate. One man could not deliver justice to a nation scarred so deeply, burdened by powerful warlords and an international community that heavily interfered in the internal affairs of the country. Karzai complained, accusing the United States of acting like a "colonial power."
Over the next two decades, thousands of innocent civilians were slaughtered. The reported figures of 70,000 Afghan military and police deaths, alongside 46,319 civilian casualties estimated by the United States Institute of Peace, begin to illustrate the enormity of the loss. The campaign to win Afghan hearts and minds was harsh. Arrests, imprisonments, night raids, and bombings were so indiscriminate that many Afghan villagers unconnected to the Taliban were caught in the crossfire and alienated. Weddings, funerals, schools, and mosques were bombed.
Official casualty statistics, both military and civilian, only hint at the true scale of the conflict. Slowly but steadily, the air in Kabul changed. The city reeked of explosions, burned rubber, and blood. In a cruel irony, during the bombing of the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz by U.S. forces, one of the 42 people killed was the nephew of our neighbor Baba, the man who had welcomed the foreign soldiers with flowers.
The consequences of the war extend beyond immediate human suffering to severe environmental damage. For example, a 2017 study revealed alarming levels of toxic substances in Afghanistan’s water, including arsenic, boron, and fluoride - serious pollutants with grave health implications.
Amid this environmental and humanitarian crisis, it is worth noting that Osama Bin Laden was eventually discovered living in Pakistan, a short drive from its powerful military headquarters.
The U.S. campaign to spread democracy in Afghanistan quickly devolved into the country’s longest war. Approximately 2,459 U.S. military personnel were killed, and 20,769 were wounded during the conflict, which stretched from October 2001 to August 2021.
After a two-decade-long war, the group signed the Doha Agreement with the United States in February 2020 - a document focused primarily on troop withdrawal and the Taliban’s commitment to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a terrorist haven. Once again, the Afghan people were forgotten and the Taliban returned to power.
As per the agreement, the last U.S. soldier was out of Afghanistan on August 30, 2021.
The Taliban claim to be protecting Afghanistan from foreign terrorists, perhaps having learned from past lessons. But on July 31, 2022, al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of the United States’ most wanted terrorists, was killed in a drone strike in Kabul. It seems unlikely he could have been living in Afghanistan’s capital without some level of cooperation from those in power. The Taliban also claim to be fighting the Islamic State’s local branch, frequently reporting arrests and ambushes against IS operatives across the country. But cross-border terrorist attacks remain a major concern for Afghanistan’s neighbors.
While the Doha agreement did not explicitly address human rights, particularly women’s rights, it outlined the process for intra-Afghan negotiations aimed at achieving a political settlement. But in reality, the U.S. withdrawal has left Afghanistan in a precarious position - back under Taliban control, with a government that has no formal recognition from the outside world. To those of us who lived in Kabul in 2001, the situation is bleakly familiar.
Moving forward, it is imperative that the United States stands with the Afghan people and supports a negotiated solution, rather than once again placing trust in those who have repeatedly failed Afghans. There should be no more engaging with notorious human rights abusers, warlords, and militia leaders as legitimate actors. Over the past two decades, these people did what they knew best: abused power, siphoned U.S. taxpayer dollars intended for the Afghan people, and eroded law, order, and justice in Afghanistan. As Kabul fell, most of them ran away to luxurious lives abroad, leaving a starving population behind.
Through the years, thousands of Afghans played a crucial role in supporting the U.S. mission during the War on Terror, standing alongside the U.S.-led coalition forces on the front lines. They risked their lives, and countless others paid the ultimate price, believing in the promise of a more stable and secure Afghanistan. Yet, many Afghans now face an uncertain future, feeling abandoned as the world turns away following the U.S. withdrawal. Over 40 million Afghans feel locked in isolation, facing an uncertain future.
In other ways, too, Afghanistan has now reverted to where it stood 23 years ago: Women are stripped of the most basic freedoms, the government remains unrecognized, and millions of girls, like I once was, are being denied education, facing starvation and isolation. Their last hope rests with the international community.
The 9/11 terrorist attacks claimed the lives of thousands of innocent people in the United States. They also left an indelible mark on the history of Afghanistan, reshaping countless lives, including my own. Yet 23 years later, millions of Afghans are once again at a stalemate, caught between uncertainty and isolation.
As I look back on the life I once lived in that small, coal-warmed ground floor apartment in Kabul - where the world slipped in only through the crackling whispers of a broken radio and water trickled weakly from forgotten Soviet pipes - I am struck by the cruel echo of history.
The same fear, hunger, and isolation that shaped my life then, again cast their shadows over the lives of millions of Afghan girls today. We clung to hope then, just as these girls do now, but hope, without action, is a fragile flame - flickering in the darkness, until it’s smothered by despair. The world, especially the United States must not let Afghanistan disappear into that darkness once more. Pakistan
Pakistan charges Imran Khan party lawmakers with terrorism offences (Reuters)
Reuters [9/11/2024 9:35 AM, Asif Shahzad, 88008K, Negative]
Several lawmakers and leaders of jailed former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s party arrested after a rally they held to demand his release have been charged with terrorism offences, according to police on Wednesday.The lawmakers have been in police custody since being arrested after Sunday’s rally turned violent, and will remain in custody until September 18 for investigation, said police officer Zafar Khan and a party official.Former cricket star Khan, 71, has been in jail for over a year since his overthrow in 2022 after a falling-out with powerful military generals which has spawned the worst political turmoil in decades in the nation of 241 million people.Chief Minister Ali Amin Gandapur of northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province where Khan’s party leads a majority government is among those facing the charges, the police report of the offences seen by Reuters showed.An Islamabad police spokesman said the charges included law and order violations and attacking law enforcement officials, which constitutes a terrorism offence. He did not give the number of those held in custody or elaborate further.Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party has said nearly a dozen of its parliamentarians have been picked up in Islamabad. Others had sought refuge in parliament to evade police, which entered the building to arrest some of them, the party said.The party has announced countrywide protests for Friday against the crackdown.Candidates backed by the PTI won the most seats in a general election in February but fell short of the majority required to form a government. Khan’s rivals cobbled together a coalition instead to set up a bloc under Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.PTI says the elections were manipulated to keep Khan out of power - a charge the Pakistan Election Commission denies. Gunmen kill a polio worker during a vaccination campaign in Pakistan (AP)
AP [9/11/2024 8:00 AM, Staff, 31638K, Negative]
Gunmen on motorcycles opened fire Wednesday on police escorting a team of polio workers during a door-to-door vaccination campaign in northwestern Pakistan, killing an officer and a polio worker, police said.No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack in Bajur, a district in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and a former stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban, according to local police chief Abdul Aziz.Pakistan’s Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi issued a statement condemning the attack.Pakistan on Monday launched a nationwide polio campaign amid a spike in militant attacks. The potentially fatal, paralyzing disease mostly strikes children under age 5 and typically spreads through contaminated water.That same day, a roadside bomb hit a vehicle carrying officers assigned to protect health workers conducting polio immunization in the northwestern South Waziristan district, in the same province, wounding six officers and three civilians.The militant Islamic State group later claimed responsibility for Monday’s attack.Anti-polio campaigns in Pakistan are regularly marred by violence. Militants target vaccination teams and police assigned to protect them, falsely claiming that the campaigns are a Western conspiracy to sterilize children.Since January, Pakistan has reported 17 new cases of polio, jeopardizing decades of efforts to eliminate polio in the country. Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only countries in which the spread of polio has never been stopped. Two killed in attack on Pakistani polio vaccination team (Reuters)
Reuters [9/11/2024 1:24 PM, Mushtaq Ali, 37270K, Negative]
Unidentified assailants opened fire on a polio vaccination team in northwestern Pakistan on Wednesday, killing one of those handing out doses and one policeman escorting him, police said.The attack in the region bordering Afghanistan comes two days after Pakistan launched its latest national campaign to stamp out the virus, which still poses a health threat in the South Asian nation, although mostly eradicated elsewhere."Unidentified armed men opened fire on polio vaccination team in a subdivision of Bajaur tribal district as they were on the vaccination campaign," district police officer Waqas Rafique told Reuters.No group has claimed responsibility, but previously Islamist militant groups in the region have claimed similar attacks on polio teams, falsely portraying the inoculation campaigns as a Western conspiracy to sterilise children.Pakistan began its latest national campaign earlier this week, aiming to administer the vaccine to up to 30 million children, the prime minister’s office said.Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries in the world still struggling to eradicate polio. A local police union group called for a strike by policemen and a boycott of security duties for the vaccination campaign in the Bajaur district following the killing of their colleague.
Pakistan Police Strike After Attacks On Polio Vaccination Teams (Agence France-Presse)
Agence France-Presse [9/12/2024 5:01 AM, Staff, 88008K, Negative]More than 100 Pakistan police who provide security for polio vaccination teams in restive border areas went on strike Thursday after a string of deadly militant attacks this week.Police officers who are routinely deployed to protect polio workers going door-to-door frequently come under attack by militants waging a war against security forces.Hundreds of police and polio workers have been killed over the past decade."Any constable who learns of the protest is leaving their polio duty to join the demonstration," said a police officer at the sit-in who asked not to be named.He told AFP that negotiations have failed between the protesting police and senior officials in Bannu district, in the northwestern border province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.Since the launch of the latest vaccination drive on Monday, at least two police officers and one polio worker have been shot dead in separate attacks in rural districts near the border with Afghanistan, including one officer escorting a team on Thursday.Nine people were also wounded on Monday in a bomb attack on a polio vaccination team claimed by the Islamic State group.Most attacks are claimed by the Pakistani Taliban, a separate group from the Afghan Taliban but with a similar ideology.In the latest attack, two motorcyclists opened fire on the police officer."The polio team was in a nearby street at the time, so they remained unharmed," Ziauddin Ahmed, the district police officer, told AFP.Pakistan has seen a surge in polio cases this year, recording 17 cases so far in 2024, compared to six in 2023.Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only countries in the world where polio remains endemic despite an effective vaccine.Health officials had aimed to vaccinate 30 million children in a week-long campaign."A partial polio campaign is underway here, but many police officials have abandoned their duties to join the sit-in," another protesting police officer told AFP on condition of anonymity.According to the United Nations children’s agency (UNICEF), the number of polio cases in Pakistan has fallen dramatically from around 20,000 annually in the early 1990s.Pockets of Pakistan’s mountainous border regions however remain resistant to inoculation as a result of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and some firebrand clerics declaring it un-Islamic.Pakistan has witnessed a surge in militant attacks since the Taliban government returned to power in neighbouring Afghanistan in 2021, mostly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, but also in southwestern Balochistan, which abuts Afghanistan and Iran.Islamabad accuses Kabul’s rulers of failing to root out militants sheltering on Afghan soil as they prepare to stage assaults on Pakistan -- a charge the Taliban government denies.The Barron’s news departme A Pakistani policeman shoots and kills a blasphemy suspect held at a police station (AP)
AP [9/12/2024 4:32 AM, Abdul Sattar, 31638K, Negative]
A policeman opened fire inside a police station in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta on Thursday, killing a suspect held on accusations of blasphemy, a local official said.The slain man was identified as Syed Khan. Police said he had been arrested the day before, after officers snatched him from an enraged mob that claimed he had insulted Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.According to police official Mohammad Khurram, the officer involved in the fatal shooting has been arrested. Khurram did not provide further details.Killings of suspects while in police custody are rare in Pakistan, where accusations of blasphemy — sometimes even just rumors — are common and often spark rioting and rampage by mobs that can escalate into lynching and killings.Under Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy laws, anyone found guilty of insulting Islam or Islamic religious figures can be sentenced to death — though authorities have yet to carry out a death sentences for blasphemy.In the case of Khan, the man killed on Thursday, local residents claimed he had used derogatory remarks against the prophet and went after him. After he was arrested, the mob surrounded the station, demanding police hand Khan back to them so they could kill him.At one point, a man hurled a grenade at the station on Wednesday while a group of Islamists briefly blocked a key road in the city, demanding punishment for Khan. The crowd dispersed later in the day after officials managed to calm them down.Pakistan has witnessed a surge in attacks on blasphemy suspects in recent years.In June, a mob broke into a police station in the northwestern town of Madyan, snatched a man who was held there and then lynched him over allegations that he had desecrated Islam’s holy book, the Quran. The attackers also torched the station and burned police vehicles parked there. The slain man was a tourist staying at a hotel in town when the locals turned on him and accused him of blasphemy.Last year, a mob in the eastern Punjab province attacked churches and homes of Christians after claiming they saw a local Christian and his friend desecrating pages from a Quran. The attack in the district of Jaranwala drew nationwide condemnation, but Christians say the men linked to the violence are yet to be put on trial.A policeman in 2011 killed a former governor of Punjab province after accusing him of blasphemy. That officer, Mumtaz Qadri, was later sentenced to death and hanged. However, support for him grew after his hanging, with tens of thousands attending his funeral in the garrison city of Rawalpindi. Many in Punjab still today considered him a martyr.Quetta, a conservative city in southwestern Pakistan is also the capital of the restive Balochistan province, where militant groups stage near daily attacks and where separatists have waged a decadeslong insurgency against the government in Islamabad. India
Violence Resurges in Indian State Locked in Bloody Conflict for 16 Months (New York Times)
New York Times [9/11/2024 4:14 PM, Pragati K.B., 831K, Neutral]
More than a year after it became an open war zone, deadly ethnic violence has resurged this month in the northeastern Indian state of Manipur. The local authorities have reimposed a curfew and an internet blackout as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government struggles to quell the unrest.
The conflict, which started in May 2023, was ignited by a dispute between two groups, the Meitei and the Kuki, over the Meitei’s claim to receive a special status guaranteeing allotment of government jobs and the right to buy land.
More than 200 people have been reported killed and at least 60,000 displaced in the unrest. After pitched violence broke out, with villages burned and reports of sexual assaults widespread, the Indian Army moved in and effectively partitioned the state between the two groups.
During India’s general election this spring, opposition politicians repeatedly criticized Mr. Modi for saying little about the Manipur unrest and not doing enough to stop it. Mr. Modi has stood by the state’s chief minister, N. Biren Singh, a member of his Bharatiya Janata Party. Critics of Mr. Singh, who is part of the majority Meitei community, say he has exacerbated the violence with his partisan statements and handling of the conflict.
While the violence had subsided over the past few months, it came roaring back in recent weeks, with 11 people — eight Kukis and three Meiteis — killed in attacks, according to data collected by Kuki and Meitei organizations. The Manipur police said there had been a “significant escalation” in the 16-month conflict, accusing Kuki militants of using drones and long-range rockets against civilians and security forces.
The state government imposed the new curfew and suspended internet service after protests by students demanding peace. The police used force to prevent protesters from storming the official residences of the state’s governor and of the chief minister. The demonstrators are demanding the resignation of all sitting local lawmakers, of the leaders of the state police and of the state’s top security adviser.
India cuts internet service more often than any other country to contain outbreaks of unrest, according to a report by Keep It On, an advocacy group that monitors shutdowns. The Manipur government said it had suspended internet access to thwart “antisocial elements” who could use social media to incite the “passions of the public.”
The current conflict traces back to a ruling by the state’s High Court that could grant a special tribal status to the Meitei, who make up just over half of the state’s fewer than three million people and are the most politically powerful group.
India’s Supreme Court has since ruled that the Manipur decision was “completely factually wrong,” but the conflict between the two groups, which had simmered for decades, has raged on.Hoihnu Hauzel, a journalist and researcher from Manipur, said that the national government under Mr. Modi needed to move with more urgency to end the violence. His government, she said, had instead let the Manipur unrest “fester,” hoping that it would “die a natural death.”“If two communities are not able to see eye to eye,” Ms. Hauzel added, the solution to the fighting “has to come from outside,” meaning from the national government. Indian soldiers kill two suspected rebels in Kashmir (Agence France-Presse)
Agence France-Presse [9/11/2024 10:11 AM, Staff, 88008K, Negative]
Indian soldiers in Kashmir killed two suspected militants on Wednesday, the army said, the latest clashes during campaigning for local elections in the disputed region.Muslim-majority Kashmir has been divided between rivals India and Pakistan since their independence from British rule in 1947, and both claim the Himalayan territory in full.India-controlled Kashmir is gearing up for the first local assembly elections in a decade, with voting in the three-phased poll beginning on September 18.The Indian army said "two terrorists were neutralised", a term they use indicating the men had been killed.The clashes took place Kathua, in the territory’s southern district of Jammu, which is majority Hindu.Rebels have fought Indian forces for decades, demanding independence or a merger with Pakistan.About 500,000 Indian troops are deployed in the region, battling a 35-year insurgency that has killed tens of thousands of civilians, soldiers and rebels since 1989.On Monday, the army said it had killed two gunmen on the Indian side of the heavily militarised de facto border with Pakistan.The territory has been without an elected local government since 2019, when its partial autonomy was cancelled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government and it was brought under New Delhi’s direct rule.A total of 8.7 million people will be eligible to vote for the region’s assembly, with voting to begin next week and results expected on October 8.Ahead of the vote, Modi is expected to address rallies for his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the southern Jammu areas of the territory, which has a sizeable Hindu population.In the past two years, more than 50 soldiers were killed in clashes, mostly in the Jammu area.India and Pakistan accuse each other of stoking militancy and espionage to undermine each other and the nuclear-armed rivals have fought several conflicts for control of the region. India, China discuss early resumption of passenger flights, Indian minister says (Reuters)
Reuters [9/12/2024 3:42 AM, Tanvi Mehta, 5.2M, Neutral]
India and China discussed early resumption of direct passenger flights between their two countries, India’s Civil Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu said on Thursday, in an indication that their air travel could recover after four years.
Reuters reported in June that China was pressing India to restart direct passenger flights, but New Delhi was resisting as a border stand-off continues to weigh on ties between the Asian rivals.
Relations between the nuclear-armed neighbours, who share a largely undemarcated Himalayan border, have been strained since a military clash on their Himalayan frontier in 2020 killed 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers.
Ever since, India has tightened scrutiny of investments from China, banned hundreds of popular apps and severed passenger air routes, although direct cargo flights still connect the world’s two most populous nations.
Kinjarapu said he met Song Zhiyong, the head of Civil Aviation Administration of China, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Ministerial Conference on Civil Aviation in New Delhi.
The two discussed "further strengthening civil aviation cooperation between the two countries, especially promoting early resumption of scheduled passenger flights", Naidu said in a post on X.
Restarting direct flights would help both countries, but the stakes are higher for China, where recovery in travel after the COVID-19 pandemic has not been as upbeat as in India’s booming aviation sector. Can India Keep Its Wealthy From Fleeing? (Wall Street Journal – opinion)
Wall Street Journal [9/11/2024 4:58 PM, Sadanand Dhume, 810K, Neutral]
India is curiously defying a common law of economics. When foreign investors cool toward an emerging economy’s stock market, share prices usually fall. Not so in the world’s fifth-largest economy.
Foreign investors were net sellers of India-listed shares last month, accounting for more than $1 billion in outflows. Foreign inflows of $2.6 billion this year are a fraction of last year’s $22 billion. Yet the Bombay Stock Exchange’s benchmark BSE Sensex has risen 12.8% year to date, buoyed in large part by domestic mutual funds.
The stock market’s resilience reflects deeper changes in India, with implications beyond investor portfolios. Long a global byword for poverty, India now boasts a significant and rapidly growing cohort of relatively wealthy consumers and investors. Goldman Sachs estimates the country’s “affluent population”—those with an annual income of at least $10,000—will grow from approximately 60 million today to 100 million by 2027. Blume Ventures, an early-stage Indian venture fund, estimates that about 30 million households, or roughly 120 million people, with an annual per capita income equivalent to $15,000 represent “the consuming class.”These are the people largely responsible for India’s stock-market boom, as well as for the majority of domestic spending on everything from beauty products and restaurant meals to airline tickets and iPhones. In historical terms they are an anomaly. India has long been characterized by extreme wealth disparities—the old cliché of maharajas and snake charmers—but it has never had a well-off class this large. Goldman Sachs estimates that as recently as 2011 only about 20 million Indians met its criteria for “affluent.”
Despite this progress, the country’s consuming class remains small. Blume estimates it at about 8% of the population. It reports that only about 25 million to 30 million households own a car. Some 30 million homes, according to Blume, have wired broadband. Among all U.S. households in 2021, 90% had a broadband internet subscription.
At the higher end, India’s market nearly vanishes. According to Mercedes Benz’s 2023 annual report, it sold about 737,000 cars in China and 298,000 in the U.S. In the 2023-24 financial year, it reportedly sold some 18,000 in India. For BMW the Indian market is less than 2% of the Chinese. India houses nearly one-sixth of the world’s population but reportedly accounts for roughly 4.4% of Netflix’s 270 million paid subscribers.
According to Blume, only 22 million Indians paid income tax last year. Of them 4.5 million—or 0.3% of the population—accounted for 80% of collected income taxes. By contrast, the top 1% of Americans in 2021 paid 45.8% of total income taxes.
Blume reports that groceries accounted for three-quarters of retail spending in India in 2022, compared with 40% in China and 30% in the U.S. Most Indians lack the disposable income to buy most consumer goods, let alone invest in the stock market. The roughly 40 million Indians invested in mutual funds, according to Blume, represent less than 3% of the country’s population. More than 800 million Indians are entitled to free grains from the government every month, and as many as 900 million have received direct cash benefits in the past decade.
How India approaches its growing bubbles of affluence will determine its future. For the past century, dating to the final decades of colonial rule, Indian politics and public discourse have been dominated by leftists quick to demonize wealth. Since the demise of the Swatantra Party in 1974 no Indian party has espoused economic liberalism. The economic reforms of the 1990s occurred because India was broke, not because its political class suddenly embraced free enterprise.
Because nonpoor Indians have almost no ability to affect electoral outcomes, they have largely “seceded” from the public sphere, Sajith Pai, a partner with Blume Ventures, says in an interview. Many of those who can have left: According to Henley & Partners, a firm that helps the wealthy acquire foreign residency, 7,500 millionaires exited India in 2022.
Even today, no Indian politician can bring himself to lament that a tiny part of the population shoulders a disproportionate amount of the tax burden and receives few government services in return. The promise of radical wealth redistribution lies at the heart of opposition leader Rahul Gandhi’s attempted political comeback. Mr. Modi’s popularity relies largely on a mix of religious chauvinism and handouts for the masses.
For the U.S., and the West more broadly, India would be a more desirable partner—both as a market and potential counterweight to China—if it could increase the proportion of its population able to afford cars, cappuccinos and international flights. Yet to do so, India must first treat such people as assets to be cultivated, not scorned. Rahul Gandhi brings a different India to Washington (Financial Times – opinion)
Financial Times [9/11/2024 11:43 AM, John Reed, 14.2M, Neutral]
One sign that India has truly opened a new chapter in its politics came this week when Narendra Modi’s main rival toured a foreign land where the prime minister has seemed most comfortable: the US.
Rahul Gandhi, the fourth-generation political dynast, paid a three-day visit to Texas and Washington. He followed in Modi’s footsteps by meeting US politicians and diaspora Indians — but with the swagger of a man who suddenly believes he has a good shot at replacing him.
His trip is the first to the US since an election when Modi’s political opponents pushed the prime minister’s Bharatiya Janata party into a minority, forcing it to rely on smaller partners and putting the strongman on the defensive. Gandhi, formerly the opposition’s most prominent face, is now its official leader.
Gandhi’s style was more low key and business-like than Modi’s, who moves through India and the world in a whirl of pomp and ceremony. But analysts say this was part of a calculated push by Gandhi’s Indian National Congress to present its candidate as a credible future leader with his finger on the pulse of ordinary Indians and an alternative vision for the country.“Rahul Gandhi has gone to the US at a time when he is increasingly becoming a symbol of all those unhappy with Narendra Modi and his government,” said Neerja Chowdhury, author of a book about Indian prime ministers who has been covering politics since the days of Rahul’s grandmother Indira.
The trip comes just ahead of Modi’s visit to the US later this month. He will attend a summit of Quad nations — the US, Japan, Australia and India — in President Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware.
The prime minister, who has met the diaspora at past large-scale rallies — including one dubbed Howdy Modi in Houston in 2019, and this year’s Ahlan Modi in Abu Dhabi in February — is also planning a mass event for the Indian community at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island. The events showcased the 73-year-old leader’s popularity among overseas Indians, and boosted his brand back home.“Whenever Modi went abroad, he has done meetings with the diaspora and made it part of his diplomatic toolkit,” said C Raja Mohan, professor at the National University of Singapore. “As the BJP showed that it was gaining ground in diaspora communities, the Congress party has finally gotten into that.”
Gandhi’s events have not matched Modi’s in scale or spectacle. But that is the point, party officials say. In talks with Indian diaspora groups, university students and faculty — and a press conference of the type Modi eschews — Gandhi has invoked the selfless ideals of his namesake Mahatma Gandhi. He even spoke of “love in politics”, a theme of his two treks across India.“The difference between what Modi does and what we do is that we are more into interactions, conversations — and not a big rally of 10,000 people where they just broadcast their messages and everyone claps,” said Sam Pitroda, chair of the Indian Overseas Congress, a diaspora organisation affiliated with the party. “We want to learn, and we are not here for an election rally.”
Party officials insist Gandhi’s visit was “not political”, and he did not visit in his official capacity as opposition leader, dispensing with the protocols that would require.
But he did meet US lawmakers on Tuesday, as well as the state department official Donald Lu — signs that Washington is keeping tabs on India’s shifting political tides at a time when the two countries are bolstering ties.
Some of Gandhi’s words and actions drew angry comment from Modi’s supporters and other critics back in New Delhi, who see him as a political lightweight, unfit to run India, who owes his position to his family name.
In Dallas, Gandhi made remarks musing about the meaning of the Hindi word devta (“deity”), which Modi supporters jumped on, and the right-wing pro-government Republic TV channel deemed “absurd”. In Washington he met Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar, who visited the Pakistani-controlled part of the disputed region of Kashmir in 2022, and whom one BJP official described as a “Pakistan-sponsored anti-India voice”.
The blowback in India was a reminder of controversies that arose around Gandhi’s past foreign trips, and what analysts describe as his continuing frailties as a politician.
But since the election, as the political commentator Chowdhury puts it, “people have been looking at him with new eyes”. The BJP’s election setback has not only dented Modi’s authority, but made his rival and arch-nemesis a potential prime minister in waiting. NSB
Bangladesh Seeks $5 Billion in Emergency Funds from Lenders (Bloomberg)
Bloomberg [9/11/2024 11:06 AM, Arun Devnath, 27782K, Neutral]
Bangladesh has sought $5 billion from major lenders, including the International Monetary Fund, to rebuild foreign exchange reserves, Muhammad Yunus, head of the interim government, said.“We’re also seeking lower interest rates and longer tenures on loans from Russia and China,” he said in his televised address to the nation.The country is under pressure to pay bills for overseas purchases. The finance ministry is in talks with Russia about the “payment of advances and outstanding balances” for the Rooppur nuclear power plant project.The government sought $3 billion in loans from the IMF, $1 billion from the World Bank, and $1 billion from Japan International Cooperation Agency, Yunus said.Yunus also announced six panels to reform the constitution, the electoral system, the judiciary, the police, the anti-corruption agency and the public administration.The reform teams are expected to formally begin work on Oct. 1 and complete their tasks in three months. Yunus: Ex-PM Hasina ‘destroyed’ Bangladesh’s institutions (Deutsche Welle)
Deutsche Welle [9/11/2024 2:15 PM, Arafatul Islam and Srinivas Mazumdaru, 16637K, Neutral]
Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, took over as interim leader of Bangladesh last month after violent political unrest led to an unceremonious end to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s 15-year rule.
In an interview with DW, he addressed an array of issues, including the domestic political situation, Bangladesh’s relations with India and the influx of the Rohingya into the country.
The 84-year-old leader, who holds the official position of chief adviser in the interim government, said former PM Hasina "destroyed almost all institutions" and "the economy was shattered."
"You do not know where to begin because everything has to be restarted in a different way," he said, adding that his interim administration wants to "establish citizens’ rights, human rights, democracy and everything that goes with a good governance."
He also hinted at amending the constitution. "We should be focusing on the major issues of constitution and build a consensus. We cannot do anything without a consensus because our strength comes from the consensus. If we can establish the consensus, we go ahead and do that."
But Yunus refused to give an exact date for the next election, saying that it will be held "as soon as possible."
"That is our mandate. We want to come to the election and have a decent election, beautiful election, and celebrate the victory of a particular party or whatever party which comes in, and hand over the power to the newly elected government. So this should be as brief as possible. We cannot give you date and time right now."
Yunus says Hasina’s corrupt practices shattered economy
During the interview, Yunus also accused Hasina’s administration of corruption, which he said shattered the nation’s economy.
"Money siphoned off from Bangladesh, through government channels to bank channels and so on. Contracts were signed not for the benefit of the people but for the benefit of a family or family members, and something like that. So, those ugly things that you see when a government goes in the wrong direction, things happen, terrible things happen in the economy and so on."
Bangladesh’s $450-billion (\u20ac412-billion) economy has struggled since the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly when it comes to creating enough, decent-paying jobs for its vast youth population.
Russia’s war against Ukraine has also sharply increased the cost of fuel and food imports, causing the South Asian nation’s foreign exchange reserves to shrink.
Dhaka was forced to seek financial support from the IMF last year in the form of a $4.7-billion bailout.
Yunus’ interim administration is currently urging international lenders to offer it $5 billion in financial aid to stabilize its dwindling foreign exchange reserves.
How to manage relations with India?
On the question of Bangladesh’s relations with India, which shared close ties with Hasina’s administration, Yunus said Dhaka has no option but to maintain good ties with New Delhi.
"Bangladesh must have the best of relationship with India, out of its own necessity and out of its own acquaintances, and the similarity of the things that we do together. We share each other’s history. So there is no escape route for Bangladesh to do something else," he said.
After the student protests turned into a mass uprising against her, Hasina fled to India in a military helicopter.
New Delhi has not provided details on Hasina’s location, though she is believed to be sheltering in a safe house.
Yunus’ interim government in Dhaka has already revoked Hasina’s diplomatic passport, and more and more voices in Bangladesh, including its top prosecutors, are demanding her extradition.
Former diplomats and academics consulted by DW say New Delhi is likely to resist pressure from Dhaka to deliver Hasina for trial.
Speaking to DW, Yunus also pointed to other bilateral problems, such as river water sharing and the cross-border movement of people. He said his administration will work together with New Delhi to resolve these issues. "We have to work together and there are international ways of solving that. We will follow that path and make a very happy solution."
Rohingya influx ‘creates problem for us’
He also briefly touched upon Dhaka’s policy toward the Rohingya people. "The Rohingya are trickling in as trouble begins in Rakhine," he said, referring to the armed conflict in Myanmar’s western province that shares a long border with Bangladesh.
Dhaka says at least 18,000 Rohingya Muslims have crossed over in recent months to escape the escalating violence in Rakhine.
"The Rohingya are trying to find a way to escape, that they’re coming towards Bangladesh. We can’t stop them, we can’t push them back. Pushing them back means we are pushing them to death. I don’t think any country can do that. So we welcome people who come, let them come in," he said.
However, he stressed that the situation is challenging for Bangladesh.
"It creates problem for us, problem for us, because we already have nearly a million Rohingyas living in the country, we don’t know what is the future of that," Yunus said
"Then on top of it, we have 200-300 people almost every day coming in. This number builds up very quickly, so this is an additional burden. So, we are worried about it. We are trying to draw attention of the international community on how to handle this. We do not have a solution right now, but we kept the door open." Two Maldivian ministers who disparaged India’s Modi resign ahead of PM Muizzu’s Delhi trip (Reuters)
Reuters [9/11/2024 6:15 AM, Uditha Jayasinghe, 37270K, Neutral]
Two junior ministers in the Maldivian government, who were suspended for disparaging Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi this year, have resigned ahead of a proposed visit by President Mohamed Muizzu to New Delhi, an official said on Wednesday.Malsha Shareef and Mariyam Shiuna in the Ministry of Youth Empowerment, Information and Arts were disciplined along with fellow minister Abdulla Mahzoom Majid in January for comments they made on social media platform X.They labelled Modi a "clown", "terrorist" and "puppet of Israel" in response to his promotion of tourism in the Indian islands of Lakshadweep, viewed as a signal to pro-China Muizzu who had pledged to end Maldives’ "India first" policy.The comments had angered New Delhi and sparked a campaign by some Indian celebrities on social media to promote local tourism, which dented Indian arrivals in globally popular Maldives, whose 1,192 islands in the Indian Ocean are dotted with luxury resorts.Muizzu’s office did not respond to calls seeking comment. A government official confirmed the resignations of Shareef and Shiuna but declined to give further details and did not wish to be named as he is not authorised to speak to the media.The president’s spokesperson was cited by local media as saying on Tuesday that Muizzu would make an official visit to India "very soon".It would be the Maldivian president’s first visit to New Delhi since he won election last year in a region where India and China compete for influence.Muizzu made a state visit to Beijing soon after winning the vote and in June he attended Modi’s swearing-in ceremony in New Delhi after India’s general election.Maldives-India relations were hurt after Muizzu won power in April and demanded New Delhi replace 80 defence personnel it had stationed on the Maldives with civilians as part of his "India out" campaign.India agreed and completed the replacements in May while the relationship has been on the mend following diplomatic talks and meetings since. Maldives hunts for bailout to avoid first Islamic sovereign debt default (Financial Times)
Financial Times [9/11/2024 4:14 PM, Arjun Neil Alim, John Reed, and Joseph Cotterill, 14.2M, Neutral]
The Maldives will test the global market for Islamic finance in the coming weeks, as the debt-burdened archipelago nation hunts for a bailout that will prevent it becoming the first country to default on a key form of sharia-compliant debt.
The price of a $500mn bond-like sukuk issued by the government has collapsed to about 70 cents on the dollar over the past month ahead of a payment due in October, as its foreign reserves run low.
A default on the bond, which matures in 2026, would be the first by a sovereign for sukuk debt, of which about $860bn were in issue at the start of the year, according to Fitch Ratings.“The questions everyone is asking: will the Maldives be the first [sovereign] sukuk to default,” said Joshua Loud, senior emerging markets portfolio manager at Danske Bank. “Given this has never happened, I don’t think the market fully understands the impact.”
The country has struggled to pay back its two main bilateral creditors, India and China, from which it borrowed heavily to finance growing budget deficits. Debt repayments now threaten to drain its reserves.
But the Maldives, known for both idyllic honeymoons and its exposure to rising sea levels, has been caught in the increasingly fraught competition for regional influence between its two huge Asian neighbours.
Global observers and investors worry that neither power will extend support to the Muslim-majority nation of half a million people, risking a complicated default and restructuring process.
Sukuk follow the Islamic principle of shunning traditional interest payments, instead offering creditors a share of profit from an underlying financial instrument.
The sharia-compliant bonds have been sold by governments around the world including the UK, Malaysia and Nigeria although they are usually associated with cash-flush Gulf governments and banks. S&P Global is forecasting up to $170bn in sukuk issuance this year, and Moody’s expects more than $200bn.
But the Maldives’ struggles threaten to upset the outlook. Tourism has bounced back after the pandemic, but the country depends heavily on imports, and global inflation and high spending on strategic infrastructure projects have caused its debt to balloon.
Mohamed Shafeeq, the Maldivian finance minister, said last week that the government could make the October payment of about $25mn. But net foreign exchange reserves fell below $50mn in July as the government also tried to hold the rufiyaa currency’s peg to the US dollar. Gross reserves dropped under $400mn, down from about $500mn in May.“Reserves are down to a critically low level,” said George Xu, a director with Fitch Ratings in Hong Kong. “The risk of default seems more probable.” Fitch last month downgraded the country’s debt for the second time in two months, deepening global investor concern.
As well as global asset managers such as BlackRock and Franklin Templeton, Emirates NBD, a Dubai government-owned bank, owns a small slice of the Maldivian sukuk, according to ownership data.
A spokesperson for the Maldivian president’s office told the Financial Times that the country was working to increase its foreign currency reserves “including exploring green bonds and potential currency swap agreements”.
The government was “engaging with bilateral and multilateral partners to address both immediate and medium-term financing needs”.
But economists and restructuring specialists say a default will test legal boundaries. In theory, sovereign sukuk are based on assets which an issuer typically sells to a special-purpose vehicle and then leases back, with the lease being filtered to investors as payments.
The Maldivian sukuk uses a Cayman Islands-based vehicle, and the government has referred in the past to using the country’s largest hospital, which was built for $140mn, as an underlying asset.
In practice, investors cannot easily seize or sell these assets to collect payment in a default.
The sovereign advisory arm of Alvarez & Marsal, the consulting firm, said this year that although “the restructuring process for sovereign sukuk is an opaque and poorly understood area of law”, terms limiting access to assets mean it would probably work much like typical unsecured sovereign bonds.
Some analysts have wondered whether one of the country’s bilateral partners — India, China or the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council — might step in to help it avert default.“Because they have this track record of no sovereign defaults, a country like Egypt has been able to issue sukuk [at better rates]. No one wants to see that reputation hit,” said Loud of Danske Bank.
Gulf monarchies, themselves big issuers of sukuk, have in the past stepped in to keep the reputation of sukuk unblemished. In 2018 Bahrain was bailed out by its Gulf neighbours.“Total external debt service will increase to $557mn in 2025 and exceed $1bn in 2026. The amount is huge for this economy, but the Maldives does have strategic partners, including India, China and the GCC,” Fitch’s Xu said. “For that reason, the government may still continue to be able to rely on external financing support from bilateral and multilateral creditors.”The Maldives Monetary Authority, the central bank, said after Fitch’s downgrade in August that it was seeking a $400mn currency swap through a south Asian regional body, in effect a bailout from India.
But others are less certain the money will be forthcoming. Last year Mohamed Muizzu won the presidency on an “India out” programme and asked the country’s small military contingent to leave before the two sides patched up relations.
One emerging market investor, who asked not to be identified, said they had seen “no sign” of India or China stepping in to help, adding that the bonds still seemed expensive relative to the risk of default.“The complexity of a default is exacerbated by it being a sukuk and uncertainty with how a sukuk restructuring will be handled and thus you could argue that bonds aren’t fully reflecting the default risk despite [the] precipitous drop.” How Nepal turned the tide on its ‘pesticide poisoning’ trend (The Telegraph)
The Telegraph [9/11/2024 5:27 PM, Sarah Newey, 31540K, Negative]
The 18-year-old’s death still haunts Dr Rakesh Ghimire. In 2011, when he was a junior doctor at a rural hospital in Nepal’s sweeping Terai lowlands, the young woman walked into the emergency department with an irritated throat. Two days later, she was dead.It was the first time Dr Ghimire had treated someone who had intentionally ingested a dangerous yet totally ubiquitous toxin and nerve agent: pesticide.“That young, 18-year-old girl – she was married, had a minor conflict with her husband, took a pesticide, and was no more in two days. I don’t think she intended to die,” says Dr Ghimire. “So, from that day, a thought came to mind: what if the pesticide had not been on the market?”He will never know, but the case altered the trajectory of Dr Ghimire’s medical career. In the years since, he has been part of a small but vocal group of doctors and regulators who have pushed Nepal to ban the most hazardous pesticides for the sake of public health.According to police data the widely available “plant medicines”, as locals call them, were implicated in roughly a third of suicide fatalities in 2018. Then, in 2019, regulators banned the sale and import of eight chemicals, followed by two more in July this year.Early data suggests the move is having an impact; by the 2022/23 financial year, reported deaths had fallen by as much as 30 per cent.Dr Ghimire, now a doctor in the department of clinical pharmacology at Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital, is rightly proud of his teams work in restricting access to pesticides.“This is the best thing I have done,” he says.The issue is not unique to Nepal. Across the globe, consuming a pesticide remains one of the most common means of suicide, according to the World Health Organization. Pesticides ‘nearly as dangerous as chemical nerve agents’
Roughly 140,000 people die annually of self-induced pesticide poisoning, with the bulk of fatalities in low and middle income countries like Nepal, where the toxins can still be bought in small bottles for just a few pence in local shops selling everything from beer to biscuits.
For pesticide manufacturers – most of which reside in the West, including the UK – making their products so easy to buy makes good commercial sense. However, most suicides are impulsive, rather than planned, hence the reason such products are so tightly controlled in West, and normally only available from specialist stores under strict licencing conditions.
“The worst of these pesticides are nearly as dangerous as chemical nerve agents”, Prof Michael Eddleston, head of the Centre for Pesticide Suicide Prevention (CPSP) at the University of Edinburgh told The Telegraph in 2019. “In many countries it remains the case that you can buy them in a local store and keep them on a shelf at home. Imagine being asked to keep a bottle of sarin stored safely under the stairs and that’s what you are dealing with.”
Today, a mounting body of research shows that curtailing access to the most dangerous pesticides in developing countries dramatically reduces suicide deaths without impacting agricultural output.
In Sri Lanka, which had one of the world’s highest suicide rates in the 1990s, deaths fell by more than 70 per cent over 20 years after specific, hazardous pesticides were phased out in 1995. Meanwhile Bangladesh saw fatalities fall by 65 per cent between 1996 and 2014 after 21 dangerous products were banned, and South Korea halved pesticide-related suicides after new restrictions in 2011. Nowhere recorded a hit to farming yields.
For most people, attempting suicide is “a spontaneous decision” made in a transient moment of crisis, says Prof Eddleston. It why we only sell paracetamol and other potentially dangerous over the counter drugs in the UK in small packet sizes and why guns – ubiquitous in the US – are the leading cause of suicide there.
Most suicide attempts are made in a sudden, impulsive manner, with the decision made just hours or minites ahead of the act. “Many people are in their teens and early 20s, dealing with a stressful situation. They use what’s available at that time,” said Prof Eddleston.
And often, in developing countries where smallholdings proliferate, what’s available is pesticides.
The Green Revolution or Third Agricultural Revolution, which ran from the early part of the last century right through to the 1980s, drove what the Food and Agriculture Organization describes as a “quantum leap forward in food production” and saved many millions from starvation.
But the mass-adoption of chemicals in agriculture, including some pesticides, has come with a plethora of unintended health consequences.
It is estimated that, since the 1960s, there have been 14 million premature deaths due to pesticide self-poisoning alone, with over 95 per cent of these fatalities in low and middle income countries.
Developed nations, the WHO notes, have already banned or restricted use of potentially lethal pesticides.
“Unlike other modes of suicide, pesticide poisoning deaths can be controlled by regulating the most highly hazardous pesticides,” says Dr Ghimire. “Research has shown that there’s less chance of people who take pesticides as poison re-attempting again. So if it’s not easy to access on that first occasion, we can save lives.”
In Nepal, where around 66 per cent of people work in farming and a third of the country’s GDP comes from agriculture, the impact of targeted pesticide bans are only just emerging.
The country announced an initial ban affecting eight pesticides in 2019, after a 2018 study led by the CPSP tracked which of the “plant medicines” (as locals call them) were most often used in poisoning deaths. That research proved to be a major turning point.
“We had tried to manage the pesticide in the past, but we were focused on the harm to the environment and harm of the people and farmers directly using them in agriculture,” says Dr Dilli Ram Sharma, a former director general of the Department of Agriculture and member of Nepal’s pesticide regulatory board. “We didn’t think about pesticide as a major cause for suicide. The CPSP study opened our eyes.”
Prof Eddleston says this is fairly common worldwide. Ministries of health and agriculture often work in silos, with information about suicide deaths not always making it to regulators.
But in Nepal, change happened quickly after the paper identified the most dangerous products, with little opposition from industry or farmers.
“I felt a responsibility to society,” says Dr Sharma, who instituted the new regulations as one of his final acts before retirement, though he has since remained a key figure in the pesticide crackdown.
“[We weren’t] banning these pesticides without alternatives for farmers. If there were no alternatives, that would have been a problem… as pesticide remains of importance in agriculture everywhere in the world,” he adds.
As Nepal does not manufacture pesticides, the 2019 ban triggered an immediate restriction on imports, but the government allowed a two year grace period on sales. The same is true for the further bans agreed in July and due to be officially announced this month.
But early data suggests that, like Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and South Korea, the restrictions are proving effective. While suicide is not and has never been criminalised in Nepal – a misconception that has hampered some efforts to tackle the issue – data remains limited, with the police currently the only organisation to record deaths.
According to their data, which does not track suicide attempts, poisoning fatalities (which experts estimate are linked to pesticides in 95 per cent of cases) spiked in the 2020/21 financial year. But they have steadily decreased since then, with overall deaths dropping by 29 per cent, from 1,320 in 2018/19 to 932 in 2022/23.
Yet challenges remain: Dr Sharma says monitoring is not always enforced, especially in the most remote areas, while a porous border with India means some farmers can continue to bring hazardous pesticides into Nepal.
Dr Ghimire says that bans alone will not solve the problem. At the same time as pushing for pesticide restrictions, he and Prof Eddleston developed the country’s first treatment guidelines, frustrated that doctors were seeing pesticide self harm “again and again and again” with few recommendations on how to respond.
Now, that endeavour has evolved into Nepal’s first Poison Information Center, tucked away in a small office down a dark corridor in Tribhuvan Hospital. The initiative, funded by Brown University in the US, provides a 24/7 hotline for health workers across the country to call for advice dealing with a range of poisoning cases, from snakebites and carbon monoxide to pesticides.
But the country also needs to provide more mental health services to those struggling, says Dr Ghimire. While poisoning accounted for 13 per cent of suicide deaths last year, down from 23 per cent in 2018/19, the number of people dying after hanging has risen since the Covid pandemic.
“There are many factors contributing to mental health, and a lot of stigma in talking about it,” says Dr Ghimire. “These are not always easy issues to tackle.”
Central Asia
Kazakh President Pardons Leading Sinologist Convicted Of Treason (Radio Free Europe)
Radio Free Europe [9/11/2024 12:26 PM, Staff, 1251K, Negative]
Kazakh President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev has pardoned noted sinologist Konstantin Syroyezhkin, who was released on parole in April after serving more than half of the 10-year prison term he was handed in 2019 on high treason charges.Syroyezhkin said on September 11 that the Kazakh presidential commission on clemencies had approved his application for a pardon, which means his parole restrictions are now lifted.The 68-year-old Syroyezhkin was sentenced on October 7, 2019.Details of the charges were not made public, but some local media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, reported at the time that Syroyezhkin was accused of passing classified information to Chinese nationals for cash.Some reports at the time of his conviction also said Syroyezhkin was stripped off his Kazakh citizenship and banned from residing in Kazakhstan for five years after his release.Kazakh authorities were reluctant to officially announce his arrest more than five years ago, but questions about Syroyezhkin’s whereabouts began circulating in the media after he failed to show up at two conferences in Kazakhstan.Syroyezhkin was born in the southeastern Kazakh city of Almaty, which between 1927 and 1997 was the capital and remains its largest city.In 1981, Syroyezhkin graduated from the Highest School of the Soviet KGB in Moscow with a specialization on China.From 2006 until his arrest in 2019, Syroyezhkin worked as a leading expert and analyst at the presidential Institute for Strategic Research.Syroyezhkin is the author of more than 1,000 analytical and research works on China and Kazakh-Chinese relations, written in Russian, Chinese, and English.When current Kazakh President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev, who is a trained sinologist as well, served as prime minister, Syroyezhkin was his adviser on Kazakh-Chinese relations, including during talks on delimiting and demarcating the Kazakh-Chinese border. Kazakh Opposition Activist Sentenced To 10 Years In Prison (Radio Free Europe)
Radio Free Europe [9/11/2024 7:26 AM, Staff, 1251K, Negative]
Asanali Suieubaev, a founding member of the unregistered Algha, Qazaqstan (Forward, Kazakhstan) political party, was sentenced to 10 years in prison on September 10 on a charge of distributing illegal drugs that he rejects as politically motivated. Suieubaev’s lawyer, Meiirzhan Dosqaraev, told RFE/RL on September 11 that the case against his client had been "trumped up" after he publicly accused former President Nursultan Nazarbaev of corruption in November 2023. Also in November, the chairman of Algha, Qazaqstan, Marat Zhylanbaev, was sentenced to seven years in prison on extremism charges that he also rejected as politically motivated. Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan caution citizens to steer clear of Russia (EurasiaNet)
EurasiaNet [9/11/2024 4:14 PM, Staff, 57.6K, Neutral]
Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan have issued advisories cautioning citizens against traveling to Russia, citing “additional security measures and enhanced border controls” put in place by Russian authorities.
The Tajik Embassy in Moscow issued an advisory on September 10, telling Tajiks “to temporarily refrain from traveling to the Russian Federation unless absolutely necessary.” The Kyrgyz Foreign Ministry issued a similar advisory earlier in September.
The economic ramifications of the advisories could be significant, given that hundreds of thousands of labor migrants from both countries travel to Russia to work. Remittances sent home to relatives in Central Asia are a major source of financial sustenance for many families.
In August, Russian lawmakers tightened migration rules, making it easier to expel those found in the country without proper documentation, and reducing the time that foreigners can stay in Russia. The changes were widely seen as a part of a response to the Crocus City Hall terrorism tragedy, in which Tajik militants killed over 140 individuals attending a concert in Moscow. The new restrictions heighten a paradox for the Russian wartime economy: while public attitudes toward guest workers have certainly grown more hostile and less welcoming, the Russian economy is suffering an acute labor shortage.
The advisories may have only a limited impact on labor migration, as illegal migration appears to be rampant. In September, Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs reported that during the first seven months of 2024, almost 93,000 deportation orders were given to foreign citizens, the overwhelming number of them from Central Asia. That number marked an over 53 percent increase in deportation orders, compared to the same period in 2023. The Interior Ministry estimated the number of illegal migrants in Russia at about 630,000. Tajikistan’s chief mufti injured in attack, interior ministry says (Reuters)
Reuters [9/11/2024 12:49 PM, Nazarali Pirnazarov, 37270K, Negative]
Tajikistan’s top Muslim cleric Sayeedmukarram Abduqodirzoda was injured in an attack outside a central mosque in the capital Dushanbe on Wednesday, the interior ministry said.The ministry said a person with "hooligan motives" had stabbed Abduqodirzoda following a prayer service at a mosque.He suffered minor injuries and was released after a medical examination, the ministry said. Authorities detained the attacker and have opened a criminal case into the incident, it added.Abduqodirzoda, 61, has served as chairman of the country’s highest Islamic institution, the Islamic Council of Ulema, since 2010, according to his official biography.Tajikistan is a land-locked country of some 10 million people sandwiched between Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and China. The majority of Tajiks are adherents of the Hanafi school of Sunni Islam. Uzbekistan’s Approach to Afghanistan in the Context of Strengthening Regional Security (The Diplomat)
The Diplomat [9/11/2024 2:08 PM, Nargiza Umarova, 1198K, Neutral]
In 2018, the Central Asian states launched a mechanism of consultative meetings, which marked the beginning of a new wave of regional integration. Today, the issue of security remains a key aspect of intra-regional cooperation.
Given the current geopolitical tensions in the world, accompanied by growing violence and conflicts of varying intensity, it is vital for the Central Asian countries to maintain stability in the region, effectively countering modern challenges and threats. In order to consolidate efforts in this direction, at the fourth Consultative Meeting of the Heads of State of Central Asia in Cholpon-Ata, Kyrgyzstan in 2022, it was proposed to establish a regular dialogue between the secretaries of the security councils of the five republics, as well as to strengthen cooperation between the military departments. The first meeting of the heads of the security councils took place in May 2024 in the capital of Kazakhstan.
Among the common security threats that regional actors seek to combat together are international extremism, terrorism, drug trafficking, and the illegal arms trade. However, there is another factor that causes extreme concern for Central Asian countries: the situation in Afghanistan, which directly affects security and stability in Central Asia.
Today, Uzbekistan pursues a pragmatic policy toward Afghanistan, based on the principles of close friendship and good neighborliness. But this has not always been the case. Until 2017, Tashkent tried to distance itself from its southern neighbor, considering it a source of threats to national and regional security. Nevertheless diplomatic, economic and cultural-humanitarian ties between the countries did not cease.
After the Taliban came to power, Uzbekistan was the first country to enter into an open dialogue with the new - and as yet unrecognized - government of Afghanistan. This approach allowed Uzbekistan to maintain and even strengthen the dynamics of bilateral cooperation. The past few years have been marked by a rapid growth in mutual trade; by the end of 2023, trade volume exceeded $860 million. Joint infrastructure projects are being implemented, including the construction of the Mazar-i-Sharif-Kabul-Peshawar railway, which will provide access to Pakistani ports in the Indian Ocean. Tashkent and Kabul are actively developing investment partnerships in such important sectors as mining, energy, and agriculture.
Today, the leadership of Uzbekistan perceives Afghanistan as a country of opportunity, emphasizes its belonging to Central Asia, and advocates for the deep integration of Afghanistan into regional economic processes.
Uzbekistan consistently places the Afghan issue on the agenda of major international events, such as sessions of the United Nations General Assembly, consultative meetings of Central Asian heads of state, and summits of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Organization of Turkic States, and other regional associations. Tashkent has called on the international community, as well as political and financial institutions not to isolate Afghanistan. Uzbekistan’s main focus is on providing widespread humanitarian aid to the Afghan people, as well as combating terrorist activity.
To this end, Uzbekistan has made a series of proposals through the years: establishing a permanent U.N. commission on Afghanistan, creating a special Humanitarian Support Fund for Afghanistan, establishing an International Transport and Logistics Hub in the border city of Termez to provide humanitarian aid to the Afghan people, unfreezing Afghan assets in foreign banks and using them to solve social problems in Afghanistan, creating a Contact Group at the level of special representatives of Central Asian countries for Afghanistan, and resuming the work of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization-Afghanistan Contact Group. Tashkent also advocates maintaining a dialogue with Kabul on border security, water use, and trade development.
Uzbekistan’s proactive actions on the Afghan track are having a multiplier effect, encouraging more and more countries to view Afghanistan - once exclusively seen through the lens of conflict - in a positive light. This provides the basis for developing a common, coordinated approach to Afghanistan, something that official Tashkent tirelessly calls on its close neighbors and other foreign partners to do.
Yet Afghanistan continues to be a safe haven for radical Islamist groups. After the withdrawal of NATO troops from Afghanistan, the number of al-Qaida and regional Islamic State fighters in the country has doubled. There has also been an increase in terrorist activity in Afghanistan, partly due to the plight of the Afghan people. According to the U.N. Development Program, around 85 percent of Afghanistan’s population lives below the poverty line.
All of this, of course, is a serious concern for the Central Asian countries, which are deeply aware of the need for consolidation to resolve the Afghan issue. In this regard, it seems relevant to develop and adopt a regional strategy for Afghanistan, taking into account the national interests of all Central Asian republics.
It is advisable to establish cooperation between the security and defense departments, to unite the military personnel and military-technical potential of the Central Asian states for the prompt identification and repulsion of external threats to regional security. It is also necessary to consolidate the efforts of the Central Asia special services with the involvement of the Afghan side to conduct counter-terrorism operations and identify "sleeper cells" of terrorist groups based in Afghanistan.
An important aspect of ensuring regional security is the availability of Central Asian countries’ own collective rapid response forces in case of crisis situations of varying intensity. The region has successful experience in that regard. In the summer of 1997, an agreement was signed between Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan on the creation of the Central Asian Peacekeeping Battalion (CENTRASBAT) under the auspices of the United Nations. The document stated that, by agreement, CENTRASBAT units could be sent and deployed on the territory of one of the parties. The battalion was dissolved in 1999.
In the current conditions of increased risks to regional security, it seems possible to follow the CENTRASBAT model. This will allow the Central Asian states to independently prevent external and internal threats to regional stability, without the participation of external players. Indo-Pacific
Afghanistan, Turkmenistan begin work on long-delayed gas pipeline (VOA)
VOA [9/11/2024 1:55 PM, Ayaz Gul, 4566K, Negative]
Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and neighboring Turkmenistan on Wednesday marked the resumption of work on a long-delayed gas pipeline designed to run through the two countries, Pakistan and India.The estimated $10 billion Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India, or TAPI, project is designed to annually transport up to 33 billion cubic meters of Turkmen natural gas from the southeastern Galkynysh field through the proposed 1,800-kilometer pipeline.Prime Minister Mohammad Hassan Akhund of the de facto Taliban government traveled to the Turkmen border region of Mary and joined top leaders of the host country to inaugurate construction of a vital section of the TAPI project. It is intended to link the city of Serhetabat in Turkmenistan to Herat in western Afghanistan.Turkmen President Serdar Berdimuhamedov joined and addressed the ceremony via video link. "This project will benefit not only the economies of the participating countries but also the entire region,” he said.Taliban authorities declared a public holiday in Herat, the capital of the province of the same name, to mark the occasion, with posters celebrating the TAPI project plastered across the border city.Initially signed in the early 1990s to provide natural gas to energy-deficient South Asia, the TAPI project has faced repeated delays due to years of Afghan hostilities, which ended in 2021 when the then-insurgent Taliban recaptured power as all U.S. and NATO forces exited the country.While Turkmen leaders Wednesday pledged to enhance bilateral ties between Ashgabat and Kabul and carry forward the TAPI project, experts remain skeptical that the gas pipeline will become operational soon. They cite funding issues, U.S.-led Western economic sanctions on Afghanistan and the international community’s refusal to recognize the Taliban as the legitimate government over restrictions on Afghan women’s rights.Islamabad’s persistent diplomatic and military tensions with New Delhi are also considered a significant obstacle to the materialization of the TAPI project.According to officials of the participating countries, Pakistan and India, each one plans to purchase 42% of the gas exports, and Afghanistan will receive the rest. Kabul will also earn around $500 million in transit fees annually.Pakistan’s relations with Afghanistan deteriorated after the Taliban takeover over terrorism concerns. Islamabad complains that Kabul shelters and facilitates fugitive anti-Pakistan militants to orchestrate cross-border terrorist attacks from Afghan sanctuaries, charges the Taliban reject. Afghanistan says to begin work on huge gas pipeline (Agence France-Presse)
Agence France-Presse [9/11/2024 10:06 AM, Staff, 88008K, Neutral]
Afghanistan said Wednesday work would begin on a $10 billion gas pipeline traversing South Asia as officials joined dignitaries in neighbouring Turkmenistan to celebrate its completion on that side of the border.Progress on the TAPI pipeline -- running through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India -- has been repeatedly delayed because of security issues in conflict-ravaged Afghanistan."From today the operations will start on Afghanistan’s soil," Taliban government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said at the ceremony in comments broadcast by Afghan state television.At the border ceremony in Islim Cheshma in Turkmenistan, officials on both sides, including Afghan Prime Minister Hassan Akhund, hailed the project."This project will benefit not only the economies of the countries participating but also the countries of the whole region," Turkmen President Serdar Berdimuhamedow said in a video broadcast live at the ceremony.In the Afghan border province of Herat, a public holiday was declared to mark the occasion, with posters celebrating the project plastered around the capital of the same name.The pipeline will see around 33 billion cubic metres of natural gas each year extracted from the Galkynysh gas field in southeast Turkmenistan.It will be pumped through a 1,800-kilometre (1,120-mile) pipeline traversing Afghanistan, including Herat and Kandahar in the south, before crossing into restive Balochistan province in Pakistan and ending in Fazilka in Indian Punjab.Pakistan and India will each purchase 42 percent of the gas deliveries, and Afghanistan 16 percent, while Kabul will also benefit from lucrative transit fees of around $500 million per year, according to Afghan media.Work on the Turkmen side began in 2015 and was initially scheduled to start in Afghanistan in 2018, but has been repeatedly delayed.India’s commitment to the pipeline has also previously been questioned over its relationship with Pakistan and its already easy access to liquefied natural gas markets.The ceremony was an opportunity to simultaneously launch various bilateral projects, including a fibre-optic line to Herat, an electricity line, and the inauguration of a railway bridge.In a country plagued by unemployment, TAPI "will provide jobs for 12,000 people in Afghanistan," the government spokesman Mujahid told AFP.Neither Afghan nor Turkmen officials have provided details on the financing or the expected date for TAPI to come online.However, Swapnil Babele, an analyst with the research group Rystad Energy, expects further delays "as a lot of work remains to be done and the question of future financing is unclear"."We expect it to be operational only in the next decade," he told AFP.For the three recipient countries, the pipeline will have the advantage of "delivering gas cheaper than liquefied natural gas and ensuring consistent supply".It is the most significant development project for Taliban authorities since they seized power in 2021, ending their two decade-long insurgency against the foreign-backed government.The pipeline gives the government, which is not officially recognised by any nation, a strategic role in regional cooperation between Central Asia and South Asia, which is facing huge energy deficits.Afghanistan, although still under economic and financial sanctions from the West, is currently trying to relaunch ambitious projects, particularly in energy, mines and infrastructure.At the end of July, Afghanistan and China officially relaunched a major copper-extraction project in the world’s second-largest known deposit, near Kabul, which had been bogged down since 2008. Twitter
Afghanistan
Sara Wahedi@SaraWahedi
[9/11/2024 6:57 AM, 92.4K followers, 143 retweets, 606 likes]
Attending the Afghan Women’s Summit this week - the largest gathering of women to be organized. Afghan women from across the world are here to discuss the urgent situation of gender apartheid in Afghanistan.
Jahanzeb Wesa@JahanzebWesa
[9/11/2024 8:46 AM, 3.8K followers, 6 retweets, 8 likes]
A number of women’s are protested in the three-day women’s conference in Albania they had slogan for “Women, Freedom, Life” and called for gender apartheid in Afghanistan In this conference serval Afghan women are participated & senior European diplomats are among the speakers.
Habib Khan@HabibKhanT
[9/11/2024 11:40 AM, 236.4K followers, 236 retweets, 856 likes]
The Afghan Women Summit, underway in Albania, is the largest gathering of Afghan women since the collapse. It unites them against the Taliban, where Afghan men have struggled. The summit should consider forming a women-led government in exile as an alternative to the Taliban.
Habib Khan@HabibKhanT
[9/11/2024 11:28 AM, 236.4K followers, 406 retweets, 1.3K likes]
The Taliban have banned women from speaking in public, but these extraordinarily brave women take to the streets of Kabul, defying the regime and raising their voices for freedom despite threats of torture and arrest.
Habib Khan@HabibKhanT
[9/11/2024 1:55 PM, 236.4K followers, 62 retweets, 116 likes]
The Taliban celebrating the anniversary of September 11 with a cake shaped like the Twin Towers. Ideologically, both Al-Qaeda and the Taliban support and advocate for global jihad.
Freshta Razbaan@RazbaanFreshta
[9/11/2024 4:11 PM, 40.3K followers, 3 retweets, 8 likes]
Dear Ms., Special Envoy @SE_AfghanWGH, I extend my heartfelt thanks for your relentless efforts in saving and relocating Afghans and allies who are at risk. The Afghan prosecutors, especially the vulnerable women, are deeply grateful for your unwavering support. Your actions not only save lives but also restore hope and trust in a better life for many of these individuals. Given the urgent situation and the serious threat of retaliation and violence that these prosecutors face, I sincerely urge you, as a Special Envoy, to pay special attention to expediting this process for their immediate relocation. Every moment is critical for these individuals, and your support could mean the difference between life and death.
Heather Barr@heatherbarr1
[9/11/2024 4:29 AM, 63.1K followers, 191 retweets, 548 likes]
Afghan women are still protesting. https://x.com/i/status/1833785031183024298
Bilal Sarwary@bsarwary
[9/11/2024 4:48 PM, 254.4K followers, 45 retweets, 75 likes]
Taliban chief Hibatullah announced a gradual ban on cricket, dispelling the claims that the Taliban has become more moderate than in the past. Many of the group’s apologists remain under the misguided belief that the Taliban is adopting a more moderate approach, but the ban on cricket suggests that Hibatullah is enforcing an even more extreme regime on the Afghan people than Mullah Omar did, using force to do so. Another key aspect of the ban is that it reveals worsening internal rifts within the Taliban, particularly between Hibatullah’s Kandahari faction and Sirajuddin Haqqani. Sirajuddin, whose brother Anas Haqqani has invested significant resources and influence in promoting cricket, has been a driving force behind its growth under Taliban rule. Cricket had become a powerful platform for the Haqqanis to advance their image both domestically and internationally, but Hibatullah’s ban will now bring that to a halt. Pakistan
Anas Mallick@AnasMallick
[9/12/2024 3:07 AM, 73.6K followers, 1 like]
Can confirm that the event of 7th September was an unprovoked provocation from Afghan side at the international border to which Pakistan side responded befittingly says Spox @ForeignOfficePk in her weekly briefing.
Anas Mallick@AnasMallick
[9/12/2024 2:52 AM, 73.6K followers, 1 retweet, 7 likes]
At this point, not aware of any communication by Indian government on their lack of participation in the SCO Heads of Governments meeting in Islamabad in mid October, says spox @ForeignOfficePk in response to a question.
Madiha Afzal@MadihaAfzal
[9/11/2024 2:58 PM, 42.8K followers, 4 retweets, 21 likes]
The biggest lesson of Pakistani politics: what goes around comes around. It’s also the lesson all Pakistani politicians ignore while in power.
Amnesty International South Asia, Regional Office@amnestysasia
[9/11/2024 5:52 AM, 91.4K followers, 231 retweets, 456 likes]
PAKISTAN: Today marks the 12th anniversary of the deadly fire that swept through the Ali Enterprises garment factory in Karachi on 11 September 2012. Over 255 died that day, trapped by the fire. They are not forgotten. Their deaths are the result of a series of failures related to workplace safety. All businesses must respect human rights and ensure safe working conditions. The Pakistani authorities have a duty to protect against human rights abuses including by businesses and to investigate, punish and redress such abuse. The auditing company, which had just weeks earlier awarded the factory a SA8000 certificate of compliance, was the subject of an OECD complaint brought by the families of those deceased and a coalition of NGOs, but the complaint was not resolved. Families of the victims and labour rights activists have been engaged in a long struggle for adequate compensation. https://cleanclothes.org/campaigns/past/ali-enterprises
Amnesty International South Asia, Regional Office@amnestysasia
[9/11/2024 5:52 AM, 91.4K followers, 7 retweets, 19 likes]
Amnesty International urges:- Governments and companies to improve access to remedies for victims of Ali Enterprises and other human rights abuses in the garment industry.- Governments to regulate the auditing industry and ensure it respects human rights.- Companies and social auditors to make social auditing reports public.- The Pakistan government along with the home governments of fashion brands and retailers where they are headquartered to implement legislation requiring mandatory human rights due diligence by companies and ensuring companies are held accountable for human rights violations in their supply chain.- The Pakistan government to ensure that labour laws, including those on health and safety are properly implemented and monitored including through investing resources into labour monitoring, ensuring investigations of factories not complying with laws and promoting the right of workers to freedom of association. India
Narendra Modi@narendramodi
[9/11/2024 22:00 PM, 101.8M followers, 1.9K retweets, 10K likes]
A big boost to connectivity and rural infrastructure! The Cabinet decision regarding Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana - IV will boost development and create many employment opportunities. https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2053894
Narendra Modi@narendramodi
[9/11/2024 1:59 PM, 101.8M followers, 1.6K retweets, 7.4K likes]
The Cabinet’s decision of approving Mission Mausam will strengthen our capacities in climate related science and services. It will benefit agriculture, disaster management apparatus and other such sectors. https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2053896
Narendra Modi@narendramodi
[9/11/2024 12:41 PM, 101.8M followers, 12K retweets, 99K likes]
Joined Ganesh Puja at the residence of CJI, Justice DY Chandrachud Ji. May Bhagwan Shri Ganesh bless us all with happiness, prosperity and wonderful health.Narendra Modi@narendramodi
[9/11/2024 11:40 AM, 101.8M followers, 5.6K retweets, 27K likes]
We are committed to ensuring accessible, affordable and top quality healthcare for every Indian. In this context, the Cabinet today has decided to further expand the ambit of Ayushman Bharat PM-JAY to provide health coverage for all citizens above 70 years. This scheme will ensure dignity, care and security to 6 crore citizens! https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2053881
Narendra Modi@narendramodi
[9/11/2024 11:38 AM, 101.8M followers, 1.5K retweets, 6.6K likes]
PM-eBus Sewa-Payment Security Mechanism (PSM) scheme will boost greater participation in the sector and encourage sustainability. https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2053890
Narendra Modi@narendramodi
[9/11/2024 11:37 AM, 101.8M followers, 1.7K retweets, 7.4K likes]
The modifications in the Hydro Electric Projects scheme approved by the Cabinet will boost infrastructure development in remote areas. It will accelerate Hydro Power growth, create jobs and drive investments in the sector. https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2053886
Narendra Modi@narendramodi
[9/11/2024 11:36 AM, 101.8M followers, 1.4K retweets, 5.7K likes]
PM E-DRIVE Scheme, which has been approved by the Cabinet, will boost green mobility and help us build a sustainable future. https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2053889
Narendra Modi@narendramodi
[9/11/2024 2:39 AM, 101.8M followers, 5.4K retweets, 23K likes]
India’s semiconductor sector is on the brink of a revolution, with breakthrough advancements set to transform the industry. Addressing the SEMICON India 2024. https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1ynJODmDBXOxR NSB
Awami League@albd1971
[9/11/2024 4:54 PM, 646.2K followers, 18 retweets, 76 likes]
Two people who were allegedly #tortured to #death and three others who endured torture at the hands of members of joint task force on Tuesday morning were criminalized in a case filed by law enforcement in possession of fire arms on Tuesday Night, even after their death. Despite family members already exposed how their near ones were tortured, law enforcement initially put out a desperate drive to cover up the #extrajudicial acts by blaming the death on health complications without explaining how the bodies bore torture marks. This case is clearly an attempt to stop the family members from speaking out the truth as no step was taken to initiate a fair probe into these claim showing this drive is focused on killing torturing and criminalizing people affiliated with Awami League, instead of finding out the real perpetrators. Alarmingly, @ChiefAdviserGoB hailed the ongoing drive by joint Task force in his latest speech, turning a blind eye to the pleas of the grief stricken families, further testament to making farce with the claim to make #humanrights universal. Read @ProthomAlo https://prothomalo.com/bangladesh/district/7s3xs0v92i #Bangladesh #BangladeshCrisis
Sabria Chowdhury Balland@sabriaballand
[9/11/2024 9:45 PM, 7.1K followers]
In an exclusive interview with DW, #Bangladesh’s interim leader Muhammad Yunus spoke about the challenges he is facing in his new role and the reforms he’s planning to implement before holding a general election. M Yunus: Ex-PM Hasina ‘destroyed’ Bangladesh’s institutions https://p.dw.com/p/4kWVR?maca=en-Twitter-sharing
Sabria Chowdhury Balland@sabriaballand
[9/11/2024 11:35 AM, 7.1K followers]
#Bangladesh has ramped up vigilance at its border with Myanmar, with at least 18,000 #Rohingya Muslims crossing over in recent months to escape escalating violence in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state, officials in Dhaka said. The influx of refugees from Myanmar has mounted as fighting escalates between the troops of the ruling junta and the Arakan Army, the powerful ethnic militia that recruits from the Buddhist majority. https://reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/bangladesh-ramps-up-border-vigilance-thousands-rohingya-flee-myanmar-2024-09-11/
Amnesty International South Asia, Regional Office@amnestysasia
[9/11/2024 11:26 AM, 91.4K followers, 19 retweets, 71 likes]
BANGLADESH: Amnesty International welcomes the reported abolition of the unjust system of "blacklisting of workers" maintained by the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA). The database had been routinely used to deny employment to workers accused of involvement in union activities, participating in peaceful protests or those who voiced their demands – leading to many workers being refused new work after being dismissed or leaving their work. The database formed part of a much wider climate of repression and restrictions on workers organising. While today’s announcement is an important first step, Amnesty International calls on the BGMEA to continue to engage constructively with independent garment worker unions. Meanwhile, the interim government of Bangladesh must ensure that the freedom of association and workers’ rights in the garment sector in the country is respected and promoted.
The President’s Office, Maldives@presidencymv
[9/11/2024 1:19 AM, 109.8K followers, 92 retweets, 87 likes]
President Dr @MMuizzu attends the first session of the ‘Top Achievers’ Award 2022-2023’ ceremony organised by @MoEdumv. At the event, he confers awards to the winners of the ‘Top Achievers’ Award 2022-2023.’ Central Asia
UNODC Central Asia@UNODC_ROCA
[9/12/2024 12:49 AM, 2.4K followers, 1 retweet, 1 like]
15 members of the Port Control Units at the Aktau and Kuryk seaport customs posts of Kazakhstan enhanced their skills in X-ray image recognition at an advanced training course. Thanks to @StateINL and @StateDept #EXBS for support to the UNODC’s initiative.
MFA Kazakhstan@MFA_KZ
[9/11/2024 9:16 AM, 52.4K followers, 5 likes]
Kazakhstan Participates in the “Yerevan Dialogue” https://gov.kz/memleket/entities/mfa/press/news/details/843939?lang=kk
MFA Tajikistan@MOFA_Tajikistan
[9/11/2024 9:17 AM, 5K followers]
Meeting of the First Deputy Minister with the Director of the OSCE Transnational Threats Department https://mfa.tj/en/main/view/15687/meeting-of-the-first-deputy-minister-with-the-director-of-the-osce-transnational-threats-department
MFA Tajikistan@MOFA_Tajikistan
[9/11/2024 9:17 AM, 5K followers]
Meeting of the First Deputy Minister with the Director of the OSCE Conflict Prevention Centre https://mfa.tj/en/main/view/15686/meeting-of-the-first-deputy-minister-with-the-director-of-the-osce-conflict-prevention-centre
Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s Press-service@president_uz
[9/11/2024 11:42 PM, 199K followers, 9 likes]
President Shavkat #Mirziyoyev led a meeting to discuss advancing efforts to reduce poverty and improve support for low-income families. Since 2020, poverty has dropped from 23% to 11% due to social programs and infrastructure investments. The new initiative, "From Poverty to Well-Being," targets the development of mahallas, fostering entrepreneurship, and job creation, with an emphasis on training, employment, and expanding microfinance services. It was stressed that poverty reduction must be a nationwide effort with strict monitoring and accountability.
Habib Khan@HabibKhanT
[9/11/2024 11:56 AM, 236.4K followers, 455 retweets, 2K likes]
Saida Mirziyoyev, daughter of the Uzbek president, has pledged support for Afghan women’s education. I hope daughters of other world leaders and daughters of the Taliban leaders studying in Qatar will also join the call.
Navbahor Imamova@Navbahor
[9/12/2024 1:59 AM, 23.6K followers, 1 like]
Uzbek-Afghan border: Reporting from the newly-opened Termez International Trade Center Shu kunlarda O’zbekiston-Afg’oniston chegarasida erkin iqtisodiy zona ish boshladi. @AmerikaOvozi Termizdagi bu gigant loyiha bilan tanishdi. 1-dastur: https://youtu.be/JPkaOZtGxGk 2-dastur: https://youtu.be/vPrnuwqqRKM
Navbahor Imamova@Navbahor
[9/11/2024 10:02 AM, 23.6K followers, 1 retweet, 1 like]
"Inflation fell in most CCA countries, including in the Kyrgyz Republic, amid exchange rate appreciations and a decline in commodity prices. Inflation remained more persistent in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan due to strong domestic demand, elevated inflation expectations, and energy price reforms in Kazakhstan." @IMFNews https://imf.org/en/News/Articles/2024/09/11/sp09112024-harnessing-power-integration-path-prosperity-central-asia-dmd-bo-li{End of Report} To subscribe to the SCA Morning Press Clips, please email SCA-PressOfficers@state.gov. Please do not reply directly to this email.