Today's D Brief: Taliban's interim gov't; Ghani's apology; Russia weaponized comment sections; And a bit more.
By Ben Watson
September 8, 2021
The D Brief
The Afghan Taliban announced an interim cabinet of all-male officials on Tuesday, and it includes a wanted terrorist as well as four former prisoners at the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The Taliban’s leader remains Haibatullah Akhundzada, and Reuters has more on him here. But his caretaker government now features Mullah Hassan Akhund as prime minister (Akhund served as the Taliban’s foreign minister 20 years ago); Siraj Haqqani as acting minister of interior (he’s the wanted guy with a $5 million FBI bounty on his head); and filling the role of defense minister is Mawlawi Yaqoob, son of deceased founder Mullah Omar.
Bigger picture: “Drawn mostly from Afghanistan’s dominant Pashtun ethnic group, the Cabinet’s lack of representation from other ethnic groups also seems certain to hobble its support from abroad,” the Associated Press reports from Kabul.
“They’re exactly the same colors as the old Taliban...mainly old men from Kandahar,” Lindsey Hilsum of the UK’s Channel 4 news said Tuesday.
https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2021/09/the-d-brief-september-08-2021/185184/
