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Pentagon leaders to face Afghanistan reckoning in Congress

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(Last Updated On: September 28, 2021)

President Joe Biden’s top military leaders are expected to face some of the most contentious hearings in memory this week over the chaotic end to the war in Afghanistan, which cost the lives of U.S. troops and civilians and left the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) back in power.

The Senate and House committees overseeing the U.S. military will hold hearings on Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively, where Republicans are hoping to zero in on mistakes that Biden’s administration made toward the end of the two-decade-old war.

That will follow similar questioning two weeks ago that saw U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken staunchly defending the administration, even as he faced calls for his resignation.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is expected to praise American personnel who helped airlift 124,000 Afghans out of the country, an operation that also cost the lives of 13 U.S. troops and scores of Afghans in a suicide bombing outside the Kabul airport.

Austin is expected to “be frank about the things we could have done better,” a U.S. official told Reuters.

That will also certainly include the U.S. military’s last drone strike before withdrawing, which the Pentagon acknowledges killed 10 civilians, most of them children – and not the Daesh (ISIS-K) militants it thought it was attacking.

Ahead of the hearing, Senator James Inhofe, the Senate Armed Services Committee’s top Republican, wrote to Austin with a long list of requests for information, including on the August 26 airport bombing, equipment left behind and the administration’s future counter-terrorism plans.

Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, said lawmakers would also press about “a lack of coordination and a real plan for how we were going to get all the Afghans who helped us out of the country.”

“I don’t know if we’ll get answers. But questions will be raised again about why we got to the point that we did in Afghanistan,” she told Reuters in a telephone interview.

Many of the hardest questions may fall to the two senior U.S. military commanders testifying: Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Marine General Frank McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command.

McKenzie called the drone strike a “tragic mistake,” one that critics say raises hard questions about America’s ability to properly identify counter-terrorism targets in Afghanistan following the U.S. withdrawal.

But McKenzie and other U.S. officials will be under pressure to defend the Biden administration’s plans to address future counter-terrorism threats from groups like al Qaeda and Islamic State by flying in drones or commandos from overseas.

Republicans have accused the Biden administration of downplaying the risks associated with that so-called “over the horizon” capability.

Separately, Milley could face intense questioning over an account in a new book alleging he bypassed civilian leaders to place secret calls to his Chinese counterpart over concerns about former President Donald Trump.

Milley’s office pushed back against the report in the book, saying the calls he made were coordinated within the Pentagon and across the U.S. government.

Senator Marco Rubio has called for his resignation. Senator Rand Paul said he should be prosecuted if the account in the book was true. But some of the greatest concern has come from lawmakers in the House, where Milley will testify on Wednesday.

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Girls’ education is a ‘vital issue’ for Afghanistan: Karzai

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(Last Updated On: April 25, 2024)

Former president Hamid Karzai said in a meeting with Iran’s ambassador and special representative, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, that education of girls was a “vital issue” for Afghanistan.

Karzai said he appreciated Iran’s cooperation and its standing with the Afghan people, especially Iran’s contributions to education in Afghanistan.

During the meeting, Karzai said peace and stability in the region are in the interest of all regional countries.

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Uzbekistan’s humanitarian aid arrives in Balkh

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(Last Updated On: April 25, 2024)

A shipment of humanitarian aid from Uzbekistan was handed over on Thursday to the local officials of Balkh province in the trade port of Hairatan.

Local authorities said the aid, which includes flour, oil, wheat, sugar and meat, has been handed over by Uzbekistan’s Surkhandarya governor to the governor of Balkh.

The governor of Surkhandarya stated the purpose of sending this aid was to support the people of Afghanistan and stressed the need for the development of good relations between the two countries.

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Afghanistan’s problems caused more damage to Pakistan than 3 wars with India: Durrani

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(Last Updated On: April 25, 2024)

Islamabad’s special envoy for Afghanistan Asif Durrani said on Wednesday that Pakistan has suffered more due to Afghanistan’s internal situation than Pakistan has suffered in three wars with India in terms of blood spilt and finances drained.

Durrani said at a one-day International Conference titled “Pakistan in the Emerging Geopolitical Landscape”, which was organized by the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad (ISSI) and the German Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES), that over 80,000 Pakistanis died in the two decades of the War on Terror and that his country was still counting its dead and injured.

“After the withdrawal of NATO forces, it was hoped that peace in Afghanistan would bring peace to the region. However, such expectations were short-lived,” he said.

He also stated that attacks by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) militant group on Pakistan’s border areas increased by 65 percent, while suicide attacks increased by 500 percent.

“The TTP’s enhanced attacks on Pakistan while using Afghan soil have been a serious concern for Pakistan. Another worrying aspect is the participation of Afghan nationals in these attacks,” he said.

Durrani also said Pakistan had suffered geopolitically since the Soviet Union invaded the neighboring country.

“The post-9/11 world order has negatively impacted Pakistan. Apart from losing 80,000 citizens’ lives, including 8,000 law enforcement agency personnel, the country’s economic opportunity cost is estimated at $150 billion,” Durrani said.

Talking about the future outlook for Pakistan in the regional context, Durrani said that while “our eastern neighbor is likely to continue with its anti-Pakistan pursuits, the western border poses an avoidable irritant in the short to medium term.”

However, he said Pakistan can overcome its difficulties with Afghanistan, including the TTP challenge.

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