The Daily Populous Monday July 1st, 2024 evening edition
Authored by apnews.com and submitted by Vampir3Robot

ISLAMABAD (AP) — The Taliban on Sunday told the West to look past the measures they have imposed on Afghan women and girls for the sake of improving foreign relations.

Their chief spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the Taliban uphold certain religious and cultural values and public aspirations that “must be acknowledged” to facilitate progressive bilateral relations rather than encountering disputes and stagnation.

Mujahid made his demand on the opening day of a United Nations-led meeting in Qatar on increasing engagement with Afghanistan and to have a more coordinated response to the country’s issues.

It’s the third such U.N.-sponsored gathering in Doha. The Taliban were not invited to the first meeting, and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said they set unacceptable conditions for attending the second one in February, including demands that Afghan civil society members be excluded from the talks and that the Taliban be treated as the country’s legitimate rulers.

Afghan women have been excluded from the current Doha meeting.

No country officially recognizes the Taliban and the U.N. has said that recognition remains almost impossible while bans on female education and employment remain.

But Mujahid struck a defiant note Sunday, saying that the political understanding between the Taliban and other nations was steadily improving.

He said Kazakhstan had removed the Taliban from its list of prohibited groups and that Russia would undertake a similar measure in the near future. Mujahid, who is meeting special envoys on the sidelines, said earlier that Saudi Arabia expressed its intention to reopen its embassy in Kabul.

The relationships with regional countries demonstrated that the Taliban have the commitment and capacity to establish and maintain relations, Mujahid said in his remarks.

“I do not deny that some countries may have problems with some measures of the Islamic Emirate,” Mujahid said in his speech. “I think that policy differences amid states are natural, and it is the duty of experienced diplomats to find ways of interaction and understanding rather than confrontation.”

Such differences should not escalate to the extent that powerful countries used their leverage to impose security, political, and economic pressures that affected Afghanistan in a significant way. He did not mention the harsh edicts on women and girls that have caused global outrage, but has previously referred to them as an “internal matter.” The Taliban have rejected criticism of their treatment of Afghan women and girls, calling it interference.

“Consequently, other nations, particularly Western countries, can remove the obstacles hindering the development of relations with the Afghan government,” said Mujahid.

The decision to exclude Afghan women from the meeting has drawn rebukes from rights groups, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan Richard Bennett, and Nobel laureate Malala Yousufzai.

Yousufzai, who was shot by a Taliban gunman for campaigning for girls’ education, wrote on social media platform X last Thursday that she spoke to U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres about the Doha meeting.

She said she was “alarmed and disappointed” that the Taliban were invited to meet U.N. special envoys while Afghan women and rights defenders were excluded from the main conversation.

Convening the meeting without Afghan women sent “all the wrong” signals that the world was willing to accommodate the Taliban’s demands.

She added that what the Taliban were doing in Afghanistan amounted to gender apartheid.

Earlier, the United Nations’ top official in Afghanistan, Roza Otunbayeva, defended the failure to include Afghan women in the meeting in Doha, insisting that demands for women’s rights are certain to be raised.

flippy123x on July 1st, 2024 at 11:39 UTC »

Do yourselves a favor if you wanna have a laugh and read this article: Taliban Militants Fed Up With Office Culture, Ready to Quiet Quit

> The camaraderie amongst fighters has dwindled, the jihadists say, as previously non-existent hierarchies are now far more apparent, and many around them get swept up in the pursuit of money. “I sometimes miss the jihad life for all the good things it had,” said Nafi. “During jihad, you couldn’t have known the difference between a commander and a foot soldier like me.”

> Kamran, a 27 year-old deputy group commander, longs for the simple life. “Now, when someone’s nominated for a government job, he first asks whether that position has a car or not. We used to live among the people. Many of us have now caged ourselves in our offices and palaces.”

> During the insurgency, Samim notes that the men did not need to earn money to support their families as the movement covered their expenses. “The jihad, a religious duty which exempted them from such everyday concerns, is over: they now have to work for the survival of their families like everyone else.”

> “There is a proverb in our area that money is like a shackle,” says Salam. “Now, if we complain, or don’t come to work, or disobey the rules, they cut our salary.”

The fucking Taliban -> Wage Slave Pipeline is real and it’s one of the funniest things i have ever read.

Intelligent_Town_910 on July 1st, 2024 at 09:33 UTC »

"We want the benefits of being part of a civilized cooperating world but also we want none of the responsibilities that come with it"

Tropicalcomrade221 on July 1st, 2024 at 08:47 UTC »

The west tells the Taliban to get fucked until they can act like civilised human beings.