American commanders worked with the Taliban to facilitate the evacuation of more than 124,000 people from Afghanistan in recent weeks. Both the United States and the Taliban share a common threat in the Islamic State, which was responsible for an attack outside Kabul airport last week that killed 13 U.S. service members and more than 170 civilians.
Here’s what to know
Facebook helps Afghan journalists and their families flee
Facebook helped a group of Afghan journalists — along with its employees — flee to Mexico before the last U.S. troops pulled out of Afghanistan this week.
175 Afghan nationals, composed of Facebook employees, activists, journalists and their families — including 75 children — landed in Mexico City on Tuesday, according to Mexico’s foreign ministry.
“In the process of assisting Facebook employees and close partners leave Afghanistan, we joined an effort to help a group of journalists and their families who were in grave danger,” a Facebook spokesman said Thursday. “The journalists have been welcomed in Mexico.”
Facebook declined to give further details on the evacuation effort, citing security reasons.
As Taliban militants took over cities across Afghanistan last month, including the capital, Kabul, many Afghans closed down their social media accounts and deleted messages amid fears of reprisals. Facebook has an official ban on Taliban content from its platforms because it considers the group to be a terrorist organization, although new Taliban accounts still surface, according to numerous reports.
The social media company said on Aug. 20 it had added several security features for Afghan users to “help protect [them] from being targeted” — a candid admission from Facebook’s security policy chief on the risks of having personal information available on social networks.
Mexico has emerged as something of a haven for media workers in Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover. The group of evacuees that landed in Mexico on Tuesday was the latest of four such humanitarian efforts involving Mexico. They traveled with help from Mexican embassy officials in Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, the foreign ministry said.
“In keeping with Mexico’s principles of solidarity with asylum seekers, refugees and those seeking humanitarian protection in our country, additional groups of Afghan citizens are expected to arrive in the coming days,” the officials said, adding that the arrivals will be provided for by “private sponsors and civil society organizations.”
As some countries welcome Afghan refugees, others are trying to keep them out
Countries where people leaving Afghanistan probably will wind up are bracing for a full-scale migration crisis in the wake of the Taliban’s rapid return to power and the hurried withdrawal of the United States and its allies. Warnings from aid groups have given credence to those fears.
The United States and about 100 other countries said Sunday that they would continue to accept fleeing Afghans, and that the Taliban has pledged to allow safe passage. But it’s unclear whether the Taliban will stay true to its word.
Neighboring countries are bracing to bear the brunt of any surge — and warning that they are not prepared. Asylum seekers who continue on the long and arduous path to Europe will encounter anti-refugee sentiment and roadblocks in countries wary of a repeat of the Syrian migration crisis of 2015.
Taliban’s central banker tries to charm financial institutions
Afghanistan’s new Taliban-appointed central bank chief has reportedly told bankers the Islamist group wants a functioning financial system, but did not elaborate on how such a banking infrastructure could be sustained.
The acting central bank governor, Haji Mohammad Idris, met members of the Afghanistan Banks Association and other bankers this week, telling them the Taliban considered the bank sector “imperative,” Reuters reported, citing two unidentified people.
Idris, a Taliban loyalist who has no formal financial training, was appointed to head the central bank last week.
When the Taliban was last in power from 1996 to 2001, a handful of commercial banks retained licenses, but none were in operation and few loans were made, according to Reuters.
Following its swift takeover of the country last month, the Taliban has inherited an economy crippled by a severe drought and the coronavirus, compounding the fallout from nearly two decades of conflict. Afghanistan’s economy is forecast to contract by 9.7% this financial year, according to Fitch Solutions.
International aid flows represented roughly 43 percent of Afghanistan’s economy in 2020, according to the World Bank. There is uncertainty over whether the international community will recognize a new Taliban government and release assets held offshore.
The Biden administration last month froze Afghan government reserves held in U.S. bank accounts, blocking the Taliban from accessing billions of dollars. The Afghanistan central bank held $9.4 billion in reserve assets as of April, according to the International Monetary Fund. That amounts to roughly one-third of the country’s annual economic output, The Washington Post has reported. The vast majority of those reserves are not held in the country.
The Taliban was working to find solutions for liquidity and rising inflation, Idris reportedly said.
A key priority for the central bank was now to have its international accounts “unblocked” and get access to its reserves, to allow it to keep enough money circulating, Reuters reported.
Analysis: George W. Bush and the worst predictions about the Afghanistan war
After 20 long years, the U.S. war in Afghanistan is officially over, with the full withdrawal of troops having taken place ahead of the Tuesday deadline.
And while the focus is presently on how the Biden administration prosecuted the chaotic withdrawal after offering false assurances about it, those false assurances are merely the latest in the long series that has marked America’s longest war.
With the war now over, it’s worth taking stock of just how it was sold to the American people — and just how much the outcome belies that sales job. The big upshot of the present situation is that the Taliban, which the United States went to war to uproot, is back in charge in the country immediately upon the withdrawal.
Afghan economy set to shrink sharply after ‘highly disruptive’ U.S. withdrawal
Afghanistan’s economy is set to contract by 9.7% this fiscal year, according to a Fitch Solutions forecast, in a reversal of an earlier estimate that the central Asian country would grow by 0.4 percent.
The country’s economy is estimated to shrink by another 5.2 percent in the fiscal year ending in 2022, and its long term growth rate is expected to be far slower than in recent years, the research group said.
“The highly disruptive manner in which the U.S.’s security forces left … and the Taliban takeover will mean that the economic pains for the country will be felt acutely over the short term,” researchers said, according to Reuters.
The report comes as the United States and its allies have frozen assets and withheld billions of dollars in aid money after the Islamist militant group toppled the Western-backed government last month.
Washington and its partners have said they would condition economic support to the country on whether vulnerable Afghans are allowed to leave the country and basic human rights are maintained under the new Taliban regime.
The United Nations has reported widespread hunger and millions of displaced people due to ongoing violence. Around 14 million people — or about a third of the country’s population — are food insecure.
Taliban moves to consolidate military and political control in Afghanistan
As the Taliban leadership closed in on forming a government Wednesday, its fighters were attacking the last bastion of Afghanistan not under their control, seeking to consolidate their military and political grip on the country.
In northern Afghanistan, heavy fighting erupted Tuesday night and continued into Wednesday. Meanwhile, the Taliban leadership met in its southern spiritual birthplace of Kandahar to discuss the formation of an Islamic government. It’s a major step that will formalize the Taliban’s transition from an insurgent movement to once again ruling the country after the 20 years of war that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.
The three-day-long engagement was chaired by Sheikh Haibatullah Akhundzada, a religious scholar who is widely expected to become the country’s supreme leader, suggesting the new government could be structured much like Iran’s theocracy.
McConnell tells Republicans to focus on regaining majority, not impeaching Biden
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Wednesday that there was no possibility that President Biden would be impeached over the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan, as political opponents — and some allies — continued to criticize the nature of the withdrawal.
“Well, look, the president is not going to be removed from office. There’s a Democratic House, a narrowly Democratic Senate. That’s not going to happen,” McConnell said at an event in Kentucky.
McConnell cannot vote on impeachment, which is decided by the House. Democrats hold a slim majority in the House and control the evenly divided Senate through Vice President Harris’s tiebreaking vote.
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) has said he supports impeaching the president, though like McConnell, he cannot cast a vote in the impeachment process. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who has tried unsuccessfully to impeach Biden since he took office, again advocated his removal after the Kabul airport attack last week that killed 13 U.S. service members. At least two other GOP senators have called on Biden to resign.
McConnell urged Republicans to focus on regaining control of Congress in next year’s midterm elections.
“The report card you get is every two years,” McConnell said, according to numerous reports. “I do think we’re likely to see a typical kind of midterm reaction to a new administration. … Typically there is some buyer’s remorse.”
U.S. consular officials at Kabul airport struggled with surging crowds and painful choices
U.S. consular officials waded into massive and increasingly desperate and belligerent crowds of Afghans outside the Kabul airport, searching for familiar faces or valid documents. They sent private instructions and authorization to American and allied citizens and to eligible Afghans, only to see those messages become useless as they suddenly appeared on the phones of thousands pushing toward the gates.
Afghan “entrepreneurs” sold bogus access to other Afghans and then tried to lie or bully their way inside. Taliban fighters manning perimeter checkpoints got conflicting orders from their chains of command or made up their own rules for who got through.
“Everybody who lived it was haunted by the choices we had to make and the people we were not able to help,” a senior State Department official said Wednesday, describing the perspective of consular officials on the ground during the two-week military evacuation effort that ended this week.
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