Aisha Wahab, the newly elected member of the U.S. Congress, has said that warlords backed by Washington plundered Afghanistan instead of serving the country’s interests. She made the remarks in an interview with New Democracy and sharply criticised the performance of U.S.-backed armed groups.<\/p>\n
Wahab also stressed that the United States should pursue diplomacy with Afghanistan. According to her, Washington should engage with Afghanistan regardless of which group is in power and work through diplomatic channels on issues such as human rights, women’s rights and civil rights.<\/p>\n
She also said Afghanistan’s geography and resources make it important to many countries, and that the U.S. should at least maintain engagement with Afghanistan to cooperate and negotiate deals over its resources. Wahab added that Washington has not so far made effective use of its diplomatic capacity in this regard.<\/p>\n
The U.S. Congress member-elect said that alongside the Taliban administration, other warlord groups in Afghanistan are also seeking power, and that these groups too have put their own interests ahead of the country’s interests. She added that in practice, these factions have not worked for what would benefit Afghanistan.<\/p>\n
Aisha Wahab won a special election last week to fill Eric Swalwell’s seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming the first person of Afghan descent to enter the U.S. Congress. She is a California state senator and a member of the Democratic Party.<\/p>\n
Wahab is considered one of the progressive figures in the Democratic Party. During the election campaign, she condemned the killing of people in Gaza by the Israeli regime and said that if elected to Congress, she would work to stop U.S. military support for the regime.<\/p>\n
According to Politico, political groups opposed to Wahab spent millions of dollars in the final days of the election to prevent her victory. The report said that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, and affiliated organizations had spent at least $5 million to support the Republican candidate and block Wahab’s win.<\/p>\n
Aisha Wahab was born in New York in 1987. Her family emigrated to the United States during the wars in the Soviet period in Afghanistan, and she is now known as the first Afghan-descended representative in the U.S. Congress.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Aisha Wahab says U.S.-backed warlords plundered Afghanistan and urges Washington to pursue diplomacy with Kabul.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20357,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,6,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-important-news","category-international","category-top-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20358\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}