Afghanistan Thread

Gonna have to check. Massoud Jr. was in Vienna for a conference.

Non politics TIL: apparently Afghanistan's famous national rice dish was not originally named Kabuli pulao! It was actually called Qabili pulao — Persian for "capable", because it takes a skilled cook to make it (not that it stopped the folk etymology from supplanting the original name).

UN food agency says widespread locust infestation in Afghan provinces is 'huge concern'

1. 8 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces will be struck by the Moroccan Locust, who flourish in northern Africa and Central Asia as an economically damaging plant pest.

2. Taliban spokesman Misbahudeen Mustaeen assures that pesticides will be provided where needed.

3. The Food and Agricultural Organization claim a quarter of a yearly harvest will be affected by this locust outbreak with the cost ranging from 280 to 480 million US dollars. This comes while Afghanistan is still suffering a drought that's in its third consecutive year, with the United Nations having requested 4.62 billion US dollars for humanitarian aid.

Edited by HallowHawk on May 12th 2023 at 1:52:56 AM

280 dollars? Maybe millions?

Sorry, meant "280 to 480 million US dollars". Will fix it now.

EDIT: edited.

Edited by HallowHawk on May 12th 2023 at 1:53:19 AM

Is this the same locusts that were part of the 2019-22 locust infestation or are they different ones?

Edited by xyzt on May 12th 2023 at 2:54:53 PM

Doesn't seem to be. Otherwise, Associated Press would have said so.

Edited this because you fixed your link.

Edited by HallowHawk on May 12th 2023 at 2:24:36 AM

Insider News follows a group of artisanal gemstone miners in Kunar and the extreme conditions they work under. The vast majority of all gemstone mines in the country are unregistered and pay no taxes to the government (as has been the case for decades), which means that the miners are constantly on the lookout for the Taliban authorities and, unlike larger mining operations, can only sell their hard-earned wares to local jewellers at rock-bottom prices rather than exporting them to the lucrative international market.

Guardian: Nearly 80 primary schoolgirls believed poisoned in Afghanistan. The poisonings took place in two schools in Sar-i-Pul over the weekend; the provincial education head suggested that the perpetrator was motivated by a "personal grudge", but did not elaborate further.

Truly Unprecedented: The Taliban Drugs Ban v2.0.

It seems like the Taliban's drug ban is going very well, they've managed to reduce poppy cultivation to levels not seen since 2001. It's really important because aside from the obvious social consequences of the drug trade it also has an obscene cost in water and soil quality. Costs Afghanistan can ill-afford given its existing water issues and projected famines as climate change intensifies.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, predictions that the Taliban would be unable to govern Afghanistan were always rooted in wishful thinking and cope.

It's still there regardless even if numbers are declining.

I'll have to check in with other folks on the matter.

https://twitter.com/bsarwary/status/1666525793785192452

Damn. Got word that the Taliban is making NG Os stop all education activities in the field. A recorded Whatsapp message is heard from the Taliban director for education for Sari Pul.

Do... you not know how numbers work? Yes of course it's still there, if the numbers are above 0 it won't be truly gone.

But that's an obviously absurd standard to use, drastically reducing drug production would be a clear policy success in literally any other circumstance. I don't see any intellectually honest reason to act differently here.

Taliban Virtue and Vice ministry ordered all salons catering to women to be closed. They told all media outlets reporting it, including BBC.

This is just so petty for no good reason.

I mean, they do believe that most women should stay home, except if they're working in places where women need to be there. And that was limited.

That view started from way back in the 1990s after the Taliban controlled Kabul the first time.

Actually, it started before the Taliban were a thing: the Ministry for Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice and the restrictions on women in public spaces were first instituted in 1992, right after the mujahideen entered Kabul and set up a coalition government "temporarily" headed by Rabbani.

Had a look see.

And seems like 1996, the ministry took off with Taliban. Haven't heard much on the 1992 establishment.

Yeah, it's evil but hardly pointless. Banning those establishments serves a clear purpose in that it makes existing in public even more difficult for Afghanistan's women.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Jul 6th 2023 at 9:31:35 AM

Anand S. Gopal, No Good Men Among the Living. Chris Sands and Fazelminallah Qazizai, Night Letters. Lots of news articles besides, plus Rabbani and Sayyaf's attempt to reintroduce similar measures in the mid-2000s.

It is indeed. Honestly not sure how much Afghan women in exile can pressure the Taliban to stop it considering I'm seeing more Taliboos online.

Rolling Stone interviewed Dostum at his mansion outside Ankara. Most of what he says isn't super groundbreaking: he denies his past attacks on political rivals, blames Ghani for not giving him the supplies to resist the Taliban advance and blames the country's collapse on omnipresent corruption (which he, of course, had nothing to do with). But there's a couple of interesting points:

• He told the interviewer that he was, in fact, poisoned (presumably by Taliban operatives) at the height of the 2021 summer offensive, which led to him being rushed out of the country for treatment and passing the command of Junbish militias to his eldest son Yar Muhammad (see first page of the thread).

• When queried on the infamous Dasht-e-Leili massacre in 2002 (where hundreds of Taliban prisoners were allegedly suffocated or gunned down in shipping containers by US-backed Junbish forces, after their failed uprising at Qala-i-Jangi), Dostum acknowledged the killings but put the blame on Abdul Malik Pahlawan, a commander who'd betrayed him to the Taliban in 1998 (allegedly after Dostum had his older brother Rasul Pahlawan whacked).

Most of the rest is run-of-the-mill old man yells at cloud stuff, so, y'know.

Washington Post: Rich lode of EV metals could boost Taliban and its new Chinese partners. So, the Chinese EV boom has brought many Chinese entrepreneurs over to Afghanistan, looking to get their hands on the country's supposedly vast lithium deposits. Miners in northeast Afghanistan regularly dig up spodumene, a lithium ore, in their search for precious stones like tourmaline and kunzite, and usually discard the chunks as a worthless waste byproduct. Now, Chinese traders are showing up in the back roads of Kunar and Nuristan by the hundreds and buying entire truckloads of the stuff, although some of them are skeptical that the lithium content is actually high enough to make mining commercially viable.

We might hear a lot about Bolivia having large lithium deposits, but there's a good reason nobody actually wants to dig up the stuff there: it's a landlocked mountain country with underdeveloped infrastructure and wobbly political stability, and there are no reasons to risk bankrupting yourself trying to fly heavy mining equipment into the Andes when you could mine the stuff much more easily in neighbouring Argentina and Chile,^* Which, of course, seized its mineral-rich northern provinces from Bolivia in the War of the Pacific, so hey, wars of imperial conquest did use to be profitable, up to a point. as well as Australia and, indeed, China itself. The regions of Afghanistan where lithium ores have been found have all these problems and more: the Pech River Valley that runs across the northeast carves steep valleys that Afghan governments and occupiers alike have struggled for decades to build any kind of infrastructure on.^* Wesley Morgan's book The Hardest Place has some interesting accounts from local residents, talking about US-sponsored bridges and roads that were regularly swept away by mudslides and rising river torrents and comparing them to the much sturdier Soviet-built bridges. If there's anyone who might be in position to challenge that obstacle, it's certainly China's hungry and richly-subsidised EV and battery industries — but the sheer challenge of developing the area, along with enduring threats from IS cells and the rise of new battery technology to challenge lithium-ion supremacy, make a successful development of Afghan lithium a fairly long shot for now.

https://twitter.com/bsarwary/status/1687891772318367744

Can only find this via Bilal Sarwary. He mentions that Afghan Turkmen are protesting against a Taliban commander trying to marry a 13-year old girl from their community.

https://www.bbc.com/news/62469204

BBC has a reality check article on the Taliban breaking promises to keep the status quo with Afghan women.

It also mentioned that despite poppy cultivation going down, it's not completely gone and it's still ongoing in the south/southwest, being Akunzakada's homebase and stopping drug cultivation will not please his supporters.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AfghanConflict/comments/15zwnb0/in_a_new_video_the_unknown_soldiers_of_hazaristan/

Another (one) group called the "Unknown Soldiers of Hazaristan" established to fight for Hazara rights.