Another sometime Nigerien spokesperson, Insa Garba Saidou, put it in blunter terms: “The American bases and civilian personnel cannot stay on Nigerien soil any longer.”

The announcements came as terrorism in the West African Sahel has spiked and in the wake of a visit to Niger by a high-level American delegation, including Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Molly Phee and General Michael Langley, chief of U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM. Niger’s repudiation of its ally is just the latest blow to Washington’s sputtering counterterrorism efforts in the region. In recent years, longstanding U.S. military partnerships with Burkina Faso and Mali have also been curtailed following coups by U.S.-trained officers. Niger was, in fact, the last major bastion of American military influence in the West African Sahel.

Such setbacks there are just the latest in a series of stalemates, fiascos, or outright defeats that have come to typify America’s Global War on Terror. During 20-plus years of armed interventions, U.S. military missions have been repeatedly upended across Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, including a sputtering stalemate in Somalia, an intervention-turned-blowback-engine in Libya, and outright implosions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This maelstrom of U.S. defeat and retreat has left at least 4.5 million people dead, including an estimated 940,000 from direct violence, more than 432,000 of them civilians, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project. As many as 60 million people have also been displaced due to the violence stoked by America’s “forever wars.”

President Biden has both claimed that he’s ended those wars and that the United States will continue to fight them for the foreseeable future — possibly forever — “to protect the people and interests of the United States.” The toll has been devastating, particularly in the Sahel, but Washington has largely ignored the costs borne by the people most affected by its failing counterterrorism efforts.   

“Reducing Terrorism” Leads to a 50,000% Increase in… Yes!… Terrorism

Roughly 1,000 U.S. military personnel and civilian contractors are deployed to Niger, most of them near the town of Agadez at Air Base 201 on the southern edge of the Sahara desert. Known to locals as “Base Americaine,” that outpost has been the cornerstone of an archipelago of U.S. military bases in the region and is the key to America’s military power projection and surveillance efforts in North and West Africa. Since the 2010s, the U.S. has sunk roughly a quarter-billion dollars into that outpost alone.

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Washington has been focused on Niger and its neighbors since the opening days of the Global War on Terror, pouring military aid into the nations of West Africa through dozens of “security cooperation” efforts, among them the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership, a program designed to “counter and prevent violent extremism” in the region. Training and assistance to local militaries offered through that partnership has alone cost America more than $1 billion.

Just prior to his recent visit to Niger, AFRICOM’s General Langley went before the Senate Armed Services Committee to rebuke America’s longtime West African partners. “During the past three years, national defense forces turned their guns against their own elected governments in Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, and Niger,” he said. “These juntas avoid accountability to the peoples they claim to serve.”

Langley did not mention, however, that at least 15 officers who benefited from American security cooperation have been involved in 12 coups in West Africa and the greater Sahel during the Global War on Terror. They include the very nations he named: Burkina Faso (2014, 2015, and twice in 2022); Guinea (2021); Mali (2012, 2020, and 2021); and Niger (2023). In fact, at least five leaders of a July coup in Niger received U.S. assistance, according to an American official. When they overthrew that country’s democratically elected president, they, in turn, appointed five U.S.-trained members of the Nigerien security forces to serve as governors.

Langley went on to lament that, while coup leaders invariably promise to defeat terrorist threats, they fail to do so and then “turn to partners who lack restrictions in dealing with coup governments… particularly Russia.” But he also failed to lay out America’s direct responsibility for the security freefall in the Sahel, despite more than a decade of expensive efforts to remedy the situation.

“We came, we saw, he died,” then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joked after a U.S.-led NATO air campaign helped overthrow Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, the longtime Libyan dictator, in 2011. President Barack Obama hailed the intervention as a success, even as Libya began to slip into near-failed-state status. Obama would later admit that “failing to plan for the day after” Qaddafi’s defeat was the “worst mistake” of his presidency.

As the Libyan leader fell, Tuareg fighters in his service looted his regime’s weapons caches, returned to their native Mali, and began to take over the northern part of that nation. Anger in Mali’s armed forces over the government’s ineffective response resulted in a 2012 military coup led by Amadou Sanogo, an officer who learned English in Texas, and underwent infantry-officer basic training in Georgia, military-intelligence instruction in Arizona, and mentorship by Marines in Virginia.

Having overthrown Mali’s democratic government, Sanogo proved hapless in battling local militants who had also benefitted from the arms flowing out of Libya. With Mali in chaos, those Tuareg fighters declared their own independent state, only to be pushed aside by heavily armed Islamist militants who instituted a harsh brand of Shariah law, causing a humanitarian crisis. A joint French, American, and African mission prevented Mali’s complete collapse but pushed the Islamists to the borders of both Burkina Faso and Niger, spreading terror and chaos to those countries.

Since then, the nations of the West African Sahel have been plagued by terrorist groups that have evolved, splintered, and reconstituted themselves. Under the black banners of jihadist militancy, men on motorcycles armed with Kalashnikov rifles regularly roar into villages to impose zakat (an Islamic tax) and terrorize and kill civilians. Relentless attacks by such armed groups have not only destabilized Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, prompting coups and political instability, but have spread south to countries along the Gulf of Guinea. Violence has, for example, spiked in Togo (633%) and Benin (718%), according to Pentagon statistics.

American officials have often turned a blind eye to the carnage. Asked about the devolving situation in Niger, for instance, State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel recently insisted that security partnerships in West Africa “are mutually beneficial and are intended to achieve what we believe to be shared goals of detecting, deterring, and reducing terrorist violence.”  His pronouncement is either an outright lie or a total fantasy.

After 20 years, it’s clear that America’s Sahelian partnerships aren’t “reducing terrorist violence” at all. Even the Pentagon tacitly admits this. Despite U.S. troop strength in Niger growing by more than 900% in the last decade and American commandos training local counterparts, while fighting and even dying there; despite hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into Burkina Faso in the form of training as well as equipment like armored personnel carriers, body armor, communications gear, machine guns, night-vision equipment, and rifles; and despite U.S. security assistance pouring into Mali and its military officers receiving training from the United States, terrorist violence in the Sahel has in no way been reduced. In 2002 and 2003, according to State Department statistics, terrorists caused 23 casualties in all of Africa. Last year, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution, attacks by Islamist militants in the Sahel alone resulted in 11,643 deaths – an increase of more than 50,000%.

Pack Up Your War

In January 2021, President Biden entered the White House promising to end his country’s forever wars.  He quickly claimed to have kept his pledge. “I stand here today for the first time in 20 years with the United States not at war,” Biden announced months later. “We’ve turned the page.” 

Late last year, however, in one of his periodic “war powers” missives to Congress, detailing publicly acknowledged U.S. military operations around the world, Biden said just the opposite. In fact, he left open the possibility that America’s forever wars might, indeed, go on forever. “It is not possible,” he wrote, “to know at this time the precise scope or the duration of the deployments of United States Armed Forces that are or will be necessary to counter terrorist threats to the United States.”

Niger’s U.S.-trained junta has made it clear that it wants America’s forever war there to end. That would assumedly mean the closing of Air Base 201 and the withdrawal of about 1,000 American military personnel and contractors. So far, however, Washington shows no signs of acceding to their wishes. “We are aware of the March 16th statement… announcing an end to the status of forces agreement between Niger and the United States,” said Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh. “We are working through diplomatic channels to seek clarification… I don’t have a timeframe of any withdrawal of forces.”

“The U.S. military is in Niger at the request of the Government of Niger,” said AFRICOM spokesperson Kelly Cahalan last year. Now that the junta has told AFRICOM to leave, the command has little to say. Email return receipts show that TomDispatch’s questions about developments in Niger sent to AFRICOM’s press office were read by a raft of personnel including Cahalan, Zack Frank, Joshua Frey, Yvonne Levardi, Rebekah Clark Mattes, Christopher Meade, Takisha Miller, Alvin Phillips, Robert Dixon, Lennea Montandon, and Courtney Dock, AFRICOM’s deputy director of public affairs, but none of them answered any of the questions posed. Cahalan instead referred TomDispatch to the State Department. The State Department, in turn, directed TomDispatch to the transcript of a press conference dealing primarily with U.S. diplomatic efforts in the Philippines.

“USAFRICOM needs to stay in West Africa… to limit the spread of terrorism across the region and beyond,” General Langley told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March.  But Niger’s junta insists that AFRICOM needs to go and U.S. failures to “limit the spread of terrorism” in Niger and beyond are a key reason why.  “This security cooperation did not live up to the expectations of Nigeriens — all the massacres committed by the jihadists were carried out while the Americans were here,” said a Nigerien security analyst who has worked with U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

America’s forever wars, including the battle for the Sahel, have ground on through the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden with failure the defining storyline and catastrophic results the norm. From the Islamic State routing the U.S.-trained Iraqi army in 2014 to the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan in 2021, from the forever stalemate in Somalia to the 2011 destabilization of Libya that plunged the Sahel into chaos and now threatens the littoral states along the Gulf of Guinea, the Global War on Terror has been responsible for the deaths, wounding, or displacement of tens of millions of people.

Carnage, stalemate, and failure seem to have had remarkably little effect on Washington’s desire to continue funding and fighting such wars, but facts on the ground like the Taliban’s triumph in Afghanistan have sometimes forced Washington’s hand. Niger’s junta is pursuing another such path, attempting to end an American forever war in one small corner of the world — doing what President Biden pledged but failed to do. Still, the question remains: Will the Biden administration reverse a course that the U.S. has been on since the early 2000s?  Will it agree to set a date for withdrawal? Will Washington finally pack up its disastrous war and go home?

Copyright 2024 Nick Turse

Tomdispatch.com

(The Conversation) – The crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, or “MBS,” is bringing a new vision of a “moderate, balanced” Saudi Islam by minimizing the role of Saudi religious institutions once seen as critical to the monarchy.

For decades, Saudi kings provided support to religious scholars and institutions that advocated an austere form of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism. The kingdom enforced strict codes of morality, placing restrictions on the rights of women and religious minorities, among others.

Under MBS, women have been allowed to drive; co-educational classrooms, movie theaters and all-night concerts in the desert – in which men and women dance together – are a new normal.

Scholars Yasmine Farouk and Nathan J. Brown call the diminishing role of Wahhabi religious scholars within Saudi domestic and international policy nothing short of a “revolution” in Saudi affairs.

MBS acknowledges that these reforms risk infuriating certain constituents or could even provoke retaliation. As a scholar who studies interpretations of Islamic law to justify or contest militancy, I’ve followed these reforms closely.

In the past, Saudis who challenged the authority of Wahhabis have provoked unrest. When King Fahd, who ruled between 1982-2005, rejected the advice of his Wahhabi scholars and allowed the U.S. military to station weapons and female service members on Saudi soil, several of them supported a violent insurrection against him.

MBS seems unconcerned with such challenges. In an interview broadcast widely throughout the kingdom, MBS chastised Wahhabi scholars, accusing some of falsifying Islamic doctrines. He then detained a major Wahhabi scholar from whom he once sought counsel, charging him with crimes against the monarchy. MBS defended these actions, claiming, “We are returning to what we were before. A country of moderate Islam that is open to all religions, traditions and people around the globe.”

Negotiating Wahhabism

This proclaimed return of “moderate Islam” echoes the reforms of MBS’s grandfather, King Abdulaziz, founder of the modern Saudi kingdom. This vision rejects policies toward Wahhabi Islam favored by his uncles, King Faisal and King Khalid.

Between 1925 and 1932, Abdulaziz suppressed Wahhabi scholars and militants who had demanded that he uphold their version of “pure Islam” and not open the kingdom to trade and development. He did the opposite and asserted the supremacy of the monarchy.

The booming Saudi oil economy developed by Abdulaziz required his son, King Faisal, who ruled from 1964 to 1975, to reconsider the monarchy’s relationship with Wahhabism. Unlike Abdulaziz, Faisal believed Wahhabis would help him save the kingdom.

Saudis who felt left behind in the emerging Saudi oil economy had found an inspirational symbol of liberation in Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who helped overthrow the Egyptian monarchy in 1952 and implemented plans to redistribute Egyptian wealth.

Faisal encouraged Wahhabi scholars to work with politically driven Islamists to reject the revolutionary politics of Abdel Nasser’s Egypt and craft a new vision of Islam for Saudi youth.

Faisal permitted Wahhabi scholars to reform Saudi educational institutions with their conservative Islamic curriculum. Abroad, Faisal’s scholars presented Wahhabism as an authentic Islamic alternative to the Cold War ideologies of the U.S. and USSR. Wealthy Saudis, these Wahhabi scholars argued, had a religious duty to promote Wahhabism across the globe.

Resisting Wahhabism

Faisal’s reforms met with success. King Khalid, who followed Faisal, continued to favor Wahhabi scholars, particularly while responding to two major challenges in 1979.

A group of Saudi students, who believed Faisal’s and Khalid’s reforms to be illegitimate, seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Islam’s most sacred site, for two weeks in 1979. An attack on the Grand Mosque was viewed as an attack on the monarchy itself, which claims the mantle of “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques.”

The seizure came to a violent end with combined action by French and Saudi military forces. Afterward, Khalid agreed to elevate religious officials who affirmed the Islamic credentials of the monarchy.

Also in 1979, other Saudi youth traveled to join the resistance against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. One such Saudi who answered the call that year was Osama bin Laden, who would establish al-Qaida in 1988.

Bin Laden’s and al-Qaida’s grievances against the monarchy emerged following King Fahd’s acceptance of an increased deployment of U.S. soldiers to Saudi soil following Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Bin Ladin proclaimed the presence of American infidels in Saudi Arabia to be a defilement of Islamic holy lands, an “affront” to Islamic sensibilities, and demanded the destruction of the monarchy. Al-Qaida launched anti-Saudi insurgent campaigns lasting through 2010.

Not all conservative Islamist leaders called for violence. As historian Madawi Al-Rasheed notes, many Saudi scholars framed themselves as reformers who sought to correct Fahd’s departures from “authentic” Islam and restore Faisal’s vision.

When MBS speaks of a “moderate Islam” he is not just condemning the violence of al-Qaida. He’s abandoning the monarchy’s accommodations of the Wahhabi establishment. He blames some Wahhabi scholars for the violence that the monarchy faced in 1979 and again in the the 1990s and 2000s.

He has worked quickly to erase those accommodations and, like his grandfather, affirm the supremacy of the monarchy.

A ‘moderate Wahhabism’ for Saudi society?

Many of these revolutionary changes occurred amid the 2016 unveiling of “Saudi Vision 2030,” a plan for complete Saudi political, economic, educational and cultural transformation. MBS believes that this will meet the demands of Saudis under the age of 30 – who number more than 60% of the kingdom’s population.

The religious curriculum shaped by King Faisal is gone, replaced with a “Saudi first” education, which removes Ibn abd al-Wahhab, the founder of Wahhabism, from textbooks and emphasizes Saudi patriotism over a Wahhabi Islamic religious identity. Saudi Arabia has announced it will no longer fund mosques and Wahhabi educational institutions in other countries.

Saudi religious police, once tasked with upholding public morality, saw their powers curtailed. They no longer have powers of investigation or arrest. They cannot punish behaviors deemed morally inappropriate.

Critics remain unimpressed, noting that demoting religious officials does not diminish the violence of the Saudi state. Religious police continue their online surveillance of social media. In 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist, was killed following his calls for a continued voice for Islamist reformers in Saudi Arabia. Al-Rasheed argues that the images of a new Saudi society conceal suppression of Saudi reformers. Some observers note that a growing Saudi “surveillance state,” with capacities to peek into the private lives of Saudis, underwrites these reforms.

As Peter Mandaville, a scholar of international affairs, observes, the “moderate Islam” offered by MBS is complicated. On the one hand, it characterizes a new tolerant Saudi Arabian Islam. Yet, inside the kingdom, Mandaville argues that the “moderate Islam” of MBS demands that Saudi youth – as good Muslims – will submit to the authority of the monarchy over the kingdom’s affairs.

Some observers believe this might not be enough. Mohammad Fadel, a professor of Islamic legal history, argues that the current configuration of the Saudi monarchy is incompatible with “the kind of independent thought the crown prince is calling for in matters of religion.” Saudi society will flourish, he adds, “when Prince Mohammed recognizes the right of Muslims to rule themselves politically.”

With these reforms to Wahhabism, MBS hopes to secure the loyalty of a generation of young Saudis. As Saudi history would indicate, however, such a bargain requires constant renegotiation and renewal.

Nathan French, Associate Professor of Religion, Miami University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( The Irish Times ) – Four global aid agencies have suspended services in Afghanistan in response to a Taliban ban on women working at non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

In a joint statement, Care, Save the Children, the Norwegian Refugee Council and the International Rescue Committee said: “We cannot effectively reach children, women and men in desperate need in Afghanistan without our female staff.”

The agencies said women employees enabled them to reach “millions of Afghans in need since August 2021″ when the Taliban seized power.

Some 3,000 women are employed by the International Rescue Committee alone and make up 40 per cent of its staff.

Many of the 180 foreign and local NGOs operating in Afghanistan funnel UN and other external aid to Afghans in need of shelter, food, and medical treatment.

Over the weekend, the Taliban’s minister of economy Din Mohammad Hanif signed an order barring women from working in national and international NGOs as they were not wearing headscarves and failing to observe other Islamic laws. He warned any organisation that didn’t comply with the order would have its licence revoked.

The edict came after condemnation by Sunni Islamic scholars and governments of last week’s ban by the Taliban on women attending university. Cairo-based Sunni authority on the faith, Grand Imam Ahmad al-Tayeb of the Al-Azhar Islamic heritage institution, ruled that the ban contradicts Muslim canon law (sharia) and conflicts with Islam’s call for both men and women “to seek knowledge from cradle to grave”.  He argued the ban ignored 2,000 sayings of the Prophet Muhammad as well as “historic roles women have assumed in education, science, and politics”.  He called the prohibition “shocking” and said it should not have been issued by any Muslim.

The Abu Dhabi-located Muslim Council of Elders also opposed the ban, saying: “Islam liberated women from pre-Islamic traditions that deprived them of their rights and rendered them unable to function.”

The UAE, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar have expressed concern over the ban while Pakistan, a Taliban ally, said it was disappointed.

In a bid to pre-empt the university ban, six Gulf Co-operation Council members met Taliban acting foreign minister Amir Khan Mutaqi in Doha last month and urged full inclusion of women and girls in Afghan affairs. The UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and Saudi Arabia – which base their laws on sharia – told the Taliban to make a reconciliation plan that “respects basic freedoms and rights, including women’s right to work and education”.

In March, the Taliban closed girls’ secondary schools but allowed girls’ elementary schools to operate. However, girls and teachers have, reportedly, been told not to go to elementary schools.

This would deny literacy to half 40 million Afghans.

Reprinted from The Irish Times with the permission of the author.

(RFE/RL ) – The Taliban banned women from attending universities in Afghanistan on December 20. In a statement, the Taliban’s Higher Education Ministry said the decision was effective immediately, and ordered educational institutions to inform the ministry of their compliance. The ministry did not give any reasons for its decision.

The move was quickly condemned by countries and rights groups around the world. In Afghanistan, female university students wept and consoled each other after hearing the news. Students in Nangahar University in eastern Afghanistan staged a protest on December 21 and male students walked out of their exams in solidarity with their female classmates. On December 22, around 50 women staged a rally in Kabul that was violently broken up by Taliban fighters.

Why It’s Important: The Taliban’s university ban is the latest restriction against women in Afghanistan. Since the Taliban seized power last year, the militant group has severely curtailed female education and women’s right to work. The militants have also imposed restrictions on women’s appearances and freedom of movement.

The university ban is a major blow to women. But it was also expected. Nida Mohammad Nadim, a hard-line cleric who was appointed as the Taliban’s minister for higher education in October, has said that female education is “un-Islamic and against Afghan values.”

The Taliban’s latest ban has also provided further evidence that the group is bent on reestablishing its brutal regime from the 1990s, when women were barred from working outside their homes and girls were banned from attending school.

What’s Next: When it seized power, the Taliban pledged to uphold women’s rights. The militant group projected a more moderate image to convince the world that it had changed. But the Taliban has failed to meet its promises and reimposed many of its repressive policies of the past. Observers have said the militants are likely to further restrict the rights of women.

Mustafa Sarwar is a senior news editor for RFE/RL’s Radio Free Afghanistan.

Copyright (c)2022 RFE/RL, Inc. Used with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.

RFE/RL

(The Conversation) – Most Muslims celebrate the birth of the Prophet Muhammad on the 12th day of the third month of the Islamic calendar, Rabi’ al-awaal – which starts on the evening of Oct. 7 in 2022. Muslims view the celebration, called Mawlid al-Nabi or simply the Mawlid, like many other Islamic celebrations: as a sign of respect and adoration of Muhammad, whom they believe to be God’s messenger.

According to Muslim tradition, Muhammad was a righteous man born around A.D. 570, whom God designated as his final prophet. He learned God’s message by heart and recited it. Later on, the verses were written down to preserve the text – what is now the Quran.

Most countries with majority Muslim populations, from Pakistan to Malaysia to Sudan, commemorate the prophet’s birthday each year. The most colorful celebrations are carried out in Egypt, with Sufi dhikr poetry commemorating the prophet, and games, toys and colorful sweets given to kids.

Yet not all Muslims will mark the holiday. In a few countries, like Saudi Arabia, it’s just like any other day. The focus of my research is how Muslim societies relate to their faith, including their sense of social justice and their expectations of governments. While most Muslim countries encourage commemorating the Mawlid, the opposite is true in communities shaped by the ultra-conservative Wahhabi school of Islam, whose global influence has rapidly expanded in recent decades.

Wahhabi disapproval

The Wahhabi movement was started in 1744 by Muhamed Ibn Abdel Wahab, a religious scholar and reformer in what is today Saudi Arabia. Muhamed Ibn Saud, a political leader considered the founder of the Saud dynasty, legitimized his authority by seeking Ibn Abdel Wahab’s religious opinions. Ibn Saud was eager to wrest more power from the Ottoman Empire, which controlled much of the peninsula at the time.

Since then, Wahhabism has spread across the Muslim world in countries such as Yemen, the post-Soviet states, Tunisia and Egypt – especially after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which spurred Iran’s rise as a regional power and prompted Saudi Arabia to try and compete.

An austere school of Islam, Wahhabism often encourages the literal interpretation of the Quran and is especially suspicious of any practices they see as idolatry. For example, Saudi authorities have clamped down on worship at saints’ tombs and razed some holy sites entirely. In extreme cases, Salafis – a related school of Islam – have claimed that the relics and statues of ancient Egypt should be destroyed. In Saudi Arabia, the religious police, called mutaween, guard the prophet’s burial grounds in Medina during pilgrimage seasons to prevent visitors from touching it or praying close to it.

Conservatives frown upon adoration of the prophet. Wahhabi puritans consider the Mawlid heretical, citing a saying of the prophet, called a hadith: Every heresy is a misguidance, and every misguidance will end in hell. The word for “heresy” here, “bid’ah,” is often used to condemn Muslim practices seen as innovations, like celebrating the prophet’s birthday.

Celebrating with awe

Critics of Wahhabism argue that it compromises people’s relationship with God by cutting off instinctual human behavior, like wanting to honor a prophet.

As opposed to the literal and conservative focus on the oneness of God, which Wahabis emphasize, most Muslims observe the prophet’s birthday as a sign of love, respect and awe.

The Mawlid is celebrated in many ways and forms in the Muslim world, whether it is quietly observed by fasting and reading the Quran, or by kids dressing up in bright colors and getting a tiny horse or a doll made out of sugar. The practices vary, but the one thing they articulate are the admirable qualities of the prophet and how dear he is to his followers.

Deina Abdelkader, Associate Professor of Political Science, UMass Lowell

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Middle East Monitor ) – On 15 August 2021, the world looked on with trepidation as the situation in Afghanistan reached a critical juncture with the Afghan Taliban assuming power in the country. The takeover was swift, and relatively peaceful, with little resistance from the masses, followed by the abrupt withdrawal of US forces, leading to a new set of debates and questions. Was this the same Taliban or a different version? What was to be the future of Afghanistan’s women? What would be the fate of political opponents who had been seen as advocates of foreign occupation? The answers remain unclear almost a year later. There was little doubt about a Taliban revival with the US exit and in the absence of a negotiated settlement. In fact, a military takeover by the group was almost expected. But the manner and speed with which Afghanistan fell to the Taliban was shocking and unprecedented.

Afghanistan is currently going through one of its most important and critical phases, even when one considers the violence and instability of the last two decades. Since the Taliban’s assumption of power, the situation inside Afghanistan resulted in unaddressed questions regarding changes in domestic governance, political freedoms, human rights and especially women’s rights, counterterrorism assurances, and the overall commitment to regional peace and stability.

15 August 2022 will mark one year since the Taliban dispensation assumed power. While, initially, there were uncertainties regarding the Taliban’s rule, the past one year has somewhat set the tone and is an indication of how the group intends to govern the country. Even within the confines of the current interim set up, the real test for the Taliban is by no means limited to securing power, but revolves around legitimacy, acceptance, performance and of course recognition. The group has been engaging independently as well as through Doha with the international community and regional countries, and while it seeks recognition, present engagement does entail de facto recognition.

Domestically, the group’s performance is debatable; however, one has seen an overall improvement in the security of the country with the exception of attacks by transnational terrorist groups like the Islamic State Khorastan Province (ISKP). The group is still trying to consolidate its position and power within its ranks as well as within the country. Governance without a doubt continues to remain a huge challenge, as the group, it seems, does not have the expertise or manpower to run the ministries. This is primarily because the majority of the educated Afghans have left the country.

While the group had time and again given assurances that it would work towards the formation of an inclusive political system and has expanded its cabinet to include a few members from other ethnic factions, unfortunately the set-up of a representative political dispensation as the group had claimed is still unfulfilled. However, the fact that the group has said the set-up is an interim arrangement is somewhat reassuring and one hopes the future government will be more inclusive. The group is struggling to formulate policies towards Afghan institutions like the bureaucracy, security and armed forces to name a few. Moreover, the group has not only inherited weak institutions but a nonexistent economy, an ongoing humanitarian crisis and effects of natural calamities; in other words, it is work in progress.

Moreover, financial sanctions on the Taliban, have largely played a part in paralyzing the banking system which has thus affected all aspects of the economy. While the provision of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan by certain countries, including the US, which has provided $775 million, is certainly reassuring; however, it is not enough to stabilise the economy let alone sustain the Afghan population of which some 95 per cent are suffering from food insecurity.

This is a huge dilemma for the Afghan population and remains one of the biggest challenges. Thus, in such dire circumstances, it is important for the international community to move away from politics and push towards a consolidated effort to ensure that Afghanistan does not further collapse into a humanitarian disaster that will then require more financial support as well as a different and enhanced set of challenges regarding refugees, among other issues.

Despite grave economic challenges, the Taliban have in their limited capacity taken measures to clamp down on corruption, and generate domestic revenue through custom and tariff duties. For example, between September and December in 2021, they collected around $400 million through revenues, taxes and on the increased export of natural resources like coal. Moreover, the group has kept official revenues flowing, and a “handful of holdovers from the former government are maintaining sophisticated financial-management software set up by the American-backed regime to run their revenue-collection systems.” The group also published a three-month budget, which has given some cause for optimism.

As a USIP report noted: “The Taliban budget is nearly balanced — and realistically projects no aid flows directly into the budget. Though the revenue projections may be somewhat optimistic, in general the budget seems relatively prudent, and compares well in this regard against past Afghan budgets.” However, any optimism is also necessarily circumscribed. There are plenty of other considerations after all. Such as the group’s inability or unwillingness to fulfill their pledges of reform pertaining to very basic yet fundamental rights, such as women’s education and their role in public life is a major impediment and stumbling block in the way of progress as it continues to keep the international community at bay from Afghanistan. Moreover, while the group has allowed private media channels to operate and often engage in public debates and discourse, many journalists have been at risk.

While children have been returning to schools, the Taliban reversed their previous decision to allow Afghan girls to return to high schools, this is both unfortunate and regrettable to say the least – and a major issue of concern for regional countries including Pakistan. It is imperative for the Taliban to realise that although Afghanistan has been at war with itself, the international community and the masses have evolved, and would like their rights to basic yet fundamental issues such as human/women right and education to name a few to be met. Hence, if the Taliban do not honour their pledges of reform, the group will lose the little support and engagement it currently enjoys from the international community. Moreover, it will become extremely challenging for regional countries to engage with the group let alone consider their formal recognition.

The biggest threats to Afghanistan are domestic constraints such as the economy and a possible humanitarian crisis, and just as importantly, the concern that the country will fall prey to transnational terrorist elements. Already, there has been some resistance shown in the north where the National Resistance Front (NRF) headed by Ahmed Masood has remained strident in its opposition towards the group. It has been trying to muster up support for its cause and lobby against the possible international recognition of the Taliban government as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. While the NRF has been trying to expand on both national and global levels, it has so far failed to gain the necessary support for its cause. This also reveals a new Afghan and international context, and a different set of perceptions and aspirations for different groups in Afghanistan, since the NRF had received some support in the past.

However, if the Taliban are not able to consolidate their position and ensure some semblance of stability, the fear is not so much of a civil war from groups such as the NRF but rather of transnational terrorist elements taking advantage of the situation and filling the vacuum. This fear has been echoed by the former UN Special Representative for Afghanistan, who also noted that “Afghanistan’s collapsing economy is heightening the risk of extremism.” After all, since the Taliban assumed power in August 2021, there has been a major spike in attacks by the ISKP domestically and against Afghanistan’s neighbours, primarily Pakistan, followed by Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. In Pakistan’s case, the rise in Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) activity and attacks against Pakistani security personnel independently as well as in collaboration with the ISKP has been of particular concern. It not only raises doubts on the Taliban’s ability to honour their commitments regarding counterterrorism assurances but also their capability to deal with transnational terrorist groups operating within the country.

While Afghanistan is being viewed as a regional issue – particularly in terms of the ongoing crises in different parts of the world, this is a gross miscalculation because as the past has proven, Afghanistan has always had global ramifications and the threat of transnational terrorist groups like the ISKP will not remain a concern for the region alone as it has global aspirations and believes in a global caliphate, hence no conflict should take precedence over the other. Accordingly, Afghanistan should not be abandoned nor ignored as it has been in the past because it will not bode well for any stakeholder. This is a time to remain engaged with Afghanistan– where the onus is on all sides to deliver. However, to achieve this, all sides need to learn to compromise and accommodate each other and instead of viewing Afghanistan as a regional issue, it must be viewed as a shared responsibility, Afghanistan is a global issue that warrants a collective and dedicated response.

While the Taliban are certainly not ideal, it must be asked whether there are any viable alternatives at this stage. Perhaps a clearer question is whether the international community desires the Taliban to fail or succeed – the answer, it appears at this point, will mean the failure or success of Afghanistan. While the Taliban face several understandable challenges be it limitations regarding governance, differences within the group’s leadership over policies or the full use of Afghanistan’s resources, the fact is that now that they are in power, they have to shoulder the responsibility of being a responsible government that serves the Afghan people. Surely, this can only happen once they attain legitimacy from the masses themselves. However, despite the grave challenges, this is still a unique and unprecedented opportunity for Afghans to come together and focus on a state and government that is inclusive, responsible, accountable and lastly, one that serves the Afghan people, because Afghanistan’s future greatly shapes the security architecture of the entire region.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

In early October 2021, the Taliban and associated militias forcibly evicted hundreds of Hazara families from the southern Helmand province and the northern Balkh province. These followed earlier evictions from Daikundi, Uruzgan, and Kandahar provinces. Since the Taliban came to power in August, the Taliban have told many Hazaras and other residents in these five provinces to leave their homes and farms, in many cases with only a few days’ notice and without any opportunity to present their legal claims to the land. A former United Nations political analyst said that he saw eviction notices telling residents that if they did not comply, they “had no right to complain about the consequences.”

“The Taliban are forcibly evicting Hazaras and others on the basis of ethnicity or political opinion to reward Taliban supporters,” said Patricia Gossman, associate Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “These evictions, carried out with threats of force and without any legal process, are serious abuses that amount to collective punishment.”

The media have reported that Hazara residents of Mazar-e Sharif’s Qubat al-Islam district in Balkh province said that armed men from the local Kushani community were working with local Taliban security forces to force families to leave, and had given them only three days to do so. Taliban officials claimed the evictions were based on a court order, but evicted residents assert that they have owned the land since the 1970s. Disputes over conflicting claims arose out of power struggles in the 1990s.

Residents of Naw Mish district in Helmand province told Human Rights Watch that the Taliban issued a letter to at least 400 families in late September ordering them to leave. Given little time, the families were unable to take their belongings or complete harvesting their crops. One resident said the Taliban detained six men who tried to challenge the order; four remain in custody.

Another resident said that in the early 1990s, local officials distributed large tracts of land among their relatives and supporters, exacerbating tensions between ethnic and tribal communities. Securing a claim to land depended on who was in power, and those who lost out in earlier decisions have now petitioned the Taliban to support their claims. An activist from Helmand said that the property is being redistributed to Taliban members holding official positions. They “are cannibalizing land and other public goods” and redistributing it to their own forces, he said.

The largest displacements have taken place in 15 villages in Daikundi and Uruzgan provinces, where the Taliban evicted at least 2,800 Hazara residents in September. The families relocated to other districts, leaving their belongings and crops behind. One former resident said that “after the Taliban takeover, we received a letter from the Taliban informing us that we should leave our houses because the lands are in dispute. A few representatives went to the district officials to ask for an investigation but around five of them have been arrested.” Human Rights Watch was unable to determine if they have been released.

The former resident added that the Taliban had established checkpoints on the roads out of the villages and “did not let anyone take even their crops with them.” Following media coverage of the evictions, Taliban officials in Kabul retracted eviction orders for some Daikundi villages, but as of October 20, no residents had returned.

In Kandahar province in mid-September, the Taliban gave residents of a government-owned residential complex three days to leave. The property had been distributed by the previous government to civil servants.

International law prohibits forced evictions, defined as the permanent or temporary removal of individuals, families, or communities against their will from their homes or land, without access to appropriate forms of legal or other protection.

The Hazaras are a predominantly Shia Muslim ethnic group that was the target of mass killings and other serious human rights violations by Taliban forces in the 1990s. They have faced discrimination and abuse by successive Afghan governments going back over 100 years.

The forced evictions in Afghanistan are taking place at a time of record internal displacement driven by drought, economic hardship, and conflict, with 665,000 people newly displaced in 2021, even before the Taliban takeover. About four million people are displaced in the country overall.

“It’s particularly cruel to displace families during harvest and just before winter sets in,” Gossman said. “The Taliban should cease forcible evicting Hazaras and others and adjudicate land disputes according to the law and a fair process.”

Via Human Rights Watch

The land we now call Afghanistan has been a place of constant migration through its mountainous passes. Its linguistic, cultural and religious diversity is a result of millennia of trade along the Silk Road. More than a dozen ethnic groups are mentioned in the country’s constitution.

Afghanistan’s fall to the Taliban means that some minorities are again at heightened risk of persecution.

As a religion and politics scholar focused on the Khoja – Shiite Muslim communities originally from India but now scattered across the globe – I have studied the precariousness of being a religious and ethnic minority in the region.

Among the Afghans who have the most to lose today, I would argue, are groups with a different interpretation of Islam – particularly the Shiite Hazara community, the nation’s third-largest ethnic group, who have faced discrimination for more than a century.

In July 2021, nine Hazara men were killed by Taliban fighters in southeastern Afghanistan, according to a report by Amnesty International – echoing previous periods under the Taliban when the Hazara were targeted.

Rich history

The Hazara’s roots in South Asia go back centuries. Their ancestors are said to include Mongol troops, and recent genetic analysis has confirmed partial Mongol ancestry.

Today, the Hazara comprise 10%-20% of the national population of Afghanistan, where their traditional homeland is in a central region called Hazarajat. This makes them an important minority in a country of 38 million.

There are also significant Hazara communities in Pakistan, as well as a
Western diaspora in such countries as the United States and the U.K. Many Hazara outside Afghanistan fled during the violence of the past five decades, from a coup in 1973 and the Soviet invasion to the Taliban’s rise and the U.S.-led war.

Frequent targets

While most Hazara are Muslim, the majority belong to the minority Shiite tradition. Most Muslims around the world follow the Sunni tradition, which recognizes Muhammad’s companion Abu Bakr as his rightful successor. Shiite Muslims like the Hazara, however, believe that the prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali, should have succeeded Muhammad after his death in A.D. 632.

In Afghanistan, as elsewhere, tensions between the majority Sunni Muslim population and Shiite Muslims has been a source of steady conflict. The Hazara continue to be targeted and brutally murdered by the Taliban in Afghanistan and its associates in Pakistan. Islamic State-affiliated groups have also targeted Shiite communities in South Asia, including the Hazara.

The community has long been among Afghanistan’s poorest and faces daily harassment, including in finding jobs.

Not just religion

The Taliban idealize a particular vision of Islamic “purity” and seek to impose it through their strict rules.

To understand the Taliban only as Muslim extremists, however, is to miss the political and economic reality of why and how they operate in Afghanistan. Afghanistan produces the vast majority of the world’s opium, which is used to make heroin, and the Taliban control much of those profits. Violence in the name of religion also helps the group expand its territory and enforce control.

From this perspective, minorities like the Hazara pose a twofold threat to the Taliban.

First, their different traditions challenge the Taliban’s authority to claim religious truth. Their presence is a testament to an indigenous, pluralistic tradition of Islam that has accommodated multiple faiths over centuries, despite periods of brutal persecution. For example, the famous Bamiyan Buddha statues in the heart of Hazara territory were respected for centuries by the surrounding community, until they were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.

Second, Afghanistan is a weak state where many tribes and communities cooperate or compete for power. Long-standing ethnonationalist conflict makes it in the Taliban’s interests to keep dissent to a minimum.

The Hazara’s security represents something bigger: the possibility of a pluralistic and multiethnic nation. Since the American withdrawal, however, thousands of Hazara who withstood years of hardship and violence have sought refuge in Pakistan. For now, they and other minorities fear a period of increased oppression and dislocation under the Taliban.

[This week in religion, a global roundup each Thursday. Sign up.]

Read all six articles in our Understanding Islam series on TheConversation.com, or we can deliver them straight to your inbox if you sign up for our email newsletter course.

Iqbal Akhtar, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Florida International University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

CBC News: “Afghanistan’s Hazara minority fear renewed massacres under Taliban”

Right now, it is important to say that Al Jazeera reports that Mazar fell to the Taliban again on August 14, 2021, as the Afghanistan National Army negotiated a retreat across the border to Uzbekistan with them. All the other security forces and local militias lost heart and also gave up. Abdul Rashid Dostum, the notorious warlord of the city, appears also to have fled, and his whereabouts are unknown. Dostum also had to flee in 1997, to Uzbekistan and then Turkey. You have to hope that the events of the late 1990s are not repeated, for the sake of the people of Mazar.

The city fell without a shot being fired. It had become increasingly isolated in the past week, as an anti-Taliban bastion in the north. Still, residents were shocked at the collapse of the national army and its desertion. One district near Mazar was governed by a woman, Salima Mazari. She sees the writing on the wall. “There will,” she told Al Jazeera, “be no place for women.”

Mazar is Afghanistan’s fourth-largest city, with probably about 400,000 residents, and an important economic and industrial site.

Mazar is a storied city, from medieval times. Even though Ali ibn Abi Talib, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, was assassinated at Najaf in Iraq in 661 A.D. and has a tomb there, the people of Balkh erected a tomb to Ali as well. In folk religion, people like their holy figures to be nearby, and legends grow up about their travels to a locality. Americans might remember that Mormons believe that Jesus spectrally visited North America. Mazar means “a shrine to which you go on pilgrimage” and sharif means noble. So the city is the noble shrine, i.e., to Ali. Balkh was properous and important in medieval times.

The mystic and poet Jalal al-Din Rumi was born in Balkh, probably not far from Mazar, in 1207 A.D. His was also a turbulent era, and his family fled the catastrophic Mongol invasion that wrecked so many urban centers in Afghanistan and Iran.

In the 20th century, Mazar emerged as one of the more industrialized cities of Afghanistan, with close economic and cultural ties to the Soviet Union, especially the nearby Uzbekistan Soviet Socialist Republic. Ethnic Uzbeks on the Afghanistan side of the border were thus more cosmopolitan than a lot of other Afghanistan citizens.

David Chaffetz wrote at the Journal of the Royal Institute for International Affairs in 1979,

“IN the mid-1970s, visiting the industrial city of Mazar-i-Sharif — a town of 100,000 souls just below Soviet Turkistan — an observer could already not help being struck by the echoes of Eastern Europe. The wide, empty streets issuing from monumental roundabouts carried the only traffic-the slow chug of vintage Volga taxicabs bringing bureaucrats in heavy overcoats and Astrakhan caps from their bungalows in the quonset-hut suburbs to the stucco chancelleries in the city. Along these dusty streets plump, East European matrons stood before tiny fruit stands driving hard bargains with the Afghan vendors. In the centre of the city, in the tiled lapis and turquoise mosque of Imam Ali, dervishes kept watch over the grave of Sher Shah, the Afghan Amir who played the Tsars and the Viceroys of India off against one another in the Great Game.”

Of Soviet developmentalism in the 1970s, he added, “In rapid succession the Russians offered Afghanistan hydroelectric stations; nitric fertilizer factories; a new road; irrigation for Jelalabad province; and-the jewel of the whole complex-a natural gas industry in Mazar-i-Sharif. By 1975 the Russians and the Afghans had agreed on over seventy projects.”

Then the Soviets invaded in late 1979, and Afghanistan was set on a road to ruin. During the 1980s a million Afghans died in the fighting between the Soviets and Afghan rebels called Mujahidin. The US government stirred up and funded the latter, taking revenge on Moscow for the Vietnam War. Three million Afghans were wounded, three million displaced to Pakistan, two million to Iran, and another million or two were displaced internally. The Soviet troops conducted ethnic cleansing campaigns of defiant villages, and bombarded particularly recalcitrant ones. The US fringe left that is always yelling about casualties of imperialism has never had a word to say about this massive Soviet atrocity. And, yes, Washington was complicit in this maelstrom, through its support of the rebels, some of whom were tribal and some of whom developed new and virulent forms of Muslim fundamentalism. Al-Qaeda was among them.

The CIA denies fostering al-Qaeda, but it certainly fostered the conditions under which the organization became a major player in Afghanistan. It did support the hard line fundamentalists such as Golbadin Hikmatyar and his Hizb-i Islami, giving them sophisticated training in guerrilla tactics and covert tradecraft, which they passed on to their al-Qaeda allies.

The great Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui used to quote an African proverb that “When two elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled.”

That “revenge” on the Soviet Union, which collapsed of its own accord in 1991, came back to haunt the US when al-Qaeda struck us on September 11.

In the 1990s, the Taliban grew up, a movement of Afghan refugees and orphans displaced to Pakistan and educated in Saudi-funded Deobandi seminaries in a rigid form of Muslim fundamentalism. As young men in an all-male environment, some of whom had lost their mothers and knew no women, they developed a vicious misogyny and feared women as autonomous agents.

The Taliban as a movement came from and appealed to the rural Pushtun population.

Afghanistan is multi-ethnic. You have your mostly Sunni Pushtuns, who speak an eastern Iranian language. You have your Sunni Tajiks north of Kabul who speak a dialect of Persian called “Dari.” And you have Sunni speakers of other Persian dialects in the west near Iran. You have the Persian-speaking Shiites in the center of the country, the Hazara, who often have an East Asian appearance. In the far north you have Sunni Turkic speakers, Uzbeks and Turkmen.

Tajiks deeply dislike Talibanism. Hazara Shiites fear it, since it is hyper-Sunni and involves deep hatred of Shiites. Most Uzbeks are mainline Sunnis or are secular-minded and don’t have the time of day for Taliban. There is also a rural/ urban divide. Urbane people of Kabul and Mazar dislike the rural fundamentalism of the half-educated Taliban.

In 2003, National Geographic reported the ethnic composition of Mazar as: Tajiks at 45 %, Pashtun 40 %, Uzbeks at 17%, Hazaras at 8 %, and Turkmen at 8%.

So the warlord of Mazar was Abdul Rashid Dostum, a member of the Northern Alliance (Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks) who opposed the rise of the Taliban through the 1990s. He was, however, betrayed by an associate in May, 1997 and had to flee. The Taliban came into the city.

The Taliban faced fierce resistance from Mazar residents. The Hazara Shiites had formed a militia under the influence of the Khomeini revolution in Iran, Wahdat, which took on the Taliban. Tajiks and Uzbeks did likewise. Ultimately they massacred at least two thousand Taliban and expelled them from the city, forming a United Front to rule themselves.

But on August 8, 1998, 23 years ago, the Taliban took Mazar again. This time they rounded up thousands of Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek men. They are alleged to have massacred 8,000 of them, and imprisoned or expelled more. An early report of these events was done by Human Rights Watch, which has lower numbers because the full story hadn’t yet come out.

HRW wrote, “Within the first few hours of seizing control of the city, Taliban troops killed scores of civilians in indiscriminate attacks, shooting noncombatants and suspected combatants alike in residential areas, city street sand markets. Witnesses described it as a “killing frenzy” as the advancing forces shot at “anything that moved.”

HRW added,

“In the days that followed, Taliban forces carried out a systematic search for male members of the ethnic Hazara, Tajik, and Uzbek communities in the city. The Hazaras, a Persian-speaking Shi’a ethnic group, were particularly targeted, in part because of their religious identity. During the house-to-house searches, scores and perhaps hundreds of Hazara men and boys were summarily executed, apparently to ensure that they would be unable to mount any resistance to the Taliban. Also killed were eight Iranian officials at the Iranian consulate in the city and an Iranian journalist. Thousands of men from various ethnic communities were detained first in the overcrowded city jail and then transported to other cities, including Shiberghan, Herat and Qandahar.”

The killing of the 8 Iranian officials at their consulate nearly provoked a war between Iran and the Taliban.

As someone who lived through and followed the events of the late 1990s (I read Dari Persian and have long been interested in Afghanistan), the news on Saturday came like a gut punch.

Those poor people.

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Bonus Video:

CBC News: “Taliban capture Afghanistan’s fourth-largest city”