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 When one hurts or kills a women
one hurts or kills hummanity and is an antrocitie.
Gino d'Artali
and: My mother (1931-1997) always said to me <Mi figlio, non esistono notizie <vecchie> perche puoi imparare qualcosa da qualsiasi notizia.> Translated: <My son, there is no such thing as so called 'old' news because you can learn something from any news.>
Gianna d'Artali.

Zan Times - April 16, 2025 - By: Omid Sharafat
<<Opinion
America’s five priorities in dealing with the Taliban
With Donald Trump’s return to office, Afghans are closely watching how U.S. policy toward the Taliban will unfold. Many — including women, journalists, minorities, dissidents, liberals, and the diaspora — view this moment with a mix of hope and anxiety, uncertain about what America’s next move will mean for their future. The U.S. government appears to be prioritizing its own interests with a pragmatic, non-ideological approach, showing little concern for Afghanistan’s internal affairs.
Here, I offer a brief look at the five priorities of the Trump administration in Afghanistan — a lens through which we can assess how much opponents of the Taliban can realistically rely on U.S. policy.
1. Release of American prisoners held by the Taliban
One of the Trump administration’s key priorities has been securing the release of American citizens held captive by the Taliban. In the early days of Trump’s presidency, his National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, warned that the U.S. president would show no mercy to groups or countries that take American citizens hostage. In line with this stance, the first high-level U.S. delegation, led by Adam Boehler, the president’s special envoy for hostage affairs and accompanied by Zalmay Khalilzad, visited Kabul on March 20, 2025. They met with Amir Khan Muttaqi, the Taliban’s foreign minister. During this visit, an American citizen was released from Taliban custody, with the group citing his release as a gesture of goodwill toward the new U.S. administration. Shortly afterward, the U.S. State Department removed Sirajuddin Haqqani, leader of the Haqqani Network, his brother Abdul Aziz Haqqani, and their cousin Yahya Haqqani from the “Rewards for Justice” list. Nearly ten days after the visit, another American hostage, Fidel Hall, was also freed by the Taliban. The exact number of American prisoners still held by the Taliban is unknown, but it is believed that at least three U.S. citizens — including Mahmood Shah Habibi, former head of Afghanistan’s Civil Aviation Authority — remain in Taliban custody. It is also worth noting that in the final days of Joe Biden’s presidency, two American citizens, Ryan Corbett and William McKenty, were exchanged for Khan Mohammad, a Taliban member imprisoned in the United States.
2. U.S. military equipment left behind in Afghanistan
From Donald Trump’s perspective, the billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. military equipment that fell into the hands of the Taliban is one of the most disastrous aspects of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. The former president has repeatedly emphasized the need to reclaim this equipment. He has even linked it to the U.S. financial assistance packages — worth $40 million — that have been directed toward Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, warning that if the Taliban want continued U.S. funding, they must return the equipment. Otherwise, he has threatened, the aid will be cut off.
According to the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, roughly one-third of the $88 billion the U.S. spent to support Afghan security forces was used to procure military equipment — much of which is now under Taliban control. The U.S. Department of Defense has estimated the value of this equipment left behind in Afghanistan to be around $7 billion. The Taliban have rejected the U.S. demand, calling the equipment “war spoils” that they say were won through jihad and thus will not be returned. In a report by Bloomberg, citing an anonymous source, it was suggested that the United States might even consider providing the Taliban with more advanced military equipment to help them combat the Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K). However, the official U.S. position so far remains focused on Trump’s insistence on the return of the equipment — and the Taliban’s firm refusal.
3. Control of Bagram airfield
The third issue of serious concern for Donald Trump and his administration is the control of Bagram airfield. Trump believes that after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, China has taken over the base. In a recent speech at the Republican National Committee’s convention, he stated that if he were president, he would have retained control of the Bagram base. In Trump’s view, Bagram is not important because of Afghanistan itself, but due to its proximity to China’s nuclear facilities. For this reason, in February of this year, Trump expressed interest in deploying a small group of American troops to Bagram to prevent Chinese influence in the region. In recent days, unconfirmed reports have circulated suggesting that control of Bagram Airfield might be handed back to the United States. However, both Taliban and U.S. officials have denied these claims.
4. Counterterrorism
The fourth priority of the United States in Afghanistan is counterterrorism. According to the Doha Agreement, the Taliban’s primary commitment is to prevent terrorist groups from using Afghan territory to pose threats to the U.S. and its allies. From the U.S. perspective, the most significant terrorist groups capable of threatening its security are Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State – Khorasan Province (ISIS-K). Since Al-Qaeda has been significantly weakened and the Taliban show little willingness to suppress it, current U.S.-Taliban cooperation is centered on fighting ISIS-K. This shared enemy has brought the U.S. and the Taliban into a tactical alignment, which may serve to justify American financial and military assistance to the Taliban.
The Taliban also enjoy support from Russia, China, and Iran in their fight against ISIS-K.
5. Gaining Influence Within the Taliban
It appears that one of the U.S.’s strategic priorities in dealing with the Taliban is to gain influence within the group. Internal divisions in the Taliban — particularly between the Kandahari and Haqqani factions — have created an opening for the U.S. to build closer ties with the more pragmatic Haqqani network. The Kandahari faction, led by Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, is highly ideological and shows no flexibility on engagement with the West. It is also seen as more aligned with Iran, Russia, and China. In contrast, the Haqqani network has historical ties to the United States dating back to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and has shown signs of disagreement on the Taliban leader’s harsh policies on women. Therefore, the U.S. appears to be attempting to expand its influence within the Taliban through support for the Haqqani network.
Conclusion
Given the priorities the United States has set for itself in Afghanistan, its foreign policy is unlikely to put it on a hostile course with the Taliban or lead to meaningful change in the short term. In other words, the U.S. shows little concern for Afghanistan’s internal affairs — particularly issues of human rights, women’s rights, freedom of expression, ethnic and minority rights, or the formation of an inclusive government.
*Omid Sharafat is the pseudonym of a former university professor in Kabul and an international relations researcher.>>
Source: https://zantimes.com/2025/04/16/americas-five-priorities-in-dealing-with-the-taliban/

And


Trumped egg
Zan Times - April 15, 2025 - By: Younus Negah
<<Opinion
Trump and the egg: Real power lies with the small and the many
Donald Trump likes to do big things: He shakes up global markets with unprecedented tariffs, wants to make Canada the 51st state, and dreams of taking over Greenland and Gaza. As the most powerful man in the world, he wants the world at his finger. The U.S. president is an extreme example of those who ignore the power of small and the many, seeking instead to belittle and exploit them. He is not alone. The world has always had powerful people who think big. Today, thousands of Trump-like individuals sit atop corporations, governments, and powerful institutions. Some of them believe they have superhuman missions to transform the world and drag countries irreversibly toward their imagined destinies.
These type of people govern in Russia, North Korea, Turkey, Iran, and now, in the United States. Even in our small and poor Afghanistan, a similar person sits in Kandahar, mired in the swamp of regression and reaching for the heavens. He treats earthly rules and the human requirements of the Afghan people — like the desire for bread, schools, and freedom — as trivial and worthless. In the image he has crafted for himself, he appears even more visionary than Trump, presenting his seat in Kandahar as the centre of the earth and the pillar of the sky and religion. Behind those masks of grandeur are vulnerable human beings who carry real worries and struggles like all of us. Mullah Hibatullah may appear immersed in dreams of jihad and global conquest but he spends long hours counting, managing, and distributing money funnelled from Kabul to his office through threats and manipulation. He is deeply anxious about infiltration of rogue suicide bombers into his residence, and the ambitions of rivals keeps him up at night.
Trump, too, is deeply entangled in everyday matters and the pressure of the small and the many. As he came to power n January and revelled in his control of the most powerful people in the United States, millions of chickens across the country were slaughtered after being infected with avian influenza. In the corridors of the White House, chickens and eggs had become the topic of conversation, alongside names like Elon Musk, Canada, and Greenland. By February, reports stated that poultry companies had been forced to cull 166 million chickens in an effort to contain the outbreak. That severely disrupted egg supplies nationwide. In just the first two months of this year, 30 million laying hens died. The price of eggs, which had remained relatively stable at under US$2 per dozen before avian influenza took hold, rose above US$3 in 2024 and then peaked in March of this year at more than US$6.20 a dozen. These seemingly small and insignificant costs became an issue across the United States because of the sheer scale of the egg shortage. They were discussed far more in homes, shops, and on street corners than the shifting of hundreds of billions of dollars among America’s economic giants. Even as Trump was humiliating Europe by sending his vice president, J.D. Vance, to speak contemptuously at once close allies at the Munich Security Conference and declaring his intention to seize Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, he instructed other administration officials to approach Denmark and several other European countries to buy eggs. Such a request to export European eggs to America reminds us that it is not the bluster and boasts of the powerful, but rather the actions and reactions of the small and the many that determine the course of history. The future of America will be shaped not so much by Trump’s lies and bravado, but at the dining tables of hundreds of millions of Americans — and how many eggs they can afford to buy. Behind every major transformation, it is the hands of the many that do the shaping.
Focusing on the decimal points of society
Mullah Hibatullah is encircled by tanks and guns in Kandahar as he and his coterie of armed men are gripped by the delusion that they are playing historic roles. He sees the people of the country as ignorant subjects, incapable of distinguishing right from wrong. With his “Emirate,” he is determined to blind the eyes, deafen the ears, and dull the minds of the people, molding tens of millions like wax to fit the shape of his fantasies.
Recently, he again declared that he is so righteous and confident in executing his inhumane decrees that he neither fears the collapse of his regime nor losing his own head. This arrogance and false certainty are precisely what guarantee the downfall of his emirate. Whether his head will remain on his shoulders until the end of his reign is uncertain. Nothing can substitute for popular support: People may seem powerless and insignificant on an individual basis, but their discontent outweighs any emir, government, or party when they rise up by the millions. A new subject was added in our ninth grade school schedule: economics. The teacher often spoke of production, consumption, supply and demand, trying to familiarize us with the basics of markets and trade. One day, he talked about the importance of decimal points and small numbers. He wrote examples on the board to show us how even the tiniest figures matter, especially when they are multipliers. “In currency exchanges,” he said, “pay close attention to the decimals.”
Politics and society are no different. Rulers who ignore the decimal points of society — those small but powerful figures — fail in their missions. If opponents of the Taliban, especially the remnants of the former republic, are seeking a new political opportunity in Afghanistan, they must reflect on the disastrous consequences of neglecting public trust and participation. They must begin again, this time recognizing the vital role of popular support.
Younus Negah is a researcher and writer from Afghanistan who is currently in exile in Turkey.>>
Source: https://zantimes.com/2025/04/15/trump-and-the-egg-real-power-lies-with-the-small-and-the-many/

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