US Troop Draw Down in Afghanistan by 2021

State, Pentagon begin reviews of Afghanistan withdrawal

The State Department and Department of Defense have begun reviews into the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The State Department’s 90-day review into the withdrawal will “seek to assess the lessons learned from our engagement in Afghanistan and provide recommendations going forward,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a memo to employees obtained by The Hill.

The review will cover the period between January 2020 and August 2021 and is being led by Daniel Smith, who briefly served as acting secretary of State in January, Blinken wrote...

Afghanistan’s Aid Infrastructure Is Unraveling

<excerpt> The travails in maternity wards are a microcosm of what the whole country is facing—with little prospect of relief from the outside. In 2018, Afghanistan had more than 3,135 functioning health facilities, the World Health Organization found. Since the Taliban took over Kabul and the country in August, they’ve closed left and right; Naziri figures as many as 2,500 may have shut down...

It’s not just the health care system that is faltering: Babar Baloch, a spokesperson for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), said nearly 19 million Afghans are food-insecure. That number is estimated to rise to some 23 million by this winter, with 8.7 million nearing famine, according to a joint report by the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) and Food and Agriculture Organization. The U.N. Development Program (UNDP) estimates that as many as 97 percent of Afghans could sink below the poverty line by the middle of next year. The WFP warned in September that Afghanistan was “on the brink of economic collapse.”

And there’s little help in sight. Humanitarian actors argue that international sanctions on the Taliban are halting the crucial flow of aid into a country that has historically been dependent on it...

On Wednesday, the U.S. Treasury Department issued new carve-outs to allow greater humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan in the form of three general licenses that broadly allow the U.S. government, international organizations, and NGOs to do business with the Taliban and the Haqqani network in the course of their normal activities without violating existing U.S. sanctions. The allowed activities include humanitarian aid, programs promoting human rights and the rule of law, good governance and transparency, and environmental protection. </excerpt>

Taliban delegation begins talks in Oslo

A Taliban delegation led by acting Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi has started three days of talks in Oslo with Western government officials and Afghan civil society representatives.

Starting on Sunday, the closed-door meetings in the Norwegian capital will see Taliban representatives meeting with women’s rights activists and human rights defenders from Afghanistan and from the Afghan diaspora.

The delegation will be pushed on promises to uphold human rights in return for access to billions of dollars in frozen humanitarian aid, Al Jazeera has learned...

First flight of American evacuees in months leaves Kabul airport for Qatar

The first chartered flight in months evacuating Americans from Afghanistan has left Kabul airport for Qatar, according to a government official, a congressional official and two people with knowledge of the matter.

The passengers on the Qatar Airways charter include more than 30 Americans, one of the two people with knowledge of the matter said. The chartered flight, run by the Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affairs and paid for by the U.S. State Department, is the first to leave Kabul since November.

The government official confirmed that the flight to Doha, Qatar, is carrying Americans but did not provide numbers...

The tragic US exit from Afghanistan was rooted in decades of failure

The betrayal of Afghanistan was solidified years ago when U.S. leaders made promises they should have, or must have, known they could never keep. The inevitable consequences of creating a hollow government, bloated public sector, and an aid-dependent war economy hung over Afghanistan like a suspended prison sentence.

The recent memory of our botched evacuation is naturally the most salient example of our failure in Afghanistan. Journalist George Packer’s important profile last week in the Atlantic of the final months of the U.S. evacuation in Afghanistan revealed how the value of an Afghan life came down to their proximity to the right American, individual ruthlessness, and blind luck. But the overwhelming scale of human trauma at Kabul’s airport as laid out in The Atlantic might inadvertently lead readers to believe this was an aberration. It wasn’t. Over two decades, the fate of individuals and entire villages hinged on their shifting positions relative to the Taliban’s insurgency and the U.S.-led counterinsurgency...

Biden to split $7 billion in frozen funds between 9/11 victims and Afghan humanitarian aid

President Joe Biden signed an executive order Friday allowing $7 billion in frozen assets from Afghanistan's central bank to be distributed for humanitarian assistance in the country and to victims of the September 11 terror attacks, senior administration officials confirmed Friday.

The funds, held in the US, were frozen following the collapse of the central government in Kabul in August. Half the remaining assets -- $3.5 billion -- will go toward providing relief inside the country, where fears of mass starvation have taken hold in the months since the Taliban took over.

The remaining $3.5 billion will be made available for terror victims, who have been fighting in court for compensation using the frozen funds. Their claims will still be litigated in court...