--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Jackie Leonard: This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Jackie Leonard, and in this edition, recorded on Monday the 30th of August, we'll be doing something a bit different. We asked for your questions on Afghanistan, and you responded in unprecedented numbers.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: So we've gathered together some of the best people from the BBC to answer them. Our Pakistan and Afghanistan correspondent, Sukhunda Kamani, is in Kabul for us. So too is Lise Doucette, who covered the ousting of the Taliban in 2001, but further back was actually there in the late 1980s for the Soviet troop withdrawal. Our security correspondent is Frank Gardner, whose knowledge of the politics, militant groups and factions at play has been honed over decades at the BBC. And chief presenter and international correspondent Yalda Hakim, who was born in Afghanistan, began her journalistic career there 15 years ago, and says she feels she's come full circle by going back to report from the country in recent months.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: It was Yalda, by the way, who got the first extraordinary interview with the Taliban after they took Kabul, and one of their commanders called her directly when she was on air.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: The other key feature of this podcast is you. You have asked about the history, the politics, the culture, human rights and the economy. And we will do our best to offer some answers.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Now, as we know, this has all been changing very fast indeed. And this podcast isn't so much about the events of today as how we got here and what might happen next.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: But for a little context, as we record this podcast, thousands of Afghans have been fleeing, or at least trying to. The airport at Kabul has seen chaos and desperation.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: On Thursday, a suicide bombing there killed 170 people. The US has since carried out drone strikes, it says, to head off further such bombings, and says its anti-missile system has thwarted attempted rocket attacks.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: There's an exodus taking place over land too. The UN has warned that up to half a million Afghans could flee the country by the end of the year and has called on neighbouring countries to keep their borders open.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Most Afghans are staying put, of course, but millions of them are facing hunger. Here's Jane Howard from the United Nations World Food Programme.
--:-- Jane Howard: Two out of three of the last years have seen really severe droughts. It's a very poor country anyhow. They were then hit by Covid, which affected just people's ability to go out to work to get money to buy food.
--:-- Jane Howard: And on top of that, then people abroad who would have sent remittances home couldn't do it because of the overall slowdown on the world economy.
--:-- Jane Howard: The scale is quite staggering. Already one in three people are struggling to find enough food. That's 14 million people.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: So there is much to talk about. A great many of you who emailed in asked for a timeline of how we got here.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Helen was one of them. Hello, Global News Podcast. This is Helen Tyson from Nova Scotia, Canada. I am almost 70 and I can remember when Afghanistan was known as a hiking destination, which seems unbelievable now.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: It would be good to give people a quick history back to the events that led to the deposition of the king in 1973 up until now.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: So let's hear now from Paul Adams, our world affairs correspondent.
--:-- Paul Adams: Helen's right. Afghanistan used to be on the old hippie trail. But that was, as she says, a long time ago, because for more than 40 years now, Afghanistan has been pretty much constantly at war.
--:-- Paul Adams: First, it was the Soviets who sent troops in in 1979 to help prop up an unpopular communist government.
--:-- Paul Adams: The Russians got bogged down for years, fighting various guerrilla groups known collectively as the Mujahideen.
--:-- Paul Adams: It was the Cold War, so the Mujahideen were actively supported by the United States, Pakistan and others.
--:-- Paul Adams: After ten long years, the exhausted Russians pulled out, leaving the government and Mujahideen to fight it out amongst themselves.
--:-- Paul Adams: Into this toxic mix arrived the Taliban, or steer young fighters educated in religious schools across the border in Pakistan.
--:-- Paul Adams: They took over most of the country, arriving in Kabul in 1996.
--:-- Paul Adams: At first, Afghans were glad to see the back of the lawless Mujahideen.
--:-- Paul Adams: But the Taliban's medieval punishments, massacres of minorities and treatment of women caused dreadful suffering and international outrage.
--:-- Paul Adams: Fatefully, the Taliban also hosted Osama bin Laden's terrorist group, Al-Qaeda.
--:-- Paul Adams: After the attacks on America in September 2001, the US led an invasion that drove out Al-Qaeda, toppled the Taliban and eventually led to democratic elections.
--:-- Paul Adams: But the Taliban never really went away.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Let's rewind just for a minute and get back to the basics of what's been going on.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: One theme that came up time and time again.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Hello, my name is Dara coming to you from Idaho. My question is, can you please discuss the difference between Al-Qaeda, Taliban and ISIS?
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Dalit Butboil in Israel asked the same thing, Mukesh in California, Joseph Chotard, they all asked about the Mujahideen too.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Could you please clarify the relationship between the Mujahideen and the Taliban, as well as US involvement?
--:-- Frank Gardner: Sure. Let's start with the Taliban. This was a movement that began in the 90s in Pakistan and southern Afghanistan to purify Afghanistan, as they saw it, of all the corruption and warlordism and bribery and so on.
--:-- Frank Gardner: It was essentially a religious militant movement.
--:-- Frank Gardner: And they ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.
--:-- Frank Gardner: And they ruled it very harshly.
--:-- Frank Gardner: It was very tough on women, which is why everyone is so afraid of the Taliban today.
--:-- Frank Gardner: While they were in charge, they provided shelter for al-Qaeda to set up bases in that country.
--:-- Frank Gardner: And from those bases, they planned and plotted the 9-11 attacks.
--:-- Frank Gardner: When they happened, the US president at the time, George W. Bush, demanded that the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda chief, and his top people.
--:-- Frank Gardner: The Taliban refused, so the CIA backed an invasion which swept the Taliban out.
--:-- Frank Gardner: Twenty years later, they're back, but they have promised that they won't allow al-Qaeda to have bases in their country.
--:-- Frank Gardner: This is still a big question. Do we trust them? Do we believe them?
--:-- Frank Gardner: Now, ISIS are a separate group who are rivals to al-Qaeda, and they are very violent.
--:-- Frank Gardner: They've carried out 24 attacks in Kabul in last year alone, and there is right now a risk that they will try and do more attacks.
--:-- Frank Gardner: They don't like the Taliban, and they don't like al-Qaeda.
--:-- Frank Gardner: They've played down this whole Taliban takeover, saying, well, it's not really a victory.
--:-- Frank Gardner: The Americans just walked away, didn't they? They handed it to them on a plate.
--:-- Frank Gardner: That's the propaganda they're pushing out.
--:-- Frank Gardner: Finally, the Mujahideen, which just is an Arabic word meaning holy warriors.
--:-- Frank Gardner: The Mujahideen refers to the original Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion in 1979 and throughout the 1980s.
--:-- Frank Gardner: These are the people who fought the Soviets to the Russian army to a standstill.
--:-- Frank Gardner: And their descendants live on today in the Panjshir Valley, northeast of Kabul.
--:-- Frank Gardner: It's the only part of Afghanistan not under Taliban control.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: I'm just going to jump in and just pick up on some of the things that Frank was saying.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: I think one thing that we can now see that really unites the United States and the Taliban is this war against ISIS or ISIS-K.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: So they have always sort of been aligned.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: And when Frank points out some of the most horrific, deadly attacks that ISIS has carried out, for example, they are vehemently anti the Shia community in Afghanistan, as they are in other parts of the world.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: So we had over 90 schoolgirls who were killed most recently from the Hazara community.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: So they the sorts of attacks that ISIS has claimed.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: In terms of the Mujahideen and its relationship with the Taliban, we can take that back I think to the 80s.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: Because when you see some of the elder Taliban, the more wise or if you allow me to say the more moderate Taliban, they go all the way back to the Mujahideen who were fighting against the Soviets who were backed by the United States with arms and weapons.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: And Pakistan played a huge role in that.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: Their children were then sent, a lot of them refugee children on the border with Pakistan to madras or religious schools, where we then understand that they were radicalised.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: And then they obviously post the civil war in Afghanistan in the 90s, they then came to power in 1996.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: And I have to actually point out that at the time, there was so much upheaval and so much violence in Afghanistan because of the civil war, that the Taliban were, for the most part, welcomed because they were offering some sort of stability.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: But as we've seen, they also rule with fear.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: And that is really what we're seeing today.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: You, Yalda, have been following this story in an extraordinary way.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: You were actually on air when you took a call from a Taliban commander.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: Mr Shaheen, can you hear me?
--:-- Mohammed Mahesh Lahim: Yes.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: Can you speak, sir?
--:-- Mohammed Mahesh Lahim: Yes, I'm Mohammed Mahesh Lahim, member of the Asian team of the Islamic community of Afghanistan.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: We've seen them make use of news conferences and they've been trying to reassure people about women's rights within Islam.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: That brings us to Max Browning, who is a student in Scotland, who says, well, why would the Taliban be any different, more tolerant, lenient today compared to 1997?
--:-- Jackie Leonard: They want international recognition.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: They realize that they didn't rule very successfully in those five years.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: For some time, they relied on opium production, which they then cut down on.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: They want investment.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: They want it to be a successful Islamic emirate.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: And China has reached out to them and said that, you know, this is they are people they can do business with.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: I think almost certainly we're going to see a lot of investment from China.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Russia has also kept its embassy open and has got links with them.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: So they realized that the way they behaved in those five years from 96 to 2001 effectively made them international pariahs.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Only three states, only three countries recognized them, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the UAE.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: So this time they want to be a part of the global community.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: And I think one thing we need to point out is that the Taliban are not a homogenous entity.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: When I went to Doha and met with Sohail Shaheen and some of the Taliban leadership, to be honest with you, and I will be frank, I was slightly charmed.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: I mean, we had a tough conversation, but I thought, if this is what's being offered for the future of Afghanistan, and if it means security and stability, perhaps the government can work with them.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Perhaps Afghan civil society journalists can find a way to negotiate with these people.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: I then went to Afghanistan and met with a Taliban commander, And I asked him about things like public executions and stoning and amputation of limbs if someone commits a crime of theft.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: And he said, well, of course, we would do all of those things.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Of course, we want the Sharia law that we had imposed on the nation in the 1990s to return.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: That is what we want.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: So I think in the coming weeks and months, we have to watch this quite carefully because I think they will even have a power struggle.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: And quite a senior Afghan leader in the country has said to me, they don't really know how to govern.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: This whole thing has caught them by surprise in terms of the fall of Kabul, right?
--:-- Jackie Leonard: So they didn't expect to just walk in to the capital.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: And all sorts of deals have been struck with different groups.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: How are they going to actually bring all that together?
--:-- Jackie Leonard: You mentioned that the Taliban themselves were somewhat surprised by the speed with which they were able to take the country.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: And they weren't the only ones surprised.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: This is Angel from Toronto, Ontario.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: My question to you is, why did the government troops flee from Taliban attacks without any resistance?
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Where did the money and resources the West has invested in this country go?
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Hi, my name is Jose Miguel Menende.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: I'm Ecuadorian, but I live in Belgium.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: I would like you guys to talk about first how it was possible for the Taliban to take control of most of the country so quickly.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Also, Jack Fitzpatrick in Swindon in the UK asked why did the Afghan National Army fold so quickly.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Sanjoy Sunar asked if the training of the Afghan forces was just simply inadequate.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: I think there are a number of factors.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: I think we need to point out that 66,000 Afghan soldiers have died in this war in the last 20 years.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: That is a huge figure.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: So there are a lot of Afghans, generals who've said to me, it's grotesque then for American leaders and NATO leaders to come out and say the Afghans didn't fight.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: In this last phase over the last few months, I think that the conversations I've had with people on the ground has been that we, for example, didn't want a bloodbath in Kandahar, so we asked the soldiers to retreat.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: We didn't want to flatten Kabul, so we walked away.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: Now, whether that is acceptable to the Afghans and the international community, I don't know.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: But a huge amount of money went into trying to train the Afghan army.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: Billions went in.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: But because of the weak government and because of the corruption, you know, some of these soldiers have told me that they even had to pay for their own boots.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: They didn't have meals.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: They weren't paid for months on end.
--:-- Frank Gardner: Yeah, I think it's also worth mentioning that there are two units that did fight incredibly hard, and that's the Afghan Special Forces units 333 and 444.
--:-- Frank Gardner: Some of them have been up at the airport refusing to hand over their weapons to the Taliban.
--:-- Frank Gardner: They fought long and hard.
--:-- Frank Gardner: But yes, you're right.
--:-- Frank Gardner: I mean, a lot of money went into training.
--:-- Frank Gardner: They had the so-called Sandhurst in the Sand Academy outside Kabul, where Britain and other countries were trying to train up this national army.
--:-- Frank Gardner: But as Yalda says, I mean, there was no national cohesion.
--:-- Frank Gardner: You know, if you're an Afghan living in a village in, say, Kandahar province, Kabul might as well be on the moon.
--:-- Frank Gardner: It's very unlikely to have been somewhere you visited.
--:-- Frank Gardner: And so there isn't a national cohesion to that army.
--:-- Frank Gardner: And by the end, the Taliban were taking so they were having so many small victories and there was so little incentive for the Afghan National Army soldiers to fight that they just thought this is not worth dying for.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: Now, Yalda, you mentioned the Afghan soldiers who are having to pay for their own boots.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: And it has been pointed out that war is very expensive.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: And a lot of our listeners are very curious about where the Taliban have been getting their funding.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: Anna Kawai in the US, how do they finance their resources and organisation?
--:-- Yalda Hakim: Who supports them financially and why?
--:-- Yalda Hakim: Stephen Corbett asks the same thing.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: Nick Hearnley wants to know who has funded their military effort and why aren't we talking about it more?
--:-- Yalda Hakim: And Sri Khalsa asking, how much are they actually getting from the drug trade and other sources?
--:-- Yalda Hakim: Yeah, so they really have run a very efficient and effective means of funding themselves.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: When I met with Taliban leadership in Doha, they said to me, they call us the shadow government, but we are the government.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: Because in certain places they were.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: It is a sort of state-run economy and they do it from everything, ranging from the drug trade to extortion to taxes from locals to donations to financing from countries like Pakistan, for example.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: And so there's a sort of array of funding that comes to the Taliban.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: And, you know, you asked the question about whether outside of the urban areas like Kabul, whether there is support for the Taliban.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: And frankly, there is.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: In many of these rural areas, they were completely sort of let down by the government and how corrupt and weak it was.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: So many people were happily giving taxes, for example, or donations to the Taliban, as were NGOs through third parties.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: in order to survive in Afghanistan.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: They were having to pay for electricity, for example, to the local mayor who had support of the Taliban, and that's where they were funneling a lot of their money.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: You've both mentioned Pakistan and its influence in Afghanistan.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: This is what Rishad had to say.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: My question was, given that NATO no longer has to rely on Pakistan for its military supply corridor into Afghanistan, and given as well that Pakistan has a new infrastructure patron in the guise of China what steps can the international community possibly take if any to curb Pakistan strategy of supporting Islamist militancy under the cover of a nuclear umbrella
--:-- Jackie Leonard: And Ricky in Denmark, Kareem in Montreal and Suzanne McCulloch in Madrid, Spain, all asked much the same.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: I think any serious commentator who understands the region knows that it's not even an open secret anymore.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: Pakistan's support for the Taliban over the decades, whether it's been, you know, through harboring them, funding them, allowing for them and their families when they've been injured to come and use Pakistani hospitals for treatment.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: And the interior minister just a few months ago conceded that.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: He said, yeah, sure, Taliban fighters come over here, they get treated in the hospitals, and then they go back over these porous borders, which they have no control over.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: I think also sort of pinning that on the civilian government is a little bit unfair.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: They do host three million Afghans, for example.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: It's more the focus on the military and security establishment of Pakistan.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: And that's long been known that they've used the Taliban as part of their proxy wars against India, for example, and sort of maintaining control over Afghanistan.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: But they've also got an understanding that an unstable Afghanistan also destabilizes them.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: I mean, just a few days ago, we saw the Taliban flag hoisted over the Red Mosque in the center of Islamabad.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: It came down very quickly, but it just gives you a sense of how emboldened the Taliban have become in Pakistan and Pakistan itself a victim of terrorism.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: So whether the military establishment can sort of have a huge amount of influence and control over the Taliban, that's not sort of something that is up for debate or question.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: We know that's the case.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: It's whether the Taliban themselves allow Pakistan to have a huge amount of influence over them.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: They found other channels and other ways of being legitimate.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: For example, just last month, they were in China.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: And the Russians have said they're willing to work with the Taliban as well.
--:-- Yalda Hakim: So they've become savvy enough to realise they can't put all their eggs in the one basket.
--:-- Frank Gardner: Let's just drill down into this a bit.
--:-- Frank Gardner: So for Pakistan, their primary security concern is India.
--:-- Frank Gardner: And that trumps everything.
--:-- Frank Gardner: And Pakistan has a very powerful intelligence service called the ISI inter-services intelligence.
--:-- Frank Gardner: They are they have far more sway over the country's policy than any other country's intelligence service that I can think of.
--:-- Frank Gardner: They're almost a sort of force within the country.
--:-- Frank Gardner: And they have certainly nurtured the Taliban.
--:-- Frank Gardner: But they've you've got to be careful what you wish for, because one of the offshoots of the Afghan Taliban is an outfit called the TTP, the Tahrirqa Taliban of Pakistan.
--:-- Frank Gardner: And they have carried out a number of attacks inside Pakistan itself.
--:-- Frank Gardner: And Pakistan has suffered a lot of casualties.
--:-- Frank Gardner: So on the one hand, yes, they have nurtured the Taliban because they don't want to find themselves surrounded by an Indian-dominated Afghanistan to their west, with India, of course, to their east.
--:-- Frank Gardner: But one of the consequences of this is that there is an Islamist extremist movement that is active inside Pakistan's own borders.
--:-- Frank Gardner: So where they are now is absolutely, as Yelda says, they will want to kind of calm the situation down.
--:-- Frank Gardner: I think Pakistan is going to be absolutely crucial in the direction that the new Taliban takes, their regional neighbours, Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, collectively are going to have more influence on the Taliban than the G7 will.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Let's just hear from Kian McCulloch, who's a university student in Australia.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: As the Taliban takes over Afghanistan and becomes the ruling government within the country, how will ruling powers around the world react to it?
--:-- Jackie Leonard: We've already seen China and Russia try to normalise ties within the Taliban.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Will other countries follow their lead, or will they more side with the United States and NATO powers in Australia, who are obviously refusing to recognise Taliban as the legitimate government?
--:-- Frank Gardner: I think how the world reacts to the new Taliban government depends on who wants what.
--:-- Frank Gardner: So if you just drill down into that, China wants the minerals.
--:-- Frank Gardner: There are things like lithium and rare earth underneath the ground.
--:-- Frank Gardner: There are huge mineral riches in Afghanistan that have been very undertapped.
--:-- Frank Gardner: They also want to make quite sure that there's no kind of Islamic militancy seeping out across the border with Afghanistan into their own Xinjiang province, where they are dealing, shall we say, euphemistically, with the Uyghur community.
--:-- Frank Gardner: For Russia, likewise, they want to make sure that Afghanistan doesn't become a kind of epicenter of global Islamist militancy across Central Asia that works its way up into the Caucasus and into Russia itself.
--:-- Frank Gardner: For the G7 nations, they are much more concerned about human rights, but also that Afghanistan doesn't become a terror base for groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda to once again recruit, send people through the training camps and plot attacks on the West.
--:-- Frank Gardner: In the five years that the Taliban hosted al-Qaeda camps in the late 90s, it's estimated that around 20,000 recruits from over 60 countries passed through those camps.
--:-- Frank Gardner: It became a kind of university of terror and nobody wants to see a repeat of that.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: A lot of our listeners who emailed in have been concerned, very concerned about human rights.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: So Elizabeth Eckhart, Natalie Orgel-Lewis, Maria Carmona, Carmen Rawiela, just to name a few, all wanted to know about women's rights, how the Taliban have said that women and girls can be educated and work as long as it's according to Sharia law.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: What does that actually mean?
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Have attitudes amongst the Taliban actually changed in terms of girls and women's rights?
--:-- Lise Doucette: The Taliban have changed. At least the Taliban leadership have changed.
--:-- Lise Doucette: I have spent a lot of time discussing with them in detail in the Gulf state of Qatar, where their political office is based.
--:-- Lise Doucette: The big question, though, is have the Taliban changed as much as Afghanistan has changed?
--:-- Lise Doucette: For example, what we know so far from the new authorities who are overseeing education, the rules they have issued so far is that young Afghan women can go to university, but they will be separated from the men.
--:-- Lise Doucette: They will not be in the same classes.
--:-- Lise Doucette: And they have also said, of course, many times that the women will have to have their heads covered.
--:-- Lise Doucette: Heads covering is not an issue.
--:-- Lise Doucette: Afghan women cover their heads.
--:-- Lise Doucette: This is a conservative Muslim society.
--:-- Lise Doucette: But when I think of the times that I have been on the American University of Afghanistan, which is one of the success stories of the last 20 years, but also at Kabul University, which has existed for more than a half a century.
--:-- Lise Doucette: It has gone, it has been open and shut through all the decades of war.
--:-- Lise Doucette: Men and women, except during Taliban time, of course, in the late 1990s, have always gone together.
--:-- Lise Doucette: And this morning, someone who is the head of gender at one of the government ministries or was the head of gender.
--:-- Lise Doucette: So this is a disaster.
--:-- Lise Doucette: They are telling us that, you know, young men and women sitting together is a Western idea and that we cannot have it.
--:-- Lise Doucette: They hate it.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Looking at the human rights of other minority groups, Sue Haas was concerned about how people with disability fare in Afghanistan.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: And if that's likely to change, Isabella Stevens in Canberra, Australia, is asking about what this is going to mean for the Hazara people.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Ben Sameya was asking about Jewish people. Are there any Jewish people left in Afghanistan?
--:-- Jackie Leonard: And Felipe from Brazil was concerned about monuments, archaeological sites, which might be considered haram by the Taliban.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: What about those issues?
--:-- Lise Doucette: Oh, that's a lot of issues.
--:-- Lise Doucette: But of course, it is all of those are sketching a picture of Afghanistan, of all its many important historical, cultural, social, human parts.
--:-- Lise Doucette: To take the minorities.
--:-- Lise Doucette: The Hazara are terrified during the last time of Taliban rule, in fact, through history, and they were singled out.
--:-- Lise Doucette: Now, we've seen images of Taliban leaders since they came to Kabul sitting down with Hazaras sitting down with actually Sikhs Hindus sitting down with minorities trying to send a message to them that they will be safe in the new Afghanistan.
--:-- Lise Doucette: A lot of our listeners are also concerned about what it all means for LGBT people.
--:-- Lise Doucette: Gabriel Aguima in Brazil, for instance.
--:-- Lise Doucette: I'd like to know if the LGBTQ representation evolved in the past 20 years in the Afghanistan society.
--:-- Lise Doucette: Can people be openly gay nowadays in Afghanistan?
--:-- Lise Doucette: That was also echoed by Nicholas in New Hampshire, Mihaly Molnar in Hungary, Jeannie Hanbury in Norfolk, Ed Cannon in Australia.
--:-- Lise Doucette: A lot of people are worried about that.
--:-- Lise Doucette: I think they should be worried about that.
--:-- Lise Doucette: They were worried about that even before the Taliban came to power.
--:-- Lise Doucette: This is a deeply conservative, traditional Muslim society.
--:-- Lise Doucette: And while they're in the last 20 years, they were very open-minded people, a lot were not even when it came to women's rights, minority rights, things talking about today.
--:-- Lise Doucette: The bottom line for them is it is rights in Islam.
--:-- Lise Doucette: They don't talk about human rights.
--:-- Lise Doucette: They talk about rights within Islam.
--:-- Lise Doucette: And they're not alone in that.
--:-- Lise Doucette: There are many other Muslim, majority Muslim countries who use the same expression.
--:-- Lise Doucette: They think that human rights is a Western concept and they believe they must live lives governed by Islamic laws.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Beyond the army, we know that President Ashraf Ghani left the country in quite a rush as well.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Todd Ely in the USA said, are there any sanctions planned for President Ghani and other ministers who fled before the country fell?
--:-- Jackie Leonard: With the wealth they expropriated with them, should it be frozen and eventually seized?
--:-- Jackie Leonard: But there was another viewpoint as well.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Hi, my name is David Saunders.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: I work for the United Nations and like many in Afghanistan.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: It'd be great if you could talk to the former president Ashraf Ghani, who left after the crisis and fled to either Tajikistan or Uzbekistan.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: He's a very sound character.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: And I'd really love to know what forced his hand to make that move and how he plans to continue to support his country, which I know he has done much of his life.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: This extraordinary story is still being pieced together.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: We heard from Ashraf Ghani himself days after he fled and when he turned up in the Emirati city of Abu Dhabi and said that he had to flee, he said to avoid bloodshed.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: He said that they were searching room to room for him.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: And he said that he had no choice.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: He left everything behind and had to flee.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: He said that the reports of him fleeing with sacks of money, millions and millions of dollars, so much that he couldn't fit them all into his helicopter, were simply not true.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: But since then, there have been so many accounts.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: There are Afghans calling for him to be indicted for stealing so much money.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: There are many Afghans who are calling him a national traitor.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: You can see on social media the videos of Ashraf Ghani standing up and defiantly saying that he will never abandon his country.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: But there is a great sense of betrayal.
--:-- Sikandar: Well, look, I mean, it's pretty clear to kind of every observer, I think, of affairs in Afghanistan that Pakistan has long been a backer of the Taliban.
--:-- Sikandar: They've seen it as one of those asking the question mentioned as a tool of strategic depth, somewhere a force that can be used to counter what they see as Indian influence in the region.
--:-- Sikandar: The Ashraf Ghani government, particularly figures like Amrullah Saleh, the vice president, always seen as being closer to Pakistan's great regional rival, India.
--:-- Sikandar: And Pakistan
