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Four countries, six years, 7,000 miles: one Afghan family’s journey to the US

August 30, 2022

The distance from Afghanistan’s south-western province of Nimroz to Iran’s historical city of Yazd is 480 miles (773km). To survive the journey, Zahra Amiri and her family ate snow.

Since the US withdrawal from Afghanistan last August, more than 76,000 Afghans have been resettled as part of the US government operation labeled Allies Welcome. Zahra, 21, and her family are among the newly arrived Afghans, relocating from the cities of Kabul and Nimroz to Yazd and Tehran in Iran, then to Ankara, Turkey, before finally resettling in Denver, Colorado, in February.

Zahra and the rest of this new Afghan community are set to contribute nearly $200m in taxes and $1.4bn to the American economy in their first year of work, according to new data released this month by the International Rescue Committee (IRC).

Since their arrival, more than 41,000 working-age Afghans have been placed into various industries including accommodation and food services, retail trade, manufacturing, transportation and warehousing. This new community of Afghans arriving in the US with a multitude of skills and degrees has the potential to contribute significantly to the American economy, especially as the country grapples with inflation and supply chain issues.

Zahra Amiri’s trek, spanning four countries and more than 7,000 miles, illustrates what these refugees had to endure to begin their new life.

Zahra’s father, who held a government-related job, was killed in a 2014 suicide attack. After her father’s death, Zahra and her four siblings in Kabul had lost not only a parent but also their family’s chief provider – and with that, the sense of peace that he helped shroud them with had been shattered.

Being the eldest, Zahra was suddenly confronted with two options: either forcibly marry a husband who could financially support her or flee.

“I did not want to end up … jobless and uneducated, so I chose to become a refugee,” Zahra told the Guardian.

One day in 2016, Zahra sat down with her mom and revealed her plans to her.

“Let’s move out of here,” she said about Afghanistan, where 65% of all civilian casualties from suicide attacks globally occur and where 57% of girls are married before the age of 16. “We are not in a situation where we can live out our lives in peace in Afghanistan.”

Her mother agreed. That year, Zahra, her mother and her siblings – the youngest of whom was two at the time – journeyed from Kabul to Nimroz, a south-west Afghan province that lies east of Iran. From Nimroz, Zahra and her family traveled to Yazd, one of Iran’s largest cities, with scarcely any food or water, forcing them to eat snow in a desperate attempt to nourish themselves.

Border officials in Yazd turned Zahra and her family away, deporting them back to Nimroz. They tried the trip a second time and finally made it through to Tehran where the next leg of the journey awaited: Ankara, Turkey.

“They would just throw families in each truck,” Zahra said, recalling how she was separated from her family for nearly two weeks on the way from Iran to Turkey before finally reuniting with them in Ankara in March 2016.

In Ankara, Zahra and her family filed for refugee status with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and submitted a visa application to the US. In the six years that it took for her family’s application to be approved by the US government, Zahra completed her high school education while working as a dishwasher and a coffee maker, earning between $1.10 and $1.93 daily.

“It’s not unusual for an application to take that long, especially considering that she applied during [Donald Trump’s presidency] where refugee arrivals were repeatedly cut, where we had things like the travel ban that really damaged the US government’s ability to process refugee applications,” an IRC spokesperson, Stanford Prescott, told the Guardian.

The US government approved Zahra’s family’s visa application early this year. On 2 February, Zahra donned a knitted sweater and pushed two pink quilted suitcases across the terrazzo tiles of the Istanbul airport.

She was finally bound for the United States.

Federal immigration services chose Colorado as the state in which to resettle Zahra’s family. With the IRC’s assistance, Zahra and her family arrived in Denver, initially to stay at a hotel for two months before being relocated to an apartment.

As with many of its refugee clientele, the IRC provided financial literacy classes, job training courses and an interpreter to Zahra and her family. The IRC helped Zahra lock down a job with the airline caterer Sky Chefs about a month and a half ago, building on the skills she had amassed while working in restaurants and kitchens.

At Sky Chefs, Zahra earns $19 an hour as she takes orders, packages them and gives them to customers. She earned a promotion to a manager assistant’s position two weeks ago and now trains new hires.

“I can move up positions here, unlike in Turkey where even when I gave my 100%, I could not move up because I am a woman and because of my refugee status,” she said.

Top job titles held by newly arrived Afghans include general production, warehouse worker, food preparer, driver and security guard, according to data from the IRC.

Typically, Afghan refugees are placed in their first jobs within 126 days of their arrival and earn an average of $16.67 an hour – which amounts to an annual income of $34,673.

“For most of these families, this is their very first job,” the IRC’s director economic empowerment, Erica Bouris, told the Guardian. “They are getting lots of things situated in the first year.

“In a lot of ways, this is very much step one in that much longer process of rebuilding their home, their life and integration into the communities.”

Bouris added: “We see lots of really interesting pathways, whether it’s that they try to pursue a certification so that they can work in a job that’s similar to what they had back home, or they might, as they settle into a new community, see for example that there are a lot of jobs in healthcare in this community and they pay well so they might pursue education and training so that they can move into a healthcare job.

“Each story is really individual, but people absolutely do take steps towards additional education, skills and training and have medium and long-term career goals that they pursue.”

Zahra is currently taking English as a second language (ESL) classes as she prepares to enroll in Aurora University’s dentistry program at the start of next year.

As many Afghans carve out new lives for themselves in the US, many still face the possibility of losing their legal right to reside in the country. The US government allowed them to enter the country in attempts to bring thousands of fleeing Afghans to safety as quickly as possible.

But humanitarian parole lasts only two years. It is not like the US’s refugee resettlement program, where participants have a clear path towards American citizenship.

Afghans on humanitarian parole must seek other paths of obtaining permanent immigration status, such as asylum, at the end of the two-year period in question.

However, without the assistance of specialized lawyers, the Byzantine asylum process is particularly difficult to navigate. Many Afghans who fled their country were also advised to destroy identification documents, professional certifications and other information that could support their asylum claims, further complicating their situation.

Although organizations like the IRC have launched various programs and collaborate with pro-bono lawyers to assist Afghans with their asylum claims, there’s another hurdle: The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is facing its own mounting backlog of asylum applications.

With the pandemic exacerbating processing delays, the USCIS is currently struggling with a backlog of nearly 5.2m cases and 8.5m pending cases. The backlog was significantly lighter – 2.7m cases – in July 2019.

“This year, even though the [Joe Biden White House] set an ambitious goal of [admitting] 125,000 [refugees], they’re only going to admit a fraction of that amount and what that shows is that refugee admission is broken and needs a lot more work so that ambition can be reality,” the IRC’s senior director of resettlement, asylum and integration policy, JC Hendrickson, told the Guardian.

As a result, the IRC has been calling on Congress to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, a bipartisan bill introduced earlier this month that would provide Afghan refugees with a pathway to lawful permanent residence in the US.

“This bipartisan legislation will provide a pathway to lawful permanent status for certain Afghan civilians, offering them a way out of legal limbo and the looming threat of deportation with great risk to their personal safety,” said Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, a co-sponsor of the bill. “Congress has a track record of passing similar legislation on humanitarian grounds, and we must swiftly do so again.”

Many Afghans remain optimistic as they settle into American society’s fabric and rebuild their lives. To Zahra, being in the US means more than just experiencing upward economic mobility.

“I know I’m new,” she said. “I know at the moment I have no voice, but in the future, I would like to raise my voice and let people know that men and women can work equally.

“If anyone needs help now or in the future, I’m willing to show them a way that they can pursue. I want to let Afghan women know that they can do what a man can do. It’s my dream to let Afghan women know that we are as equal as men.”

Four countries, six years, 7,000 miles: one Afghan family’s journey to the US
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UN Aid Chief Pushes for Restart of Afghanistan Development Aid

August 30, 2022
Reuters
29 Aug 2022

More than half of Afghanistan’s 39 million people need humanitarian help and six million are at risk of famine, said Griffiths.

Countries should restart development aid for Afghanistan that was halted a year ago when the Islamic Emirate seized power, the UN aid chief said on Monday, as the US told Russia and China to “put your money where your mouth is.”

Afghanistan has long relied heavily on development aid, which was cut as the international community demanded the Islamic Emirate respect human rights, particularly for girls and women whose access to work and school has been limited by the interim government.

“Poverty is deepening, the population is still growing, and the de facto authorities have no budget to invest in their own future. It’s clear to us that some development support needs to be restarted,” UN aid chief Martin Griffiths told the UN Security Council.

More than half of Afghanistan’s 39 million people need humanitarian help and six million are at risk of famine, said Griffiths. More than a million children are “estimated to be suffering from the most severe, life-threatening form of malnutrition” and could die without proper treatment, he said.

“Afghanistan’s de facto authorities must also do their part. Bureaucratic interferences and procedures slow down humanitarian assistance when it is needed most. Female humanitarian aid workers … must be allowed to work unhindered and securely. And girls must be allowed to continue their education,” he said.

The Islamic Emirate has not been formally recognized by any foreign governments and is still subjected to international sanctions, which the United Nations and aid groups say are now hindering humanitarian operations in Afghanistan.

‘PUT YOUR MONEY WHERE YOUR MOUTH IS’

International banks are wary of breaching sanctions and the United Nations and aid groups have been struggling to get enough money into the country over the past year.

“Humanitarians have brought in over $1 billion in cash to sustain program delivery, but the liquidity and banking crisis continues to impact delivery of assistance and on the daily lives of Afghans,” Griffiths said.

The United Nations has been trying to kickstart a system – described as a Humanitarian Exchange Facility (HEF) – to swap millions of aid dollars for Afghan currency in a plan to stem aid and economic crises and bypass Islamic Emirate leaders.

Griffiths said this plan was “still under deliberation” with the Islamic Emirate.

Billions of dollars in Afghan central bank reserves, held mainly in the United States, have also been frozen by foreign governments to prevent it from falling into Islamic Emirate hands. Russia and China have called for those funds to be released.

US Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said: “No country that is serious about containing terrorism in Afghanistan would advocate to give the Taliban instantaneous, unconditional access to billions in assets.”

The Afghan central bank “was hollowed out long ago” and cannot currently conduct responsible monetary policy, she said, citing a lack of credible systems to combat money laundering and the financing of terrorism.

Thomas-Greenfield said the United States was the top aid donor to Afghanistan and called out Russia and China: “If you want to talk about how Afghanistan needs help, that’s fine. But we humbly suggest you put your money where your mouth is.”

Russia and China dismissed her remarks.

UN Aid Chief Pushes for Restart of Afghanistan Development Aid
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TOLOnews Interview With UK’s General Sir Nick Carter

August 30, 2022
Banafsha Binesh
Tolo News
30 August 2022

According to Carter, not inviting the Taliban to the Bonn meeting in 2001 was a failure.

General Sir Nick Carter, the former Chief of the Defense Staff of the United Kingdom, believes that interaction with Afghanistan’s current government is necessary.

In a special interview with TOLOnews, Carter stressed that the Islamic Emirate has a chance to be recognized by the international community if they form an inclusive government and uphold human rights.

“Engaging with the Taliban means we must try to encourage the moderate elements in the Taliban to think differently and to think about how they can create an inclusive government and to create a government in a way that is genuinely consistent and predictable, and this means that those Afghans who want to lead normal lives are able to lead normal lives. I think it is important,” he said.

“They need to govern inclusively to the benefit of all Afghans, and if they do that there is reasonable chance that many Afghans…who have left Afghanistan over the course of the last year might return to the country which will be very good for the country,” Carter added.

According to Carter, not inviting the Taliban to the Bonn meeting in 2001 was a failure.

“It was obviously a failure to exclude the Taliban from the Bonn agreements and not to continue a dialogue with the Taliban which could have led to an inclusive government,” he said.

Since the Islamic Emirate took over, more than a year has passed, but no country has officially recognized it.

TOLOnews Interview With UK’s General Sir Nick Carter
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The Real Problem With Biden’s Afghanistan Withdrawal: It Came 10 Years Too Late

August 30, 2022

19fortyfive

Published 29 August 2022

Tomorrow marks the first anniversary of America’s messy and chaotic withdrawal from the 20-year war in Afghanistan. Many observers are evaluating today whether President Joe Biden’s decision to end the war was the right one. While there is no question that America’s exit could have been handled better, the bigger question is whether Biden was right to leave.

The answer is a resounding yes. In fact, he should have done so earlier.

That view is not universal, however. Some of the most famous advocates of the two-decade war in Afghanistan have been just as outspoken in claiming Biden’s order to end it was a mistake. In The Atlantic, former U.S. commander, retired Gen. David H. Petraeus, wrote that the real problems were America’s lack of commitment and strategic resolve.

John Nagl, who famously penned the military’s counterinsurgency strategy, claimed, “The failure to build a sufficient dedicated advisory force structure is among the most critical failures of the military” in Afghanistan and “contributed significantly to American defeat” in that war.

Former Army Deputy Chief of Staff, retired Gen. Jack Keane, went so far as to blame the president’s withdrawal for the Taliban’s return to Kabul. Keane claims that American withdrawal put the Taliban in charge again, allowing them to provide sanctuary to al Qaeda. What we should have done, Keane says, is maintain an acceptable stalemate.

What all of these men essentially argue is that the U.S. did not try hard enough, did not stay long enough, and did not provide enough support.

Yet as I can personally attest from having served two combat tours in Afghanistan (the last during 2010-2011, at the height of Petraeus’s Afghan surge), these proponents of continued U.S. military engagement in Afghanistan are ignoring a whole herd of elephants in the room.

The reality is that Petraeus, Keane, and Nagl were three leading voices among a broad cohort of foreign policy elite in the United States that constantly argued for more troops, more time, and more engagement. Any talk of ending the war, of withdrawing, was summarily rejected. The rejections were always accompanied by stark warnings of unspecific threats that would materialize if the U.S. military left.

But over the final 13 years of the war, there were a handful of highly qualified voices that tried to inject reality into the conversation.  Matthew Hoh was the first.

In September 2009, Hoh was a senior civilian officer for the State Department, working in Afghanistan’s Zabul province. A former Marine who led a combat engineer company during the Iraq war, he resigned his post in protest. The Afghan people who were fighting against the U.S. coalition, he told ABC News, weren’t doing so “for any ideological reasons, not because of any links to al Qaeda,” but simply “because we are occupying them.”

The Afghan government, Hoh wrote in his resignation letter, demonstrated a “glaring corruption and unabashed graft; a president whose confidants and chief advisors comprise drug lords and war crimes villains, who mock our own rule of law.” The regional officials were just as corrupt, he claimed. “Our support for this kind of government,” Hoh concluded, “coupled with a misunderstanding of the insurgency’s true nature, reminds me horribly of our involvement with South Vietnam.”

One of the most consistent and accurate voices warning that our war was failing throughout was Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In a 2010 assessment, Cordesman wrote, “The lack of transparency, unity of effort, and effective (action) in each of the six areas (of President Obama’s Afghan war strategy) is now losing the war. No amount of spin, optimism, and wishful thinking can deal with any one of these challenges.”

During my second combat deployment to Afghanistan, I found that nearly everything Hoh and Cordesman had written was accurate, and in some cases understated. I lamented in a 2012 Armed Forces Journal essay that senior U.S. civilian and military leaders were systematically deceiving the American public about the war, claiming progress where there was none.

“How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding,” I rhetorically asked. The most responsible action then-President Obama could have taken would been to have ended the war in 2012, not let five more years of pointless war and sacrifice pass before handing the morass off to his successor. Trump could have ended the war during his Administration, but at least he established an end date for the war before he left office.

Despite the warnings shared by many who had direct knowledge of the failures of the war, the pro-war advocates won out for another full decade after I wrote the above. During that time, thousands more Americans were killed and wounded – hundreds of thousands would eventually suffer traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder – for a war that was militarily unwinnable.

Biden was right to end the war and stop the bleeding. Without question, the withdrawal could have been executed better, but the truth is that the rot of two full decades spent trying to cover military failure could no longer be hidden, resulting in the complete collapse of the Afghan state in mere months. To stay longer would have increased the number of U.S. casualties and delayed the inevitable.

Expert Biography: Now a 1945 Contributing Editor, Daniel L. Davis is a Senior Fellow for Defense Priorities and a former Lt. Col. in the U.S. Army who deployed into combat zones four times. He is the author of “The Eleventh Hour in 2020 America.” Follow him @DanielLDavis.

The Real Problem With Biden’s Afghanistan Withdrawal: It Came 10 Years Too Late
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Afghanistan reels from deadly flash floods and landslides

August 30, 2022
By Abid Hussain
Al Jazeera
Published On 30 Aug 2022

Martin Griffiths said donors should immediately provide Afghanistan with $770m to survive the coming colder months.

Several provinces across the eastern, central, southern and western regions of Afghanistan have been hit by heavy rains, resulting in flash floods and landslides that have caused the deaths of more than 180 people, displaced at least 8,000 others and damaged at least 3,000 houses.

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the provinces of Kunar, Laghman, Logar, Wardak, Nangarhar, Nuristan, Paktia and Parwan have been the hardest hit.

The UN OCHA – in its latest update – said that in this month alone, at least 118 people died due to flash floods. Several provinces of Afghanistan have faced heavy rains and floods in recent weeks. At least 20 people have been killed and 30 others injured in Logar province.

Afghanistan has been reeling from natural disasters this year, including a drought and a devastating earthquake that killed more than 1,000 people in June. The nation has been largely cut off from the international financial system since the Taliban took over a year ago.

Mullah Sharafuddin Muslim, deputy minister of state for disaster management of the Taliban government, told reporters that the floods have caused major loss of life and assets.

Speaking at a news conference on August 27, Mullah Abdul Latif Mansour, acting minister of energy and water, said that “750 cisterns, 329 small dams, and 441 major water channels were damaged in recent flooding across the country.”

The acting minister of agriculture, irrigation and livestock, Mullah Ataullah Omari, said almost 600,000 acres (24,281 hectares) of land remains flooded and “cannot be used”. The Taliban officials said that the country is currently experiencing a “humanitarian crisis” and appealed for more international aid.

Feroz Khan, resident of Khoshi district in Logar province, told Al Jazeera that four days ago he was at home with his family when the floods hit.

“We were just having lunch when the flood struck. We were helpless and did not know what to do. The walls of my house crumbled, and water poured in my home, and took away our things,” he said.

“We forgot everything and just tried to run out and save our lives,” he said, adding that the deluge swept away livestock as well.

A day later, they managed to find shelter at their relatives’ home. “Our mud house is unlivable, and we don’t know when we will manage to go back, if at all,” he said.

Meanwhile, on Monday, the UN humanitarian chief urged donors to restore funding for development in Afghanistan that was frozen when the Taliban took last August, warning that six million people were at risk of famine.

Martin Griffiths told the United Nations Security Council that Afghanistan faced multiple crises – humanitarian, economic, climate, hunger and financial – and that donors should immediately provide $770m to help Afghans survive the coming colder months.

Conflict, poverty, climate shocks and food insecurity “have long been a sad reality” in Afghanistan, but he said what makes the current situation “so critical” is the halt to large-scale development aid.

“Poverty is deepening, the population is still growing, and the de facto authorities have no budget to invest in their own future. It is clear to us that some development support needs to be restarted,” Griffiths said.

More than half of Afghanistan’s 39 million people need humanitarian help and six million are at risk of famine. More than a million children are “estimated to be suffering from the most severe, life-threatening form of malnutrition” and could die without proper treatment, he said.

The Taliban has not been formally recognised by any foreign governments and is still subjected to international sanctions, which the UN and aid groups say are now hindering humanitarian operations in the country.

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA
Afghanistan reels from deadly flash floods and landslides
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‘The Taliban don’t know how to govern’: the Afghan women shaping global policy from exile

August 28, 2022
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Despite the upheaval of the Taliban takeover, the ‘group of six’ are finding ways to tackle the political and humanitarian crisis

It has been described as Afghanistan’s brain drain, after the Taliban’s return to power last year precipitated an exodus of politicians, academics and journalists who fled in anticipation of reprisals and censorship under the militant group’s draconian regime.

For a small group of Afghan women, however, the work of running the country has not stopped, even in exile.

Fawzia Koofi is a former member of Afghanistan’s parliament and was its first female deputy speaker. Despite moving several times since leaving the country in August last year, the 47-year-old has kept talking with her former colleagues and contacts in international governance, working to find solutions to the political and humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan.

“They [the Taliban] don’t know how to govern and they don’t respect the social mosaic of Afghanistan, which makes them more fragile, but is also hurting Afghans,” says Koofi, who has been working in Europe and the US with member states across the UN for the past year. “I don’t believe they will last very long, but I am concerned over the damage they inflict on Afghanistan’s social and political fabric.”

The work of Koofi and fellow Afghan women has helped to fill the gulf that exists between the Taliban, which are operating under severe sanctions and are domestically consumed with an economic crisis and enforcing gender apartheid, and the international community.

“We call them the ‘group of six’,” says Sarah Douglas, of UN Women, referring to a core group of Afghan women who have been instrumental in steering international policy towards their country over the past year. The group also includes Asila Wardak, a former diplomat and one of the founders of the Afghan Women’s Network; Sofia Ramyar, the former executive director of the youth-led organisation Afghans for Progressive Thinking; and the journalist Anisa Shaheed.

Giving an example, Douglas says: “There were negotiations around the mandate renewal of the UN assistance mission in Afghanistan (Unama) – and concerns that the mandate would regress in terms of gender equality and human rights, and that this would be reflected in the budget. But the mandate remained intact, and central member states actually reached out to me and said that the advocacy by these women really made a difference in those negotiations.”

Mariken Bruusgaard Harbitz, part of the permanent mission of Norway to the UN, says: “Norway initiated closed-door dialogues for these women to present their priorities to key member states at a critical time. During the process of renewing Unama’s mandate, these women came with clear expectations to the wording of the mandate, which in turn contributed to a strong monitoring and reporting mechanism for Unama on the ground.”

Mariam Safi, director of the Afghan Organisation for Policy Research and Development Studies, has not allowed the chaos and shock of the last year to stop her continuing her work from Canada, collecting crucial data from Afghanistan, specifically from women. After a brief hiatus, Safi improvised and restarted her work a few months ago through a digital platform, with female researchers across Canada and Afghanistan working from home.

One of their key projects, called Bishnaw, which means “listen” in Dari, continues to hold surveys with women across Afghanistan. “There’s a narrative [in the media] right now that says Afghans are predominantly concerned with the humanitarian crisis,” says Safi. “But our data from women across nine provinces shows that right after that, women are most concerned about women’s rights and closure of girls’ schools.”

Bishnaw’s surveys have also revealed a pattern of women being excluded from receiving international aid. “Of about 295 women, 163 told us that no women in their household had access to aid, contrary to the Taliban claims that women-led households were being provided aid. Only about five women out of 532 surveyed said all women have access at all.”

“Such data can actually provide [the international community] with a lot more leverage in their discussions with the Taliban,” she says. “In every meeting they are always asking, ‘What do Afghans want? What do women want? What are their concerns?’ We want to be able to provide data to answer those questions,” she says.

Naheed Farid, one of the youngest Afghan parliamentarians when she was elected at 27, describes her work with the group of six as reviving her sense of mission after she left Kabul for the US last year. “I had lost all hope after the Taliban takeover. But watching Afghan women and youth marching across Kabul, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif and Jalalabad demanding for their rights gave me the strength to reignite my advocacy,” she says.

Douglas says there is a danger of international focus drifting away from Afghanistan without the efforts of these women and others like them. “My assessment is that they are being extremely bold because they want to keep the momentum and the visibility, and the issue of Afghan women, high on the agenda. And especially with the situation in Ukraine, they’re very concerned that the international community is forgetting about that.”

One member state whom she highlights for their continued commitment to working with the group is Ireland. Their outgoing ambassador to the UN, Geraldine Byrne Nason, says: “With my team, I meet with them on roughly a monthly basis. We cover the latest developments in Afghanistan as they affect ordinary people, and women in particular. I keep them abreast of developments at the UN and in particular, at the security council. I seek their views on the issues of the day as they relate to the council’s work on Afghanistan. We exchange views on how to use our respective leverage to make a difference.”

“Discussions of and decisions on peace and security in a conference room in midtown Manhattan can only be effective if they are informed by the voices of those directly impacted,” says Byrne.

‘The Taliban don’t know how to govern’: the Afghan women shaping global policy from exile
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The Afghan Women Left Behind

August 27, 2022
By Rozina Ali
The New Yorker

On the morning of August 15, 2021, Samira was lying in bed, drifting in and out of sleep, in a room she shared with several other people. They were in a shelter in Kabul run by Women for Afghan Women (waw), a U.S.-headquartered N.G.O. dedicated to protecting vulnerable women in Afghanistan. Samira and her roommates had found refuge there from abusive brothers, fathers, husbands. Suddenly, she was jolted awake by the voice of the shelter manager giving urgent orders: the Taliban had taken control of Kabul and they all had to get out. waw could no longer guarantee their safety. Around Samira, women started to cry. Staff scrambled to determine who could go to relatives’ homes, and handed out forms stating that clients were leaving the shelter of their own accord.

Samira panicked. She had been there for only two weeks and couldn’t return to her family. Her stepmother and half brothers hit her often, and for little reason. Once, they beat her when she cooked a meal they didn’t like. In fact, this was her second stay at waw. Two years earlier, she had lived there for nearly seven months. waw had mediated between Samira and her family members, who agreed to stop the violence, and she returned home. But, Samira told me, the beatings got worse. Sometimes her family refused to let her eat for days. Recently, the brothers—struggling farmers in Laghman Province—announced that she would be married to an elderly man, who was offering a hefty sum. Samira realized that she was being sold. She snuck out in the middle of the night and huddled at a bus terminal. When dawn broke, she took a taxi to Kabul and eventually arrived at waw.

By the time the shelter manager ordered the women to leave, the city was already transforming. Taliban fighters had entered the capital on pickup trucks and Humvees, brandishing machine guns. Local police abandoned their posts, and embassies evacuated their staff. President Ashraf Ghani and his wife, Rula, left on a plane. Some Afghans, remembering the Taliban rule of the nineteen-nineties, took precautionary measures, painting over photos of women on advertisements. waw’s leaders were convinced that the Taliban would not allow them to continue operating shelters. In the confusion, Samira made a quick decision. She signed the form, gathered her few belongings, and stepped out of the shelter’s gates and into the midafternoon sun.

Samira started walking toward the northern part of the city. U.S. military planes circled overhead, and sporadic gunfire sounded in the distance. She came to a cemetery where tents of cloth and rope had been erected. The area had been a gathering place for heroin addicts and, more recently, Afghans fleeing conflict in other parts of the country. If Samira stayed on the main streets, people would ask who she was, what she was doing. At least in a cemetery, she reasoned, there would be the safety of seclusion. Night fell, and more people arrived. Samira found two women who reluctantly allowed her to sleep near them and settled in.

Like thousands of other Afghan women, Samira thought that waw would save her from a life of abuse. However, soon after the government’s stunning collapse, and the chaotic U.S. pullout, waw, the largest women’s organization in the country, would make the decision to shutter its shelters permanently, leading many of its clients to feel abandoned, and dividing staff members over how to proceed. Several of its leaders would quietly flee Afghanistan; its founders say that the institution betrayed its own mission. As the world rushed to evacuate tens of thousands of people from the country, a daunting question hung in the air: What would happen to the millions who were not able to leave?

Waw was conceived in early 2001 by Sunita Viswanath, who was then a thirty-four-year-old human-rights activist working at the Sister Fund, a charity based in New York. She had been shocked by what she read in newspapers about Taliban rule—people stoned in football stadiums, music outlawed, women banned from public spaces—and how little attention it was getting. She and a group of other women, including Masuda Sultan, an Afghan American entrepreneur and human-rights activist, formed waw to try to help.

In the beginning, their programs mainly served Afghan communities living in the U.S. But after the American invasion toppled the Taliban government following the 9/11 attacks, waw turned its operational focus to women in Afghanistan. Gloria Steinem helped plan their first conference, in New York. In 2003, waw gathered women from across Afghanistan in Kandahar, the Taliban’s former stronghold. The attendees produced an “Afghan Women’s Bill of Rights” that they wanted to include in the country’s new constitution: access to reproductive health care, the right to marry and divorce, rights of inheritance. The constitution ultimately didn’t incorporate any of these demands, but it did recognize that men and women have “equal rights and duties before the law.”

Still, the new, Western-backed government failed to reach some of the most vulnerable populations. When waw staff visited women’s prisons, they found that many detainees were languishing there after fleeing abusive homes. (Women were incarcerated for “moral crimes,” such as eloping or having extramarital sex, even in cases of rape.) waw launched a shelter program and built support centers that cared for children who had been jailed alongside their mothers. In Afghan society, it’s unusual for women to live alone, and waw led mediations to reunite clients with their families. If a woman returned home, staffers would visit unannounced to confirm her safety. If she didn’t want to go back, waw could help her secure a divorce and find a new husband, or a job with the organization. Lawyers and counsellors were trained to root waw’s work in Islamic law and traditions.

waw’s programs and budget in Afghanistan outgrew those in the U.S. Eventually, it was operating in twelve provinces and serving more than three thousand clients annually. But, as its work became more public, it drew scrutiny and criticism. In 2010, Noorin TV in Kabul ran an “investigative series” that falsely accused shelters of being fronts for prostitution. That same year, Manizha Naderi, then waw’s executive director, brought Bibi Aisha, an eighteen-year-old girl, to the U.S. for reconstructive surgery. Bibi Aisha had run away from her in-laws; after she was found, her husband, a Talib, and his family, cut off her nose and ears. Time featured her picture on its cover with the headline “What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan.” Some felt that waw had used Bibi Aisha to justify the U.S. occupation. (Viswanath recalled a State Department official expressing the opposite concern—they thought that publicizing Bibi Aisha’s case highlighted the U.S.’s inability to keep Afghans safe.)

At times, waw struggled with the Afghan government, too. In 2011, President Hamid Karzai tried to take control of all women’s shelters in the country, nominally to quell rumors of corruption and prostitution. (The plan failed.) But, after Ghani came to power, in 2014, waw developed closer ties with Kabul. Rula, Ghani’s wife, became particularly invested in the organization, once remarking that few had been able to tackle problems facing women “with the understanding and dedication, the wisdom, and the patience” of waw. Leslie Cunningham, a member of the board and the wife of a former U.S. Ambassador, was friends with Rula, and it sometimes seemed to Viswanath that waw had to seek permission from the government to do its work. By 2018, there were new concerns. The government, rife with corruption and dependent on the U.S., was unable to hold territory—or popular support—in the peripheries of the country. The Taliban was making gains, and the U.S. had started engaging the group in peace talks. “Things are looking really bad,” Sultan told Viswanath.

In 2019, the two approached waw’s board about following the U.S.’s lead. If the Taliban was capturing large swaths of territory, they reasoned, waw would need to work with them. With help from Islamic scholars, Sultan and Viswanath put together a document that outlined religious justifications for women’s shelters. They met with academics, experts, and N.G.O.s who advised them on how to open lines of communication with Taliban leadership so that they could continue their operations. waw didn’t stop these efforts, but it didn’t support them, either. Viswanath and Sultan felt sidelined by their own organization.

According to Viswanath and Sultan, several board members, including Cunningham, worried about legitimizing the Taliban. There also seemed to be a strong desire to maintain a relationship with the Ghani administration, which had been left out of the U.S.-Taliban peace negotiations. Meanwhile, Najia Nasim—waw’s Afghanistan-based executive director—and a few other staff members simply believed that the group couldn’t be trusted. To the founders, getting stalled by these concerns amounted to a failing strategy.

waw staff declined my requests for individual interviews; Annie Pforzheimer, a board member who briefly served as the acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Afghanistan, responded on behalf of the organization. She confirmed that there were concerns that the Taliban might leverage a relationship with waw to portray itself in a more favorable light. But, she said, waw ultimately decided not to engage with the group because it believed that doing so would be ineffective and possibly illegal. (Sultan told me that the State Department knew she was pursuing meetings with the Taliban and didn’t indicate any legal concerns.)

When Kabul fell, panic set in. This was the worst-case scenario that Sultan and Viswanath had feared, and waw was unprepared to deal with it. Nasim directed employees to completely halt shelter operations and to send as many women as possible back to their relatives. The abrupt decision surprised one of waw’s donors. “Suddenly, I get the news that everyone is reintegrated,” Tooba Mayel, the director of the Colombo Plan Gender Affairs Programme, told me. “We could have helped.”

Nasim, the executive director, would’ve been the one to find a way to operate under the new regime; several former staff and board members told me that, in mid-August, she seemed to disappear for weeks and did not respond to multiple urgent messages. (According to waw, she was in contact with a few people.) In New York, staff worked tirelessly on evacuations. In Afghanistan, Haqiq and Shirzad took charge, rushing to negotiate with local Taliban militias who had entered waw offices, confiscated furniture and cars, and in one instance detained some employees. Zahra, the shelter manager in Kabul, moved forty-five women and their children to a safe house, and fielded calls from other employees and clients looking for guidance. “It was mad days,” she told me, fighting back tears. Haqiq led talks with several Taliban officials to explain waw’s work. They didn’t get explicit permission to continue operating the shelters, but they weren’t attacked, either. Haqiq told me that he wished the conversations had happened before August’s chaos.

Despite these efforts, leadership in New York seemed determined not to continue. In a private conversation about how to work in the new climate, which I acquired a recording of, Nasim said that keeping shelters open would put the staff in danger. Kevin Schumacher, the deputy executive director, called the Taliban a “bunch of animals.” In early 2021, waw had been serving five hundred clients, many of whom had few options aside from returning to abusive homes or prison. After the takeover, waw permanently shuttered its women-focussed services, including the shelters and halfway houses, and evacuated many high-level employees, including Nasim, who ended up in Canada. By the end of the year, waw had let go of hundreds of staff members—defense lawyers who had once argued divorce cases in court, cooks who had worked in the shelters, personnel who had housed women at great personal risk. Like the clients, they were left behind. Pforzheimer emphasized that waw had to end its programs to protect staff and clients from danger, but Viswanath saw it differently. “Hatred of the Taliban defined the organization more than protection of women and girls,” she told me.

This spring, I travelled to Kabul and met with former waw clients and employees. We filed into an empty lounge inside a hotel in the center of the city, the gates of which are now guarded by the Taliban. Six staff members squeezed onto a sofa and a couple of armchairs, while about a dozen women—former clients—gathered around me. (Some names have been changed for their safety.)

Marwa, who wore gold-rimmed glasses, spoke softly and quickly. Like many of waw’s clients, she had transferred to a shelter from prison. She showed me photos of her face at the time: bloody cuts on her cheek and upper lip and bruises around her left eye. “My brother,” she explained. It happened after she ran away from her abusive husband. She had been with waw for eighteen months when the Taliban entered the capital. Marwa moved to a staff member’s house, but, soon, people started inquiring about the “strange women” living there, suspicions that morphed, as they often did, into accusations of prostitution. Marwa tried appealing to her father, who refused to allow her to enter his house; finally, the staff member helped her find a husband. He was a kind man, Marwa told me, but he had been part of the Afghan National Army and was now unemployed.

The women wanted to give each other the space to tell their stories, but whenever there was a pause in the conversation, they talked over each other in excitement. The staff seemed similarly impatient, often interjecting to reiterate how waw had abandoned them. At one point, the Kabul shelter manager, Zahra, who had been composed and stern, started to cry. She had worked with waw for ten years and was familiar with the weight these women carried. “What’s most hurtful is that leadership left us,” she said.

Mina, who wore a black-and-white floral hijab wrapped tightly around her face, told me that she had been a university student in Kapisa Province when she had a baby out of wedlock. She was imprisoned for several months before being transferred to waw, where she stayed for five years, working at the kindergarten in one of the halfway houses. In mid-August, she returned to her father’s home. When he finally allowed her in, he started beating her and withholding food. Her family taunts her, she told me, saying that her child should be killed. She had nowhere else to go.

It was Ramadan, and, with sunset looming, it was almost time to break the fast. Some women gave their apologies and left. Most, however, stayed, wanting to make sure that I heard what had happened. Rokhsana breast-fed her son as she told me that she and a few other women had pooled one-time payments given to them by waw (about ten thousand Afghanis, the equivalent of a hundred and twenty-five dollars, each) and, together, they had rented an apartment. Eventually, the other women left. Rokhsana was still living there; with no way to pay rent, she could be evicted at any time. Razia, who has three kids, leased a similar apartment in a squalid corner of Kabul, and hadn’t been able to pay rent in several months. Her daughter and two sons were helping her beg on the street.

Samira had not received any money from waw, and still didn’t have a regular place to live. After staying at the graveyard for three nights, she had moved to a settlement in a park. She started crying as she recalled a woman who handed her a hundred Afghanis, which she used to buy bread, her first meal that day. She spent the following months in the harsh cold, moving from park to park, she told me. She had been leered at and propositioned, and, at one point, in desperation, she befriended a group of women who gave her heroin.

Other women had faded into faraway corners of the country. Some had gone missing, and some had stopped answering their phones after sending cryptic messages. Haqiq told me about one woman who had been hurriedly reintegrated with her parents. One day, when she had left home to run errands, her husband approached and stabbed her to death. (waw declined to elaborate on the case, but told me that “we are devastated by the fact that we don’t have the tools to protect people anymore.”)

When Biden announced the pullout from Afghanistan, he promised that the U.S. would “continue to support the Afghan people.” The end of the military conflict has been a reprieve for many families, especially in rural parts of the country, but, since August, the U.S. and much of the international community have been waging a different type of war against Afghanistan, through economic might. The Biden Administration froze seven billion dollars of Afghan assets—and in February earmarked half those funds for families that lost relatives in 9/11. According to one estimate, around half a million government employees, including teachers and health-care workers, stopped getting paid. The U.S. has also imposed sanctions on the Taliban government, hampering the ability of aid groups and N.G.O.s to deliver services, and, in tandem with the asset freeze, causing a severe liquidity crunch. Before the withdrawal, foreign donors accounted for three quarters of the country’s public spending. That money has evaporated. In May, the United Nations warned that nearly half the population was at risk of starving. “We have never seen the impacts of poverty and societal breakdown on such a scale,” Anita Dullard, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said. (Last month, the World Food Program estimated that four million children are “acutely malnourished.”)

In Kabul, which is more connected to the banking system than the rest of the country, and where the population is bloated with internally displaced people, the economic crisis is visibly dire. Soon after I arrived, a man burned himself on the streets in desperation. Amid the orchestra of honks in downtown traffic, young girls tapped at car windows, begging for money. In a quiet corner of the city, women gathered outside a bakery at dusk to wait for a piece of bread. One woman thrust her son at me, holding up his thin arms; her husband had died in the war, she said, and she had been coming here to feed her family.

After the Taliban takeover, waw raised nearly eleven million dollars to help Afghans. Little of that money has actually gone to Afghanistan. Staff members in the country did not receive their paychecks through the end of 2021, and had little financial support to assist the women they once cared for. waw told me that it did provide small stipends and food to some clients and staff, using resources already in the country, but that it was unable to send more money because it was concerned about violating U.S. sanctions. Some organizations use the hawala system—an informal network of cash transfers that involve unknown middlemen—which waw deemed “too legally risky.” The organization insists that clients are still able to request ongoing humanitarian support. More than a dozen women and former staff I spoke with said that they hadn’t received anything in months.

Operating as a women’s organization under the new regime is mired in difficulties; for example, the Taliban dissolved the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, which had once been waw’s main government contact. To Viswanath, the fact that the largest Afghan women’s organization chose to focus on evacuations and refugee resettlement, rather than make plans for the twenty million women “who didn’t have luxury to leave,” reflects a moral problem. “We needed out-of-the-box, non-bureaucratic solutions for a huge crisis moment,” she told me.

The waw staff and clients I spoke with often circled back to a nagging point: the injustice of waw’s hasty withdrawal. One Saturday this spring, several dozen gathered outside the main office in Kabul to demonstrate against the leadership. One woman held up a sign that read, in English, “I was waw staff. Now I’m hungry and jobless.” They also lodged a formal complaint with the Taliban’s Ministry of Economy, alleging corruption, abandonment of clients, favoritism in the evacuation process, and failure to disburse donated money to clients and staff. In recent months, after the U.S. eased some financial restrictions, waw has paid back salaries to former staff. Haqiq and Shirzad, meanwhile, have been forced out of waw—in retribution, they believe, for speaking out against Nasim’s handling of the situation. (Pforzheimer told me that Haqiq was not performing his duties. Shirzad told me that he felt pressured to resign.)

Donors and women’s-rights activists are uncertain, and sometimes split, on how to support Afghan women under the Taliban, which has already reversed gains from the past twenty years. Despite promises to the international community, girls have not been allowed to return to secondary schools. The Taliban has also decreed that women should stay at home, hampering their ability to work. If they go out, they must be covered from head to toe in loose clothing. If they travel long distances, they must be in the company of a male relative. The rules are not enforced uniformly, or regularly, but the legal premise hangs like a cloud. Prominent activists have been harassed and detained.

In July, a report by Afghanistan Analysts Network found that aid organizations have scaled back their activities because of funding shortfalls, and that donors are concerned about the appearance of “working with the Taliban.” In fact, a split has emerged between high-level officials in Kabul, who want to engage the international community and allow girls to attend secondary schools, and the Supreme Leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, in Kandahar, who has taken a more hard-line approach. Some experts argue that further isolating Afghanistan will only undermine the moderate faction. Mayel, the waw donor, told me that humanitarian needs have to be prioritized regardless of the political leadership and that organizations should find openings where they can. “We can’t just let them die,” she said.

It occurred to me that the women I spoke with, both clients and former staff, hardly ever mentioned the Taliban. The concerns they talked about were more immediate—finding shelter and their next meal, how to avoid capture by abusive relatives. Samira was particularly vulnerable on the streets, young and alone. She has recovered from heroin addiction and continues to beg during the day; some nights, she goes to hospitals and pretends to visit patients so that she can find a place to sleep. When I asked her if she faced harassment from the Taliban, her voice was level. “Taliban is not the only threat for young women,” she told me.

The economic pressures bearing down on the country will likely lead to more abuse in households, exacerbating problems that organizations like waw had aimed to solve. According to an estimate by Save the Children, in the first eight months since the Taliban takeover, as many as a hundred and twenty thousand Afghan children may have been forcibly traded or married in exchange for financial reprieve by desperate families.

International donors and organizations have limited their support to humanitarian programs, mostly implemented through the U.N. According to one study, the number of local N.G.O.s and civil-society groups has been cut in half. In recent months, waw has begun working closely with the U.N. on children and girls’ education, but has chosen to stay away from women-focussed projects. Most of its efforts have been recentered on Afghan women in the U.S. “Over time, we would like to do more that is back to the core of what waw stands for,” Pforzheimer told me. I asked her if she believed it was possible under the Taliban. She laughed. “If we stay and do good work, and understand the landscape, maybe,” she said.

Sultan and Viswanath have both left waw, frustrated by what they described as the organization’s unwillingness to find solutions to help women in Afghanistan. Viswanath was upset, in particular, about how little of the eleven million dollars raised since the collapse has been directed to such efforts. (Half has been allotted to serve Afghans who came to the U.S.; a quarter will be used to assist with continued evacuations, humanitarian support, and children’s programs; and a quarter will be reserved for possible future operations.) They are starting a new N.G.O., called Abaad: Afghan Women Forward, which will provide humanitarian assistance and fund economic programs for women. Among its first clients will be those that waw once served.

For decades, Afghanistan has depended on N.G.O.s for service delivery, basic humanitarian aid, and projects geared toward helping the most marginalized. But being a “republic of N.G.O.s,” as one analyst called it, comes with its own problems. At its crux, an N.G.O. is beholden to donors and their ideological bent, not the communities it supports. As the scholar Faisal Devji argued after the U.S. withdrawal, “These beneficiaries possess neither political equality nor democratic power over their benefactors, however much they are consulted in the apportioning of aid or the launching of development projects.”

Women inside the country have little choice but to carve space for themselves however they can. I spoke with one female journalist who used to run a women’s media network in Kabul. She shut it down, but chose to stay in Afghanistan as an independent journalist. Last fall, a group of women gathered in the capital for a press conference on the right to education and employment. Just as waw had done over the years, the organizers drew upon the Quran to justify their demands, which focussed on a woman’s right to learn and work under Islamic law. They used Islamic history to point to how women had contributed to the fields of health care, business, government, and farming. One of the hosts recently told me that, although the political climate has worsened, the group is continuing to push the government on issues such as education.

Even in the context of women’s rights, shelters are a particularly sensitive issue, as they are often accused of being fronts for brothels. Some have chosen to take the risk. One afternoon, I travelled to one of the only shelters in the country, which has managed to obtain permission from the Taliban to operate. A few of waw’s former clients had been transferred there, and the group had grown to about thirty women and children. When I visited, they were cleaning the house in preparation for Eid. One woman was much older than the rest—she had gray hair and eyes framed by wrinkles. Another woman, who stood a few feet apart and looked on in silence, had arrived recently. She had been at a mosque by herself; I was told that the Taliban hadn’t known what to do with her and brought her to the shelter.

Sunlight streamed through the open doors at one end of the house. A group of four teen-agers moved from the staircase, where they had been chatting, to stand in the warmth. They wrapped their arms around one another, whispering fiercely, as if sharing a secret. They were giggling. ♦

Rozina Ali is a journalist and a fellow at Type Media Center.
The Afghan Women Left Behind
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Why the Afghan peace process failed, and what could come next?

August 27, 2022

August 18, 2022

Aref Dostyar, Zmarai Farahi

Middle East Institute

After nearly two decades of U.S. presence, the Afghan conflict between the central government and the Taliban reached a deadly stalemate, taking a hundred lives a day from each side between 2018 and 2021. However sad, the international community viewed this impasse as a sign of Afghanistan’s ripeness for peace. Meanwhile, the U.S. shifted its policy from pursuing a military victory to achieving an expeditious political settlement. Yet despite multifaceted and multiparty motivations to finally end this drawn-out conflict, the peace process still failed. Why?

This article’s authors observed the peace process closely from within the Afghan government. The following identifies four interconnected factors that converged to spoil the final attempt to end the long war in Afghanistan, resulting in the Taliban unilaterally taking control of Kabul in August 2021. Additionally, the piece offers three sets of recommendations to the United States and the international community about how the lessons of the past 20 years could inform a workable peace process going forward.

Failure in shaping narratives

Aside from armed struggles over physical territory, the Afghan War was also fought on a parallel battleground: the minds of the people.

Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government, which existed between December 2001 and August 2021, had the burden to prove two narratives: its ability to provide basic services — physical security at a minimum — to the local population and a capability to advance counterterrorism efforts both at home and beyond the country’s borders.

But the Taliban’s car bombs and suicide brigades continued to speak louder than the government’s infographics proclaiming the competence of its institutions. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan described civilian casualties in May-June 2021 — on the eve of the United States’ announced withdrawal date — as the highest on record for those two months since the mission began recording such data in 2009.

The government itself, seeking sustained global support in the fight against terrorism, reported during every major international meeting that more than 20 terrorist organizations with regional and international reach enjoyed safe havens in Afghanistan under the patronage of the Taliban.

The Taliban, by contrast, defined their existence in terms of the enemy, America, which occupied Afghanistan and established a “puppet” government in Kabul. Over the 20 years of war, the Taliban used sustained offensive attacks and some short-term ceasefires to promote themselves as a cohesive military force. And foreigners interpreted that characterization to mean that if the Taliban committed to something like crushing internationally designated terrorist groups, the Taliban could deliver on it. Whether they actually would remained to be seen.

No narrative promulgated by the last Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, who garnered less than a million votes in a contested election in September 2019, could change a simple reality: the war against the Taliban was widely perceived as lost.

Failure in leadership for peace

During the last decade of America’s presence in Afghanistan, the international community and the local government came to an understanding that the way to end the conflict was through peace negotiations with the Taliban. However, the stakeholders in these talks had conflicting interests.

For Afghan technocrats, peace initially meant a full Taliban surrender. The highest leadership bodies of the government held internal discussions regarding the “reintegration” of the Taliban fighters. During these meetings, the officials offered four types of incentives:

  1. Security in return for disarmament;
  2. Political space to run for office or be appointed to political posts;
  3. Economic incentives to provide jobs; and
  4. Legal incentives to remove the Taliban from international sanctions lists and release their prisoners.

For former mujahideen factions, peace meant a division of power among influential parties. But this process of power-sharing, which would inevitably break down along ethnic lines, would leave no room for the technocrats who now held the presidency. The share of power for Afghanistan’s ethnic Tajiks would go to the Jamiat party; that for the Pashtuns would be given to the Taliban and Hizb-e-Islami; the Wahdat party would claim the Hazaras; and the Junbish party would represent the Uzbeks. Where would the technocrats fit?

Some individuals in the technocrat and mujahideen camps accepted that one way to achieve peace was to hold elections with the participation of the Taliban. However, there were disagreements around the timing of these elections, not to mention the Taliban’s total disinterest in sharing in what they believed to be an illegitimate political system imposed by the United States. President Ghani, in turn, demanded that the transfer of power be based on votes alone, but he showed willingness to hold early elections for the sake of peace. Potential rival candidates argued that no credible election could take place under a party to the conflict. These candidates pushed President Ghani to step aside and let an interim government oversee the elections, which he refused.

In the internal debates regarding peace, three important segments of Afghan society remained outside the process. Youth, women, and civil society organizations, including the media in Afghanistan, did not know what benefits peace would bring them. Apart from symbolic representation in some meetings that were held by the government or the international community, these groups did not meaningfully participate in the wider peace process.

Disagreements over how non-Taliban groups could negotiate with the Taliban were also not resolved. Ghani wanted a two-sided table — the government and the Taliban — in order to portray a united Islamic Republic. But others viewed this format as an unacceptable opportunity for government technocrats to assume leadership roles in the peace negotiations. Therefore, political opponents of the president advocated for multi-party talks in which each side could bargain based on its own interests: the government, the Taliban, political parties, and civil society.

The lack of a shared vision or clear objectives for the peace process among non-Taliban factions ultimately was another factor that contributed to the inability to achieve a settlement.

Parallel structures

In addition to leadership challenges, technical chaos prevailed over the political peace process. The High Peace Council, which later transformed into the High Council of National Reconciliation under Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, was in constant rivalry with the Afghan president and never achieved the power needed to represent the political arm of the peace process. The State Ministry of Peace attempted but failed to project itself as the technical arm of the peace talks. Others rightly viewed “technical matters” as a strategic tool to influence the process.

There were also other governmental agencies that claimed leadership, which instead only added ambiguity to the process. Chief among these agencies was the Office of the National Security Council (ONSC), which maintained a Directorate of Peace and Reconciliation Affairs. Furthermore, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs struggled to preserve its perceived status as the point of contact on peace affairs for foreign countries. Disjointed involvement from too many people and institutions in the peace process meant local Afghans and foreign diplomats had difficulty coordinating their activities with the government.

To make matters worse, rivalries, incompetence, and ideological differences led to the formation of factions within the Afghan state’s negotiations team. When the president was finally able to create a government-led team, it was divided. A former head of the intelligence agency, Masoom Stanikzai, was the lead negotiator. But the Islamist Taliban disregarded Stanikzai because of his former affiliation with parties that were known for their adherence to communist ideologies. Via the Chinese and Uzbekistani governments, the Taliban asked the central government in Kabul to keep Stanikzai out of the peace negotiations. The government responded that the Taliban did not have veto power. Parallel to the official negotiations team, a secret channel of communication between the government and the Taliban opened in Doha, according to Fawzia Koofi, one of the negotiators.

The process was further complicated by foreign interventions. In December 2018, after a year-long effort, high-level representatives from Afghanistan, the United States, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia succeeded in bringing the Afghan government and Taliban negotiators to Abu Dhabi. Even though the two Afghan sides did not meet face-to-face during that time, this quadrilateral effort saw some progress until the Americans shifted the venue to Qatar.

Two years later, there was a new team of negotiators from Kabul and a new process was underway in Doha. At this moment, the U.S. administration changed and the newly appointed Secretary of State Antony Blinken asked the sides, via a letter, to appear for peace talks in Turkey. A meeting in Istanbul never materialized, perhaps because the Qataris, with significant influence over the Taliban, opposed it. Each change of plan meant more stakeholders offended, a reshuffling of negotiating teams to adjust their levels of participation, new logistical complexities, discontinuity, and, eventually, failure.

Peace negotiations never took place directly between the Afghan government and the Taliban. Composed of a few members, a governmental contact group repeatedly met with the Taliban in Qatar; but this was the extent of the face-to-face interaction between the two sides. They worked out the principles for the talks but never succeeded in developing an agenda, let alone negotiated over it.

Reducing peace to one element of a foreign deal

The role of the United States was equally important in forestalling peace.

For many years, the overriding stated purpose of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan was to counter terrorism. And so, under the influence of this policy, the Afghan government continuously presented its peace plans as a counterterrorism strategy.

Over time, America’s assessment of the nature of the threat changed, with major terrorist hotspots appearing in other areas of the world. So, America shifted its sights toward withdrawal from Afghanistan, prioritizing the end of its protracted involvement in the region. The agreement U.S. officials signed with the Taliban in 2020 demanded security guarantees for the pull back of U.S. troops and the Taliban’s commitment to counterterrorist actions; but it encouraged the mere start of peace talks among Afghans and only included a ceasefire as a topic for discussion in subsequent intra-Afghan negotiations.

Once the U.S. was determined to depart and the collapse of the Afghan government became conceivable, negotiations with the Taliban were deemed more important than negotiating with the Afghan government. Diplomats and military generals from the U.S., Europe, and regional countries queued up to talk with the Taliban. The insurgent group viewed this string of international visitors as proof of the effectiveness of their violent movement. Now that the whole world was at their door and the United Nations had endorsed the deal they signed with Washington, they sensed it was only a matter of time before they would seize Kabul.

The Taliban, thus, encouraged the U.S. side to pressure the Afghan government into giving in without preconditions. Most notably, under foreign insistence, the Afghan authorities released more than 5,000 dangerous Taliban detainees in 2020, in return for one-fifth that number of their own prisoners. Against their pledge, these violent extremists returned to the battlefield with greater resolve for vengeance, while the Taliban leadership rewarded their time spent behind bars by appointing them as field commanders.

Conclusion and recommendations

The last political peace process failed, but the need for peace and reconciliation in Afghanistan did not disappear. In fact, conditions likely to drive armed conflict — such as political exclusion and social oppression — are growing daily under the new regime. Therefore, Afghanistan requires a new political process that aims to not only prevent another civil war but also achieve lasting peace. Afghan leaders need to develop the capability to rally the public and align all Afghan sides of the conflict around a common vision for the future of the country.

The international community, particularly the United States, should undertake three specific sets of actions to foster the conditions for such a political process:

First, the U.S. should change its pragmatic engagement with the Taliban to a more inclusive engagement with all Afghan stakeholders, including civil society organizations, political parties, armed opposition groups, ethnic and religious minorities, women, and youth. While the U.S. has no diplomatic presence in Kabul, American officials can engage Afghan actors in the region around Afghanistan as well as communicate with those inside Afghanistan virtually, through video conference calls. Finally, Washington could better coordinate its efforts with the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, which has a political office that is active on the ground.

Engagement with non-Taliban actors will have a range of repercussions. For leaders who remain inside Afghanistan, contact with the U.S. will come with security risks. Their identities should be protected; but ultimately, they must be allowed to determine for themselves whether the risks are worthwhile. U.S. interactions with the armed opposition to the Taliban can take place without providing material support to such factions. Engaging with America can still benefit armed groups as a means of exerting political pressure on the Taliban. If the U.S. administration shies away from such a policy, Congress should fill this gap.

In fact, Capitol Hill lawmakers ought to play a more active role regardless of the presidential administration’s stance vis-à-vis Afghanistan. American senators and House members should intensify their meetings with Afghans in the U.S. as well as travel to Europe and the region around Afghanistan to meet with leaders in exile. These meetings would broadcast a confident message that America stands with the people of Afghanistan in their struggle to create a peaceful and free country.

Second, the U.S. should use its leverage with the Taliban more strategically to encourage the start of a political process. For instance, the U.S. should work with the U.N. Security Council to turn international sanctions into effective tools of diplomacy rather than use them solely as punishment. Currently, neither imposed sanctions nor limited waivers are tied to specific political or accountability benchmarks and objectives. The unfreezing of Afghanistan’s assets and discussions about recognizing a new government should become conditional on progress in a legitimate political process.

Conditions and benchmarks for launching such a political process may include initiating a series of meetings between Afghan actors and the Taliban, developing a list of popular demands — from opening girls’ schools and reversing restrictive measures against women to creating a broad-based and people-centric government — and finally, delivering on these demands within agreed timeframes.

Identifying stakeholders to meet with the Taliban is complicated but not impossible. One way to group different segments of Afghan society is based on their ideological visions for the country: modernists who constitute much of the new generation of Afghan leaders, conservatives like the jihadist groups, fundamentalists such as the Taliban and their sympathizers, and moderates who have separated from or never joined the other three groups. Representation of all these ideological differences is important because not all civil society organizations, political parties, or women’s groups think alike.

Finally, Washington must revise its approach toward Afghanistan in light of the fact that al-Qaeda’s leader Ayman al-Zawahiri — who last month was eliminated by a U.S. drone strike — was found to have been sheltered in Kabul. America should, thus, take certain diplomatic steps to mobilize the region and the wider international community to ensure a political process leads to a government that does not harbor terrorists but promotes peace and stability in the world.

Al-Zawahiri’s presence only a few miles from Kabul’s Presidential Palace demonstrated that a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan can be dangerous for the region and beyond. A high-level visit from the U.S. administration or Congress to Central or South Asia in the near-term could potentially ignite momentum among regional countries to mobilize and diplomatically curb future threats that emanate from Afghanistan. The only sustainable means to achieve such an objective is to encourage the formation of a broad-based and people-centric government that is shaped by all Afghans through an inclusive political process. The fact that the Taliban continue to operate as a de facto “acting” government and have yet to announce a new constitution provides a window of opportunity for initiating such a political process.

These short- to medium-term measures by America are achievable. They could exert some pressure on the Taliban and reassure non-Taliban groups that they are not alone in their struggle. They could also mobilize the region to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a regime-run safehouse for terrorists with objectives reaching far beyond its borders. Lastly, these steps, if sustained long enough to jumpstart a potential political process and see it through to completion, could contribute to the restoration of America’s reputation after its catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Aref Dostyar is a Senior Advisor for the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc-Pulte Afghanistan Peace and Development Research Program, and former Consul General of Afghanistan in Los Angeles. He tweets from @ArefDostyar.

Zmarai Farahi is former Head of the Peace Unit at the Office of the National Security Council of Afghanistan. He tweets from @FarahiZmarai. The views expressed in this piece are their own.

The Middle East Institute (MEI) is an independent, non-partisan, non-for-profit, educational organization. It does not engage in advocacy and its scholars’ opinions are their own. MEI welcomes financial donations, but retains sole editorial control over its work and its publications reflect only the authors’ views.

 

Why the Afghan peace process failed, and what could come next?
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Judge Recommends Rejecting Bid by Sept. 11 Families to Seize Frozen Afghan Funds

August 27, 2022

By Charlie Savage

The New York Times

Aug. 27, 2022

A federal judge said the Afghan central bank’s assets could not legally be used to pay off judgment debts owed by the Taliban to relatives of victims of the 2001 terrorist attacks.

WASHINGTON — A federal magistrate judge has recommended rejecting the effort by relatives of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to seize $3.5 billion in frozen Afghan central bank funds to pay off judgment debts owed by the Taliban — in part because doing so, she said, would effectively recognize the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.

“The Taliban’s victims have fought for years for justice, accountability and compensation,” the judge, Sarah Netburn, wrote. “They are entitled to no less. But the law limits what compensation the court may authorize.” Those limits, she added, placed the Afghanistan central bank’s assets beyond the court’s reach.

The 43-page report and recommendation by Judge Netburn, issued on Friday, is the latest twist in a case arising from the extraordinary circumstance of a country seized by a terrorist organization that is not recognized as its legitimate government. The case has raised novel legal issues that touch on matters of foreign policy, international finance, counterterrorism and domestic politics.

The $3.5 billion in question is part of about $7 billion in Afghan central bank funds that had been deposited at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York before the Taliban took control of the country last year. In February, President Biden froze the funds, reserving about half to be spent on helping the Afghan people while leaving the remaining $3.5 billion for the Sept. 11 victims’ families to go after in court.

The recommendation by Judge Netburn is not a final decision. A Federal District Court judge for the Southern District of New York, George B. Daniels, is supervising the litigation and has the authority to issue a ruling that disagrees with Judge Netburn’s legal analysis. And if he instead rules in accordance with her recommendation, the victims’ families could file an appeal.

Fiona Havlish, the named plaintiff in the lead group of Sept. 11 victims’ relatives who are trying to seize the funds, said that she respectfully disagreed with Judge Netburn’s conclusion that they were not entitled to the funds belonging to the Afghan central bank, known as Da Afghanistan Bank, or DAB.

“It is clear that the president wished to make these funds available to victims of terrorist attacks for which the Taliban was found liable, that the court has jurisdiction and that the Taliban controls DAB,” she said in a statement.

But Leila Murphy, a steering committee member for Sept. 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, a group of victims’ relatives who oppose trying to seize the Afghan bank funds, praised Judge Netburn’s analysis.

“As the daughter of a 9/11 victim, it makes me sick to think that Afghan victims of atrocity are being deprived of necessary resources during a time of great need,” Ms. Murphy said in a statement. “I am relieved that the judge has taken a step toward the only legally and morally correct approach — making the entire $7 billion available to Afghans to deal with the economic crisis we helped to cause.”

It is not clear what would happen to the $3.5 billion if the efforts by the Sept. 11 victims’ relatives to seize it fail. The American government does not want to send money to Afghanistan if there is a risk it will fall into Taliban hands. It is therefore possible that some or all of the funds could simply remain frozen for years, awaiting a change of circumstances in Afghanistan.

The complex saga traces back to lawsuits filed years ago by family members of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks seeking billions of dollars from a range of defendants they held responsible for their losses, including Al Qaeda and the Taliban. When such defendants failed to show up in court, judges declared them liable by default.

But with no way to collect damages, the rulings seemed like symbolic gestures until last year, when the Taliban took control of Afghanistan. As part of the fallout, the New York Fed blocked access to an account for the Afghan central bank holding about $7 billion.

The Havlish plaintiffs — about 150 people, linked to 47 estates of the nearly 3,000 people killed — moved to seize some of that money to pay off the Taliban’s judgment debt to them.

Eventually, the Havlish plaintiffs struck a deal to divide up any recovered funds with several other groups of Sept. 11 plaintiffs and with insurance companies that had losses from the attacks. That deal would give the Havlish plaintiffs, who were first in line under New York law, a greater share in any proceeds than the plaintiffs in other groups.

That arrangement has been a matter of dispute among victims’ relatives. Some opposed the deal as unfair, on the argument that everyone should get the same amount. Others joined outside voices — including exiled Afghans — who urged the court to reject giving any of the money to Sept. 11 families, saying it belonged to the Afghan people and should be spent on helping them at a time of a humanitarian crisis and mass starvation caused by the collapse of the country’s economy.

Against that backdrop, Judge Netburn concluded that as a matter of law, none of the Sept. 11 victims’ relatives or the affected insurance companies were entitled to seize the frozen Afghan central bank funds. She laid out three independent legal rationales for why Judge Daniels should dismiss their requests.

First, she wrote, the court lacks jurisdiction over the Afghan central bank because it is an instrument of a foreign government and thus has sovereign immunity. While Congress has enacted a law that made a narrow exception to sovereign immunity allowing lawsuits against state sponsors of terrorism, Afghanistan has not been designated as such, and the Sept. 11 victims’ families did not sue the state of Afghanistan itself.

Second, she said, any ruling that the central bank’s assets can be used to pay off the Taliban’s judgment debts would amount to ruling that the Taliban are the legitimate government of Afghanistan. But Mr. Biden has not recognized the Taliban as Afghanistan’s government, and courts lack constitutional authority to do so on their own.

“The Constitution vests the president with the sole power to recognize foreign governments,” Judge Netburn wrote. “Courts may not extend such recognition either directly or by implication. Yet such recognition would be inescapably implied if this court found that the DAB is being controlled and used by the Taliban such that the Taliban may use DAB’s assets (ultimately the assets of the sovereign state of Afghanistan) to pay its legal bills.”

Finally, she wrote, even if both of those arguments were wrong, under the law, the bank must count as an “agency” of the Taliban, which she said means it must have willingly worked with the group. But the Taliban have seized control of the bank — and imposed their own leaders atop it — by force.

“The court must determine whether a bank robber can transform an unwilling bank into his agency or instrumentality,” she wrote. “The answer must be no.”

Judge Recommends Rejecting Bid by Sept. 11 Families to Seize Frozen Afghan Funds
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Ashraf Ghani Says His Staying Would Not Have Saved the Republic

August 27, 2022
Shirshah Rasooli
Tolo News
26 August 2022

Ghani claims that his personal assets were looted in Afghanistan.

Former President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani in an interview with PBS said he will not return “under the Taliban rule,” but he will return as an “Afghan citizen to an Afghanistan where every Afghan feels a sense of belonging.” 

“I will not return under the Taliban rule, but I’d be delighted to return as an Afghan citizen to an Afghanistan where every Afghan feels a sense of belonging, where Afghan women, Afghan youth, and Afghan poor become stakeholders, and, finally, we get the stability that has been denied to us,” said Mohammad Ashraf Ghani, former Afghan president.

“I left as the last person in the chain of command…because our forces could no longer sustain,” Ghani said, speaking via videoconference from the United Arab Emirates. “I had no one to fight with me …  it was not a situation where sacrificing myself would have saved the republic. On the contrary, it would have created another trauma and we have had enough of trauma in our history.”

Ghani claims that his personal assets were looted in Afghanistan.

“I have declared $5 million in my declaration of assets in 2014. I don’t know how much was left. But my personal assets were looted. I did not leave with anything, because — and I don’t have any assets abroad,” Former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani told PBS.

The former president said that Afghanistan was the grounds for a proxy war between the United States and almost every other major power from Russia to Iran and others

“Second, Afghanistan became the ground for a proxy war between the United States and almost every other major power from Russia to Iran and others. And related to this is the loss of logistical support. In the end of 2020, there were about 20,000 contractors, and they were withdrawn to less than 100 in July,” said Ashraf Ghani, former Afghanistan president.

Meanwhile, some critics hold that the escape of Ashraf Ghani and his cabinet was the main reason for the collapse of the last government in the country.

Ashraf Ghani Says His Staying Would Not Have Saved the Republic
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