Sudan

• The UN estimated that fighting in Sudan has already displaced 73,000 people in just the first 16 days - and could displace 815,000 if it continues. Sudan's seven neighbors are preparing for a larger influx of refugees.

Ukraine

• A Russian freight train traveling through the Bryansk region near Ukraine struck an "explosive device" on the track and derailed. The previous day, an alleged Ukrainian strike in Bryansk killed four people. Ukraine hasn't officially acknowledged carrying out any strikes in Russian territory like Bryansk, but is almost certainly behind them.
• Molfar, a Ukraine-based think tank, estimated that there are at least 25 Russian mercenary groups currently or recently active in Ukraine - including some with links to senior figures in the Orthodox church (which generally supports Putin) and some with white supremacist or neo-Nazi leanings. Of the 25, Molfar said 12 were created solely for deployment to Ukraine.
• Ukrainian military officials say some Russian hired guns have started fighting uniformed Russian soldiers in Ukraine: "With no significant achievements on the battlefield, the Russian Armed Forces and ‘Wagner Group’ PMC are increasingly attempting to find someone to blame for the defeats. They shift the responsibility for their own tactical miscalculations and losses suffered onto each other."

Afghanistan

• The UN Security Council agreed to give sanctioned Taliban foreign minister Mawlawi Amir Khan Muttaqi a limited exemption to travel to Pakistan for meetings with the Pakistani and Chinese foreign ministers.
• This is Muttaqi's second recent exemption: he was allowed to go to Uzbekistan last month for a similar meeting - but was pointedly not granted an exemption to attend yesterday's talks in Doha, where other countries strategized about how to challenge the Taliban's ban on women working or going to school.
• On a related note, a Foreign Policy article pasted below discusses the UN's tough choice "between integrity and collaboration" in Afghanistan: "integrity" meaning upholding UN values and refusing to work with a Taliban that continues to enact measures eroding those values, and "collaboration" meaning holding its nose and working with the Taliban for little wins while continuing to provide aid.

Venezuela

• Bloomberg reported that senior Chinese officials met Pres. Maduro's close aides for talks on China's loans to Venezuela last month. China had been standing back and letting Iran cozy up to Venezuela, so these new meetings represent a re-engagement that will worry the U.S.: an influx of Chinese money buying Venezuelan oil would erode the impact of U.S. sanctions.

Other News

• Khader Adnan, a senior Islamic Jihad leader imprisoned in Israel, died after hungerstriking for almost three months - and just before he was due to stand trial. Islamic Jihad threatened revenge and fired at least three rockets toward Israel.

The Taliban Aim to Divide and Conquer (Foreign Policy)
The U.N. meets this week to decide whether to play by Taliban rules or pull out. Both are bad.

Afghanistan has become the world’s problem child, controlled by unruly and unpredictable religious fanatics and terrorists who throw their toys out of the stroller each time they’re chided for bad behavior yet keep getting their own way. As the United Nations prepares to host another meeting to discuss how to deal with the near-starvation of the Afghan population and the appalling toll of Taliban misogyny, the men in charge are again goading the world body: It’s our way or the highway.

The U.N., criticized by many as a bloated bureaucracy, has reached an existential moment in Afghanistan, pushed into an impossible position by an intransigent Taliban, with what one U.N. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, described as “no obvious solutions and no good outcomes.”

Barred by Taliban decree from abiding by the U.N. Charter yet obliged to alleviate the terrible suffering of Afghanistan’s people, the U.N. must make a choice between integrity and collaboration. If it stays, it risks becoming a tool of the Taliban, as it was in the 1990s, operating contrary to its mandate while sending a message to repressive regimes everywhere that they can do as they wish without consequence. If it calls an end to its Afghanistan mission, reasoning that it cannot function according to its fundamental principle of nondiscrimination, it will abandon the country’s 40 million people to a violent, lawless gang of drug-dealing misogynists.

U.N. agencies in Afghanistan are apparently unable to agree on a unified way forward, according to a U.N. source in Kabul, who described the internal deliberations as descending into “utter chaos.” It’s a gift to the Taliban, who are adept at exploiting the divisions of both opponents and friends to their own advantage.

In what appears to be an attempt to find a way out of this dilemma, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres is hosting representatives from 21 countries and two multilateral organizations in the Qatari capital of Doha on May 1 and 2. The closed-door meeting follows almost two years of appeals, threats, promises, billions of dollars in aid, and hints that if only the Taliban would behave, they could pocket the legitimacy they so crave. (Of course, the Taliban also want the $9 billion in frozen Afghan funds held overseas given over to them.)

The decision is not helped by the lack of a unified vision among those U.N. member states that still take an interest in Afghanistan. For many neighbors, including China, Pakistan, Iran, Russia, and the Central Asian states, counterterrorism, trade, and issues such as water sharing are more important than preventing famine and economic collapse. Western countries by and large, while worried about a revival of Taliban sponsorship of terrorism, are also deeply concerned by the de facto regime’s oppression of women and the specter of mass famine and poverty. The divisions play into the Taliban’s hands, enabling them to entrench power while enforcing edicts that have made Afghanistan the only country in the world where girls are banned from secondary school and university, where women are not permitted to work, and schools are being transformed into madrassas drilling boys on the Quran.

It’s doubtful the meeting will even come up with a meaningful joint statement, let alone a viable plan. Nothing has worked so far—not even the carrot of recognition held out to almost universal astonishment by U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed, who, like most diplomats, seems to believe that that’s what the Taliban want. But the Taliban aren’t swallowing any carrots and keep throwing sticks of their own, doubling down on misogynist policies and defying U.N. Security Council resolutions.

The Doha meeting comes amid a crisis for the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), which staggers under tremulous, and hubristic, leadership. The head of the mission, former Kyrgyz President Roza Otunbayeva, ordered an “operational review” after months of internal dithering and mixed messages from Taliban leaders left UNAMA unprepared for what many already suspected: that the Taliban’s Dec. 24, 2022, edict banning women from working with NGOs included UNAMA. At least through this week—and probably longer—local UNAMA employees have been instructed to work from home.

With the hindsight that comes with sudden clarity, the U.N. has conceded that it may be forced to pull the plug in Afghanistan, a move that could have profound impacts—for the general population, anyway; few Taliban leaders are in any danger of starving as they rake in money from trade, drugs, resource rape, and aid pilfering. Weekly cash deliveries of $40 million, flown in by the U.N., are about the only thing keeping the currency stable. Neighboring states are already gaming out the country’s collapse, commissioning assessments of possible scenarios, from Taliban loss of control to civil war to an exodus of refugees.

The head of an Afghan charity, who has witnessed the Taliban’s emboldened impunity, said things can and will get worse, whether UNAMA leaves Afghanistan or decides to stay on Taliban terms, as it did in the 1990s. “The de facto [leaders] will become harsher and point their guns at people. That, in turn, will create a political environment in which acceptance of the international community’s terms are even more difficult, and that will make a military intervention more likely,” the source said, speaking on the condition that he not be identified for his own safety. The Doha meeting “is a useless, irrelevant, and unnecessary effort—unless, of course, UNAMA decides to leave. And then economic catastrophe will unfold.”

Beyond the economic worries, without the presence of UNAMA, Afghanistan risks becoming a black hole where terrorism thrives and the Taliban strengthen their power through violence. Dozens of terrorist and jihadi groups reside in Afghanistan, and concerns about the country being a hub for planned attacks on external targets are growing. Numerous diplomatic meetings have been held to discuss the threat that Islamabad is already feeling, as the Taliban-affiliated Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan wages war on the Pakistani state. Other neighbors, including Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, China, and Iran, fear the same is coming their way. UNAMA’s departure would remove the one observation-and-reporting mechanism that remained after the United States and NATO partners withdrew in August 2021 and most embassies closed.

No one can say they weren’t warned about the consequences of a Taliban return. What’s happening in Afghanistan today is a pitch-perfect repeat of the Taliban’s last time in power, from 1996 to 2001, when they imposed a severe, fundamentalist vision of Islam, turned women into less than chattel, and welcomed al Qaeda into their nest. Their reign ended shortly after al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

Back then, though, the U.N. opted to work with the Taliban to keep aid flowing to the extent it could. The U.N. signed a memorandum of understanding with the Taliban in 1998 in which it agreed to comply with edicts that were, in essence, a death sentence for millions of women and children. The medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières denounced the world body’s complicity at the time, saying that it undermined “the principles that should guide its action, including the equality of men and women, especially in matters of health.” Rates of malnutrition and maternal and infant mortality soared, women were largely barred from medical treatment, and widows were not permitted to receive food aid. Afghanistan was plunged into desperate poverty and was on the verge of economic collapse when the U.S. invasion forced the extremists out and ushered in a two-decade experiment with democracy conducted against the backdrop of the Taliban’s vicious insurgency. Former U.S. President Donald Trump opted to hand Afghanistan over to the Taliban with his 2020 deal, an arrangement that current U.S. President Joe Biden stuck to, leading to today’s humanitarian disaster.

Many now see the U.N. looking at a stay-or-go decision, rather than trying to come up with a third way that would involve some constructive presence while fending off the worst of Taliban demands. The U.N. could, for example, opt for further sanctions on individual Taliban leaders, travel bans, and the return to Afghanistan of Taliban daughters sent abroad to study. At a meeting of the opposition National Resistance Front in Vienna last week, its leader, Ahmad Massoud, implored the U.N. not to abandon Afghanistan but to stop short of legitimizing the regime.

“We were left behind and betrayed. The people of Afghanistan did not fail democracy—they voted and stood for values, for women, raised their voices, and had achievements in the past 20 years,” he said. “I understand the current situation for the U.N. I don’t think leaving is a good choice.” Even if only a small portion of the international aid delivered to the country reaches the truly needy, he said, that’s better than nothing. But for Massoud, and many Afghans inside and outside the country, diplomatic recognition is the red line.

“Even thinking about recognition will be a nail in the coffin of the people of Afghanistan, of freedom and democracy. And the little hope and respect for the international community that is left in Afghanistan will be gone. The U.N. can be part of the solution, but the solution is not through recognition,” Massoud said.