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A year into the Taliban takeover, children in Afghanistan are in facing death, suffering, and an uncertain future.

With forced labor, malnutrition, and education restrictions dampening the population, Asuntha Charles, a humanitarian aid worker, told Insider that Afghan children are in urgent need of support.Since the Taliban takeover, the US and its international partners froze roughly $10 billion of the country's assets leaving the people who remain inside the country in dire need of outside aid.

"It's not the right moment for the international communities to stay away from Afghanistan, but to provide more and more support so that the future generation is not affected, but able to see life and hope," said Charles, who is from southern India.

Charles has been working with World Vision for about two years and has lived in Afghanistan for roughly 20 years. The Christian-based organization focuses on aiding children facing poverty and justice.

Since the Taliban regained control in August of last year, economic collapse, drought, and the aftermath of a substantial earthquake have devasted the region and the people who live there.

"One thing gives me real worry is about the future of both girls and boys in this country. Because the future generation is really losing lot of opportunities because of so many factors," Charles told Insider.

A study by an NGO called Save the Children found that an estimated one million childrenhad been forced into child labor by February.

"It's really going to have not only physical but psychological impact on the children who are in this country now," Charles added.

It's not uncommon for children in the Taliban-controlled region to work to survive.

After school, some children, boys mostly, are forced to sell items to make money for food or search for litter to burn for warmth.

Girls have been barred from receiving an education beyond primary school, a dramatic regression in women's rights that had been made in the region over the last 20 years.

And outside of education, the lives of Afghanistan's youth are at stake.

Hundreds of children have died while playing outside as a result of explosive weapons that remained from the war.

And, by February, roughly 5 million children were close to starvation, according toThe Guardian. And, as of August, about 90% of households in the country don't have enough food to survive, CBS News reported.

Some parents have faced the impossible decision of selling their children into marriage or at the bazaar in order to feed the rest of the family.

"That's why we really want to continue to advocate that this is not the right moment to forget the people of Afghanistan and especially the children, and the global has to stand by them, and that's very, very crucial," Charles told Insider.

She acknowledged the numerous humanitarian issues going on across the globe, but said she doesn't want the world to forget about Afghanistan.

"There are so many crises globally, so people tend to also associate with different conflicts," Charles continued, "So, that type of frustration exists among people, that they are forgotten."

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The future of Afghanistan's youth is in peril - Business Insider

The Transforming Education Summit (TES) is an excellent starting point to reimagine how our educational systems can meet local needs within a shared global context. In our recent State of Education in Afghanistan conference, we discussed the challenges of national consultation in conflict, fragile, and emergency contexts and suggested how educational actors in Afghanistan and international policymakers could engage, mobilize, and facilitate a national dialogue on transforming education, along with accompanying strategies and delivery mechanisms.

We held our conference on August 15, 2022, exactly one year after the fall of the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan to the Taliban. We provided an overview of the educational history of Afghanistan with a focus on the relationship between education and conflict, followed by two panels. The first panel, which included former Afghan government officials, NGO representatives working in education, and technology experts, discussed the challenges and opportunities of providing education services from a local perspective. The second panel, which included representatives from the United Nations, Global Partnership for Education, Education International, and the Brookings Institution, discussed the challenges of donor coordination for education planning and implementation within a conflict-ridden context that lacks clear engagement mechanisms.

We can use this opportunity to mobilize greater political ambition, commitment, and action to support local dialogue and initiatives that would transform the educational landscape toward inclusive, locally-led solutions.

The discussion between panelists and among the audience covered many important topics, ranging from education funding to school access and safety. However, three topics stood out for their urgency and direct relevance to the themes of the upcoming TES discussions:

The TES concept note proposes a country-led national consultation process as the primary mechanism for engagement and mobilization, offering an inclusive and safe space for a dialogue among all stakeholders to discuss education system transformation. However, in fragile and conflict contexts like Afghanistanwhere the legitimacy of the government is under questioneducation aims, forms, and delivery mechanisms can fuel the conflict. In such contexts, a country-led process for national consultation needs to be approached differently.

In the case of Afghanistan, the Taliban government has not taken any steps to provide a forum for stakeholders to mobilize and engage in a discussion on educational aims and delivery mechanisms, despite the fact that the Talibans policies toward education are at the forefront of both local and international demands from the government. The Taliban leadership is not even consulting their ministry staff on larger policy issues. There are serious limitations in dialogue among the global response to educational interventions, as well. The discussions at our conference highlighted that most international educational assistance, estimated at nearly $500 million is channeled through one entity UNICEF. However, it is unclear, even within other United Nations programs, under what conditions UNICEF provides educational support to the Taliban government. UNICEF members meet regularly with a few ministry of education officials behind closed doors, but neither the local nor the international stakeholders know what is being discussed or decided during those meetings.

Although a government-led national consultation process may be ideal for more stable societies, in places like Afghanistan, a more inclusive and transparent approach is necessary to facilitate a national dialogue about transforming education. There is no easy or single answer on how to facilitate such a dialogue. However, we propose three considerations to help achieve that goal. First, the United Nations should form a multi-stakeholder independent coordinating body composed of current government members and national and international education actors with the mandate to facilitate an inclusive and transparent dialogue. Second, this coordinating body should support and draw upon national and international perspectives to capture the many voices and translate those into policy, planning, and budgetary recommendations needed to recover learning losses, get SDG 4 back on track, and reimagine education into the future. And third, as the TES concept note suggests, the conversation on national transformation should not be timebound. It must continue after the TES, especially in conflict and fragile states.

When the heavy lifting of negotiating education policy is too daunting, national and international actors tend to fall back on familiar solutions without considering the negative consequences or spillover effects. In the case of Afghanistan, the two go-to interventions used to bypass the challenging task of negotiating an educational model with the Taliban government seem to focus on scaling CBE programs and online course offerings. However, scaling these two efforts without understanding the spillover effects and without a clear vision of the end goal might cause more harm than good. CBE has a long history in Afghanistan and shown some great success. However, the programs have been successful for a small portion of studentsonly about 5 percent) when they operated as part of the overall ministry of education framework in rural areas for out-of-school children and were connected to hub schools. In the current environment, CBE is not a solution for most of the countrys urban areas. A large-scale CBE rollout will likely create a competing parallel schooling structure that could further exacerbate conflict. Additionally, without an official sanctioning of the program by the current Ministry of Education, there is no mechanism to provide credentialing for students.

Unlike CBE, education technology (ed tech) does not have a long history in Afghanistan, but reliance on digital technologies is rapidly growing and many people are looking to ed tech as a solution to solve the problems of education. However, even in stable higher-income countries, ed tech needs a robust ecosystem. In Afghanistan and other similar contexts, the challenges of logistics, technology infrastructure, content development, teacher and institutional readiness, and regulatory frameworks are daunting. Even if the infrastructure and other program issues are worked out, questions related to access, equity, and control over curriculum content will continue to be areas of concern.

Both CBE and ed tech must be incorporated as essential supplemental parts of the larger educational ecosystem but are not standalone solutions that can be scaled to solve the national concerns related to Afghanistans educational challenges.

As the TES concept note outlines, inclusive, equitable, safe, and healthy schools are essential for a holistic educational experience. In fragile and conflict-affected environments, all segments of society must have access to quality education to promote a unified national identity and foster social cohesion. Issues of inclusion must be based on local solutions and dialogue. Imposing and scaling solutions from the outsideby outsiders who may not understand the complexity of the contextwill likely cause more harm than good.

However, as the case of girls secondary access in Afghanistan illustrates, the issue of inclusion is complex and is used as political leverage locally and internationally because of its symbolic power. The discussions at our conference highlighted that the closure of girls schools has opened an unprecedented focus on education in the public sphere, particularly girls education. The Afghan population, including the diaspora, is engaged in a public debate about girls educationwith the majority expressing their support for girls education but arguing about the mechanism, including 27 out of 30 Taliban ministers. This level of public support for girls education in Afghanistan is historic. Educational stakeholders, including representatives of international agencies, must leverage this window of opportunity to acknowledge and formalize this national dialogue. We can use this opportunity to mobilize greater political ambition, commitment, and action to support local dialogue and initiatives that would transform the educational landscape toward inclusive, locally led solutions.

Read more:
Transforming education in a time of uncertainty: Insights on Afghanistan - Brookings Institution

Caught between the Taliban's gender politics and a lack of foreign funding, the public education sector in Afghanistan faces the risk of collapse, aid agencies warn.

At least $1.5 billion is required annually to keep public schools open for millions of students, to pay salaries and provide other essential educational resources, but the war-torn country is unable to provide that amount on its own.

Facing international sanctions, Afghanistan's de facto Taliban government has set a national budget of about $2.6 billion this year, which already suffers from a nearly $500 million deficit.

"Approximately 187,000 teachers will need salary support to avoid a total collapse of the education system," Ashiqullah Mandozai, a spokesperson for Save the Children in Afghanistan, told VOA.

"The new MoE [Ministry of Education] has indicated that they can only pay salaries for 30% of the current work force, which underlines a precarious position for public infrastructure without development funding," Mandozai said.

Foreign donors have stopped development funding for Afghanistan, including to the public education sector, since the Taliban seized power last year but have maintained humanitarian assistance, mostly to avert mass hunger in the country.

Donors also strongly disagree with the Taliban's educational policies, particularly with the closure of secondary schools for girls.

"Between the Taliban's bad politics and a lack of donor funding, Afghanistan's education system is being decimated," said Ghulam Mohammad Fida, director of Afghan Education for a Better Tomorrow, a California-based nongovernmental organization.

The U.N. says Afghanistan's education system has been devastated by decades of sustained armed conflicts, and almost 4 million Afghan children are already deprived of schooling.

In January and February, the U.N. children's agency (UNICEF) paid Afghan teachers a support salary of $100 per person but stopped the payments after the Taliban reneged on their pledge to reopen secondary schools for girls in March.

"The system is undoubtedly strained, and the increased demand for education across the country will require additional support to ensure that children are able to access learning," Joe English, a UNICEF spokesperson, told VOA.

Schools closed, transformed

Secondary schools for girls in most parts of Afghanistan have been closed for more than a year as Taliban authorities say they are waiting for a verdict from religious scholars on the reopening of schools for all girls.

Despite widespread domestic and international condemnation, the Taliban have not indicated when or whether these schools will reopen.

"Depriving girls of secondary education translates to a loss of at least $500 million to the Afghan economy in the last 12 months," UNICEF said last month.

Moreover, the Taliban are increasingly transforming public schools into religious seminaries by overhauling the educational curriculum, hiring clerics as teachers and principals, and discouraging female participation in the educational system.

The "USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development] also expressed concern about the conversion of public school buildings, specifically technical and vocational education and training centers and teacher-training colleges, to madrassas. Hours of instruction allocated to religious studies have also reportedly been increased during the quarter," the U.S. government's Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction reported to Congress in July.

Senior Taliban officials, such as the minister for higher education, have publicly berated modern education and have vowed for a strict Islamization of Afghanistan's educational system.

Made up entirely of male Islamic clerics, the Taliban's de facto government has failed to earn recognition from any country in the world as it faces universal condemnation for its extremist policies.

In response, Taliban leaders say they are accountable only to God and that the leadership will never budge on its pure Islamic governance.

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Public Education in Afghanistan Faces Collapse, for Boys and Girls - Voice of America - VOA News

Kabul [Afghanistan], September 17 (ANI): The rapid growth of ISIS and the Al-Qaeda network in Afghanistan has put not only Afghanistan but also the region and the rest of the world in grave danger, John Bolton, a former adviser to the US National Security Council said in an interview with Voice of America, local media reported.

Speaking at the VOA interview, Bolton said that the ever-rising influx of international terrorists in Afghanistan should worry everyone in the world and added that US intelligence findings show ISIS and al-Qaeda terrorist groups are restructuring in Afghanistan, reported Khaama Press.

Moreover, the former official also slammed the Taliban for its nexus with international terrorist groups. He highlighted that the Taliban since its takeover of Kabul last August has failed to comply with the provisions of the Doha Agreement to battle terrorism.

The Taliban have proven once again that their words are not worth the paper they are printed on. They have created a worldwide danger, not only in Afghanistan, Bolton said in the VOA interview.

In the backdrop of the US drone strike killing al-Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the former top official said that the Taliban has not fulfilled its commitments made under the Doha Agreement, especially with the stay of Zawahiri in Afghanistan, reported Khaama Press.

In the months after the Taliban seized national control, the Islamic State-Khorasan (ISIS-K) has managed to expand its reach to nearly all of Afghanistans provinces. This was stated by the U.N. mission in Afghanistan in November, reported Washington Post.

ISIS-K has also stepped up the tempo of its attacks, carrying out suicide bombings, ambushes and assassinations. ISIS-K began operating in Afghanistan in 2015. It was started by Pakistani national Hafiz Saeed Khan, who had pledged allegiance to then-Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2014.

Originally consisting mostly of Pakistani militants and based largely in the eastern Afghan province of Nangahar, it drew some recruits from the Taliban and other extremist groups.

The Islamic State follows a version of Salafism, an ultraconservative movement in Sunni Islam.

In Afghanistan, the Hazaras, a Shiite minority group, have been frequent targets of ISIS-K attacks. ISIS-K is led by Sanaullah Ghafari, also known as Shahab al-Muhajir, who is reported to be in eastern Afghanistan, according to the United Nations.

The Taliban has a history of close ties with Al-Qaeda, a rival to the Islamic State. Though Taliban leaders pledged in a 2020 agreement with the United States to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a haven for terrorist groups, the killing of Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in a US drone strike in Kabul last month seemed to indicate ongoing ties between the groups, reported The Washington Post.

Before the Taliban takeover, the United Nations estimated that ISIS-K had some 1,500 to 2,200 fighters in Konar and Nangahar provinces, along with smaller cells in other parts of the country. Islamic State leaders, who think the Taliban is not sufficiently extreme, denounced its victory last year.

Late last year, the core Islamic State group gave USD 5,00,000 in new funding to ISIS-K, according to the UN monitoring team. A Taliban intelligence official acknowledged in the fall that his groups fight to overthrow the US-backed Afghan government allowed many Islamic State prisoners to escape. (ANI)

This report is auto-generated from ANI news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.

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ISIS, Al-Qaeda network in Afghanistan puts world in grave danger: Ex-adviser to US national security body - ThePrint

After the change in the regime in Afghanistan, significant developments occurred in the region. Apart from other major happenings, remarkable progress was witnessed in the peace process between the Pakistani establishment and the outlawed Tehrik Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Both parties held a series of talks in the capital of Afghanistan, in which they agreed upon several matters, while several others were in the process of discussion. However, it has been a few weeks since there is an ambiguous atmosphere between TTP and Pakistan state agencies, in terms of peace talks.

There are several reasons which show that there is a possible deadlock between the two negotiating parties, thus both are reluctant to further the peace process. As there are several gray areas regarding the peace talks on one hand; the TTP on the other hand has increased its so-called defensive attacks in the various parts of the country. Such situations have made peace talks uncertain and their future is looking indecisive in the coming time.

Read more: Taliban opposition leader pushes for a new political front

In the last few weeks, a number of top individuals from the TTP were targeted in various areas of Afghanistan. Omar Khalid Khorasani is a major example in this regard who was targeted in a roadside explosion in the Paktika province of Afghanistan. Similarly, the risks of drone attacks are increasing day by day. In the previous month of August, the US drone attack killed Al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri, which is a serious concern not only for the leadership of the Afghanistan Taliban but for that other terrorist outlets as well. Keeping the increasing security concerns in mind, the TTP leadership is not only worried but also alert in this regard. Therefore, they are more focused on their security and are unwilling to pursue peace talks with the Pakistani state.

More importantly, it is notable that the current Afghanistan government which is comprised of the Afghan Taliban plays a major role in bringing TTP to the peace talks with the establishment of Pakistan. The in-term interior minister of Afghanistan and one of the Key figures in the Islamic Emirates, Sirajudin Haqani played a significant role as a bridge between the outlawed organization and Pakistani intelligence agencies. But currently, a sort of mistrust is developing between the officials of Pakistan and the Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan due to many reasons.

Few incidents on the soil of Afghanistan such as several US Drones attacks, and target killings of TTP leaders and other militants by unknown persons have made the situations complex. A few weeks ago, Ayman Zawahiri, the Al-Qaeda chief was killed in a US drone attack in Afghanistan. Mullah Yaqoob, Talibans defense minister blamed Pakistan for facilitating US drone attacks against Afghanistan. Moreover, there are several other matters related to border security, due to which differences are found between the officials of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

It is due to the mentioned factors that, the Afghan Taliban has stepped back from pushing TTP anymore in order to continue peace talks with the Pakistani authorities. Therefore, there is an ambiguous situation, and the Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan is looking reluctant in facilitating the peace process.

Read more: Taliban claim that the US usurped Afghanistans frozen assets

Similarly, the recent public opinion of the people has also greatly influenced the peace talks with the TTP. Although the civil government partially endorsed the peace talks in front of the camera session, it was hesitant regarding the process behind the scenes. A few days ago, a massive number of people came out on roads in various areas of Malakand Division and the Former tribal region, in order to record their protest against the recent waves of terrorism in the country. Moreover, they openly criticized the decisions behind closed doors and urged clear policy regarding peace talks. The such public opinion further pushed the civil government to think about future outcomes, strictly in the political context. Thus, there are serious reservations of political entities regarding the ongoing peace talks as a result of which there is a delay in the process.

In order to make sure a sustainable and long-lasting result of the process, it is extremely important that the state of Pakistan not only make a comprehensive consensus on the forum of parliament, regarding the peace talks but overcome the reservations of brother Islamic countries on various issues as well. By doing this, it will not only make effective peace talks but those talks will also be greatly acceptable to the people.

The writer currently works as a Research Associate at the International Parliamentarians Congress Islamabad. He has wide experience in writing for various newspapers and can be reached atbarkatullahbarakaat@gmail.com. The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Global Village Spaces editorial policy.

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Determining the future of peace talks in Afghanistan - Global Village space