The South Asia Politics, News, and Analysis Thread

KABUL, Afghanistan — Around the time his hometown turned into the epicenter of coronavirus in Afghanistan and the government began a lockdown, Mohamed Kareem Tawain, an 80-year-old dentist in the western city of Herat, had a dream one night: that he took some money from his wife to distribute for charity, but found no one on the streets to give it to.

“When I came to the clinic the next morning and interpreted my dream, I knew it had a direct connection to the coronavirus,” Mr. Tawain said. “That morning, I decided I would waive the rent for the 10 shops I own,” which comes to about $6,000.

The virus is spreading across Afghanistan at a time when the country is grappling with a raging war with the Taliban, an election dispute that has split the government and brought a $1 billion aid reduction from the United States as punishment, and a dire economy that has plunged about half the population below the poverty line.

In such a moment of need, ordinary Afghans have stepped up to share the little that they have, tapping into a culture of generosity, volunteerism and care within the community that many feared had been eroded by decades of war, survival-first imperatives, greed, and corruption.

The shared sense of responsibility for easing the pain of an impending health crisis is turning into another test of survival for a country where life has been a daily fight for decades.

Across Afghanistan, many landlords have waived rent, in some cases until the virus threat recedes. Tailors have handed out thousands of homemade face masks. Youth groups and athletes have delivered food to hospitals and families in destitution. Local television stations have run live fund-raising events and a newspaper has championed a campaign of rent reduction. Wedding halls and private schools have volunteered to be turned into hospitals.

In Kunduz, a city overrun by the Taliban twice in recent years and badly bruised by fighting, dozens of shopkeepers have pitched in with the little they could afford: setting up wash basins and soap so passers-by can disinfect.

In Taloqan, a city in the northern province of Takhar, a large business center of about 40 shops was locked down by the municipality to reduce movement.

“As soon as the lockdown began, the owner of the business center called me and asked me to share with all the tenants that the rent is waived,” said Jamshed Kundali, who runs a small radio station in the city, housed in four shops of the business center. “The owner said not only is the rent forgiven for this month, but even until the end of the year if the situation continues like this. He didn’t ask for anything in return. He said he just wanted us to go home and follow the directives of health officials so we don’t get infected.”

In many cases, the country’s widespread poverty interferes with even the most basic efforts to tackle the spread of the virus. As many people rely on daily wages to feed their families, locking down cities and closing markets pushes them to another threat — hunger.

The crisis has often brought out the best in local leadership. With provincial leaders still preoccupied with fighting the war, local officials have acted swiftly to crack down on price gouging and to prop up quarantine and health facilities that have modest to little means.

In the eastern province of Nangarhar, the governor, Shahmahmood Miakhel, set up an emergency Covid-19 fund and in just one day received contributions of more than $100,000. When not preparing quarantine facilities and labs, Governor Miakhel — like many other local leaders — has to fight superstitions around the illness. The latest fallacy: that taking two cups of black tea before midnight protects against the virus. That advice, so the story goes, came from the mouth of a newborn baby who lived only a few minutes but who miraculously spoke to pass on the so-called revelation.

“The cure of corona is not in black tea,” the governor said on his social media accounts. “The only prescription is reducing crowds and social distancing.”

In the northern province of Faryab, the governor, Naqibullah Faiq, said that many men suspected of having the virus refused to go to hospitals because they believed their families depended on them for survival. So he has tried to break down that resistance by giving their families basic food packages.

Mr. Faiq recalled an episode in which he had forced a 50-year-old man suspected of having the virus to go to the hospital. “He escaped from the ambulance twice and once from the police,” he said.

Going to the family’s home, Mr. Faiq found the man’s mother, who said her son was the only one who had work. “So we gave them a sack of flour, a sack of rice, two kilos of sugar, five kilos of beans,” he said. “His mother became very happy, and then he happily came to the hospital to be quarantined.”

In Kandahar Province, in the south, a tailor called Mohammad Younas said he had turned his shop into a mask factory so he could hand them out to the poor.

“The lethal virus really terrified us all,” he said. “I went out to buy masks to protect myself and my family members, but I only found masks in drugstores. The costs were too high, and the people in Kandahar cannot afford them.”

Mr. Younas said he had made 7,000 masks using his own resources, and another 1,000 funded by a donation from a friend in Canada.

“They are good quality, and they are washable,” Mr. Younas said proudly. “I am not wealthy, but I felt obliged to do something for my people.”

Mr. Tawain, the dentist in Herat, said he had experienced multiple wars and droughts in his lifetime, and that Afghanistan was better prepared to deal with the virus now than with those past scourges. Even if the majority are poor, he said, there is enough wealth in the country now that, if people share, everyone can make it through.

“I remember days when a harsh famine followed a year of drought,” he said. “We were terrified because we always received word of people dying from hunger. Cattle were dying on the streets because people had nothing to feed themselves, let alone their cattle.”

“I even remember people brought their daughters to the Malan Bridge to sell so they could feed their remaining children,” he added. “But now I am not too terrified. Although it is difficult times, if we join hands, God willing the corona problem will pass.”

From Maternity Ward to Cemetery, a Morning of Murder in Afghanistan

Afghans don’t need a reminder that no one is safe from the country’s endless war, but they got one anyway on Tuesday.

By Mujib Mashal and Fahim Abed

KABUL, Afghanistan — The morning was not yet over, but already it felt as if the very cycle of life in Afghanistan was under assault, with attacks at a maternity ward and a funeral serving as grim reminders that its people are in peril from cradle to grave.

First, three militants stormed a hospital in Kabul soon after 10 a.m. on Tuesday, shooting new mothers dead before the newborns in their arms had even seen the light outside the hospital. At least 15 people were killed inside the hospital — mothers, babies, medical workers, and one police officer.

As security forces were scrambling in Kabul, about a hundred miles to the east, in the province of Nangarhar, a suicide bomber walked into the funeral for a local police commander. As hundreds of locals queued in front of the body for the final prayer, the bomber detonated his explosives not far from the corpse.

The commander, 59, who had survived many battles and attacks, had died of a heart attack. Now his body was riddled with shrapnel, too. The explosion killed at least 25 and wounded 68 others.

Violent death here is so frequent, and so scattered, that an accurate count is an impossible task. But by dusk on Tuesday, when the reported deaths of the day from all sides had been tallied, the Afghan war had most likely taken 100 lives.

Of course, the night brings more death — and the next day more tallying.

What is crushing Afghans is not just the sheer brutality of the attacks with newborn babies soaked in blood and deprived of mothers before they have even gotten a name, but the failure of anything to bring a reprieve.

The United States and the Taliban signed a preliminary peace agreement in February that was supposed to have brought the two-decade war closer to an end. Instead, the insurgents have only cranked up attacks around the country, inflicting heavy casualties on Afghan forces with dozens killed every day.

The peace deal has been stuck in a prisoner exchange that was supposed to unlock direct negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban to plan for power-sharing after the United States withdraws its remaining troops. The Taliban are insisting on the release of up to 5,000 of their prisoners before considering any other moves.

An Afghan group affiliated with the Islamic State has claimed responsibility for attacking the funeral. But no group has claimed responsibility for attacking the hospital. The Taliban, in a statement, denied that they were behind it. But coming after weeks of intensifying Taliban attacks, the government blamed the group.

And in a sign that any momentum toward peace was dissipating, President Ashraf Ghani ordered Afghan forces to abandon the “active defense” posture they had been in since the signing of the U.S.-Taliban agreement and return to offensive attacks against the insurgents.

“The Taliban, with the stoking of foreigners, have intensified the war and are shedding Afghan blood,” Mr. Ghani said in an address to the nation at the end of the bloody day. “Don’t see our invitation for peace and a cease-fire as our weakness, but as deep respect to the demand and will of the people.”

Deborah Lyons, the head of the U.N. mission in Afghanistan, condemned the hospital assault. “Who attacks newborn babies and new mothers? Who does this?” she said on Twitter. “The most innocent of innocents, a baby! Why? Cruelty has no followers from humanity.”

The insurgents have refused even calls for a humanitarian cease-fire to allow the country to combat the rapidly spreading coronavirus, a call Mr. Ghani repeated in his address. Afghanistan has officially recorded about 5,000 cases of Covid-19, but officials warn that the spread is most likely much wider.

Between the daily toll of the war and the virus, the country’s health resources are stretched thin. With 80 percent of the population living just barely above the poverty line, there is fear that the economic shock waves of the pandemic could bring starvation.

On Tuesday, the health system itself came into the cross-hairs.

“Today, my doctor, my medical personnel, the poor mother who is in labor, are left in chaos — the doctor that is there to rescue her is covered in blood and falls next to her bed,” said Wahid Majrooh, the deputy minister of health.

The attack in Kabul, the capital, targeted a 100-bed hospital in the western part of the city, a largely Shiite area often hit by Islamic State bombers.

The hospital is known for its large maternity ward, which is supported by Doctors Without Borders. During the five-hour operation to kill the three assailants, Afghan special forces were seen rescuing newborn babies. NATO troops were also seen at the site.

Crowds gathered outside the hospital and emotions ran high as they saw babies soaked in blood. A security official coming out of the hospital showed reporters pictures of the devastation inside the ward: mothers shot as they had tried to hide under a bed, a female nurse prostrate in blood, one woman still clinging to her newborn.

“She was dead, but the baby was alive,” the official said.

The relatives of one woman who had given birth at dawn were trying to get news. The woman’s brother wailed and twisted in pain as other relatives tried to calm him. “Oh, God, oh God,” was all he could say as he kept crying.

“She had given birth already when the suicide bombers entered,” said Rafiullah, the woman’s brother in law.

A community elder came out of the hospital with a list of a dozen newborns who had been evacuated to other hospitals. As he read the names of their mothers — these had been written on pieces of tape on the babies’ stomachs, he said — and the names of the hospitals the babies had been sent to, a man from the anxious crowd asked about the mothers.

“Fifteen martyred mothers,” said the community elder, Abdul Hadi. “Their bodies are in the ambulances being evacuated now. We put them in body bags.”

The bombing in Nangarhar Province targeted the funeral of Sheikh Akram, a local police commander. About 500 people had gathered at a large field in Khewa district for the final prayer, and a grave had been dug for him just across the road.

Naeem Jan Naeem, an eyewitness, said the imam had just asked people to line up and announced the beginning of the prayer when a huge blast was heard and a fire erupted in the front of the crowd.

“The body of Sheikh Akram was close to the explosion,” Mr. Naeem said. “There was shooting after the explosion, too — his face and his chest had shrapnel wounds.

“His body was wounded after he had died.”

As China projects its power across Asia, and along the disputed India-China border in the Himalayas, India is feeling surrounded. Both sides insist they don’t want a war, but thousands of troops have been sent.

By Jeffrey Gettleman and Steven Lee Myers

NEW DELHI — High in the Himalayas, an enormous fistfight erupted in early May between the soldiers of China and India. Brawls at 14,000 feet along their inhospitable and disputed frontier are not terribly unusual, but what happened next was.

A few days later, Chinese troops confronted Indian soldiers again, this time at several other remote border points in the Himalayas, some more than 1,000 miles apart. Since then both armies have rushed in thousands of reinforcements. Indian analysts say that China has beefed up its forces with dump trucks, excavators, troop carriers, artillery and armored vehicles and that China is now occupying Indian territory.

No shots have been fired, as the de facto border code dictates, but the soldiers have fought fiercely with rocks, wooden clubs and their hands in a handful of clashes. In one melee at the glacial lake Pangong Tso, several Indian troops were hurt badly enough that they had to be evacuated by helicopter, and Indian analysts said Chinese troops were injured as well.

Nobody thinks China and India are about to go to war. But the escalating buildup has turned into their most serious confrontation since 2017 and may be a sign of more trouble to come as the world’s two most populous countries increasingly bump up against each other in one of the bleakest and most remote borderlands on earth.

President Trump, unsolicited, stepped in on Wednesday, offering on Twitter to mediate what he called “a raging border dispute.”

For India, the Chinese incursions and maneuvers at multiple points along the more than 2,100-mile border have raised suspicions of a concerted campaign to exert pressure on the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

With the world consumed by the coronavirus pandemic, China has acted forcefully to defend its territorial claims, including in the Himalayas. In recent weeks, the Chinese have sunk a Vietnamese fishing boat in the South China Sea; swarmed a Malaysian offshore oil rig; menaced Taiwan; and severely tightened their grip on the semiautonomous region of Hong Kong.

The confrontation with India “fits a broader pattern of Chinese assertiveness, ” said Tanvi Madan, director of the India Project at the Brookings Institution in Washington, noting that it was the fourth flare-up since China’s authoritarian leader, Xi Jinping, rose to power at the end of 2012.

All this, he added, could also be “Beijing’s way of sending a political message” to India not to get too close to the United States and to back off its criticism of the way China has handled the coronavirus.

Even before the scuffling, India was feeling increasingly hemmed in by China’s expanding economic and geopolitical influence in South Asia.

To the west, the Chinese are working with Pakistan, India’s archenemy, and recently agreed to help construct an enormous dam on the border of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, an area India claims.

To the east, China’s new friend, Nepal, just produced a map that challenges where the Indian border lies; India has blamed China for stirring up the trouble. Nepal was once a close ally, but after India encouraged a punishing trade blockade in 2015, Nepal drifted closer to China.

To the south, deep in the tropics, the Chinese have taken over an island in the Maldives, a few hundred miles off India’s coast. Indian military experts say China has brought in millions of pounds of sand, expanding the island for possible use as an airstrip or submarine base.

“Obviously, the Chinese aim is to pressurize India,” said D.S. Hooda, a retired general in India’s army.

China’s foreign ministry has blamed India for the recent tensions but tried to play down the confrontation. That is in stark contrast to similar border skirmishes in 2017, when the two countries squared off for 73 days over another contested Himalayan border region near Bhutan, leading to a dangerous spike in nationalistic sentiment on both sides.

“The Chinese border troops are committed to upholding China’s territorial and sovereignty security, responding resolutely to India’s trespassing and infringing activities and maintaining peace and tranquillity,” a spokesman, Zhao Lijian, said after the first public reports of clashes emerged in mid-May.

He urged India to “refrain from taking any unilateral actions that may complicate the situation.”

Both countries run patrols along the disputed border, known as the Line of Actual Control, the precise location of which can be blurry. The packs of soldiers marching up and down the mountains are under strict orders not to shoot at each other, security analysts said, but that doesn’t stop them from throwing rocks. Or the occasional punch.

Sometimes, big passing patrols collide. A few years ago, another Indo-China brawl broke out — and was captured on video — at the same mountain lake where some of the clashes happened this month.

China has not officially acknowledged any recent deployment of forces to the Himalayas. But Global Times, a tabloid controlled by the Communist Party, cited a source close to the People’s Liberation Army in a May 18 article who said China’s military bolstered its forces in response to what it considered illegal construction by India in or near Chinese territory.

China has a superior military, which analysts believe could force India to back down. Ajai Shukla, a former Indian Army colonel, estimated that China had brought in three brigades of the People’s Liberation Army — amounting to thousands of troops — and India had deployed around 3,000 reinforcements.

“If they want to evict the Chinese, the Indian Army would have to start a shooting war,” Mr. Shukla said. He doesn’t think that will happen and added that India’s options are “limited by not wanting this to escalate.”

Just a few months ago, Mr. Modi and Mr. Xi were sipping fresh coconuts together during a quick summit meeting in southern India. A good relationship would help both countries in their aspirations for world power.

Still, they have become increasingly watchful of each other, especially in the high Himalayas, where few ever go.

India has recently stepped up efforts to improve the roads its military uses to crisscross the mountain passes in the Ladakh region, on the border of Tibet. These roads are not easy to build. They snake across a gravelly landscape of high altitude rivers, glaciers and passes at 17,000 feet above sea level.

Analysts said that China did not intend to start a war but that it wanted to frustrate India’s road-building efforts. The race to make these high mountain roads is becoming increasingly fraught. The 2017 standoff between India and China began when Indian troops physically blocked a Chinese road crew in a disputed region claimed by Bhutan, a close ally of India’s.

China is also sensitive about the Indian border because it abuts two regions within China that Beijing is especially concerned about: Tibet and Xinjiang.

The spark of the recent tensions seems to have been one particular new road that the Indians have been building to reach a military airstrip at India’s northernmost border outpost, which was the site of another border standoff in 2013.

The two countries have established mechanisms for resolving border conflicts since 1962, when they went to war in the Himalayas, with India losing badly.

“There hasn’t been a shot fired in years,” Ms. Madan said, adding that the last death from a border skirmish happened in 1975.

Still, tensions could easily flare.

“All of this is happening in the area where they fought in the ’62 war,” she said. “There is a lot of baggage associated with this on both sides.”