Afghanistan Peace CampaignTuesday, July 16, 2024
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Taliban attendance and Afghan civil society’s exclusion at Doha 3 meeting was heavily criticized.
- Western states want Taliban to uphold human rights, but regional powers are more focused on Afghanistan stabilizing.
- Still, Doha 3 made progress toward more coordinated international engagement.
Western donor states and human rights defenders strongly criticized the latest gathering for the U.N.’s inclusion of the Taliban.
Significant Criticism
The focus on securing the Taliban’s attendance for Doha 3 prompted a groundswell of criticism from Afghan civil society and human rights defenders. In the weeks leading up to Doha 3, officials from a number of donor states expressed frustration, and several even pondered the possibility of downgrading or cancelling their attendance.
The criticism was leveled on two different planes. Publicly, much of the backlash against the U.N.’s planning focused on the lack of civil society representation at the main event, highlighting the absence of Afghan women. The lack of women’s rights on the public version of the meeting’s agenda was seen as a further, unnecessary concession to the Taliban.
It is worth noting that states discussed women’s rights extensively with the Taliban at Doha 3, and the U.N. always planned on this.
Reactions and Reasoning
Less than two weeks before Doha 3, a group of major donors, including the United States, drafted a collective communique to the U.N. The letter, not made public but leaked widely, was a sternly worded rebuke on both the substance and planning process for the impending meeting.
The signatories emphasized the importance of not marginalizing Afghan civil society and noted domestic political demands to hold the Taliban accountable on human rights. One Western official described the signatories’ perception that regional countries’ interests seemed to carry more weight in the U.N.’s decision making than those of the largest donors supporting aid and development in Afghanistan.
This letter implicitly threatened that donor states (including signatories such as Canada, the U.K. and France) might scale down their participation in the gathering. In particular, the signatories insisted on engagement with civil society in some form. The U.N. accommodated this demand — some U.N. officials privately noted that it had always been their intent to involve civil society, at the same level as they had been during Doha 2, and it was simply a matter of careful negotiation with the Taliban to ensure they would not pull out. But the U.N. also preserved the originally proposed agenda, and largely stuck to its approach.
Some donors went further: Canada published a reprimand of the U.N.’s approach to the conference — though they also ultimately attended.
In the end, on the second day of Doha 3, a side event was held with five Afghan women and two men, most of them residing inside Afghanistan — similar in scope to the inclusion of civil society at Doha 2.
Speaking to the press from Doha, DiCarlo hinted at the logic underlying U.N.’s approach, saying the brief was to bring the Taliban together with the world’s envoys in these meetings. This was an intriguing, almost misleading representation of the Security Council’s resolution in December 2023. Yes, the U.N. was encouraged to continue facilitating the envoy meeting format, but with very little detail specified. Where did this brief, which seemed to privilege the Taliban, come from?
The U.N. was compelled to find a balance between the agendas of Western states, many of which demand to see the Taliban adhere to international standards on human rights before proceeding any further with development assistance or economic normalization, and those of regional powers, eager to see nearby Afghanistan stabilize. Sources suggest that key regional states — including permanent Security Council members Russia and China — saw little reason to continue engaging in a U.N. process that did not include the Taliban. In other words, while Western frustrations over the U.N.’s direction spilled into public view, regional states may have been even closer to abandoning the meeting format.
There was a basic theory of change underpinning Doha 3 preparations: the U.N. assessment, and all of its recommendations, were intended to break free from the deadlock that had overtaken international relations with the Taliban. To move past this deadlock, U.N. officials have said the most difficult demands should be set aside until later in this engagement process. For now, they assert, discussion should focus on overlapping interests. Only after much more trust has been built between the suspicious Taliban and a host of doubtful states, do these officials feel it makes sense to bring the most contentious issues to the table.
The counterargument is that such sequencing awards the Taliban legitimacy and emboldens their repressive policy agenda. The rebuttal to this view, however, is that waiting for the Taliban to meet demands before expanding assistance, knowing the Taliban are unlikely to budge, is a decision to cut off 40 million Afghans from the rest of the world. These arguments on how to approach engaging with such a difficult regime are not new — they remain much the same as before the U.N. assessment proposed a roadmap to move past them.
Now What?
Undersecretary-general DiCarlo and other U.N. leaders have stressed that Doha 3 is but one meeting in a long-term process. But privately, officials have made clear that DiCarlo and other U.N. leaders do not have the bandwidth to continue managing the Doha meeting format, much less any broader process it might spur. The negative reactions and public controversy around Doha 3 have only lessened the U.N.’s enthusiasm to occupy center stage as host and facilitator.
The most efficient solution is one that has been mired in Security Council politics from the beginning. Last year’s assessment recommended appointing a U.N. official for Afghanistan, an envoy or coordinator in addition to Special Representative Roza Atunbayeva who manages U.N. presence in the country, to carry out the obviously full-time job of organizing an international engagement process. However, the Taliban’s objections to such an appointment, along with the lack of Russian and Chinese enthusiasm, may prove to be insurmountable.
In spite of the controversy beforehand and the difficult path ahead, Doha 3 did make concrete progress toward more coordinated international engagement. Attending nations tentatively agreed to establish technical-level working groups on the chief agenda items: private-sector economic issues and counternarcotics. More work remains before the concept can be finalized, and so this outcome was not formally announced from Doha. But such working groups will open new channels of dialogue between donors, regional states and technocrats from Taliban-run ministries — with the aim of streamlining and improving assistance to the Afghan people.
The Taliban have thus far kept mum about the conference, other than claiming that the world heard and accepted their messaging. Their chief spokesman, who led the delegation to Doha, declined to commit to participation in future meetings, saying that each time, Taliban leadership would determine if the engagement would be beneficial.
The controversy surrounding Doha 3 revealed that, while most countries (and the Taliban) are willing to entertain discussion about a difficult roadmap forward, many are also still insistent: the other side must give something first. Neither Western donor states nor the Taliban’s leadership are likely to bend when it comes to the group’s draconian domestic policies, at least not in the foreseeable future.
These high levels of mistrust require a delicately managed process, in which all sides cautiously inch forward, testing each other, assured that all sides will benefit if they continue to move forward together. Doha 3 illustrated how badly such a process requires an empowered, dedicated individual or office to keep all sides incentivized to do so.
The U.N. is uniquely positioned to provide this sort of leadership; with a growing gap between the approach of donors and regional states, there is no alternative. But is the U.N. itself, as a vulnerable institution increasingly underfunded and under siege, sufficiently incentivized to try and provide that sort of leadership, while under constant criticism?
U.S. national interests are best served through careful, principled engagement with the Taliban.
