ГОЛОВНЕ

In this edition of Straight Talk Africa, host Haydé Adams looks at what’s behind the social uprisings led by youth across Africa.

Our guests include Kamissa Camara, expert for the Sahel at the United States Institute of Peace, Dimah Mahmoud, Sudanese activist and political analyst and Aya Chebbi, youth activist and former African Union youth envoy.
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Pakistan’s prime minister says that America’s accelerated troop exit from Afghanistan has left Washington with no “bargaining power” for arranging a peace deal between warring Afghans.

“I think the U.S. has really messed it up in Afghanistan,” Imran Khan said in an interview with PBS NewsHour aired on Tuesday night.

Khan stressed that the United States and NATO allies had about 150,000 troops in Afghanistan and that was the time when they ought to go for a political solution rather than trying to militarily end the war with the Taliban insurgency there.

“But once they had reduced the troops to barely 10,000, and then, when they gave an exit date, the Taliban thought they had won. And so, therefore, it was very difficult for now to get them (the Taliban) to compromise,” he told the American broadcaster.

President Joe Biden said earlier this month that “We did not go to Afghanistan to nation-build.  And it’s the right and the responsibility of the Afghan people alone to decide their future and how they want to run their country.”

The Taliban has captured vast areas across Afghanistan, including key trade routes with neighboring countries, since U.S.-led foreign troops officially began leaving the country in early May.

The international military drawdown has largely been completed and all American as well as allied troops will have left Afghanistan by the end of August under orders from Biden amid fears the Taliban could regain control of the war-ravaged country.

“Here were the U.S. for two decades in Afghanistan trying to force a military solution. The reason why we are in this position now is because the military solution failed,” Khan said.

U.S. and Afghan officials have long accused Pakistan of allowing the Taliban to use sanctuaries in the neighboring country to direct attacks inside Afghanistan, charges Islamabad denies.

Khan’s government maintains it has used whatever leverage Islamabad had over the Taliban to bring them to the table for peace talks with Washington. The negotiations culminated in the February 2020 deal, setting the stage for all American troops to withdraw from the Afghan war after 20 years.

But the ensuing peace talks between the Taliban and the U.S.-backed Afghan government have met with little success and largely stalled.

“Absolutely, there’s nothing more we can do, except push them as much as we can for a political settlement. That’s all,” Khan told the PBS show when asked if Pakistan needs to do more to press the Taliban to end their violent campaign.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani earlier in the month alleged 10,000 jihadi fighters have recently entered his country from sanctuaries in Pakistan and other areas to join Taliban ranks.

“This is absolute nonsense,” Khan responded. “Why don’t they give us evidence of this? When they say that Pakistan gave safe havens, sanctuaries to (the) Taliban, where are these safe havens?,” he asked.

The prime minister went on to explain insurgents could hide among the refugee camps in Pakistan that still host three million Afghans, saying the Taliban constitute the majority in the refugee population.

“(The) Taliban are not some military outfit. They are normal civilians. And if there are some civilians in these camps, how is Pakistan supposed to hunt these people down? How can you call them sanctuaries?” he asked.

Khan feared a “protracted civil war” would pose security challenges to Pakistan and could trigger a fresh refugee influx that his country could ill-afford due to its economic challenges.

He defended his decision to not allow the U.S. to establish military bases on Pakistani soil for anti-terrorism operations in Afghanistan after all American troops leave the neighboring country.

Khan explained that Pakistan’s decision to join the U.S.-led war on terrorism after the September 11, 2001 strikes against America triggered a domestic militant backlash, killing 70,000 Pakistanis and inflicting an estimated $150 billion in losses to the national economy.

“Now, if there’s a conflict going on in Afghanistan and there are (U.S.) bases in Pakistan, we then become targets,” he said.

“We want to be partners in peace, but not in conflict,” Khan emphasized when asked what kind of relationship Islamabad wants with Washington.

Khan’s interview came while his national security advisor, Moeed Yusuf, is in Washington for official talks with his U.S. counterpart, Jake Sullivan, on how to move a traditionally rollercoaster bilateral relationship. The head of the Pakistani spy agency is also said to be accompanying Yusuf.
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A former Air Force intelligence analyst who once helped find targets for deadly U.S. drone strikes was sentenced to 45 months in prison for leaking top-secret details about the program.

Daniel Hale, 33, told a federal judge he felt compelled to leak information to a journalist out of guilt over his own participation in a program that he believed was indiscriminately killing civilians in Afghanistan far from the battlefield.

“It is wrong to kill,” Hale said in a defiant statement in which he accepted responsibility for his actions, but also pleaded for mercy. “It is especially wrong to kill the defenseless.”

But U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady told Hale he had other avenues for airing his concerns besides leaking to a journalist. Citing the need to deter others from illegal disclosures, he imposed a punishment that was harsher than the 12- to 18-month term sought by Hale’s attorneys but significantly more lenient than the longer sentence sought by prosecutors.

“You could have resigned from the military,” or told “your commanders you weren’t going to do this anymore,” O’Grady told Hale.

The prosecution is one in a series of cases the Justice Department has brought in recent years against current and former government officials who have disclosed classified secrets to journalists. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced new guidelines this month to bar prosecutors from subpoenaing journalists’ records in leak probes, but the department has shown no signs of scaling back efforts to charge officials whom they identify as having leaked national security information.

Prosecutors argued that Hale, who deployed to Afghanistan in August 2012 and was honorably discharged less than a year later, abused the government’s trust and knew the documents he was sharing “risked causing serious, and in some cases exceptionally grave, damage to the national security” but leaked them anyway. The prosecutors said documents leaked by Hale were found in an internet compilation of material designed to help Islamic State fighters avoid detection.

Hale’s stated rationale that he was trying to expose injustices surrounding the military’s drone program has earned him support among whistleblower advocates and among critics of the government’s war efforts, some of whom held supportive signs outside the courthouse and attended Tuesday’s sentencing hearing.

But prosecutors painted a different portrait. Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Kromberg said the impact of Hale’s actions was not to contribute to a public debate over war but rather to “endanger the people doing the fight.”

The Justice Department said Hale began communicating with a journalist in April 2013 while still in the Air Force. The following February, while working as a defense contractor at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Hale printed six classified documents that were each later published. All told, he admitted leaking roughly a dozen secret and top-secret documents to a reporter in 2014 and 2015.

While court papers never specified the recipient of the leak, details about the case make it clear that the documents were given to Jeremy Scahill, a reporter at The Intercept, who used the documents as part of a series of critical reports on how the military conducted drone strikes on foreign targets.

The arguments Tuesday were less about whether Hale leaked the records — he openly acknowledges doing so — but about his rationale for his actions and what role that should play in the sentence calculation.

“He committed the offense to bring attention to what he believed to be immoral government conduct committed under the cloak of secrecy and contrary to public statements of then-President Obama regarding the alleged precision of the United States military’s drone program,” defense lawyers wrote in a filing last week.

Prosecutors painted Hale as eager to ingratiate himself with journalists, but Hale described himself as racked with angst over the role his actions may have played in the taking of innocent lives. He had served as a signals intelligence analyst, helping locate targets for drone strikes by tracking down cellphone signals.

He said he had wanted to dispel the idea that “drone warfare keeps us safe,” and the document he leaked showed the drone program was not as precise as the government claimed in terms of avoiding civilian deaths.

Reading aloud from a prepared statement, his voice occasionally cracking with emotion, Hale repeatedly took responsibility for his actions but expressed more regret over wartime actions than the “taking of papers.”

He said he was pained by the possibility that his actions in the drone program could have emboldened terrorists in the United States, referring to the case of Omar Mateen, the gunman who massacred nightclub patrons in Orlando, Florida, in 2016 and had explicitly demanded that the U.S. stop bombing Iraq and Syria.

 
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A Nigerian court has ordered the secret police to release five suspects detained for wearing T-shirts criticizing President Muhammadu Buhari, their lawyer said Tuesday.

The men were arrested early this month by the Department of State Service (DSS) during a church service led by a well-known evangelical pastor in the Nigerian capital Abuja.

They had been wearing T-shirts with the slogan “Buhari Must Go!” inside the church when they were arrested and detained.

The church was accused of aiding the arrests, but it denied the allegation.

On Monday, the federal high court Abuja ordered the DSS to release the suspects, lawyer Allen Sowore told AFP.

“The judge ordered their release forthwith without any condition. But we have not got a certified true copy of that order,” he said.

He said his clients were yet to be freed.

“Unfortunately, the judge has not signed the order. So, we just came here [to the DSS office] thinking that they will act on the order of the court, but they have not acted.”

Buhari, a former army commander, has come under fire after his government recently banned Twitter, a move Western allies and critics warned undermined freedom of expression.

Officials announced the ban after Twitter removed a remark from Buhari’s personal account for violating its policies.

The Nigerian leader is also under pressure to tackle the country’s insecurity.

The security forces are battling an Islamist insurgency in the northeast, a surge in mass kidnappings by criminal gangs in central and northwestern states, and separatist tension in parts of the south.
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Jillian Rossi dropped her strikingly powerful new single “Give Me A Reason,” a song that emphasizes Jillian’s vocal prowess and her hopes to continue to cement herself as the next power vocalist of the next rising generation of pop acts. The 21-year-old artist recently teased the song on her Tik Tok, receiving over 1 million views. 
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