Category: Asia News

According to the former minister, nobody is above blame. Not even he himself. While the US abandoned Afghans, Afghanistan did not have the collective will to reform, he said….reports Asian Lite News

Khalid Payenda who resigned as the finance minister days before Kabul fell to the Taliban now drives Uber cab in and around Washington, apart from working as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University where he gets $2,000 per semester. In an interview with the Washington Post, the last finance minister of the Ashraf Ghani government said he is grateful for the gigs that he has found as it helps him to provide for his family of wife and four children.

Recalling the last few days of his ministership, Payenda told Washington Post he had resigned as the finance minister when Ashraf Ghani pulled him up at a public meeting for his ministry’s failure to make a payment to a Lebanese company. Seeing Ghani’s rage, Payenda feared that he might have arrested him on false charges. As he narrates how he landed in the US from then strife-torn Kabul, he said he quickly left the country and arrived in the US. His family members had left for the US a week before.

“Right now, I don’t have any place,” he said. “I don’t belong here, and I don’t belong there. It’s a very empty feeling,” Khalid said.

According to the former minister, nobody is above blame. Not even he himself. While the US abandoned Afghans, Afghanistan did not have the collective will to reform, he said.

Payenda got to know about Kabul’s fall from television and then on Twitter. “All we built was a house of cards that came down crashing this fast. A house of cards built on the foundation of corruption. Some of us in the government chose to steal even when we had a slim, last chance. We betrayed our people,” the former minister said in the interview.

In the following few days, Payenda’s former fellow ministers created a WhatsApp group where the anger was directed towards those who have fled the country. Payenda said he distanced himself from the mudslinging as he saw no point.

This is not the first time that Khalid Payenda has left his homeland. In 1992, when he was just 11, his family moved to Pakistan as the civil war began in Afghanistan. “A decade later, after the Americans toppled the Taliban, he returned to co-found Afghanistan’s first private university,” the report said.

He had worked for the US Agency for International Development and the World Bank, and in 2008 he came to the United States for the first time, attending the University of Illinois on a Fulbright scholarship. In 2006, he became the deputy finance minister and in 2019, he relocated to the United States temporarily. In 2020, he returned to Kabul to work on a short-term project for Ghani when he was offered the post of finance minister. His family was against the proposal and Payenda now regrets his decision.

Months before the fall of Kabul, the former minister said, he had made a visit to an illegal customs post outside Kandahar. When he questioned the police officers who were running the operations netting millions of dollars per day, he was held at the gunpoint, the video of which is still there on the minister’s cellphone.

“What had caused the massive corruption that had destroyed the Afghan state? Selfishness? Afghan bureaucratic incompetence? A US strategy that empowered warlords who were good at killing Taliban, no matter their ruthlessness or how much they stole?” the former minister said he carries these questions as he takes classes in Georgetown University.

ALSO READ: Taliban welcome extension of UN mission in Afghanistan

The attack came several days after Iran said it would retaliate for an Israeli strike near Damascus that killed two members of its Revolutionary Guard….reports Asian Lite News

The exchange of missile strikes by Iran and Israel in Iraq and Syria puts US forces at risk, the top US commander for the Middle East said, just days after an Iranian missile barrage struck near the US Consulate complex in northern Iraq.

Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie told Pentagon reporters that over the past six months Iran has attacked US forces and facilities a number of times, but “very good action on the part of commanders on the ground” had thwarted any US casualties.

“Had US casualties occurred, I think we might be in a very different place right now,” said McKenzie.

McKenzie and other US officials said this week the missile strikes on Sunday that hit close to the consulate were not aimed at the US And Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard said on its website that it had attacked what it described as an Israeli spy center in Irbil.

The attack came several days after Iran said it would retaliate for an Israeli strike near Damascus that killed two members of its Revolutionary Guard.

“I think it’s obvious that Israel is going to take steps to defend itself when it’s confronted with Iranian actions. And of course, Iran is dedicated to the destruction of Israel,” McKenzie said.

“I do worry about these exchanges between Iran and Israel, because many times our forces are at risk, whether in Iraq or in Syria. So that, in fact, does concern me.”

McKenzie, who is retiring after about three years as head of US Central Command, was speaking at what was expected to be his final press briefing. He said that as he prepares to turn over the job to incoming Army Gen. Erik Kurilla, his message to his successor is that Iran continues to be his biggest challenge.

“My central problem in my three years of command was Iran,” said McKenzie, who also oversaw the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and commando raids to kill Daesh leaders.

“There were other problems, other huge problems, but the headquarters as a whole … focused on the Iranian problem and everything attendant to that.”

The US presence in Iraq has long been a flash point for Tehran, but tensions spiked after a January 2020 US drone strike near the Baghdad airport killed a top Iranian general. In retaliation, Iran launched a barrage of missiles at Al-Asad air base, where US troops were stationed. More than 100 service members suffered traumatic brain injuries in the blasts.

More recently, Iranian proxies are believed responsible for an assassination attempt late last year on Iraq’s Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi. And officials have said they believe Iran was behind the October drone attack at the military outpost in southern Syria where American troops are based. No US personnel were killed or injured in the attack.

Last year, US forces in Iraq shifted to a non-combat role, but Iran and its proxies still want all American troops to leave the country.

McKenzie said the Iranian leaders believe that they can launch a certain level of attacks against the US without affecting the ongoing negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear program.

Diplomats trying to salvage the 2015 Iran nuclear deal appear to be near the cusp of an agreement that would bring the US back into the accord and bring Iran back into compliance with limits on its nuclear program.

Congressional opponents of the deal peppered McKenzie with questions this week about the impact of an agreement on Iranian aggression and whether sanctions relief will only provide Iran funding for other malign behavior.

McKenzie said the US has gotten better at countering potential strikes by Iranian drones and other defensive measures, which contributed to the lack of American casualties. But he and others have noted that the Iranian ballistic missile strikes have gotten more precise.

“We don’t want Iran to have a nuclear weapon, and the best way to get to that is probably through a negotiated solution,” he said, adding that such a deal won’t likely solve other problems, such as Iranian conventional attacks in the region.

“I don’t think anybody in the United States government is blind to that fact, but … if you can take nuclear weapons off the table, that’s a powerful capability that you don’t have to worry about.”

Once that is done, he said, then the US could move on and deal with other problems, including Iran’s increasing ballistic missile and drone threats.

“What you’d like to do is negotiate that, but if you can negotiate that, that’s where US Central Command comes in. It’s our job to demonstrate to Iran the concept of deterrence — that the things they want to pursue are too painful for them to achieve. We work at that every day.”

ALSO READ: Antonio voices concern over missile attack in Iraq’s Erbil