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570 days since the Taliban banned teenage girls from school. Education is not a privilege, its a human right; a right Afghan women and girls continue to be denied #LetAfghanGirlsLearn, tweeted Yalda Hakim of the BBC on April 13.

Like Hakim, many human rights, women rights and education rights activists across the globe have been counting the days that Afghan girls have been deprived from education, hoping for the day when school doors will be open again for all Afghan girls.

However, what will girls learn at school when they return? A recent report from Afghan newspaper Hasht-e Subh paints a dark picture of what boys at schools are currently learning:

After the Doha agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban in 2020, the Taliban started to revise the school curriculum. In this process, Pashto and some Dari textbooks have been used, which include 45 elementary school textbooks, 48 secondary school textbooks, and 43 high school textbooks. The Taliban have evaluated the textbooks by a board they call technical, assuming that the previous government was a puppet. According to the Taliban, since the curriculum was compiled and issued by the Republic with the financial assistance of foreign countries, some non-Islamic and non-Afghan standards similar to the western world have been included in it. In the introduction, they admit that the curriculum of the past 20 years has an Islamic appearance, but ugly superstitions have skillfully been included in it under the title of Islam. By ugly and superstitious, they mean democracy, equality, womens rights, civil liberties, tolerance, mutual acceptance, non-violent measures and other values that are not compatible with their own ideology.

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The report added that the Taliban have not revealed the identities, academic backgrounds and scientific qualifications of the board members [responsible for evaluating textbooks]. But from the content of the report, it can be understood that there was no place for education specialists and pedagogy experts in the composition of the board.

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Instead, Hasht-e Subh noted that the Talibans goal in overhauling the education curriculum is to strengthen the ideology of the Taliban among the future generations This is why the changes proposed by the Taliban are very extensive.

This attitude toward education is why no one in my family currently attends school none of my brothers or sisters.

I remember very well what they were teaching and forced students to learn at school in the last period of Taliban in 1990, my father said. They were trying to brainwash people. I dont want my children study the Talibans curriculum. I want my children get educated and empowered to serve to our nation and humanity.

The Taliban claimed that they changed, but they never did, he added. They want to take time back and do everything like that period.

As an example, one of the main goals of changing the curriculum, according to the Taliban, is to replace the extremist views of the Taliban in the textbooks. As part of that, the Taliban have demanded an end to the emphasis on peace in the previous curriculum, and a rehabilitation of the Talibans real jihad against the United States, among others. Under the Taliban curriculum, children are encouraged to fight instead of financial and human losses of past wars, the religious and worldly benefits of past jihads should be explained in the curriculum.

But my father does not want his children learning to embrace violence. He believes that the ideology of the Taliban is against our religion and culture.

Islam teaches us to do not offend people with our tongues, our hands, and our works. Killing people is an unforgivable crime. If in Afghanistan my children cannot go to school forever, that is okay, but I dont want that my children learn how to commit suicide or be proud of being killers and humiliating and discriminating against other people.

In addition to teaching violence, the Taliban have removed all topics related to human freedoms in school curriculum, Hasht-e Subh notes. The Taliban have said that the standards of human rights in the education curriculum should be explained only from the perspective of the Talibans religious interpretation. The new curriculum instead emphasizes Shariah and the evils of democratic elections.

The issue of womens rights, and depictions of women taking part freely in society, was another major concern for the Taliban. From the Hasht-e Subh report:

In two cases, members of this committee read stories in the textbooks that encourage women to leave the house; they emphasize that the necessity of going out fully covered should be emphasized in the same lessons. Regarding womens work in schools, hospitals, factories and government offices, the Taliban have said that the limits of womens work conditions for education should be defined from an Islamic point of view The fact is that according to the Taliban, women cannot work in any of these places

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My father expressed his anger against the Talibans claim that their restrictions on women are an essential part of Islam. The first wife of our Prophet Mohammad (PBUH), Bibi Khadija, was a business woman. Bibi Aisha also was dealing with politics even she participated and led in war, he pointed out. However today, after 15 centuries, the Taliban claim that Islam bans women from working.

We follow Islam. not the Taliban ideologies. So my daughters have the right to study and work in any major they are interested in. There must not be any restriction on my daughters and all Afghan women.

Today, it has been nearly two years since any of my siblings have been to school. During that time, my sister and I have been teaching my younger brother and sister using old textbooks; along with this we are looking for opportunities to study online. I believe there are thousands of families who think like my father, and thousands more children including boys being kept out of public school to avoid the Talibans brainwashing.

The Taliban paralyzed the education system during their previous period of rule, when they also dealt with the curriculum in an ideological way. And the practice of putting ideological propaganda in Afghan textbooks was strong even before the Taliban. During the civil war, the school curriculum was compiled with the help of international institutions and Mujahideen. Its main goal was to promote jihadism and antagonism. This included students being taught to count numbers with images of bullets, weapons, and other tools of war.

It remains to be seen whether international donors will work with the Taliban this time to develop a curriculum in which hate and hostility are propagated. But it seems that due to 20 years of living in relatively democratic conditions and the media revolution, the young generation of Afghanistan will not easily reconcile with an extremist ideological curriculum.

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Under the Taliban, None of Afghanistan's Children Can Really Learn - The Diplomat

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In Doha, Special Representative for Afghanistan (SRA) Thomas West will meet with Qatari colleagues, Afghan civil society leaders, and partner missions. In the UAE, SRA West will meet withEmiraticounterparts, Afghan business and thought leaders. In Istanbul, he will hold consultations with Afghan political leaders, journalists, humanitarian professionals and human rights activists.

SRA West is conducting outreach in the region to secure input as the international community seeks solutions to Afghanistans compounding challenges, made worse by the Talibans recent decisions to limit womens participation in humanitarian operations and ban them from their vital work for the UN.

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Special Representative for Afghanistan West's April 11 - 18 Travel to ... - Department of State

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In December of 2021, I asked Ambassador Dan Smith to lead an After Action Review of the Department of States execution of its duties related to ending the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan. The After Action Review covers the period from January 2020 to the end of August 2021 and the completion of the U.S. military withdrawal. I directed this review because I believe we have an obligation to our workforce, our institution, our partners in Congress, and the American people to learn from the lessons of this chapter in U.S. foreign policy.

The After Action Review, which we are now making available to relevant Congressional committees, produced a series of findings on how the Department planned for and carried out its missions during this period. It also provided detailed recommendations that we are already taking steps to implement. These include strengthening the Departments overall contingency planning, crisis preparedness, and response capabilities.

The State Departments greatest asset is its people, including an extraordinary group of dedicated and talented professionals who worked tirelessly on the ground in Kabul, in Washington, and at other sites domestically and abroad to evacuate and assist as many people as possible during that period. Their efforts, and the efforts of all from our Department who served in Afghanistan over two decades as well our Afghan partners who served alongside them, deserve our highest praise and gratitude, and we continue to honor them through our work going forward.

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After Action Review on Afghanistan - United States Department of ... - Department of State

The bodies are piling up in Afghanistan as the Taliban claim to be wiping the country clean of a resurgent Islamic State in a campaign that should be music to the ears of the U.S. military, counterterrorism, and intelligence communities, which regard the Islamic State as a major threat to homeland and global security. But many security experts believe the Talibans rampage is just cover for eradicating enemies, including U.S.-trained former military members, while al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other terrorist groups grow stronger in the absence of any meaningful counterterrorism response from the United States.

The United States slunk out of Afghanistan in late August 2021, after 20 years spent fighting the Taliban, which had harbored the al Qaeda terrorists who blew up the twin towers in New York, took a chunk out of the Pentagon, and knocked U.S. foreign policy askew for a generation. When former U.S. President Donald Trump handed Afghanistan to the Taliban in the 2020 Doha, Qatar, peace deal, an explicit condition was that the resurgent Taliban would sever their ties with al Qaeda. An implicit understanding was that Washington would be able to maintain an over-the-horizon counterterrorism capability in the country. The Biden administration, which carried out the final, ignominious withdrawal from Kabul in 2021, has claimed that despite having no boots on the ground, it would still have plenty of eyes in the sky, as it were.

And there have been a few successes. A U.S. drone scissored through Ayman al-Zawahiri, then al Qaedas frontman, as he stood on the balcony of a Kabul villa last year. The head of U.S. Central Command, Army Gen. Michael Kurilla, has hinted at other, similar operations, but no details have been made public.

But U.S. and Afghan security and diplomatic sources say the United States relies on intelligence provided by the Talibanmost of whose leadership is sanctioned by the United Nations for terrorismabout terrorist activities in Afghanistan. Poachers can be turned into gamekeepers; inmates, though, make poor wardens. Taliban information is likely self-serving, if not false, those sources said.

Thomas West, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan, said last year that even in the wake of the hit on Zawahiri, we are prepared to engage pragmatically with the Taliban regarding terrorism concerns, and he referred to the local branch of the Islamic State, known as IS-Khorasan Province, or IS-K, as a common enemy. Speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, he said the United States is extremely concerned about terrorist groups that still have an active presence in Afghanistan.

A new report on global terrorism concluded that, for the fourth consecutive year, Afghanistan is the country most impactedand thats even though Taliban atrocities are no longer included in the count, since the former terrorists are now the nominal government. Next door in Pakistan, where the Taliban spinoff is reemerging, deaths caused by terrorism more than doubled from the previous year, rising to 643, said the Sydney-based Institute for Economics and Peace.

The Taliban count anti-terrorism scalps by pretending to fight IS-K. Whats odd is that a lot of the terrorism attacks in Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover look a whole lot like those that used to be chalked up to the Haqqani network, an offshoot of the Taliban thats close to al Qaeda and headed by the current de facto interior minister, Sirajuddin Haqqani. Those include the suicide bombing outside the Kabul airport in August 2021, that killed 13 U.S. military personnel and many Afghans during the chaotic evacuation.

That attack, and other mass-casualty events, such as the attack in September on a Hazara education center, have been claimed by IS-K. To keep its theoretical monopoly on violence, the Taliban leadership has had to make a show of eradicating its local Islamic State franchise. It has also made U.S. military and intelligence officials worry about just what threat IS-K might pose to the homeland.

Kurilla, the head of Centcom, name-checked IS-K when he appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 16. He reckoned that the group could attain the capacity to attack targets in Europe and Asia within six months, but he conceded that it would have greater difficulty attacking the United States. The U.S. intelligence communitys 2023 Annual Threat Assessment said IS-K almost certainly retains the intent to conduct operations in the West and will continue efforts to attack outside Afghanistan.

The first problem, some former Afghan hands say, is that Washington has swallowed the Islamic State lure hook, line, and sinker. Annie Pforzheimer, a former deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, called it an alarming miscalculation by West, the U.S. special representative, that the United States and Afghanistan shared a common enemy in IS-K. There should be no illusions that the Taliban is doing anything to weed out the presence of terrorist groups on Afghan soil, which is why they are under U.N. sanction, she wrote recently.

The second problem is that al Qaeda is still a thing, and the Taliban still work with the group, despite Trumps failed peace plan.

The Taliban have been enmeshed with al Qaeda for decades. They harbored Osama bin Laden as he planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks, prompting the U.S.-led invasion that ended their first regime and started the vicious 20-year war. After victory in August 2021, the Taliban again welcomed their old friends with state sponsorship necessary for achieving their long-term ambition of toppling modern governments and establishing a caliphate. Zawahiris presence in the Afghan capital was evidence of the comfortable ties between the two groups, but also of U.S. intelligence capabilities in Afghanistan at the time. That might have been more a blip than a feature.

By concentrating on the short-term aims and capabilities of IS-K, some analysts believe, the United States and its allies are missing the long-term threat posed by al Qaeda.

To me, al Qaeda is the greater threat than the Islamic State. Its because of its patience. The Islamic State is more of an immediate threat. It likes to conduct attacks for its propaganda and recruiting. But I dont think it has a real caliphate-building plan. And al Qaeda does. Al Qaeda is patient. Patient and thoughtful enemies are what scares me, terrorism analyst Bill Roggio said last year.

Its hard to say exactly what the counterterrorism relationship between Washington and Kabul is these days. CIA officials and Taliban agents, whove met at least twice in the Qatari capital, Doha, in the past six months, probably discuss counterterrorism issues, said another former Afghan security official, though release of Americans in Taliban prisons obviously tops the agenda. A different Afghan official suggested its a one-way street. The United States will jump on any information that is related to national security, but sharing intelligence with the Taliban? Thats a big no. Another, who held a sub-cabinet post in the pre-Taliban government, doubted any sort of covenant.

There is no formal covert or overt arrangement on counterterrorism between the Taliban and the U.S., they said.

The burr in the saddle that bites deep is Zawahiri. Forged in the Egyptian jihad, he took over the helm of al Qaeda after Navy Seals dispatched bin Laden one night in the spring of 2011. Still, though, he shouldnt have been in Kabul, of all places.

The Zawahiri strike looms large in the minds of counterterrorism strategists, even those who felt some kind of cooperation was absolutely essential; they feel burned by the Taliban bringing Zawahiri to Kabul, said Asfandyar Mir, an expert on South Asia security issues at the United States Institute of Peace. A lot of people feel that we had a pact with the Talibanwe made it clear that there is one thing you cannot do, and thats to bring the leadership of al Qaeda, or any of the groups that we are concerned about, to Afghanistan. Now that trust deficit runs deep.

The trust deficit has a blood price. The Taliban are using the cover of counterterrorism to mask systematic killings of former security service personnel. Former soldiers, commandos, and police are regularly killedshot, beheaded, dismembered, or set on fire, and their families killed with themand their deaths reported by human rights organizations and the armed opposition National Resistance Front (NRF).

The Taliban are, in fact, battling with IS-K. But not on the battlefield. They are fighting on the recruiting ground. The Islamic State is making inroads among disaffected Taliban foot soldiers, who are footsore and underpaid. That doesnt mean that the Taliban are suddenly MI6.

The Talibans rank and file will never fight against ISIS, said NRF spokesman Ali Maisam Nazary. He said the Taliban and IS-K are two sides of the same coin.

The Talibans leadership know that any attempt to go against any jihadist organization will cause their own disintegration and demise. The international community needs allies who arent recognized terrorists to help with counterterrorism, Nazary said.

Link:
What Happened to the Taliban's Pledge to Fight Terrorism? - Foreign Policy

The past few years have brought significant challenges for people living in Afghanistan and Pakistan, driven by complex economic crises and the continued impact of climate change.

Humanitarian conditions in Afghanistan are deteriorating at pace, with a projected two-thirds of the population over 28 million people expected to need humanitarian assistance in the coming year. The dire situation for women and girls in Afghanistan is particularly concerning, with their rights increasingly curtailed.

In Pakistan, the economic downturn and rising inflation have left many families unable to afford basic healthcare. This has been compounded by a series of devastating natural disasters, such as last years floods, which affected millions of people, destroyed thousands of homes and damaged an already struggling economy.

It is against this backdrop that the UK government has announced its aid budget to these two countries for the next financial year, which confirms a reduction of over 53% from last year, more than any other region. A reduction of this level could have serious consequences for people living in these countries who rely on humanitarian support but also raises questions about the credibility of the UKs stated commitments. For instance, how do the promises made by the UK during COP26 stack up if funding to Pakistan is reduced? Similarly, how can expressed words of solidarity for Afghan women be meaningful, if vital programmes that support women and girls risk closure as a result of UK cuts?

For Afghans in particular, these cuts will only compound an overwhelming sense of abandonment. It is also concerning for NGOs, both international and Afghan organisations, who are working tirelessly to provide lifesaving assistance in the country, despite significant operational challenges.

The recent ban on the employment of Afghan women from NGOs has been particularly challenging. There are concerns that any further reduction in UK aid could impact the ability of aid organisations and local partners to implement programmes and deliver essential services to those who need them most. We must ensure that the response from donors, including the UK, helps rather than hurts Afghans.

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This reduction has also come just days after the UK aid watchdog, the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI), criticised the use of approximately one-third of the UKs aid budget on the first-year costs of asylum seekers and refugees in the UK.

This marks a failure in the UKs moral and legal responsibility to support both people seeking safety in the UK and those facing conflict, climate change and inequality around the world. It also raises concerns about the value for money and the lack of transparency in aid spending.

We hope, first and foremost, that the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) will reconsider its funding decisions for Afghanistan and Pakistan, with careful consideration about the human consequences that such a significant reduction in aid could have.

Despite the significant challenges in Afghanistan, we have been encouraged by the continued commitment of FCDO staff to understand the complexity of the situation and try to find solutions to support the Afghan people.

However, given the funding gap, the FCDO should clearly outline how it intends to meet its commitments. For instance, the FCDO has committed to supporting women and girls in Afghanistan as a focus country in the National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security. Policy commitments need to be followed up with meaningful funding.

Also in Afghanistans context, rather than kneejerk reactions to Taliban policies, donors should be thinking strategically about its engagement with Afghanistan to focus on promoting economic stability, for example, supporting the recovery of the countrys private sector.

The recent aid cut to Afghanistan and Pakistan by the UK government is a cause for serious concern. Whilst the full impact of the cuts remains to be seen, we fear that it could be devastating for people living in these countries who are struggling so much. This is not the time for the UK to turn its back.

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Is the UK turning its back on Afghanistan and Pakistan? - Bond