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Ghani explains three pillar approach to a better Afghanistan
President Ashraf Ghani called for a moment of silence on Tuesday, while delivering his keynote remarks virtually at the Geneva Conference, for victims of recent attacks, including the Kabul University attack.
Geneva Conference 2020 has brought together about 70 foreign countries and stakeholders who will decide the funding assistance to Afghanistan for the years 2021 to 2024.
Addressing delegates Ghani said: “We, the Afghan people, government and the international community-share a vision of a sovereign, unified, democratic Afghanistan at peace with itself, the region and the world, capable of preserving and expanding the gains of the past two decades.”
Ghani said the country’s “three-pillar approach of peace, state and market-building presented in the second Afghan National Peace & Development Framework were validated & further enriched through a series of workshops with our partners in a spirit of genuine openness”.
Ghani said that we must build a strong regional consensus for a stable and peaceful Afghanistan.
“A sovereign, unified and democratic Afghanistan at peace…is a shared vision of all. This is not just the ultimate objective of our negotiations with the Taliban in Doha, but more importantly, it is also the ultimate goal of the work we do every day,” Ghani added.
Ghani says conditions of well-being need to be created and “rules of the game” also need to be created so that Afghanistan does not find itself “pulled backwards by vacuums of governance in which destructive forces can thrive such as corruption and unequal distribution of resources.
Ghani says “peace-making process will, inshallah, result in an agreement on paper. But peace-building is a multi-dimensional, cross-sectoral, long-term process that will allow us to actually implement the components of any peace agreement on paper.”
Ghani highlighted the need to establish rule of law and security and providing services that build citizen’s trust in government in order to sustain a peace agreement.
“In this way market-building and state-building are inextricably linked to peace-building”.
Ghani stated that regional connectivity is not only key to Afghanistan’s market and state-building agenda but also a key to the country’s peace-building agenda.
“We need to create a strong regional consensus for a stable and peaceful Afghanistan,” he said.
Ghani said Afghanistan is facing daunting challenges but the country needs to adjust to deal with these issues and also acknowledged that “a lot more needs to be done now with a lot less”.
Ghani also mentioned the Afghan security forces and their ability to safeguard the country.
“We have been able to retake most of the districts captured by the Taliban,” Ghani said.
He also stated that there are less than 10,000 foreign troops in the country currently. “International forces reduced from 150,000 in 2011, to below 10,000 today,” he said.
Ghani asked international partners to help Afghanistan “do more with less” in the years ahead and said key sectors “are low-hanging fruits for increasing efficiency and output relatively quickly by implementing cost-cutting measures and deflating bloated bureaucracies”.
Ghani said that Afghanistan is currently focusing on self-sufficiency measures in the education, urban development, energy and infrastructure sectors.
“The real test of the strength of our partnership and the virtue of our shared vision is if we are able to avoid an even greater tragedy of our shared history. We must not let history repeat her tragedies here in Afghanistan.”
UN chief Antonio Guterres delivered a pre-recorded message to the pledging conference and highlighted the achievements Afghanistan has made over the years despite the serious challenges the country has faced over the years including conflict and poverty.
Guterres said Afghans have suffered for too long and called for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire.
Guterres told delegates it’s important that the peace process is inclusive and urges Afghanistan’s neighbors to support the country in its quest for peace and prosperity.
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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