Category: World

KABUL: Afghan President Ashraf Ghani replaced two top ministers charged with managing the country”s faltering security Saturday, as the Taliban pressed on with their campaign to capture new territory in fierce battles with government forces. The shake-up of the defence and interior ministry portfolios comes as violence surges and peace talks remain deadlocked, with the Taliban claiming to have seized more than 40 districts in recent weeks across the rugged countryside. The presidency announced in a statement that General Bismillah Khan Mohammadi, who fought under the late anti-Taliban commander Ahmad Shah Massoud during a 1990s civil war, has been appointed the new defence minister. Mohammadi has previously held the defence and interior ministry portfolios and also served as the chief of army staff after the fall of the Taliban regime following a US-led invasion in 2001. Ghani also appointed General Abdul Sattar Mirzakwal as interior minister, the presidency said. Mirzakwal has previously held several regional posts.

TEHRAN: Iran”s ultraconservative cleric Ebrahim Raisi was elected president with just under 62 percent of the vote, according to figures released Saturday by Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli. Voter turnout for Friday”s election was 48.8 percent of the more than 59 million eligible voters, he said — a record low for a presidential election in the Islamic republic. In second place by a wide margin was the ultraconservative Mohsen Rezai, a former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who won 11.8 percent. He was followed in third place by the only reformist left in the race, former central bank chief Abdolnasser Hemmati, who scored 8.4 percent. Last placed out of the four candidates was another ultraconservative, Amirhossein Ghazizadeh-Hashemi, who won 3.5 percent. Over 3.7 million ballots were declared void — more votes than were won by second placed Rezai. Three of the original seven candidates had dropped out two days before the election — reformist Mohsen Mehralizadeh and ultraconservatives Saeed Jalili and Alireza Zakani.

MOSCOW: Russia has notified its partners under in the Open Skies arms control treaty that it will leave the group on Dec. 18, the Russian foreign ministry said on Friday. The Kremlin said this month that the US decision to withdraw from the treaty – which allows unarmed surveillance flights over member countries – had “significantly upset the balance of interests” among the pact’s members and had compelled Russia to exit. Moscow had hoped that President Joe Biden would reverse his predecessor’s decision. But the Biden administration did not change tack, accusing Russia of violating the pact, something Moscow denied. In January, Russia announced its own plans to leave the treaty, and the government submitted legislation to parliament last month to formalise its departure.

UNITED NATIONS: The U.N. General Assembly unanimously elected Antonio Guterres to a second term as secretary-general on Friday, giving him another five years at the helm of the 193-member organization at a time a deeply divided world faces numerous conflicts, the growing impact of climate change, and a pandemic still circling the globe. Ambassadors in the assembly chamber burst into applause as Assembly President Volkan Bozkir announced Guterres’ re-election by “acclamation,” without a vote. Just before the announcement, Estonia’s U.N. Ambassador Sven Jurgenson, the current Security Council president, read a resolution adopted by the 15-member council recommending Guterres for a second term. Under the U.N. Charter, the General Assembly appoints the secretary-general on the recommendation of the Security Council. Guterres was the only candidate nominated by a U.N. member state, his home country Portugal where he previously served as prime minister, and the country’s current president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, was in the assembly chamber to watch the event. Immediately after his re-election, Guterres took the oath of office and delivered an address urging U.N. member nations “to do everything we can to overcome current geostrategic divides and dysfunctional power relations.”

“There are too many asymmetrics and paradoxes,” he said. “They need to be addressed head on.”

Guterres expressed hope that “what we are living through today in terms of mistrust is, I hope, an aberration but it cannot become the norm.”

WASHINGTON: The Democratic-led House, with President Joe Biden’s backing, passed legislation Thursday to repeal the 2002 authorization for use of military force in Iraq, a step that supporters said was necessary for Congress to reassert its constitutional duty to weigh in on matters of war. Detractors worried it would embolden militias or terrorist groups. The repeal was passed overwhelmingly, 268-161. Forty-nine Republicans voted for the bill. Only one Democrat, Rep. Elaine Luria of Virginia, voted against it. In the Senate, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., intends to bring the measure to the floor this year.

Supporters said repeal would not affect US military operations around the world, but could prevent a president from relying on the 2002 authorization to conduct unrelated military actions. The White House says there are no ongoing military activities reliant solely upon that authorization. The authorization was directed against the government of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, authorizing the “necessary and appropriate” use of force to “defend US national security against the continuing threat posed by Iraq” and to “enforce all relevant” U.N. Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq. “Repeal is crucial because the executive branch has a history of stretching” the authorization’s legal authority, said Democratic Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “It has already been used as justification for military actions against entities that had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist dictatorship simply because such entities were operating in Iraq.”

Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, said he agreed the authorization was outdated, but he argued that Congress should not repeal it without also approving a replacement.

“We should not encourage any president to go it alone without Article I congressional authorization,” McCaul said.

The action follows years of debate over whether Congress has ceded too much of its war-making authority to the White House. Many lawmakers, particularly Democrats, say passage of the 2002 authorization was a mistake, and some Republicans agree the authority should be taken off the books. Some lawmakers say the 2001 resolution to fight terrorism, passed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, should be reexamined as well. As a senator in 2002, Biden voted for the resolution that President George W. Bush used to invade Iraq the following year. Biden was not considered a leading critic of that 2003 military operation at the time, despite his claims as a presidential candidate in 2020.

Biden faced considerable criticism for the vote during the Democratic primary campaign. He and his aides, including now-Secretary of State Tony Blinken, initially defended the vote by saying the Bush administration wanted more leverage against Hussein and that Biden hadn’t intended his vote as a blank check. Biden eventually called the resolution a mistake.

Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee of California, the bill’s sponsor, said that 87% of the current members of the House were not in Congress in 2002 and that the authorization for military force passed at that time bears no correlation to the threats the nation faces today. She also was the lone vote against the 2001 auhtorization following Sept. 11.