$64 Million to Afghanistan Per Biden Admin but Add in $1.2 Billion

The Taliban is swimming in significant assets, with more to come. and China is delighted.he ultimate winner of two decades of war in Afghanistan is likely China. Secretary of State Antony Blinkin confirmed that if the Taliban behaves, the $64 million will be authorized. Further, there is the matter of nations around the world and the pledges they have made in ’emergency funds’ for Afghanistan.

At the first high-level conference on Afghanistan since the Taliban took power a month ago, Western governments, big traditional donors and others announced pledges that went beyond the $606 million that the United Nations was seeking to cover costs through the end of the year for protecting Afghans from looming humanitarian disaster.

U.N. humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths announced at the close of the ministerial meeting that more than $1.2 billion in humanitarian and development aid had been pledged. He said this included the $606 million sought in a “flash appeal” but also a regional response to the Afghan crisis that U.N. refugee chief Filippo Grandi spoke about after arriving in Kabul on a previously unannounced visit.

He wrote on Twitter that he would assess humanitarian needs and the situation of 3.5 million displaced Afghans, including over 500,000 displaced this year alone.

Officials at the U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, have expressed concerns that more Afghans could take refuge into neighboring Pakistan and Iran, which both already have large numbers of Afghans who fled their country during the past decades of war. sourceTaliban seen with SCAR rifle commonly carried by American ...

GovExe: The aircraft and armored vehicles left behind when U.S. forces withdrew will give China—through their eager partners, the Taliban—a broad window into how the U.S. military builds and uses some of its most important tools of war. Expect the Chinese military to use this windfall to create—and export to client states—a new generation of weapons and tactics tailored to U.S. vulnerabilities, said several experts who spent years building, acquiring, and testing some of the equipment that the Taliban now controls.

To understand how big a potential loss this is for the United States, look beyond the headlines foretelling a Taliban air force. Look instead to the bespoke and relatively primitive pieces of command, control, and communication equipment sitting around in vehicles the United States left on tarmacs and on airfields. These purpose-built items aren’t nearly as invincible to penetration as even your own phone.

“The only reason we aren’t seeing more attacks is because of a veil of secrecy around these systems,” said Josh Lospinoso, CEO of cybersecurity company Shift5. “Once you pierce that veil of secrecy…it massively accelerates the timeline for being able to build cyber weapons” to attack them.

Lospinoso spent ten years in the Army conducting penetration tests against radios, small computers, and other IT gear commonly deployed in Afghanistan.

Take the radios and communications equipment aboard the Afghan Air Force C-130 transport plane captured by the Taliban. The Pentagon has assured that the equipment was disabled. But if any of it remains on the plane an adversary with time and will could pick those apart one by one.

“You now have some or all of the electronic components on that system and it’s a representative laboratory; it’s a playground for building, testing, and iterating on cyber-attacks where maybe the adversary had a really hard time” until he obtained actual copies of the gear, Lospinoso said. “It is the playground for them to develop attacks against similar items.”

Georgianna Shea, who spent five years at MITRE helping the Pentagon research and test new technologies,  said the loss of key equipment to the Taliban “exposes everything we do in the U.S., DOD: our plans of action, how we configure things, how we protect things. It allows them unlimited time and access to go through and find vulnerabilities that we may not be aware of.”

“It’s not just a Humvee. It’s not just a vehicle that gets you from point A to point B. It’s a Humvee that’s full of radios, technologies, crypto systems, things we don’t want our adversaries getting a hold of,” said Shea, now chief technologist at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’s Transformative Innovation Lab.

Of particular concern are the electronic countermeasures gear, or ECMs, used to detect improvised explosive devices.

“Imagine the research and development effort that went into develop those ECM devices that were designed to counter IEDs,” said Peter Christensen, a former director of the U.S. Army’s National Cyber Range. “Now, our adversaries have them. They’re going to have the software and the hardware that goes with that system. But also develop capabilities to defeat or mitigate the effectiveness of those ECM devices.”

Gear that has been “demilitarized” or “rendered inoperable,” as U.S. officials described the planes and vehicles left behind, can still reveal secrets, Shea said.

“In some cases, this equipment was fielded with the assumption we would have gates and guards to protect it. When it was developed, no one thought the Chinese would have it in their cyber lab, dissecting it, pulling it apart.”

Once an attacker has physical control of a device, little can stop her from discovering its vulnerabilities—and there are always vulnerabilities, Shea said.

Under current acquisition practices, most new defense gear is not tested for vulnerabilities until late in the design process. Testers often receive far too little time to test comprehensively. Sometimes they get just two weeks, she said, and yet “they always find something. Always.”

“Regardless of the previous testing that’s been done on compliance, they always find something: always… “They’re very backlogged and don’t have an unending amount of resources,” she said. So you have to schedule development with these testers. There’s not enough resources to test it to the depth and breadth that it should be to understand all of the vulnerabilities.”

Plans to fix newly discovered vulnerabilities “were often inconsistent or inadequate,” Christensen said.

Lospinoso, who spent years conducting such tests for the Army, still performs penetration testing for the U.S. military as a contractor. He says a smart hacker can usually find useful vulnerabilities  in hardware “within hours.”

When such a network attack disables a radio or a truck, troops are generally not trained to do anything about it. They may not even realize that they have been attacked, and may chalk up problems to age or maintenance problems.

“Every time we run an attack against a system, knocked out a subcomponent or have some really devastating effect that could cause loss of an asset—every time, the operator in the cockpit says, ‘We do not have operating procedures for what you just did,’” Lospinoso said.

Little of this is new. In 2017, the Government Accountability Office highlighted many of these concerns in a blistering report.

More than just insight into network vulnerabilities, the abandoned vehicles and gear will help China understand how U.S. forces work with partner militaries, said N. MacDonnell Ulsch, the CEO and chief analyst of Phylax Analytics.

“If you were to take all of the technology that was currently deployed in Afghanistan by the [United States] and you made an assessment of that, you have a point in time and a point in place reference of what the status quo is; what technology is being used, how much it costs, what’s it capable of doing and you realize it’s going to a developing nation,” Ulsch said.

China can use the knowledge to develop their weapons and tactics, but also to give their arms-export sales team an edge, he said. The Taliban have highlighted their nascent partnership with China as perhaps their most important foreign diplomatic effort. China, meanwhile, has already begun giving millions in aid to the new regime.

Whatever vulnerabilities China does discover will likely imperil U.S. troops for years to come, Lospinoso said.

“There is a zero percent chance we will go back and re-engineer” all of the various systems with serious cyber vulnerabilities, he said. “We are stuck with billions and billions in weapon systems that have fundamental flaws.”

 

Deputy CIA Director Says Here Comes al Qaeda Again

Leaving Afghanistan and abandoning Bagram Air Base immediately created a terror state. Did anyone contemplate that?

Meanwhile, the Taliban has named Mohammad Hassan Akhund, a longtime ally of Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar, to serve as the country’s acting prime minister. Akhund, who was the Taliban’s foreign minister before the U.S. invasion in 2001, told the United Nations in 1999 that “we will never give up Osama [bin Laden] at any price.”Hibatullah Akhundzada, considered the “emir” of Afghanistan by the Taliban, is a strong al Qaeda ally and proud father of a suicide bomber known as the “commander of the faithful.” Current al Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri reportedly swore allegiance to him as the “emir of the believers” in 2016.

Al Qaeda could reconstitute in Afghanistan and regain the capability to threaten the U.S. in “one to two” years, intelligence chiefs said Tuesday, revising downward estimates that were previously issued by the Pentagon.

source

“The current assessment, probably conservatively, is one to two years for al Qaeda to build some capability to at least threaten the homeland,” said Lieutenant General Scott Berrier, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), at an annual summit hosted by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, with panels moderated by CBS News.

“That said, DIA is not going to take…their eye off the ball of terrorism,” Berrier said.

CIA deputy director David Cohen said at the same event that the agency was keeping “a very keen watch” on the terror network’s activities in Afghanistan, adding there is evidence its militants are returning to the country.

“[W]e are already beginning to see some of the indications of some potential movement of al Qaeda to Afghanistan,” Cohen said, “but it’s early days, and we will obviously keep a very close eye on that.”

The Taliban, who seized control of Afghanistan in a stunningly rapid takeover last month, are known to have maintained close ties with al Qaeda and are suspected by analysts of harboring senior operatives.

Both U.S. officials said Tuesday that intelligence agencies were working on ways to continue intelligence collection without a troop presence or embassy in the country, acknowledging current capabilities had been meaningfully reduced by the U.S. withdrawal. Lawmakers, counterterrorism experts and former intelligence officials have expressed concern over how reliable so-called over-the-horizon capabilities can be without networks of informants to guide them.

“We’re thinking about ways how to gain access back into Afghanistan with all kinds of sources,” Berrier said. “We are prioritizing that effort.”

Cohen said the agency would seek to maintain a network of intelligence assets within Afghanistan, but that operating from a distance and absent a physical presence was not a “new” challenge for the intelligence community.

“As we work from over the horizon principally…we will also look for ways to work from within the horizon, to the extent that is possible,” Cohen said. “But we will approach this in the way that we have approached the counterterrorism mission in many places around the world for a number of years, and I think, as a community, we continue to get better and better at doing that.”

Speaking at the summit on Monday, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said Afghanistan did not currently top the list of international terror threats, saying the “greatest threat” came from militant groups operating in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq and Syria.

N.Korea Tests First ‘Strategic’ Cruise Missile

Japan’s chief cabinet secretary Katsunobu Kato said the country had “significant concerns” and was working with the US and South Korea to monitor the situation.

The US military said the test showed North Korea’s “continuing focus on developing its military programme”, adding that its commitment to defending allies South Korea and Japan remained “ironclad”.

Top-level officials from the three countries are due to meet this week to discuss North Korea’s denuclearisation process.

South Korea’s military is also doing an in-depth analysis of the launches with US intelligence authorities, the news agency Yonhap reports.

  • Tests involved new, long-range cruise missiles – KCNA
  • New missiles represent serious capability for N.Korea – analysts
  • U.S. military: Launches highlight threat to N.Korea’s neighbours
  • Tests came before meeting by U.S., Japan, S.Korea to discuss N.Korea

SEOUL, Sept 13 (Reuters) – North Korea carried out successful tests of a new long-range cruise missile over the weekend, state media said on Monday, seen by analysts as possibly the country’s first such weapon with a nuclear capability.

The missiles are “a strategic weapon of great significance” and flew 1,500 km (930 miles) before hitting their targets and falling into the country’s territorial waters during the tests on Saturday and Sunday, KCNA said.

The latest test highlighted steady progress in Pyongyang’s weapons programme amid a gridlock over talks aimed at dismantling the North’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes in return for U.S. sanctions relief. The talks have stalled since 2019.

North Korea’s cruise missiles usually generate less interest than ballistic missiles because they are not explicitly banned under U.N. Nations Security Council Resolutions.

“This would be the first cruise missile in North Korea to be explicitly designated a ‘strategic’ role,” said Ankit Panda, a senior fellow at the U.S.-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “This is a common euphemism for nuclear-capable system.”

It is unclear whether North Korea has mastered the technology needed to build warheads small enough to be carried on a cruise missile, but leader Kim Jong Un said earlier this year that developing smaller bombs is a top goal.

The two Koreas have been locked in an accelerating arms race that analysts fear will leave the region littered with powerful new missiles.

South Korea’s military did not disclose whether it had detected the North’s latest tests, but said on Monday it was conducting a detailed analysis in cooperation with the United States.

The U.S. military’s Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) said it was aware of the reports and was coordinating with its allies and partners.

“This activity highlights (North Korea’s) continuing focus on developing its military program and the threats that poses to its neighbours and the international community,” INDOPACOM said in a statement.

Rodong Sinmun, the ruling Workers’ Party’s official newspaper, ran photos of the new cruise missile flying and being fired from a transporter-erector-launcher.

The test provides “strategic significance of possessing another effective deterrence means for more reliably guaranteeing the security of our state and strongly containing the military manoeuvres of the hostile forces,” KCNA said.

The Academy of National Defense Science conducts long-range cruise missile tests in North Korea, as pictured in this combination of undated photos supplied by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on September 13, 2021.   KCNA via REUTERS    ATTENTION EDITORS - THIS IMAGE WAS PROVIDED BY A THIRD PARTY. REUTERS IS UNABLE TO INDEPENDENTLY VERIFY THIS IMAGE. NO THIRD PARTY SALES. SOUTH KOREA OUT. NO COMMERCIAL OR EDITORIAL SALES IN SOUTH KOREA.     TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
The Academy of National Defense Science conducts long-range cruise missile tests in North Korea, as pictured in this combination of undated photos supplied by North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on September 13, 2021. KCNA via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS – THIS IMAGE WAS PROVIDED BY A THIRD PARTY. REUTERS IS UNABLE TO INDEPENDENTLY VERIFY THIS IMAGE. NO THIRD PARTY SALES. SOUTH KOREA OUT. NO COMMERCIAL OR EDITORIAL SALES IN SOUTH KOREA. TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

It was seen as the North’s first missile launch after it tested a new tactical short-range ballistic missile in March. North Korea also conducted a cruise missile test just hours after U.S. President Joe Biden took office in late January.

SERIOUS CAPABILITY

Jeffrey Lewis, a missile researcher at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, said intermediate-range land-attack cruise missiles were no less a threat than ballistic missiles and were a pretty serious capability for North Korea.

“This is another system that is designed to fly under missile defence radars or around them,” Lewis said on Twitter.

Cruise missiles and short-range ballistic missiles that can be armed with either conventional or nuclear bombs are particularly destabilising in the event of conflict as it can be unclear which kind of warhead they are carrying, analysts said.

Kim Jong Un did not appear to have attended the test, with KCNA saying Pak Jong Chon, a member of the Workers’ Party’s powerful politburo and a secretary of its central committee, oversaw it.

The reclusive North has long accused the United States and South Korea of “hostile policy” toward Pyongyang.

The unveiling of the test came just a day before chief nuclear negotiators from the United States, South Korea and Japan meet in Tokyo to explore ways to break the standoff with North Korea.

China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, is also scheduled to visit Seoul on Tuesday for talks with his counterpart, Chung Eui-yong.

Biden’s administration has said it is open to diplomacy to achieve North Korea’s denuclearisation, but has shown no willingness to ease sanctions.

Sung Kim, the U.S. envoy for North Korea, said in August in Seoul that he was ready to meet with North Korean officials “anywhere, at any time.”

A reactivation of inter-Korean hotlines in July raised hopes for a restart of the negotiations, but the North stopped answering calls as annual South Korea-U.S. military exercises began last month, which Pyongyang had warned could trigger a security crisis.

In recent weeks South Korea became the first non-nuclear state to develop and test a submarine-launched ballistic missile.

Reporting by Hyonhee Shin and Josh Smith; Additional reporting by Idrees Ali in Washington; Editing by Daniel Wallis, Peter Cooney and Lincoln Feast.

The U.S. has Frozen $9.5 Billion in Assets Belonging to Afghanistan Central Bank

The U.S. has frozen nearly $9.5 billion in assets belonging to the Afghan central bank and stopped shipments of cash to the nation as it tries to keep a Taliban-led government from accessing the money, an administration official confirmed Tuesday.This amounts to roughly one-third of the country’s annual economic output. International aid flows represented roughly 43 percent of Afghanistan’s economy in 2020, according to the World Bank.Afghanistan Economy: Hard to recover - CGTN

The official said that any central bank assets that the Afghan government has in the U.S. will not be available to the Taliban, which remains on the Treasury Department’s sanctions designation list. Additionally, as the Taliban began their march through Afghanistan, the Biden administration cancelled a planned shipment of physical dollars due to be delivered to the country and directed the International Monetary Fund to renege on its long-planned release of funds to Afghanistan. More detail and context here. 

The United States’ principal competitors in Beijing and Moscow see a potential opening with the U.S. departure. While there is little thought that China or Russia are interested in aiding Afghanistan’s development – instead seeing the country as both a playground for great power influence and, on the part of Beijing, a mercantilist maneuver critical to clinching its Belt-and-Road initiative in South Asia – it is possible that China and Russia can actually leverage U.S. sanctions and the restrictions major financial institutions will face in dealing with Afghanistan to empower the Taliban and their own interests. The Taliban meanwhile may welcome China and Russia filling the void of western finance and aid while also taking advantage of the departure of U.S. restrictions on poppy production to return to state controlled narcotics sales, furthering enriching themselves while continuing to impoverish the Afghan people.

Beyond the reserves, the United States also sends roughly $3 billion per year in support for the Afghan military, or roughly 15 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. The funding can only be spent if the secretary of defense “certifies to Congress that the Afghan forces are controlled by a civilian, representative government that is committed to protecting human rights and women’s rights,” according to a congressional summary of the legislation. This funding is expected to stop flowing as well, along with smaller pots of money, such as $20 million for recruiting women to the Afghan national security forces.

About 80 percent of Afghanistan’s budget is funded by the United States and other international donors, John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, told Reuters in the spring. A spokesman for the White House Office of Management and Budget declined to comment on the status of congressionally approved funding for Afghanistan. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said at a news conference Tuesday that NATO has suspended aid to the Afghan government as well. “We have of course suspended all support, financial and other kinds of support, to the Afghan government, because there is no Afghan government for NATO to support,” Stoltenberg said. “No money is transferred; no support is provided.” More context here. 

Meanwhile, China, Pakistan, Iran and Russia will keep their embassies in Kabul open and functional while most other nations have shuttered and evacuated their embassy operations. China is making financial moves to support the Taliban while doing the same to takeover the now former US air base in Bagram.

The UN Secretary General held a half day conference seeking to raise the $606 million which humanitarian agencies say is urgently needed to provide life-saving aid to millions of Afghans over the four final months of the year.

Among other things, the money is needed for critical food and livelihood assistance for nearly 11 million people and essential health services for 3.4 million.

‘Starvation’

Guterres stressed that Afghans were experiencing “one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world” even before the Taliban takeover on August 15.

Some 40 percent of the country’s GDP was already drawn from foreign funding, and half of the population was already dependent on humanitarian aid, according to the UN.

Afghanistan is also facing a devastating drought and mass displacement in addition to the impact of Covid-19.

Fears now abound that other countries’ reluctance to deal with the Taliban could push Afghanistan over the edge.

Guterres announced that the UN would release $20 million from its Central Emergency Response Fund to support the humanitarian operation in Afghanistan.

Under the leadership of acting central bank governor, Haji Mohammad Idris, a Taliban loyalist who has no formal financial training, the central bank has been moving to restrict dollar outflows amid a pause in foreign aid and a scramble by some Afghanis to get savings out of the country.

Further controls are expected to hasten the afghani’s depreciation against the dollar, exacerbating inflation in a country where more than a third of the population lives on less than $2 a day.

“It’s a matter of concern that the remaining physical cash of U.S. dollars is going to reduce further,” said an Afghani banker. “With the restrictions we are predicting the dollar will reach more than 100 afghanis to the dollar.”

Less than a Dozen Countries Accepting Afghan Refugees

Primer:

Treaties and other international agreements are written agreements between sovereign states (or between states and international organizations) governed by international law.  The United States enters into more than 200 treaties and other international agreements each year.

The subjects of treaties span the whole spectrum of international relations: peace, trade, defense, territorial boundaries, human rights, law enforcement, environmental matters, and many others. As times change, so do treaties. In 1796, the United States entered into the Treaty with Tripoli to protect American citizens from kidnapping and ransom by pirates in the Mediterranean Sea. In 2001, the United States agreed to a treaty on cybercrime.

Read more about what specific bureaus are doing to support this policy issue:

Office of Treaty Affairs (L/T): The Office of the Assistant Legal Adviser for Treaty Affairs, within the Office of the Legal Adviser, provides guidance on all aspects of U.S. and international treaty law and practice. It manages the process under which the Department of State approves the negotiation and conclusion of all international agreements to which the U.S. will become a party. It also coordinates with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on issues involving the Senate’s advice and consent to ratification of treaties. Read more about the Office of Treaty Affairs

***

To date, the U.S. State Department has no secured refugee agreements with a permanent status as a result of the Afghanistan refugee crisis. Some countries are cooperating only on a temporary basis while conditions and vetting has been satisfied. This now forces the United States to essentially accept the high majority of the refugees which could exceed perhaps as many as 1.0 million. Today, several of our military bases across the globe and those inside the United States have become refugee camps with no end in sight.

Anyone remember the Syrian refugees and the continuing crisis throughout Europe? Even Germany is deporting Syrian refugees.

***

As of August 31, 2021 via Newsweek

U.S.

Afghans who aided the U.S. war effort can be eligible for special immigrant visas, but those who don’t qualify can look to resettle in the U.S. in other ways.

Earlier this summer, the Biden administration expanded its Afghan refugee program and created a new category for those who worked with U.S.-based news outlets or nongovernmental organizations.

As many as 50,000 Afghans could also arrive in the country on “humanitarian parole,” an immigration tool that allows people to enter the country without visas for urgent humanitarian reasons.

The Biden administration has not announced exactly how many Afghan refugees will be taken in by the U.S., but has committed to resettling up to 125,000 refuges in the 2022 fiscal year.

U.K.

Earlier this month, the U.K. government announced plans to welcome 5,000 Afghan refugees this year and resettle a total of 20,000 Afghans in the coming years.

The Afghan Citizens’ Resettlement Scheme would prioritize women and girls as well as religious and other minorities who are at most risk from the Taliban, the government said.

 

Afghan refugees in Manchester
People believed to have recently arrived from Afghanistan stand in the courtyard of a hotel near Manchester Airport on August 25, 2021 in Manchester, England.CHRISTOPHER FURLONG/GETTY IMAGES

Canada

Canada has said that it will take in 20,000 refugees from Afghanistan, focusing on those in danger from the Taliban, including government workers and women leaders.

The country’s Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino has said Canada would consider taking in additional refugees on behalf of the U.S. or other allies, if asked.

Mexico

Mexico welcomed a group of 124 Afghan media workers and their families on Wednesday.

The country had accepted its first group of refugees from Afghanistan on Tuesday, when five women and one man arrived in Mexico City, according to the Associated Press.

Mexico’s interior secretary, Olga Sánchez Cordero, said Wednesday that Mexico would grant asylum “to those Afghan citizens who require it.”

Germany

Germany has indicated that some Afghan refugees will be accepted, but numbers have not been specified.

Chancellor Angela Merkel faced criticism after Germany opened its borders to over a million migrants, mostly Syrians and Iraqis, six years ago.

After the Taliban takeover, Merkel said her government was focused on ensuring Afghan refugees “have a secure stay in countries neighbouring Afghanistan.”

France

In a televised address after the Taliban takeover, President Emmanuel Macron said Europe must protect itself from a wave of Afghan migrants.

He said France would “protect those who are in the most danger” but added that Europe “cannot take on the consequences from the current situation alone.”

Pakistan

Most Afghan refugees cross over the border into neighboring Pakistan.

In June, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan told The New York Times that the country would seal its border if the Taliban took control as it did not want another wave of refugees from Afghanistan.

The country was already struggling to cope with the estimated three million Afghan refugees already in Pakistan, he said.

Tajikistan

In July, Tajikistan said it was preparing to accept up to 100,000 refugees from its neighboring country.

Uganda

Uganda said it had agreed to a request from the U.S. to temporarily take in 2,000 refugees from Afghanistan. The African nation currently hosts about 1.4 million refugees.

Albania, North Macedonia and Kosovo

Albania and North Macedonia have also accepted a U.S. request to temporarily take in Afghan refugees, accepting 300 and 450 refugees respectively. Kosovo has also agreed to temporarily host refugees headed for the U.S., but numbers have not been specified.

Switzerland

The Swiss government has said it will not accept large groups of refugees arriving directly from Afghanistan.

Austria

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has ruled out taking in any more Afghan refugees. In a recent interview, Kurz said Austria had accepted 40,000 Afghans in the past few years, which he described as a “disproportionately large contribution.”

Afghan people climb atop plane
Afghan people climb atop a plane as they wait at the Kabul airport in Kabul on August 16, 2021, after a stunningly swift end to Afghanistan’s 20-year war.WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Turkey

Turkey hosts the largest number of refugees out of any country in the world, but has been ramping up construction of a border wall to keep further influxes of migrants out.

There are 182,000 registered Afghan migrants in Turkey and up to an estimated 120,000 unregistered ones, according to Reuters.

But the country’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has urged other European countries to take responsibility for those fleeing Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover, saying Turkey had no intention of becoming “Europe’s migrant storage unit.”

Iran

Iran already hosts 780,000 Afghans refugees, according to the U.N. refugee agency.

Emergency tents for refugees were set up in three Iranian provinces which border Afghanistan.

However, Hossein Ghassemi, the country’s interior ministry border affairs chief, has said that any Afghans who have crossed into Iran would be repatriated once conditions improve.

Russia

President Vladimir Putin has said Russia will not accept Afghan refugees because he does not want militants entering the country disguised as refugees.

“We don’t want militants under the disguise of refugees to appear here [in Russia] again,” he said Sunday, according to the TASS news agency.

“We will do everything, in particular in contact with our Western partners, to ensure stability in Afghanistan as well. But we do not want a repeat of the situation of the 1990s and early 2000s.”

Australia

Australia has pledged to take in 3,000 Afghan refugees within an existing annual allocation of its humanitarian visa program. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has indicated the number could be increased, referring to it as “a floor, not a ceiling.”

Meanwhile, the country has also begun a campaign to deter Afghan refuges from trying to reach Australia by boat.

“Australia’s strong border protection policies have not and will not change,” Karen Andrews, Australia’s minister for home affairs, said in a video posted on YouTube Monday.

“No one who arrives in Australia illegally by boat will ever settle here. Do not attempt an illegal boat journey to Australia. You have zero chance of success.”