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Karzai claims Afghanistan is being played by global powers
Former Afghan president Hamid Karzai said on Tuesday that he has suspected for “a long time” that the United States and some of its allies have tried to create a weakened Afghanistan with a splintered government.
Addressing an online forum of Russia’s Valdai International Discussion Club, Karzaid said: “I have been suspecting for a long time that there was an intention in Afghanistan by the United States and some of its allies to create a weakened Afghanistan where there is government in name in Kabul, and then there are splinters of governments or authorities around the country.
“This is something we have been working against . Some proposals of this nature were made to my government at the time to allow the Taliban to take one or two provinces to accommodate them and then to negotiate from there which I rejected and outrightly neutralized,” he said.
“Now in the past two months we see the situation moving in that direction and an official indication of this came in the remarks of the US President Mr Joe Biden. When he recently spoke on Afghanistan he referred to Afghanistan in two ways; one was that Afghanistan was never a unified country in his words and the other one was that Afghanistan may not have one government.
“That’s what he precisely said. Now we don’t see this as an accidental remark. I see this more as something that probably someone is thinking about doing,” Karzai said.
He questioned why a country, such as the US, would go as far as suggesting that Afghanistan may not have one government unless there is a plan and a thought behind it.
“If this is true, and the signs are there, this means Afghanistan is used for a larger global game in this region where all the major powers of the world are situated,” he said.
He said a loosely governed Afghanistan needs to be avoided, adding he hopes Russia and other major regional powers will help prevent this.
“I have been urging the United States of America that if they are sincere towards peace in Afghanistan, if they really want peace in Afghanistan, then that is only possible if they engage with Russia and with other major powers in this region so we can have peace, not only peace but a stable and unified Afghanistan,” he said.
Also participating in the discussion was Russia’s Special Presidential Envoy for Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov who said if no real progress is seen in the process of national reconciliation, the military-political balance in Afghanistan will be reformatted in favor of the Taliban.
“And then their takeover in the country will become a very real prospect,” Kabulov said.
“So far, the Taliban is unable to capture big administrative centers in provinces. However, I don’t rule out that in the near future they will be able to take control of two or three administrative centers but they are not strong enough to seize and, importantly, to establish long-term control of the country’s big provinces,” he said.
Kabulov said however that this process impacts the Kabul government, but that the Taliban’s offensive will not lead to the collapse of the entire government.
The Embassy of Japan in Afghanistan announced on Friday that the country has allocated $19.5 million in humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan.
In a statement, the Japanese Embassy said it hopes the aid will help bring positive change to the lives of vulnerable Afghans.
According to the statement, the assistance will cover the basic humanitarian needs of vulnerable communities in Afghanistan.
The embassy added that the aid will be delivered through United Nations agencies, international organizations, and Japanese non-governmental organizations operating in Afghanistan.
Japan’s total assistance to Afghanistan since August 2021 has reached more than $549 million.
Security forces at the Islam Qala border in Herat province prevented hundreds of young Afghans from illegally entering Iran.
Officials from the 207 Al-Farooq Army Corps said that around 530 people attempted over the past two days to illegally enter Iranian territory through areas of Kohsan district in Herat, but border forces detained them and transferred them back to their original areas.
Meanwhile, officials in the local administration of Herat said that due to severe cold along the illegal migration route to Iran, three Afghan migrants have lost their lives in the Kohsan district of the province, and a shepherd has also died there for the same reason.
Mohammad Yousuf Saeedi, spokesperson for the Herat governor’s office, said that some statistics and images shared on social media regarding the incident are not reliable.
According to him, further investigations are underway to determine whether any individuals have died on the other side of the border.
President Donald Trump suspended the green card lottery program on Thursday that allowed the suspect in the Brown University and MIT shootings to come to the United States.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on the social platform X that, at Trump’s direction, she is ordering the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the program, the Associated Press reported.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” she said of the suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente.
Neves Valente, 48, is suspected in the shootings at Brown University that killed two students and wounded nine others, and the killing of an MIT professor. He was found dead Thursday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, officials said.
Neves Valente had studied at Brown on a student visa beginning in 2000, according to an affidavit from a Providence police detective. In 2017, he was issued a diversity immigrant visa and months later obtained legal permanent residence status, according to the affidavit. It was not immediately clear where he was between taking a leave of absence from the school in 2001 and getting the visa in 2017.
The diversity visa program makes up to 50,000 green cards available each year by lottery to people from countries that are little represented in the U.S., many of them in Africa. The lottery was created by Congress, and the move is almost certain to invite legal challenges.
Nearly 20 million people applied for the 2025 visa lottery, with more than 131,000 selected when including spouses with the winners. After winning, they must undergo vetting to win admission to the United States. Portuguese citizens won only 38 slots.
Lottery winners are invited to apply for a green card. They are interviewed at consulates and subject to the same requirements and vetting as other green-card applicants.
Trump has long opposed the diversity visa lottery. Noem’s announcement is the latest example of using tragedy to advance immigration policy goals. After an Afghan man was identified as the gunman in a fatal attack on National Guard members in November, Trump’s administration imposed sweeping rules against immigration from Afghanistan and other counties.
While pursuing mass deportation, Trump has sought to limit or eliminate avenues to legal immigration. He has not been deterred if they are enshrined in law, like the diversity visa lottery, or the Constitution, as with a right to citizenship for anyone born on U.S. soil. The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear his challenge to birthright citizenship.
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