As Afghan women remained cloistered at home in Kabul, fearful for their lives and their futures, a starkly different image played out on Tuesday on Tolo News, an Afghan television station: a female presenter interviewing a Taliban official.
Sitting several feet away from Mawlawi Abdulhaq Hemad, a member of the Taliban’s media team, the host, Beheshta Arghand, asked him about the situation in Kabul and the Taliban’s conducting house-to-house searches in the Afghan capital.
“The entire world now recognizes that the Taliban are the real rulers of the country,” he said, adding: “I am still astonished that people are afraid of Taliban.”
The interview, remarkable given the Taliban’s history of subjugating women, was part of a broader effort by the group since taking power to present a more moderate face to the world.
They are encouraging workers back to their jobs — and have even encouraged women to return to work and to take part in the government.
“The Islamic Emirate doesn’t want women to be victims,” Enamullah Samangani, a member of the Taliban’s commission on culture, said in a statement, using the group’s name for Afghanistan. “They should be in the government structure, according to Shariah law.” …
As pressure mounted on the Biden administration to do more to evacuate thousands of Afghan allies fearing for their lives, the Taliban on Tuesday sought to present themselves to the world as a responsible steward of Afghanistan.
But with both the Biden administration and the Taliban promising to offer protection, for millions of Afghans the future promised only more uncertainty. While the U.S. military on Tuesday restored order within Kabul’s international airport, it was unclear whether Afghans could make it there.
Despite assurances of safe passage, the Taliban are not only known to operate with brutality, but also have a dismal history of managing a vast nation largely dependent on foreign aid.
The group’s leaders took to Twitter, appeared on international cable networks, planned a news conference to provide assurances that they would not engage in systemic retribution and offered vague reassurances to women. Yet there were ominous signs that those promises did not match the situation on the ground.
Taliban fighters spread out across the streets of Kabul, the capital, riding motorbikes and driving police vehicles and Humvees that had been seized from government security forces. Armed fighters occupied Parliament, some visited the homes of government officials, confiscating possessions and vehicles, while others made a show of directing traffic. …
After their stunning capture of Kabul, the Taliban have tried to convey a sense of calm. Only days after Afghanistan’s top officials scrambled onto military flights and desperate Afghans clung to the fuselage of departing planes, the Taliban coolly went on inspection tours of government facilities. In the control room of the state electrical utility, a delegation of the Taliban stood in front of the blinking display panels and promised to keep the lights on.
How exactly the Taliban plan to keep all systems running, in one of the poorest countries of the world that depends on more than $4 billion a year in official aid and where foreign donors have been covering 75 percent of government spending, is an urgent question. The state’s bankruptcy has tempted some Western donors into thinking that financial pressure — in the form of threats to withhold humanitarian and development funding — could be brought to bear on the new rulers of Afghanistan. Germany already warned it would cut off financial support to the country if the Taliban “introduce Shariah law.”
But those hopes are misplaced. Even before their blitz into the capital over the weekend, the Taliban had claimed the country’s real economic prize: the trade routes — comprising highways, bridges and footpaths — that serve as strategic choke points for trade across South Asia. With their hands on these highly profitable revenue sources and with neighboring countries, like China and Pakistan, willing to do business, the Taliban are surprisingly insulated from the decisions of international donors. What comes next in the country is uncertain — but it’s likely to unfold without a meaningful exertion of Western power.
One reason foreign donors inflate their own importance in Afghanistan is that they do not understand the informal economy, and the vast amounts of hidden money in the war zone. Trafficking in opium, hashish, methamphetamines and other narcotics is not the biggest kind of trade that happens off the books: The real money comes from the illegal movement of ordinary goods, like fuel and consumer imports. In size and sum, the informal economy dwarfs international aid. …
When Federal Reserve officials head to their annual mountain retreat next week to talk economic inequality, they’ll be sitting in the country’s wealthiest county.
Wyoming’s Teton County, home to Jackson Hole, has the nation’s highest per-capita income from assets, according to a study by the Economic Innovation Group. The analysis found a sharp increase in geographic concentration of asset ownership over the past decades.
Jackson Hole, a rural community near the majestic Grand Teton national park and renowned ski slopes, has attracted the ultra-rich in recent years, pulling away from the rest of the country.
The EIG report, released Wednesday, specifically looked at income from interests, dividends, and rents. The gap between counties with the lowest and highest asset income per capita rose sixfold between 1990 and 2019, as income skyrocketed in centers of finance, technology, mining, and recreation.
Income from assets — a measure of wealth that excludes wages and government assistance programs — make for about a fifth of personal income nationwide. …
Only a minority of Americans holds assets beyond homes, cars, and retirement savings. About 15 percent of households own stocks and 13 percent hold business equity or other residential property, according to Fed data. …
Fed officials, economists, and central bankers have convened annually at Jackson Hole in August since the 1980s to discuss economic policy. The topic of this year’s gathering is ‘’Macroeconomic Policy in an Uneven Economy,’’ as the Fed has focused more during the pandemic on the issues of economic inequality.
(Several Walton heirs reside in the Jackson Hole area,
which alone would skew the average wealth figures.)
President Biden told the American people this week that when it comes to the performance of the American government, specifically on the withdrawal of American troops in Afghanistan, the “buck stops with me.”
At the same time, Biden also wanted it known that before that buck stopped with him, there was a lot of blame to go around for the botched way troops were removed from Afghanistan as the Taliban took over the country in just 11 days.
Biden said that former Afghan President Ghani just jumped on an airplane and fled, Afghan troops simply surrendered, and he was handed this whole deal in the first place by the Trump administration, who struck a deal with the Taliban to pull out of the country. …
Indeed, Biden becomes the third president in a row to have a rough first August in office. History shows they are hardly the only ones.
For Donald Trump, in August of 2017, white supremacists staged a so-called Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville that attracted counter-protesters, one of whom was killed by a man who plowed his car into a crowd. Racial tensions soared. President Trump not once, but twice declared that “both sides” were to blame, instead of standing squarely against those pushing harsh racism and antisemitic views.
The backlash was swift and much of it came from leaders in his own party.
At the same time that was happening America seemed on the brink of war with North Korea, as language escalated quickly including Trump’s line that any provocation from Pyongyang would be met with “fire and fury.”
For Barack Obama, August 2009 is remembered as the month of the angry, turbulent town hall meetings. Obama had introduced a framework for the Affordable Care Act just before members of Congress were headed off to their August recess breaks. Many would hold town halls around their districts with constituents. …
Normally quiet affairs, the town hall meetings that weren’t canceled, and some required police to keep the peace. Many meetings were forced to end early. …
The former president and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, are attacking President Biden over Afghanistan even as their own policy faces harsh criticism.
Days before the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks two years ago, President Donald J. Trump had a novel idea. He would invite leaders of the Taliban, the group that harbored Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan as the founder of Al Qaeda plotted his strikes on America, to join peace negotiations at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland.
The notion of any presidential meeting with the Taliban, let alone one close to Sept. 11, stunned many of Mr. Trump’s top advisers. But Mr. Trump was eager to engage with the militant group, which the United States had been fighting for almost 20 years, as he pursued his goal of removing American troops from Afghanistan by the end of his term.
Months earlier, at Mr. Trump’s direction, the State Department had begun face-to-face talks with the Taliban in Qatar to negotiate an American exit. Mr. Trump called off the Taliban visit to Camp David after an American soldier was killed in a bombing in Kabul, the Afghan capital, but the peace talks continued.
They culminated in a February 2020 deal under which the United States agreed to withdraw in return for Taliban promises not to harbor terrorists and to engage in their first direct negotiations with the Afghan government. …
Some former senior Trump officials now call that agreement fatally flawed, saying it did little more than provide cover for a pullout that Mr. Trump was impatient to begin before his re-election bid. They also say it laid the groundwork for the chaos unfolding now in Kabul.
“Our secretary of state signed a surrender agreement with the Taliban,” Mr. Trump’s second national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, said of Mr. Pompeo during a podcast interview with the journalist Bari Weiss on Wednesday. “This collapse goes back to the capitulation agreement of 2020. The Taliban didn’t defeat us. We defeated ourselves.”
And in an interview with CNN on Wednesday, former Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said that, while President Biden “owns” the ultimate outcome in Afghanistan, Mr. Trump had earlier “undermined” the agreement through his barely disguised impatience to exit the country with little apparent regard for the consequences. …
The former president and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, are attacking President Biden over Afghanistan even as their own policy faces harsh criticism. …
… “Our secretary of state signed a surrender agreement with the Taliban,” Mr. Trump’s second national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, said of Mr. Pompeo during a podcast interview with the journalist Bari Weiss on Wednesday. “This collapse goes back to the capitulation agreement of 2020. The Taliban didn’t defeat us. We defeated ourselves.”
And in an interview with CNN on Wednesday, former Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said that, while President Biden “owns” the ultimate outcome in Afghanistan, Mr. Trump had earlier “undermined” the agreement through his barely disguised impatience to exit the country with little apparent regard for the consequences. …
Taliban wants women ‘in the government’
As Afghan women remained cloistered at home in Kabul, fearful for their lives and their futures, a starkly different image played out on Tuesday on Tolo News, an Afghan television station: a female presenter interviewing a Taliban official.
Sitting several feet away from Mawlawi Abdulhaq Hemad, a member of the Taliban’s media team, the host, Beheshta Arghand, asked him about the situation in Kabul and the Taliban’s conducting house-to-house searches in the Afghan capital.
“The entire world now recognizes that the Taliban are the real rulers of the country,” he said, adding: “I am still astonished that people are afraid of Taliban.”
The interview, remarkable given the Taliban’s history of subjugating women, was part of a broader effort by the group since taking power to present a more moderate face to the world.
They are encouraging workers back to their jobs — and have even encouraged women to return to work and to take part in the government.
“The Islamic Emirate doesn’t want women to be victims,” Enamullah Samangani, a member of the Taliban’s commission on culture, said in a statement, using the group’s name for Afghanistan. “They should be in the government structure, according to Shariah law.” …
Taliban seeks to reassure the world
The Taliban Have Claimed Afghanistan’s Real Economic Prize
US wealth gap rises with Jackson Hole coming at the top
(Several Walton heirs reside in the Jackson Hole area,
which alone would skew the average wealth figures.)
What is it with August and new presidents? Historically, it’s when first major the crisis hits
Trump’s Deal With the Taliban Draws Fire From His Former Allies
Trump’s Deal With the Taliban Draws Fire From His Former Allies