Afghanistan

The leader of al-Qaida spent the last weeks of his life less than 500 metres from the swimming pool and bar where British diplomats relaxed during their Kabul tours.

The gaudy house where Ayman al-Zawahiri was reportedly killed by a drone strike while out on his balcony is nestled at the very heart of the Afghan capital.

By Tuesday morning, sheets of dark green plastic covered shattered windows that were shown in photos shared earlier on social media. But Afghanistan’s new rulers were aggressive about keeping journalists and curious bystanders from taking a closer look at the damaged house.

CIA Director William Burns said he is “very proud” of the agency’s analysis in Afghanistan in 2021 despite being blindsided by the swift collapse of the Afghan government and failing to predict how quickly the Taliban would take Kabul.

The Taliban rapidly took over Afghanistan in mid-August amid a chaotic U.S. military withdrawal, and a suicide bombing by ISIS-K late that month killed 13 U.S. service members and at least 170 Afghan civilians as the United States led evacuation operations at the airport, with the Taliban providing security outside.

Less than halfway to its goal of bringing 40,000 Afghans to Canada, the federal government is no longer taking new referrals for the special immigration program meant to prioritize former employees of the Armed Forces or Canadian government and their families.

CBC News has learned the government is processing the last of the 18,000 applications filled out by Afghans hoping to come here through the program. Advocates for refugees say the decision to wind down the program abandons Afghans desperate to come to this country.

Did anyone ever believe the numbers thrown round by the Trudeau government? 40K? 18K? I doubt both numbers. It’s hard to believe that many Afghans even with the inclusion of extended family ever “worked” for Canada.

If someone did work directly for Canada then we have to honor the agreement but not for their 40th cousin 17 times removed. This program sounds like it was deliberately built for abuse.

A powerful earthquake has killed at least 920 people and left hundreds more injured in Afghanistan, Taliban officials say.

Pictures show landslides and ruined mud-built homes in eastern Paktika province, where rescuers are scrambling to treat the injured.

In remote areas, helicopters have been ferrying victims to hospitals.

Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada said hundreds of houses were destroyed and the death toll was likely to rise.

I’m certain all Muslim nations will be sending aid immediately.

The country’s heroin reaches all corners of the world, but it is inside Afghanistan itself that a catastrophe of addiction is unfolding

The dark sea of huddled forms is almost impossible to take in at first.

The grimy, bent figures resemble residents of some vast, squalid dungeon. In the filthy riverbed nearby, scattered lifeless figures look like the aftermath of a battle, or an air crash.

There are close to 1,000 drug addicts sheltering under this bridge in a western neighbourhood of the Afghan capital.

New SIGAR findings shine a light on America’s dysfunctional efforts to train the Afghan National Police, which “actually contributed to increasing criminality” in Afghanistan.

After spending over $21 billion trying to train a national police force in Afghanistan, the United States splurged on equipment rather than focusing on institutional reform and churned out police trainees who were effectively “barely qualified mall guards,” per an international observer. That’s according to a sprawling new report published by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) that examines what went wrong in America’s costly and ineffective management of the Afghan National Police (ANP).

In their long white gowns, the inspectors of the Taliban’s Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue look more like food safety inspectors than “moral police”.

But they’re at the forefront of attempts to mould a new, more “Islamic” identity in Afghanistan, in keeping with the group’s hard-line views.

Their role seems broad. During their last visit to a multi-storey shopping centre in Kabul a few months back, shopkeepers remembered the inspectors checking whether products were past their expiry date, as well as instructing them to remove posters featuring women’s bodies.

Afghan armed forces collapsed last year because they had been made dependent on US support that was abruptly withdrawn in the face of a Taliban offensive, according to a scathing assessment by a US government watchdog.

A report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (Sigar) on the catastrophic defeat that led to the fall of Kabul on 15 August, blamed the administrations of Donald Trump and Joe Biden as well as the Afghan government of Ashraf Ghani.

“Sigar found that the single most important factor in the Afghan National Defence and Security Forces’ (ANDSF) collapse in August 2021 was the decision by two US presidents to withdraw US military and contractors from Afghanistan, while Afghan forces remained unable to sustain themselves,” said the congressionally mandated report, which was released on Wednesday.

Cheezus you have 20 years of lies to blame though personally I place the entire responsibility on the shoulders of Malala.

If there was any hope that the Taliban would pay heed to repeated calls from Afghanistan’s civil society and the international community to uphold women’s rights, the Islamic fundamentalist group’s latest decree for women to cover their faces in public has dashed it.

The latest order to make veil compulsory is one of the harshest controls on women’s lives in Afghanistan since the Taliban seized power in August last year. It is also reminiscent of the Islamist outfit’s strict Shariah-based rule in the late 1990s.

20 years of blood and treasure.