The National Statistics and Information Authority (NSIA) said this week that in the past year, almost 28,000 foreign nationals have visited Afghanistan.

The authority said that over the past year, it registered the entry and exit of 27,914 foreign citizens through land border crossings and airports in the country.

According to the figures recorded by this authority, the highest number of border crossings of foreigners was through Nimroz province crossing, Herat airport, Torkham crossing, Haritan crossing and Kabul International Airport.

NSIA said most people came in for work purposes or as tourists.

The authority also stated that tourists primarily visited historical sites in Bamiyan, Herat, Kandahar, Nangarhar, Ghor, Badakhshan, Kunduz, Paktia, Khost, Nuristan, Balkh, Samangan and Kunar provinces.

Abdul Latif Mansour, Acting Minister of Water and Energy, met with Zhao Xing, the Chinese Ambassador to Afghanistan, on Thursday in Kabul.

The Ministry says that Mujibur Rahman Omar Akhundzada, deputy Minister of Water; Dr. Farooq Azam, the official advisor of the Ministry; and a number of technical officials were also at the meeting where they discussed joint cooperation in the implementation of water and electricity projects.

Both sides noted the good economic and commercial relations between the two countries, and discussed various issues including the Bagh Dara dam project in Kapisa province and the Surobi 2 power dam project – which will supply electricity to Mes Aynak copper mine in Logar province.

Mansour said the implementation of these projects was important and necessary, especially the power project for Mes Aynak mine.

“Mr. Mansour stressed on speeding up the affairs to start the practical work and reminded the Chinese companies to show the necessary seriousness and determination in the implementation of these projects; the ministry will contract more projects for investment with Chinese companies in the future,” the statement read.

At the same time, the Chinese ambassador assured the leadership of the ministry of the embassy’s cooperation in the implementation of these projects and promised that Chinese companies will take the necessary measures to invest in the mentioned projects as soon as possible.

US President Joe Biden ignored the counsel of senior US diplomats, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who urged him not to pull US troops out of Afghanistan without certain conditions in place, former Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs in a transcribed interview released Wednesday.

Khalilzad — who helped negotiate the Doha agreement that led to the complete withdrawal of troops – testified that Biden could have stopped or altered the plan to remove all US forces from Afghanistan by September 2021.

“The State Department — or the secretary and myself, we wanted a conditional withdrawal approach,” he said. “But the ultimate decision was, as we all know, that it was to withdraw based on a timetable.”

Khalilzad said he recommended that the Islamic Emirate and the Afghanistan government at the time reach a separate peace agreement before US troops left the country.

“Secretary Blinken and I, I believe, did recommend that conditionality. That’s my judgment, that conditionality would be the prudent thing to do,” Kalilzad told the committee in his Nov. 8 interview. “But then the response was, ‘Can you get the other side – the Talibs (Islamic Emirate) – not to go back to fighting?”

In his testimony, Khalilzad said such an agreement could have been based on an early 2021 peace negotiation that Khalilzad said visualized a “peace government,” which would have given the Islamic Emirate an equal share of power over Kabul with the then Western-backed Afghan government.

“It was essentially kind of a power-sharing formula that our experts had put together in consultation with outside experts in which the government consists of individuals with ties to both – from the Afghan Government and the Taliban – and be led by somebody acceptable to both sides,” he told the committee.

He said that when reaching such a conditional agreement appeared unlikely, Biden instead decided to move forward with the pullout to avoid IEA attacks on US forces.

Khalilzad said the sudden lack of US support helped enable the Islamic Emirate to retake power, 15 days before the last American service member left the capital.

Khalilzad also told lawmakers that State Department officials had predicted the power-sharing initiative would not have lasted longer than three years without a continued US presence in the country.

He also said at points throughout negotiations with the Islamic Emirate, there were times he believed that the IEA “negotiated merely as a stall tactic to wait out the U.S. until its military forces withdrew to zero.”

Khalilzad believed Biden’s announcement in April 2021 to withdraw all U.S troops negatively affected the morale of the Afghan government forces. He explained that: “The U.S. withdrawal had a psychological impact and negatively affected the relative balance of power for the government. That’s obvious.”