Month: September 2021

There is growing optimism that India could resume exports of COVID-19 vaccines as production expands at a rapid pace, putting the country on track to immunize its adult population in the coming months

“We had put a target of 1.85 billion doses for ourselves. That has been organized by the end of December and thereafter the government will be able to allow vaccine exports,” N.K. Arora, head of the national technical advisory group on immunization told VOA. “We will have several billion doses available next year.”

India, a vaccine powerhouse, was expected to be a major supplier of affordable COVID- 19 vaccines to developing countries.

However, after supplying 66 million doses to nearly 100 countries, New Delhi halted exports in April following a deadly second wave of the pandemic, slowing inoculation programs of countries from Africa to Indonesia.

There is no official comment on a timeline for resumption of exports, with officials stressing that for the time being, the focus is on India’s domestic rollout.

“First, all of our adults will have to be immunized, we have to take care of our own people,” Arora said.

The issue of vaccine supplies is expected to figure in the summit meeting of the Quad nations —  the United States, Japan, India and Australia — Friday in Washington.

Public health experts say India will likely wait to restart exports until the country’s festive season ends in November to ensure it does not have to grapple with a third wave. Currently authorities are racing to administer at least one dose to all adults.

India has given one shot to roughly two thirds of its population but only 20% of its approximately 900 million adults have been fully inoculated.

In April, as a ferocious surge in infections took a heavy toll, the government had faced criticism for exporting vaccines when most of its own population was not inoculated.

India has been urged to resume exports as the country’s vaccination program gains momentum and the supply of vaccines increases.

The World Health Organization told a press briefing in Geneva Tuesday that it has been assured that supplies from India will restart this year. Officials said that discussions in New Delhi have emphasized the importance of ensuring that India is “part of the solution for Africa.”

African countries have struggled to inoculate their populations — only about 3% of the continent’s population is vaccinated.

“Given the successful ramp-up of domestic production and the diminishing intensity of its own outbreak, we hope that India will ease its restrictions,” a spokesman for the Gavi alliance, co-leading the global vaccine sharing platform COVAX, told VOA.

The Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest producer of the AstraZeneca vaccines, has said that exports could resume as India nears a level where sufficient stocks are available for its inoculation drive.

“In the next two months, we do expect slow easement of exports. But you have to also check with the government; ultimately it is their decision,” SII chief executive Adar Poonawalla said on Friday.

The institute was to be one of the major suppliers of affordable vaccines to COVAX, but the vaccine-sharing platform’s ability to get sufficient doses for low- and middle-income countries took a hit when India shut down exports.

“Countries with a low level of vaccination can breed variants and if the world does not cover those people there is an opportunity for mutants to rise and creep into other countries, making it harder control the pandemic,” K. Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India, said.

Eyes will also be on the Quad summit next week to see how it makes headway on the vaccine initiative announced in March under which the four countries had decided to produce 1 billion doses in India by 2022 with financial backing from the United States and Japan.

“The summit will be a good opportunity to take stock and expedite that initiative. Some conversations have happened, let us see what progress is made,” an official in India’s Ministry of External Affairs, who did not want to be named, said.

Vaccines produced under the Quad initiative were meant for countries in the Indo-Pacific region. These and other developing countries have turned to China, which has supplied over a billion doses, while Western countries are seen to have lagged in their efforts to vaccinate developing countries.

However, hopes are rising that India will emerge as a major global supplier as new production facilities are set up and the basket of vaccines expands.

The SII for example is set to ramp up production to 200 million doses next month –nearly three times its output in April when India halted exports. Indian companies are also set to make millions of doses of both domestically developed vaccines and those developed overseas, such as the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, and Russia’s Sputnik V.

“It may look like a presumptuous statement, but we will immunize many countries next year, and these will be with affordable shots. There is no confusion in that. India is committed to it and I see no difficulty at all,” Arora said. 
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A Qatar Airways flight on Friday took more Americans out of Afghanistan, according to Washington’s peace envoy, the third such airlift by the Mideast carrier since the Taliban takeover and the frantic U.S. troop pullout from the country.

U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad tweeted he was “grateful that more Americans were able to leave on a Qatar Airways flight.” There was no immediate information how many Americans were on the flight.

An Afghan official said more than 150 passengers were on the flight, though it was not immediately clear how many were Americans.

On Saturday, the U.S. State Department said 28 U.S. citizens and seven lawful permanent residents were on the flight. 

In the past week, more than 300 foreign nationals as well as U.S. green card holders and Afghans with special visas have left Afghanistan. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

He said more flights were expected on Saturday, including another Qatar Airways flight. It’s unclear how many American nationals are still in Afghanistan, but Khalilzad tweeted “we remain committed to get them out if they want to come home.” 

U.S. State Department spokesperson Jalina Porter confirmed that the plane departed Kabul on Friday and told reporters that officials were still trying to determine how many Americans, green card holders or holders of special immigrant visas for Afghans were on the flight heading to Doha, the Qatari capital.

Porter said that in all, “between the charter flights and overland crossings, a total of 36 U.S. citizens” have left Afghanistan since the U.S. troop pullout.

The development came amid rising concerns over the future of Afghanistan under the Taliban. The country’s new Islamic rulers on Friday ordered boys and male teachers of grades six to 12 to return to school and resume classes, starting Saturday, but not girls and women teachers.

The statement, posted on the Facebook page of the now Taliban-run education ministry, underscored fears that the Taliban might again impose restrictions on girls and women. Since taking power, the Taliban had allowed girls in grades one to six to resume classes. When they ruled Afghanistan previously in the late 1990s, the Taliban banned girls and women from attending school and work. 

The Taliban order for the boys and male teachers to return to junior high and high schools went against earlier promises by the Taliban to guarantee girls equal access to education. Since taking over, the Taliban have only allowed women back to work in the health sector and as teachers in grades one through five.

At a news conference last week, the Taliban minister for higher education, Abdul Baqi Haqqani, had said classes would be gender segregated but that girls would have the same access to education as boys.

Earlier this month, the Taliban declared their interim, all-male government — devoid of any women or members of the country’s minorities. The 33-member Cabinet is stacked with veterans of the Taliban’s hard-line rule from the 1990s and the 20-year battle against the U.S.-led coalition.

This is unlikely to win the Taliban the international support they desperately need to avoid an economic meltdown. 
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Every night in yet another house in Afghanistan’s capital, a U.S. green card-holding couple from California take turns sleeping, with one always awake to watch over their three young children so they can flee if they hear the footsteps of the Taliban.

They’ve moved seven times in two weeks, relying on relatives to take them in and feed them. Their days are an uncomfortable mix of fear and boredom, restricted to a couple of rooms where they read, watch TV and play “The Telephone Game” in which they whisper secrets and pass them on, a diversion for the children that has the added benefit of keeping them quiet.

All of it goes on during the agonizing wait for a call from anybody who can help them get out. A U.S. State Department official contacted them several days ago to tell them they were being assigned a case worker, but they haven’t heard a word since. They tried and failed to get on a flight and now are talking to an international rescue organization.

“We are scared and keep hiding ourselves more and more,” the mother said in a text message to The Associated Press. “Whenever we feel breathless, I pray.”

Through messages, emails and phone conversations with loved ones and rescue groups, AP has pieced together what day-to-day life has been like for some of those left behind after the U.S. military’s chaotic withdrawal — that includes U.S. citizens, permanent U.S. resident green-card holders and visa applicants who aided U.S. troops during the 20-year war.

Those contacted by AP — who are not being identified for their own safety — described a fearful, furtive existence of hiding in houses for weeks, keeping the lights off at night, moving from place to place, and donning baggy clothing and burqas to avoid detection if they absolutely must venture out.

All say they are scared the ruling Taliban will find them, throw them in jail, perhaps even kill them because they are Americans or had worked for the U.S. government. And they are concerned that the Biden administration’s promised efforts to get them out have stalled.

When the phone rang in an apartment in Kabul a few weeks ago, the U.S. green card holder who answered — a truck driver from Texas visiting family — was hopeful it was the U.S. State Department finally responding to his pleas to get him and his parents on a flight out.

Instead, it was the Taliban.

“We won’t hurt you. Let’s meet. Nothing will happen,” the caller said, according to the truck driver’s brother, who lives with him in Texas and spoke to him afterwards. The call included a few ominous words: “We know where you are.”

 

That was enough to send the man fleeing from the Kabul apartment where he had been staying with his mother, his two teenage brothers and his father, who was in particular danger because he had worked for years for a U.S. contractor overseeing security guards.

“They are hopeless,” said the brother in Texas. “They think, ’We’re stuck in the apartment and no one is here to help us.′ They’ve been left behind.”

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken testified to Congress this past week that the U.S. government had urged U.S. citizens and green cards holders to leave Afghanistan since March, even offering to pay for their flights.

Blinken said the U.S. government does not track U.S. green card holders in Afghanistan but he estimated several thousand remain in the country, along with about 100 U.S. citizens. He said the U.S. government was still working to get them out.

As of Friday, at least 64 American citizens and 31 green card holders have been evacuated since the U.S. military left last month, according to the State Department. More were possibly aboard a flight from Mazar-e-Sharif on Friday, but the administration did not release figures.

Neither the U.S. nor the Taliban have offered a clear explanation why so few have been evacuated.

That is hardly encouraging to another green card holder from Texas, a grandmother who recently watched from a rooftop as militants pulled up in a half-dozen police cars and Humvees to take over the house across the street.

“The Taliban. The Taliban,” she whispered into the phone to her American son in a Dallas suburb, a conversation the woman recounted to the AP. “The women and kids are screaming. They’re dragging the men to the cars.”

She and her husband, who came to Kabul several months ago to visit relatives, are now terrified that the Taliban will not only uncover their American ties but those of their son back in Texas, who had worked for a U.S. military contractor for years.

Her son, who is also not being named, says he called U.S. embassy officials in Kabul several times before it shut down, filled out all the necessary paperwork, and even enlisted the help of a veteran’s group and members of Congress.

 

He doesn’t know what more he can do.

“What will we do if they knock on the door?” the 57-year-old mother asked on one of her daily calls. “What will we do?”

“Nothing is going to happen,” replied the son.

Asked in a recent interview if he believed that, the son shot back, exasperated, “What else am I supposed to tell her?”

The Taliban government has promised to let Americans and Afghans with proper travel documents leave the country and to not retaliate against those who helped the United States. But U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet said there is evidence they are not keeping their word. She warned Monday that the country had entered a “new and perilous phase,” and cited credible reports of reprisal killings of Afghan military members and allegations of the Taliban hunting house-to-house for former government officials and people who cooperated with U.S. military and U.S. companies.

AP reporters in Afghanistan are not aware of any U.S. citizens or green card holders being picked up or arrested by the Taliban. But they have confirmed that several Afghans who worked for the previous government and military were taken in for questioning recently and released.

The California family, which includes a 9-year-old girl and two boys, ages 8 and 6, say they have been on the run for the past two weeks after the Taliban knocked on the door of their relative’s apartment asking about the Americans staying there.

The family moved to Sacramento four years ago after the mother got a special immigrant visa because she worked for U.S.-funded projects in Kabul promoting women’s rights. Now, the mother says both she and her daughter have been wearing burqas each time they move to their next “prison-home.”

The father, who worked as an Uber driver, has been having panic attacks as they wait for help.

“I don’t see the U.S. government stepping in and getting them out anytime soon,” said the children’s elementary school principal, Nate McGill, who has been exchanging daily texts with the family.

Distraction has become the mother’s go-to tool to shield her children from the stress. She quizzes them on what they want to do when they get back to California and what they want to be when they grow up.

Their daughter hopes to become a doctor someday, while their sons say they want to become teachers.

But distraction is not always enough. After a relative told the daughter that the Taliban were taking away small girls, she hid in a room and refused to come out until her dad puffed himself up and said he could beat the Taliban, making her laugh.

The mother smiled, hiding her fear from her daughter, but later texted her principal.

“This life is almost half-death.”

 
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Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan says he has opened a dialogue with Afghanistan’s Taliban to try to persuade them to form an “inclusive” government in Kabul to ensure peace and stability in the war-torn country.

Khan disclosed the initiative Saturday via Twitter, saying it stemmed from his meetings this week in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, with leaders of countries bordering Afghanistan.

The Pakistani leader concluded a two-day visit to Dushanbe on Friday, where he held bilateral talks on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit, an annual meeting of the China- and Russia-led regional security bloc.

“After meetings in Dushanbe with leaders of Afghanistan’s neighbors & especially a lengthy discussion with Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rahmon, I have initiated a dialogue with the Taliban for an inclusive Afghan govt to include Tajiks, Hazaras & Uzbeks,” Khan tweeted.

Without elaborating, he emphasized “inclusivity” as key to ensuring Afghan peace and stability after four decades of conflict, adding that it would serve the interest of not only the war-ravaged South Asian nation but also the entire region.

Pakistan shares a nearly 2,600-kilometer border with Afghanistan, where the Taliban swept back to power last month as all U.S.-led troops withdrew, ending nearly two decades of war.

The insurgent group last week named an all-male 33-member caretaker government, comprising mostly senior leaders of the Taliban, who are predominantly ethnic Pashtun.

The move drew strong criticism at home and internationally for excluding women and not giving proper representation to Afghan ethnic minorities such as Tajiks, Hazara and Uzbeks, contrary to the Taliban’s pledges on inclusivity.

At Friday’s summit, leaders of SCO member states — China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan — vowed to work with the Taliban and urged the global community to engage with Kabul rather than abandoning it to help prevent a looming humanitarian crisis and an economic collapse in the war-torn country.

“Abandoning Afghanistan could take us back to an unstable situation resulting in civil strife, negative spillover effect on neighboring countries, outflow of refugees, rise in terrorist incidents, drug trafficking and transnational organized crime,” Khan told a meeting of the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization, a Eurasian intergovernmental military alliance comprising several post-Soviet states, also hosted by Dushanbe.

Afghanistan is an observer state, but it was not invited to the SCO huddle because member nations have not yet recognized the Taliban government, nor has the international community at large.

Pakistan has had close ties with the Taliban and has been accused of sheltering its supporters as they directed a deadly insurgency against the U.S.-backed government in Kabul for 20 years, charges Islamabad denies.

Washington has acknowledged Islamabad’s role in arranging negotiations that culminated in the February 2020 deal, paving the way for the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Some conflict of interests

However, Secretary of State Antony Blinken this week told a congressional hearing in Washington that Pakistan has a “multiplicity of interests, some that are in conflict with ours.”

“It is one that is involved hedging its bets constantly about the future of Afghanistan, it’s one that’s involved harboring members of the Taliban. … It is one that’s also involved in different points cooperation with us on counterterrorism,” Blinken said.

He noted that the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden would soon be reassessing its relationship with Pakistan.

“This is one of the things we’re going to be looking at in the days and weeks ahead — the role that Pakistan has played over the last 20 years but also the role we would want to see it play in the coming years and what it will take for it to do that,” Blinken said.

Pakistan responded by expressing “surprise” over Blinken’s remarks, saying they were “not in line with the close cooperation” between the two countries.

A foreign ministry statement noted that Islamabad’s “positive” role in the Afghan peace process, facilitation of the multinational evacuation effort from Kabul before and after the U.S. withdrawal from the country, and continued support for an inclusive political settlement in Afghanistan had been “duly acknowledged” by the international community.
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Afghanistan’s new Taliban rulers apparently have closed the government’s ministry of women’s affairs and replaced it with a ministry aimed at promoting morality and averting wrongdoing.  

 

Outside the building in Kabul that housed the women’s affairs ministry, a new sign was raised Friday saying it was now the headquarters of the “Ministry for Preaching and Guidance and the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.”

 

Employees of the World Bank’s $100 million Women’s Economic Empowerment and Rural Development Program were escorted out of the building Saturday as part of the change, according to program staffer Sharif Akhtar, who was among those forced out.

 

In a statement Saturday, the Taliban-run education ministry said, “All male teachers and students should attend their educational institutions.” It did not mention women teachers or female students.

 

The developments are the latest indications the Taliban are limiting women’s rights since they seized the capital of Kabul last month, despite recent statements they are willing to ease restrictions on women and girls.  

 

When the Taliban ruled the country from 1996 until the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, the Taliban denied women and girls the right to education and largely excluded them from public life.

 

The Taliban has not commented on the developments.  

 

Also Saturday, three people were killed in three explosions targeting Taliban vehicles in the eastern provincial capital of Jalalabad. No one has claimed responsibility, but Islamic State militants, enemies of the Taliban, are based in the area.

 

More than 500 people left Afghanistan Saturday morning on two flights out of Kabul’s airport, one by Pakistan’s national carrier and the other by Iran’s Mahan Air, an airport official said. The official said the identities and nationalities of the people were not immediately known.

 

On a Qatar Airways flight on Friday, more Americans flew out of Afghanistan, according to Washington’s peace envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad.  

 

Some information in this report came from the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse.

 
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