Afghanistan’s Taliban government said on Thursday Russia had become the first nation to recognize its rule.
The announcement came after Aghanistan’s Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi met the Russian ambassador to Afghanistan, Dmitry Zhirnov, in Kabul on Thursday.
“This brave decision will be an example for others… Now that the process of recognition has started, Russia was ahead of everyone,” Muttaqi said in a video posted on X.
ISLAMABAD (AP) — The U.S. drone strike that killed al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri on the balcony of a Kabul safe house intensified global scrutiny Tuesday of Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers and further undermined their efforts to secure international recognition and desperately needed aid.
The Taliban had promised in the 2020 Doha Agreement on the terms of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan that they would not harbor al-Qaida members. Nearly a year after the U.S. military’s chaotic pullout from Afghanistan, al-Zawahri’s killing raises questions about the involvement of Taliban leaders in sheltering a mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks and one of America’s most-wanted fugitives.
Fearless prediction … Biden paid the Taliban for al-Zawahri
An Extremist Regime Is Pushing Afghanistan to the Brink
When the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in August 2021, some observers suggested that their approach to governance might prove more moderate this time around. Twenty years had elapsed since the group was last in charge. The country had transformed dramatically, and with the fight against the United States over, tasks like collecting garbage and keeping the lights on now seemed largely nonideological in nature.
The Taliban’s initial actions in office, however, quickly dashed those hopes.
MES AYNAK, Afghanistan (AP) — The ancient Buddha statues sit in serene meditation in the caves carved into the russet cliffs of rural Afghanistan. Hundreds of meters below lies what is believed to be the world’s largest deposit of copper.
Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers are pinning their hopes on Beijing to turn that rich vein into revenue to salvage the cash-starved country amid crippling international sanctions.
The fighters standing guard by the rocky hillside may once have considered destroying the terracotta Buddhas. Two decades ago when the Islamic hard-line Taliban were first in power, they sparked world outrage by blowing up gigantic Buddha statues in another part of the country, calling them pagan symbols that must be purged.
Say what? China plans to destroy an ancient Buddhist city to get the copper buried there
The Islamic State’s Khorasan Province has claimed responsibility for a series of bombings that targeted Taliban convoys throughout the city of Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar province. The group claims that 35 Taliban members were killed or wounded in the attacks, though the casualty figures could not be independently verified.
Even rendered inoperable, equipment now in the hands of the Taliban will yield troves of information about how the U.S. builds weapons and uses them.
And it’s not just the Taliban – it’s anyone they sell them to, also.
h/t Mauser98
“I think that the Taliban winning the war in Afghanistan, and then the way our exit happened, has absolutely inspired jihadists all over the world,” Morell said, Fox News reported.
Even before the suicide bombings outside the Kabul airport on Thursday evening, the US media was acting with rare unanimity. For the first time in memory, US media organs across the ideological and political spectrum have been united in the view that US President Joe Biden fomented a strategic disaster for the US and its allies with his incompetent leadership of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Some compare it to the 1961 Bay of Pigs; others to Saigon in 1975; others to the US embassy in Tehran in 1979. Whatever the analogy, the bottom line is the same: Biden’s surrender to the Taliban has already entered the pantheon of American post-war defeats.
A major row broke out between leaders of the Taliban over the make-up of the group’s new government in Afghanistan, senior Taliban officials told the BBC.
The 53-year-old far-right leader blasted ‘arrogant’ incumbent Emmanuel Macron while promising to restore law and order in France.
‘There will be no place in France where the law does not apply,’ she told flag-waving supporters. ‘We will eradicate gangs and mafias and all those, Islamists or not, who want to impose rules and ways of life that are not ours.’
So far, the main losers in Afghanistan disaster, apart from the US and the Free World, are the people of Afghanistan, especially those who helped the US and found themselves betrayed, and the women who for 20 years, thanks to the US and its allies, had for the first time known freedom.
It was just a few weeks ago that President Joe Biden left his vacation in order to handle a couple of photo opportunities. One was to deliver a speech at the White House regarding the crisis in Afghanistan while the other was to conduct an interview with ABC News to try and salvage his credibility.
In the ABC interview, Biden said that he was committed to leaving American troops in Afghanistan until anyone who wanted to leave the country was out. He said that he was committed to providing these Americans a safe exit from the country.
Friday on FNC’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson ridiculed the media and those claiming “progress” in Afghanistan in the wake of the collapse of the U.S.-installed government in Kabul in an abbreviated amount of time.
Carlson noted the U.S. military equipment left behind, which he described as the Biden administration arming the Taliban and marooning its own citizens.
The Afghanistan fiasco is the worst strategic blunder since 1938: the year that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waved around a copy of the Munich Agreement and proclaimed “peace in our time.” Chamberlain’s failure to understand the enemy gave Germany the space it needed to invade Poland — the event that marked the start of World War II. Chamberlain resigned in 1940 when his political support evaporated. Winston Churchill assumed power, ultimately snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.
President Joe Biden’s debacle will have no such savior; the Islamic jihad isn’t that kind of war. Instead of getting us out of Afghanistan, and bringing peace in our time, he’s opened the gates of hell. In one disastrous and grossly ill-conceived strategic move, Biden has armed and empowered the Taliban and elated every Muslim fanatic from Morocco to Mindanao. Not since 9/11 have events so galvanized our enemies — U.S. forces abandoning the field; the Afghan military laying down arms; and the Taliban reestablishing their Islamic Emirate.
I’m convinced China instructed Biden in this debacle.
An Al Jazeera reporter, spoke with Taliban fighters after they entered the formerly American side of Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA), and posted a video of the event to various social media networks, said that the Taliban fighters expected the U.S. to leave their equipment in full working order, though it is not clear whether the U.S. made any such promises.
Now we’re going to have to send repair parts and mechanics. Think I’m kidding? Watch. The Taliban and the USA will be ‘allies’ within a month.
