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A ban on girls in Afghanistan singing has been reversed by officials following a social media campaign.

Last week a memo was sent to schools in the Afghan capital Kabul forbidding girls older than 12 to attend choir practice or sing at public events.

An exception was made for ceremonies with 100% female participants, the education department said, but that girls could not be trained by a male music teacher.

In protest, Afghan activists across the country, including prominent women, flooded social media with videos of themselves singing their favourite songs using the hashtag#IAmMySong.

The ban, announced two days after International Womens Day, sparked international outrage, with some accusing the government of sympathising with the Taliban.

The campaign, started by Ahmad Sarmast the founder of Afghanistans Institute of Music, soon gained traction on Twitter, with some Afghan girls singing their favorite tunes for the camera and calls popping up for petitions to oppose the directive.

Turkish author Elif Safak was among those who shared a video of two Afghan girls singing, saying she had "so much respect for the young women" joining the campaign.

In light of the campaign, Afghanistan's education ministry scrambled to defend the memo, insisting it had been "misunderstood" saying it was a precaution against the spread of coronavirus.

An investigation was launched into the Kabul branch of the ministry and its chief, Ahmad Zameer Gowara, who was responsible for the memo, a spokesperson said.

Following the announcement that the ban had been lifted, Helsinki's deputy mayor for culture and leisure, Nasima Razmyar wrote on Twitter: "Afghanistan tried to ban girls from singing. Social media showed support with #IAmMySong and made officials to reverse the ban. This is for you brave Afghan girls!"

The ban - and subsequent reversal - come as womens rights groups are fighting to ensure that fragile human rights gains made over the last 20 years in Afghanistan since the US-led forces overthrew the Taliban - take centre stage in ongoing peace talks.

It also shows how the rights of girls and women are under threat from conservatives on both sides of the protracted conflict.

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Ban on girls singing in Afghanistan reversed after social media campaign - ITV News

The International Cricket Council on Tuesday imposedeight-year bans on United Arab Emirates (UAE) cricketers Mohammad Naveed and Shaiman Anwar Butt. The two cricketers were found guilty of breachingICC Anti-Corruption Code as they tried to fix matches in the T20 World Cup qualifier in 2019.

While cricket as a sport has made great strides in the associate nations, it has come at a cost. The issues like match fixing in cricket, illegal activities and corruption have become a part of the sport with players being exposed toillegal betting, spot-fixing and ball-tampering etc. Recently, ICC Anti-Corruption Unit General ManagerAlex Marshall opened up on match fixing in cricket, corruption andhow T20 leagues are causing a threat to the game.

While speaking toESPNCricinfo, Marshall said that the thingwhich makes the top associate nationsso attractive to the corruptors and match-fixers is the relatively low cricket income of people from Nepal, UAE, Oman andsome of the African cricket nations. He further said that the players from these countries are being paid very little if anything at all Marshall cited the example of Zimbabwe to explain his point.

The ICC ACU General manager stated that Zimbabweare among the poorest of the full member nations which is whyplayers there are being offered $30,000 to commit corrupt conduct. On the other hand,the players in the Associates areoffered $10,000. whileplayersin European club matches getoffered 3,000 Euros. According to Marshall, that's the sort of scale of the offers. Elaborating on the same, he reckoned thatan offer of $10,000 to a playerin some of these countries is an awful lot of money. Marshall further said that an offer of $30,000 in Zimbabwe would probably help one buy a house.

Speaking about the strategies to curb these activities, Marshall said thatat the ICCtheir fundamental objective is to see the growth and development of cricket. He added that the idea that the Associates are going to get better and more extensive coverage is absolutely brilliant and theycelebrate it along with everyone else. Marshall acknowledged that theyalso recognise that the more popular any form of cricket becomes, the more likely it is that corruptors will target it which is why they aredoing a whole load of different things.

He revealed that one of the things is that they're working with all the Associates, but particularly the ones who are higher risk, to provide them with material around education and what they should do in the event of anyone receiving an approach or things for them to look out for in the way they run their matches. Marshall opinedthat theywill also risk assess which of those matches are most likely to be targeted and subsequently put-putanti-corruption resources into that particular match.

Marshall also spoke on how Afghanistan Premier League is a more favourableoption for bookies. Comparing APL to a Test match, Marshall said thatwith its evening short-form matches, the APL is a much more attractive option to the viewing audience which is why they're going to bet on it. He further said that corruptors go after leagues like APL and Global T20 Canada because they like weak governance chaos because it allows them in.

Marshall reiterated that the bookies love franchise events where all the teams have not been sold with three weeks to go and the people running the event are desperate to secure the next owner or the next two owners at the last minute. According to Marshall,corruptors look for these opportunities andAPL is a very good example of poor governance, an appalling run event, dreadful accreditation and a whole host of other issues that just meansit isvery attractive to corruptors.

Marshall stated that they absolutely want to see a higher profile for Associate cricket and he thinksit's comingbecauseof the pathway and qualifier events where according to him, some excellent cricket will be played. Citing the example of Afghanistan cricket, Marshall said that a number ofAfghan players (Rashid Khan, Mujeeb ur Rahman, Mohammad Nabi) have risen to prominence andare playing around the world which makes him believe that more new playerswill come through.

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ICC ACU head worried over corruption in T20 leagues, cites Afghanistan example for success - Republic TV

A US Predator drone flies over the moon above Kandahar Air Field in southern Afghanistan. (Kirsty Wigglesworth / AP Photo)

In recent months talk of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan has increased once again. Its not the first time during the course of the nearly two-decades-long war that weve heard this, and at several points since the war began in 2001, some troops have actually been withdrawn. But somehow, almost 20 years in, there still isnt very much talk about what it will actually take to end US actions that kill civilians. We hear talk about the forever wars, of which Afghanistan is of course the longest, but not much about what their first perpetrator, President George W. Bush, named the Global War on Terror (GWOT)and the effect that thats had.

The shift in name and definition of war in Afghanistan (and related post-9/11 wars in so many countries) away from GWOT to forever wars reflects how the wars have been and continue to be fought. Bushs war in Afghanistan, and many years of Obamas war there, and beyond, were characterized by large troop deployments and the occupation of cities and huge swaths of Afghanistan and its people. Arrests of thousands of Afghans accused, often wrongly, of sympathy with the Taliban, pitched battles with the Taliban, and deadly US air strikes, all devastated the country and the people.

Obama began reducing ground troops only after years of escalating deployments on his watch, during which time the emphasis of the war also changed. It had morphed into an air war, a war of drone strikes, bombers, and more, along with the deployment of US Special Forces for targeted operations. US casualties dropped to near zero; by 2011, Afghan civilian casualties had significantly escalated. That war in Afghanistan continues, under the guise of counterterrorism. The forever war in Afghanistan, the one that involves US troops on the ground, mainly training and assisting Afghan troops, continues today, though with dramatically reduced deployments.

While he was in office, Donald Trump, for reasons seemingly unrelated to actual US strategy in Afghanistan, and definitely unrelated to any concern about the still-climbing numbers of Afghan civilian casualties, withdrew some troops and talked about pulling out more. That withdrawal process escalated in early 2020 after the signing of the US-Taliban peace deal, which called for a complete US withdrawal by May 2021 in return for the Talibans cutting of ties with Al Qaeda, ending attacks on US troops, and opening negotiations with the Afghan government.Current Issue

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When Trump actually began withdrawing troops in November 2020, despite that commitments being key to the US-Taliban agreement, supporters of the war, Republicans and Democrats alike, erupted in opposition. They raged that Trumps decision would mean betraying the US service members who had died there, or ditching the corrupt and feckless Afghan government the United States had installed, or forsaking our Afghan allies in the military our troops continued to train, or abandoning Afghan women, ormaybe the most iconic warninglosing the war and allowing the Taliban to win. For some Democrats, the fact that it was Trump calling for withdrawal was all the evidence they needed that US troops should remain.

Among all of those Washington insiders outraged at the prospect of pulling troops out, few seemed willing to ask what the consequences would be if they stayed. Or, for that matter, what the consequences have been of the US troop presence in Afghanistan for almost two decades. For many people in the States, the war in Afghanistan had largely become invisible. US casualties had dropped to near zero, which meant that coverage of the war in the mainstream press had dramatically fallen off.

The impact of the December 2019 Afghanistan Papers, documents published by The Washington Post proving that senior US officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable, was short-lived. At that point, there were about 13,000 US troops remaining in Afghanistan20 were killed in combat that year, and that was actually the highest number of US casualties since Obamas 2015 reduction of combat operations and their replacement with the train-and-assist mission that remains in place today. But the Pentagons separate counterterror war continued throughout the 44th presidents tenure and beyond, with little discussion back home. With annual American deaths in combat barely over single digits, press coverage disappeared, and it was much easier to keep up the deadly air war with few people paying attention. And so the number of Afghan civilians killed, whether in funeral processions, wedding parties, or trying to simply live their lives, has not led to debate about the legitimacy and human costs of the war.

There are answers, of course, to the claims asserted of why the war needed to continue.

Threat or no threat, US forces have continued killing civilians. McChrystals strategy was supposed to move away from just killing bad guys to also protecting civilians, which required more troops. His successors during the next few years oversaw Obamas huge escalation of boots on the ground. That didnt win the war either. By 2014, ground troop numbers were massively reduced, but the counterterrorism focus on air strikes and Special Forces remained.

That counterterrorism emphasis continues today, rarely discussed publicly except to mention, almost in passing, that no decision to withdraw ground troops will impact on continuing counterterror activitiesin Afghanistan, Yemen or elsewhere. By 2019 the United Nations reported that the United States and its allies were responsible for more civilian deaths than the Talibanand that aerial operations were the third-highest cause of civilian casualties. The [UN] report attributed almost all of those casualties to American air strikes. The 2020 UN casualty report documents a slight decline in civilian deaths, with numbers dropping after the signing of the US-Taliban agreement but increasing again as the talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government began. US air strikes dropped precipitously, but those by the Afghan air force increasedwith the United States still training pilots, delivering parts for the planes, and providing the bombs. So Washington still bears responsibility for the deaths of thousands of civilians every year.

The 2020 UN report also called on the United States and its allies to increase transparency of investigations into civilian casualty incidents and communicate results to civilian victims and their relatives.

Ironically, while continuing its air war against Taliban fighters, the United States has simultaneously partnered with the Taliban in its conflict with ISIS, or the Islamic State, which has a small number of fighters in Afghanistan. In the fall of 2020, as if to prove that there is no military solution to terrorism, only a permanent game of lethal whack-a-mole, Taliban and ISIS fighters were fighting for control of the Korengal Valley. According to The Washington Post, US Special Operations forces were preparing to intervene in the fighting in Konar province in eastern Afghanistannot by attacking both sides, but by using strikes from drones and other aircraft to help the Taliban.

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The public text of the US-Taliban agreement does not mention CIA personnel remaining in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of troops. But public reports make clear that while reducing the number of such agents and perhaps moving them to the US embassy in Kabul was discussed during the negotiations, there is no reason to think CIA agents wont remain even when all foreign forces are withdrawn.Unending War

Pulling out the ground troops is important. Theyre not keeping Afghans safer. Theyre not building democracy. Theyve been there far too long, and we signed a peace deal promising to get them out.

But pulling out the ground troops is not enough. If were serious about ending the US role in the war, and we must be, we need to get serious about ending the war thats still killing Afghans almost two decades after the United States invaded the country. Calling the air war counterterrorism isnt a sufficient reason to continue military campaigns that kill civilians.

Ending the US military role will not in and of itself bring peace to Afghanistan, but its a necessary precondition to end the war. Malalai Joya, then the youngest member of the US-installed Afghan parliament and one of very few women, was driven out of parliament by threats and attacks, including from government supporters. In the Taliban time, she said, we had one enemy: the Taliban. Now we have three: the Taliban, warlords [inside the US-installed government and parliament] and the occupation forces. The US and NATO presence is making the struggle for justice and peace much harder because they empower these reactionary terrorists, who are great obstacles for true democratic-minded elements in my country.

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Withdrawing US Troops From Afghanistan Is Only a Start. We Have to End the Air War Too. - The Nation

Then, in 1988, as the Soviets prepared to depart and it became clear that Kabul could fall to the mujahedeen, the museum staff hid some of the most important objects in government facilities closer to the center of town. The Bactrian Hoard, a collection of 2,000-year-old jewelry and weapons, was stashed in the depths of the presidential palace. The museums staff kept its secret for the next decade, successfully safeguarding the finest treasures. But there wasnt enough space to move the remainder of the museums collection, including the Islamic wing.

One morning, Saifi and the others woke to a pillar of smoke rising in the distance. Fighting had broken out between two rival groups, and the museum was hit by rocket fire. An inferno raged on the top floor; in the galleries, metal and wood were reduced to heat, light and ash; stone cracked and shattered.

Not everything was destroyed in the blaze. Afterward, fighters in the area began stealing from the museum. They went for the low-hanging fruit, said Jolyon Leslie, who was working for the United Nations in Kabul. The museums coin collection, the remains of the Islamic gallery, and its remarkable Begram Ivories, delicate and portable, were all taken. At first, it was opportunistic: ragged, hungry men stumbling off with what they could carry. Leslie recalled driving past street sellers flogging items fresh from the museum, displayed among vegetables on a sheet of newspaper in the mud. My God, thats a Buddha, that isnt an onion, he realized. Hed stop and pay the equivalent of a few dollars, and take them for safekeeping.

But as time went on, the looting became more organized. Leslie was part of a group that tried to preserve what it could at the museum by welding iron bars onto the windows. The thieves came back with crowbars. One night, two massive schist reliefs in the entrance hall, which had seemed too heavy to remove, disappeared, presumably by truck. There were anecdotal reports that the mujahedeen were in cahoots with Pakistani dealers, Leslie said. Certainly, many of the museums looted artifacts turned up for sale across the border in Peshawar.

During the war, almost 100 Ghazni marbles, including the Hamburg panel, disappeared from the governments possession. The pieces that were missing were the big, complete pieces, Rugiadi told me. Though we cannot be certain, it seems probable that the Hamburg marble ended up on the black market in Pakistan, which was awash with Afghan antiquities. During the 90s, commanders and other wartime entrepreneurs invested in heavy machinery and labor to systematically excavate the richest sites. Thats when you have the looting of sites across the whole country, Simpson, the curator at the British Museum, said.

As tragic as the looting of the museum was, such illicit excavations were worse in an important sense, because they destroyed the archaeological record. At least we know something about the original site of the Ghazni marbles. But each illegal dig meant that information about the past was lost forever. Shorn of their connection to their sites of discovery, a rich stream of antiquities crossed Afghanistans borders, destined for world markets, many via the Persian Gulf, where the mujahedeen had well-established connections with wealthy patrons of the jihad.

According to the Italian database, the al-Sabah Collection in Kuwait holds four of the Ghazni panels taken from the Afghan government collection; others have ended up at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization and the Islamic Art Museum Malaysia. The Sharjah Museum did not respond to a request for comment. Eric Delpont, director of the Paris museum, said that its panel was acquired from Hotel Drouot in 2003, and that the museum was unaware that it came from the Afghan government collection, believing it to be from a mausoleum in the Ghaznavid capital. Salam Kaoukji, the collection manager at al-Sabah, said that she was aware of their panels provenance but that she didnt know if there were plans for restitution, adding that it was up to the governments of Kuwait and Afghanistan to decide.

Continue reading here:
How One Looted Artifact Tells the Story of Modern Afghanistan - The New York Times

On the table are, sadly, two very badoptions: The withdrawal of all international troops by May 1, as agreed in the Doha accord, or the extension of the US-led intervention that began nearly 20 years ago.

I favor staying, and let me explain why.

International soldiers will not win this war, nor will they bring peace. But they are an indispensable bargaining chip in the difficult peace negotiations underway in the Qatari capital.

Thirsty for power and recognition, the Taliban are demanding the end of foreign occupation and the easing of all sanctions against them. These are the only two levers the West has at its disposal to put pressure on the radical Islamist extremists to agree to a cease-fire and advance negotiations.

Sandra Petersmann has been reporting on Afghanistan since 2001

To put it bluntly, troop withdrawal and sanctions are not a panacea that will work overnight. People will continue to die in Afghanistan in the coming months as a result of terror and war. According to the UN, between October and December of last year alone, at least 30 civilians on average were killed or injured each day.

This is the bitter truth of the "America First" policy. Former President Donald Trump took it to extremes with the Doha Accord. The narcissist desperately wanted to go down in history as the president who brought US troops home. He was all about ending America's longest war to win an election. But that plan backfired.

Trump was not the first to decide on Afghanistan's fate based solely on domestic political considerations. "America First" began with the revenge-driven invasion after the 9/11 terror attacks.How else can we explain the United States and its Western allies' unsavory alliances with war criminals and human rights abusers (for example the warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum) for the sake of hunting down al-Qaeda and punishing the Taliban?

Germany's Bundeswehr has been on duty in Afghanistan for the past 20 years

The hasty invasion took no account of the Afghan civil war which began in 1978 and remains unresolved to this day. Nor did the intervention at least consider the wounds left by the Cold War and Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The military campaign was carried out without any regard for the dangerousrole played in Afghanistan by regional states such as Pakistan, India and Iran. They, too, are igniting the Afghan battlefield with maximum national egoism.

And that is why now after 20 years of war for the US coalition and after a total of four decades of continuous war for the Afghan people there are no better options on the table.

America's allies, including Germany, will follow the beat of Trump successor, Joe Biden's administration. If the US goes, all coalition troops go. There are currently about 10,000 left in the country. If the Americans stay, NATO allies will stay. Germany currently has around 1,100 troops stationed in Afghanistan, making it the second-largest troop contributor after the United States.

But theAfghanistan mission is just as unpopular in Germany as it is in the US. Germans also question why the Bundeswehr is still on the ground. Germany is now facing a federal election, but the political elite in Berlin do not want to spoil their campaigns with the issue of Afghanistan and they refuse to provide much-needed explanations to the public. Germany first!

It is time for truth: Those who invaded Afghanistan 20 years ago in anill-considered manner should not pull out equally recklessly and deal a death blow to the young and however imperfect Afghan democracy which was created by, and is totally dependent on, Western support. Dodging responsibility means admitting defeat.

Afghanistan needs maximum pressure on the Taliban as well as on the divided, often corrupt government and the many warlords. It needs maximum political and diplomatic involvement of all the major regional states and the other two global powers, Russia and China. This will be strenuous and dangerous.

But those who still refuse to put the necessary strength, willpower and patience into an "Afghanistan first" policy risk further displacing a terrorized Afghan population from their homeland an outcome that will also have consequences for the rest of theworld.

Read more from the original source:
Opinion: Why the United States needs to stay in Afghanistan - DW (English)