Comment by Riaz Haq on November 26, 2021 at 7:48am

Where Afghanistan’s New Taliban Leaders Went to School
Darul Uloom Haqqania in Pakistan argues that the madrasa and its graduates have changed. Some worry they could be the source of new radicalism.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/25/world/asia/pakistan-taliban-afgh...


Haqqania has broadened its curriculum to include English, math and computer science. It demands full documentation from foreign students, including those from Afghanistan, and administrators said it adopted a zero-tolerance policy for anti-state activities.

-----------

AKORA KHATTAK, Pakistan — The Taliban have seized Afghanistan, and this school couldn’t be prouder.

Darul Uloom Haqqania madrasa, one of Pakistan’s largest and oldest seminaries, has educated more Taliban leaders than any school in the world. Now its alumni hold key positions in Afghanistan.

The school’s critics call it a university of jihad and blame it for helping to sow violence across the region for decades. And they worry that extremist madrasas and the Islamist parties linked to them could be emboldened by the Taliban’s victory, potentially fueling further radicalism in Pakistan despite that country’s efforts to bring more than 30,000 seminaries under greater government control.

The school says it has changed and has argued that the Taliban should be given the chance to show they have moved beyond their bloody ways since they first ruled Afghanistan two decades ago.

“The world has seen their capabilities to run the country through their victories on both the diplomatic front and on the battlefield,” said Rashidul Haq Sami, the seminary’s vice chancellor.

---------


Haqqania has broadened its curriculum to include English, math and computer science. It demands full documentation from foreign students, including those from Afghanistan, and administrators said it adopted a zero-tolerance policy for anti-state activities.

Experts on education in Pakistan say that the effort has had some success and that Haqqania doesn’t advocate militancy like it once did.

Still, they said, such madrasas teach a narrow interpretation of Islam. Lessons focus on how to argue with opposing faiths rather than critical thinking, and stress enforcement of practices like punishing theft with amputation and sex outside marriage with stoning. That makes some of their students vulnerable to recruitment from militant groups.

“In an environment of widespread support for the Taliban, both with the government and society, it would be naïve to hope that madrasas and other mainstream educational institutions would adopt a teaching approach other than a pro-Taliban one,” said Mr. Abbas, the author.


The school’s syllabus may be less influential than individual instructors.

“Whenever a madrasa student is found engaged in an act of violence, the wider approach is to hold the madrasa system and its syllabus responsible for the ill and no attention is paid to the teacher or teachers who influenced the student,” Mr. Abbas said.



---------

School administrators point to recent statements by some groups in Afghanistan as reflective moderate teachings. After the Taliban captured Kabul, the Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam-Sami party, founded by Mr. Sami’s father, urged them to ensure the safety of Afghans and foreigners, particularly diplomats, protect the rights of religious and ethnic minorities and allow women access to higher education.

In any case, Mr. Sami said, the world has little choice but to trust the Taliban’s ability to govern.

“I advise the international community to give a chance to the Taliban to run the country,” he said. “If they are not allowed to work, there will be a new civil war in Afghanistan and it will affect the entire region.”

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 30, 2021 at 6:39am

Taliban Covert Operatives Seized Kabul, Other Afghan Cities From Within
Success of Kabul’s undercover network, loyal to the Haqqanis, changed balance of power within Taliban after U.S. withdrawal

https://www.wsj.com/articles/taliban-covert-operatives-seized-kabul...

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

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

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

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

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

--------

Similar Taliban cells operated in other major Afghan cities. In Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest metropolis, university lecturer Ahmad Wali Haqmal said he repeatedly asked Taliban leaders for permission to join the armed struggle against the U.S.-backed government after he completed his bachelor’s degree in Shariah law.

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

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

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

But it wasn’t until the day after the fall of Kabul—when the man appeared on television clutching a Kalashnikov rifle—that she discovered he was in fact a Taliban commander. “I was shocked,” said Ms. Abbasi, who is now based in London.

The commander, Assad Massoud Kohistani, said in an interview with CNN that women should cover their faces.

A person familiar with Mr. Kohistani’s employment history said he worked for a USAID-funded irrigation project and was previously employed by a United Nations agency as a finance officer. The U.S. Agency for International Development, asked about Mr. Kohistani, said it subjects its Afghan programs to counterterrorism partner vetting.

Run by Westerners, Camp Baron included a hotel with a restaurant that openly served beer and other alcoholic drinks. Ms. Abbasi, like many female colleagues working at Camp Baron, wore a loose head scarf in the office, and sometimes none at all. “I can’t imagine how angry he must have been with us,” she said.

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 1, 2022 at 4:38pm

#American Marine, Now @nytimes Reporter, Meets a #Taliban Fighter: "I wanted to tell him I had been a Marine...and that I had fought against him. I wanted to say I was sorry for all of it: the needless death, the loss. His friends. My friends" #Afghanistan https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/29/world/asia/afghanistan-taliban-h...


MARJA, Afghanistan — The tea was hot. The room, oppressive and dusty. And the Taliban commander I sat across from in a bullet-scarred building in southern Afghanistan had tried to kill me a little over a decade ago.

As I had tried to kill him.

We both remember that morning well: Feb. 13, 2010, Marja district, Helmand Province. We were about the same age: 22. It was very cold.

Mullah Abdul Rahim Gulab was part of a group of Taliban fighters trying to defend the district from the thousands of American, coalition and Afghan troops sent to seize what at the time was an important Taliban stronghold. He didn’t know it when we recently met, but I was a corporal in a company of Marines that his fighters attacked that winter morning so many years ago.

With the insurgents’ victory in that 20-year war secured this summer, Mr. Gulab, now a high-level commander, was sitting with me in Marja’s government headquarters, a mess of a building the Americans had refurbished years ago. I was his guest, along with two of my colleagues from The New York Times. I told him that the fight for Marja had been important in the eyes of the United States, but that most people had heard only one version of the story of the battle. Not the Taliban perspective.

It was 2010, and the Taliban were once again becoming a potent military force, threatening nearly every part of Afghanistan. In Marja, the insurgents were taxing local residents, administering cruel and quick justice, and taking in a significant amount of income from the poppy harvest.

Operation Moshtarak, as the U.S. military called the 2010 mission to seize the district, was the first set-piece battle of President Barack Obama’s counterinsurgency troop surge, which failed.

Eleven years later, Mr. Gulab and I still remember the call to prayer that February morning in the village of Koru Chareh, a hamlet set amid half-flooded poppy fields, not far from the center of Marja. The surrounding trees, leafless, looked like dead outstretched hands.

“The skies over Marja were full of helicopters, and dropped American soldiers in different areas,” Mr. Gulab said.

I had just moved with my team of seven Marines to a small mud-brick pump house, having landed with more than 250 other troops a few hours earlier. As the sun rose, Mr. Gulab gathered his band of Taliban fighters from a nearby village.

Soon after, the mullah, loud and angry, came over the mosque loudspeaker. Mr. Gulab and his Taliban fighters prayed.

Then the shooting started.

“It was a very tough fight,” Mr. Gulab said.

He wasn’t wrong. By the end of the day, a Marine engineer was dead and several others wounded. The insurgents suffered their own casualties.

---

In November, my drive back to the district, now controlled by the Taliban, was easy enough. The roads were busy with motorbikes and trucks packed with cotton. The pavement was pockmarked with craters from the roadside bombs the insurgents had once placed beneath them. Abandoned military and police outposts dotted the highway like sporadic Stonehenges.

Marja was as I remembered, but some things had changed. There was a paved road. The canals were dry.

And the war was over.

The fall’s cotton harvest was underway, the sound of tractor engines and chattering field hands now audible in the absence of the background noise of gunfire, though a withering drought is threatening many farmers’ financial lifelines and the country’s economic downturn has affected everyone.

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 19, 2022 at 7:37am

In Afghanistan, Pakistan has outmanoeuvred India

Rawalpindi has used geography and geopolitics and its perceived influence over the Taliban to its advantage to reclaim its most-favoured ally status Neena Gopal

Read more at: https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/in-afghanistan-pakistan-has-ou...


As he told me recently: “We were shocked. Firstly, that Massoud would talk to the Americans, who had given us nothing. And secondly, when the CIA operative said, ‘you know there’s a reason that the West chose to back Pakistan over you. They speak our – not just English – but they can present their argument, lay out their long-term strategy, which Washington buys into. You don’t.” Massoud, he said, simply shrugged it off.

But some 20 years later, with the US handing Afghanistan back to Pakistan on a platter on August 15, 2021, the CIA operative’s words seemed prescient; as true then as it is now.

Today, in an eerie repeat of history, a National Resistance Front (NRF) put together by Massoud Jr is the only force pushing back against the Taliban. Except this time, its remit is limited to the Panjshir and Andarab valleys, its ranks made up of made up of former members of the Afghan National Army and residents of Panjshir. The 25,000-man force has no international support, no funding, no arms supply. The Taliban, by contrast, has access to $7.1 billion worth of military equipment, helicop...

During the EAM’s visit to the US, red carpet or not, American officialdom refused to back down from its public insistence that relations with Pakistan were separate from its partnership with Delhi. The buzz is that this is a fallout of Delhi’s continued oil purchases from Russia, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s face-saving message to Russian President Vladimir Putin on this being “not an era of war” notwithstanding. But the real story lies in the shifting power centres that has seen the vacuum left by the US exit from Afghanistan being filled by Rawalpindi, where a new pro-US army chief is set to be installed. Offering up Al Qaida chief Ayman Al Zawahiri won Pakistan Army Chief Gen Qamar Jawed Bajwa American confidence. It is expecting another Al Qaida ‘offering’ soon. For Rawalpindi, it seems, as demonstrated by Gen. Bajwa’s recent tour of Washington, where he was feted and dined on his purported farewell tour after he had rebuilt Pakistan’s ties with the US, there’s no going back.

Comment

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• …
• 3
• 4
• 5
• Next ›
• Page