New Laws, Regulations Compound Abuses Against Women, Girls
(Bangkok) – Afghanistan’s human rights situation worsened in 2024 as the Taliban intensified their crackdown on women and girls and minority groups, Human Rights Watch said today in its World Report 2025. The Taliban authorities detained journalists and critics and imposed severe restrictions on the media. Afghanistan’s economic crisis left 23 million in need of humanitarian assistance, disproportionally affecting women and girls.
For the 546-page world report, in its 35th edition, Human Rights Watch reviewed human rights practices in more than 100 countries. In much of the world, Executive Director Tirana Hassan writes in her introductory essay, governments cracked down and wrongfully arrested and imprisoned political opponents, activists, and journalists. Armed groups and government forces unlawfully killed civilians, drove many from their homes, and blocked access to humanitarian aid. In many of the more than 70 national elections in 2024, authoritarian leaders gained ground with their discriminatory rhetoric and policies.
“Three years into Taliban rule, the suppression of rights and freedoms has only intensified,” said Fereshta Abbasi, Afghanistan researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Governments should press the Taliban to end their abuses against women and girls, while urgently supporting the creation of a comprehensive United Nations accountability mechanism.”
The Taliban announced a new law prohibiting women from traveling or using public transportation without a male guardian, and from singing in public or letting their voices be heard outside their home. The Taliban also detained women and girls for not abiding by the prescribed dress code.
The Taliban arbitrarily detained and tortured journalists and other critics. In September, they banned live broadcasts of political programs, criticism of the group, and limited interviews to individuals from a preapproved list.
The Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), the Afghan affiliate of the Islamic State (ISIS), carried out attacks that injured and killed civilians, on ethnic and religious minorities, especially the Hazara, as well as on the Taliban. On May 18, ISKP issued a statement threatening nongovernmental organizations, the media, and foreign aid agencies.
Afghanistan’s economic crisis left more than half of the population – 23.7 million people – in need of urgent humanitarian assistance in 2024, with 2.9 million at emergency levels of hunger.
Afghanistan’s donors should provide assistance aimed at reaching those most in need and crafting durable solutions to Afghanistan’s economic crisis, Human Rights Watch said.
We thought we would start 2025 by asking AAN writers and friends to recommend books about Afghanistan. Their choices are eclectic, ranging across the academic and journalistic, memoirs and fiction, books written by Afghans and others. Our recommended reads include one book which its reviewer believes will become a standard work for universities teaching about Islam in Afghanistan and the work of a fiction writer who seemingly tells stories in an effort to make sense of Afghanistan’s violent history and its impact on his own life. Our reviewed books also include an excoriating scrutiny of the post-2001 ‘project’, which, its reviewer says, “forces readers to ask: In a conflict so riddled with miscalculations and shifting allegiances, can anyone truly claim to have won?” We hope you enjoy these reviews as much as we enjoyed reading the books.
Annika Schmeding, Sufi Civilities: Religious Authority and Political Change in Afghanistan, Stanford University Press, 2024
Islam is everywhere in Afghanistan, in almost every facet of society, but despite this, it is underrepresented in the English-language academic literature. Annika Schmeding’s newly published book Sufi Civilities – based partly on her PhD dissertation work – is one of the few lengthy monographs fully dedicated to analysing a facet of Islam in Afghan society. As this is anthropology, the case study is not on the practice of the majority or the whole, but of a narrower group, urban Sunni Sufis.
There is a lot a reader can choose to focus on in this book. Someone with a background in international development may have their attention caught by the story at the beginning where a Sufi gathering is jokingly referred to by a local as the “real civil society,” while a reader like myself with a political science background will start scanning immediately for references to the political power and influence of Sufis – or lack thereof. An item of interest for scholars, students and adherents of Islam will be Schmeding’s analysis of Sufism’s relationship with those imams and ulama (Islamic scholars) who are outside Sufi circles – or even hostile to Sufism, and her clear description of the role within Sufism of leadership and leadership selection.
Readers less interested in the topics above, considering them mundane or exhausting (just more ‘politics and war’), may enjoy Schmeding’s lengthy analysis of the role of dreams and dream interpretation among Afghanistan’s Sufis, or her extensive discussion of the more common theme of gender in society and the surprisingly prominent role played by women in Sufi communities. Poetry is another topic that appears regularly throughout the book.
Overall, the adaptation of the Sufis of Afghanistan to the massive changes brought about by war, migration, ideological competition and the accompanying social upheavals is the main focus of Schmeding’s book. Adherents of various Sufi communities have both resisted and cooperated with and joined various state and insurgent forces over the last 40 years, what she terms as “alignment” versus “resistance”. Schmeding adds to these choices the third choice of “strategic distance” to describe Sufis seeking “distance from the source of power and the potential for violence,” with distance being both physical (relocating somewhere else in the country or abroad) and political/social (avoiding relationships with government officials or armed opposition groups).
Within the extreme upheavals of the last several decades, Schmeding convincingly argues for the Sufis’ “remarkable dexterity in their ability to adapt” as they choose between various strategic positions under changing conditions. Schmeding’s field research ended before the Taleban’s 2021 return to power. In her conclusion and epilogue, she discusses the urban Sufi communities’ adaptation to once again living under Taleban rule after a 20-year break. Past history suggests, she says, that Sufism will survive once again.
This book sits firmly with the sub-field of the anthropology of Islam. For those coming from the fields of history, political science and perhaps sociology, who want to comb the text for useful analysis, they can easily find a clear and focused discussion of the role of religion during times of war and social upheaval, with both individuals and institutions as units of analysis. Those readers who are rightfully wary of academic literature and its intentional and unintentional confusing and obtuse writing style, you can be assured that Schmeding’s writing is clear and easily understood. Her focus on people makes for engaging story-telling throughout the text. Sufi Civilities will remain for decades a mandatory (English-language) text for understating the role of Islam in Afghanistan.
Reviewed by Christian Bleuer
Ulrik Høj Johnsen, Schuyler Jones, Torkil Funder and Taj Khan Kalash (eds), Toward the Horizon: Lennart Edelberg and the Danish Hindukush Research, Moesgaard Museum, 2021
Moesgaard Museum, just south of the Danish university city of Aarhus, is a striking example of modern northern European (‘Skandinavian’) architecture. Built into the slope of a hill, its large glass windows look down on early 19th century Moesgaard Manor. Built as a poorhouse, today it is the home of the Aarhus university’s Department of Archaeology and Anthropology.
What’s more important to us is in the museum’s storage: a large Nuristan collection, that began to be compiled during the 1947-50 Third Danish Expedition to Central Asia, the first one going to Afghanistan. (The two earlier ones went to Mongolia.)[1] That expedition took place roughly fifty years after the area had been forcibly incorporated into Afghanistan by Abdul Rahman, the ‘Iron Amir’ (r1880-1901), in the winter of 1895/96. After that, Kabul changed the area’s name from Kafiristan (land of the heathen) to Nuristan (land of light), referring to the people having become Muslim.[2]
The 1947-50 expedition was led by ethnologist Henning Haslund-Christensen, who tragically died from illness in Kabul in September that year and is buried there. Its four other core members were: historian of religions Halfdan Siiger (1911-99), who later worked on the (not yet converted to Islam) ‘Kalash Kafir of Chitral’ across the Durand Line; zoologist Knut Paludan (1908-88), whose main work is Birds on Afghanistan, Copenhagen 1959, today a rare book; the film photographer Peter Rasmussen, who later produced the documentary ‘Kafiristan – the land of Heathens’; and Lennart Edelberg (1915-81), a schoolteacher who taught in Denmark’s oldest town, Ribe, and was a botanist-turned-ethnologist. One of their Afghan collaborators, Ahmad Ali Motamedi, later became the director of Kabul’s National Museum.
It was for the ethnologist Edelberg that, in 2021, Moesgaard Museum dedicated a set of articles brought together in the book, Toward the Horizon: Lennart Edelberg and the Danish Hindukush research. The collection is based on papers presented at a seminar held in 2016 by Moesgaard Museum, in cooperation with Aarhus University, in the tradition of earlier International Hindukush Cultural Conferences organised, among others, by Edelberg, in Denmark and Pakistan.[3]
Toward the Horizon is a richly illustrated tome that contains articles on new research on Nuristan (each with rich bibliographies) and posthumous tributes to Lennart Edelberg and his scientific career. Edelberg visited Nuristan four times, the last time in 1970. By then, he had become a paragon of Danish Afghanistan-shenasi (experts).[4]
While most contributors to this book are Western, there is also a Nuristani originating from Afghanistan, Kakhail Nuristani, and a Kalash from Pakistan, Taj Khan Kalash, who is also one of its editors.
In his article, Kakhail Nuristani related how a 2012 New York Times article by author Adam Klein helped re-establish contact between Nuristan and the Danish research community that had been lost during the most recent Afghan wars. Kakhail had met Klein at a workshop for Afghan writers in the United States and told him the story of his grandfather, ‘Wakil’ Abdullah (he became a member of parliament). Abdullah had hosted Edelberg during a Danish expedition in the 1960s and was even visited at home by Denmark’s king, Frederik IX, and the then crown princess, Margrethe, during a state visit to Afghanistan. (A Danish prince had also participated in Edelberg’s 1953/54 expedition.)
According to Kakhail, his grandfather’s knowledge had “greatly informed” Edelberg’s 1984 book on Nuristani architecture, Nuristani Buildings (published by Jysk Arkæologisk Selskab, Moesgaard). In return, Abdullah was invited to Denmark where he opened the Nuristan collection after it was moved from the capital Copenhagen to Moesgaard, which opened as a museum in 1970. During his stay, he was knighted by Denmark’s royal family.
The custodian of Moesgaard’s Nuristan collection and one of the editors of Toward the Horizon, Ulrik Høj Johnsen, came across Klein’s article and reached out to Kakhail. Nuristani-Danish contacts were revived.
There is plenty of interesting detail in this volume, but one paragraph was particularly intriguing and provoked ideas for fresh research. Co-editor Schuyler Jones’ contribution mentions the bāri, a caste of artisans in Nuristan (p180). (I use the phonetical transcription here to indicate the pronunciation, ie that the ‘a’ is a long one.) Jones – a United States-born, retired professor of anthropology at Oxford University with ten fields trips to Nuristan to his pedigree – writes of the bari and their relationship with the landowning atrožan:[5]
The social standing of the bari in Nuristani society is at odds with the contribution they make to the very people who hold them in such low esteem. The largest social and political group in Nuristani society is that of the land-owning and livestock-herding atrožan. The bari occupy a separate class, and the main rules they must follow are: they may not marry outside their class, they may not own livestock [and mostly not land and grazing rights], and they may not eat with atrožan. There are other restrictive rules, of course. And yet, the bari make all the houses and other buildings, they make all the furniture, they make the shoes, the blacksmiths among them make the tools, they do the [famous Nuristani] carving, and do the weaving. [They also make all the weapons the Nuristani warriors and hunters use and all the wooden bowls and clay pots and jars for their households.] In short, the bari produce all the material culture that is so characteristic of Nuristan…
The bari, whom the atrožan do not even address by name, just “bari,” live in separate, lower parts of the Nuristani villages that even have separate names.[6] They represent roughly ten per cent of Nuristani society and although not all Nuristan’s villages have them, most have one or a few families. Those who don’t, can ‘borrow’ or even ‘buy’ them.
This is unfortunately more or less all that you learn about the bari in Toward the Horizon – and actually also in Edelberg and Jones’ standard work, simply entitled Nuristan, published in Graz, Austria in 1979 – apart from one more important thing: the reason why Wakil Abdullah was able to help Edelberg with his book on Nuristan architecture was – he was a bari himself (p106). This is why he knew everything about building in Nuristan.
For more information on the bari, you have to go back to other, partly much earlier literature.[7] Yet even there, there are only smatterings. One problem is that most literature on Nuristan only touches on this particular group and related aspects of class or caste in passing. Edelberg’s impressive bibliography, which is attached to Toward the Horizon, does not include any publications that have ‘bari’ (or something like ‘class structure’) in its title.
Another problem is that literature on Nuristan has concentrated and still concentrates mainly on its pre-Islamic culture. Even the book reviewed here leaves it unclear how the bari-atrožan relationship developed after the local people’s mass conversion to Islam. The fact that the paragraph about the bari quoted above is written in the present tense obscures this problem. It also omits to speak out that the bari were, as Austrian Nuristan expert Max Klimburg put it in a 2004 article, “socially stigmatized,” namely as “formerly enslaved” and then living “in a form of bondage.” This is the gravest shortcoming in Toward the Horizon.
To our rescue, Klimberg writes:
In theory, Islam liberated the bari, but their social position is still largely the same as before and intermarriage with any ‘genuine’ Nuristani is still all but impossible. … At present, the bari’s main problem is under-employment, as they face competition from outside craftsmen, called in to build houses in a new style.
The fact that the builder Abdullah became his area’s representative in the Afghan parliament under Zaher Shah (r1933-73), as Wakil Abdullah Khan, speaks for possible upward social mobility for former bari after Islamisation.
Apart from this, Taj Khan Kalash, in his article for Toward the Horizon, also looks at Muslim-Kalash interaction over the past century and in today’s Pakistan. This makes his contribution one of the most valuable.
In that sense, one important merit of Toward the Horizon is that it prompts two research questions. Firstly, how has Islam shaped, and is still shaping Nuristan and Nuristanis? [8] Secondly, did Islamisation, now complete, with only a few pre-Islamic artefacts kept in the community lead to greater equality between the former atrožan and the bari?[9] As a first step, it would be good if a researcher compiled what has already been published about Kafir/Nuristani class society in the existing literature, scattered as it is in its margins, to make it possible to move on from there. Does the fact that Wakil Abdullah made it, as a bari, to member of parliament show there could be more social mobility among the Nuristani than when they were all still ‘kafir’?
Moesgaard’s Nuristan collection, unfortunately, is no longer on permanent display. But Toward the Horizon provides insights into it, and for researchers, it should be possible to access this volume.
The book is available at the Museum’s shop or online via Unipress.
Reviewed by Thomas Ruttig
Anand Gopal, No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes, Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, 2014
Anand Gopal’s No Good Men Among the Living is a standout work of investigative reporting and storytelling that grips you from its opening pages and immerses readers in the tragic realities of America’s war in Afghanistan. Through the interwoven lives of three Afghans – a Taleban commander, a US-backed warlord and an Afghan woman – it provides a rare, deeply humanising perspective on the failures of the ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan.
Gopal traces the complex trajectories of his protagonists in vivid detail. Akbar Gul, a former Taleban commander, renounces violence and attempts to integrate into civilian life by opening a small business but is thwarted by corruption and police brutality that, eventually push him back to the Taleban. Jan Muhammed, warlord and close ally of Hamed Karzai, exploits American support to crush rivals, amass wealth, and terrorise civilians. Heela, a housewife, endures the horrors of war and personal tragedy yet rises to a position in the Afghan Senate, embodying resilience amidst chaos.
The book excels in showing how these personal stories illustrate broader failures. Gopal examines the unintended consequences of American actions, including civilians killed and injured, indiscriminate raids and support for corrupt warlords, all of which alienated many Afghans. The war also created a system where local leaders manipulated US forces for personal gain, fabricating enemies to get the US to target their rivals. By selectively targeting the Taleban while ignoring other factions’ crimes, the US deepened feelings of injustice and hindered efforts at reconciliation and peace-making.
Gopal’s ability to illuminate the nuances of Afghanistan’s shifting alliances is particularly striking. In a country where today’s ally can be tomorrow’s enemy, the rigid binaries imposed by the US were not only ineffective but also counterproductive.
The book’s title, drawn from a Pashtun proverb – “There are no good men among the living, and no bad ones among the dead” – captures the moral ambiguity that pervaded the war. No group, Afghan or foreign, emerged untainted. The US, ostensibly there to fight terrorism, found itself entangled in a war where clear distinctions between good and bad, ally and enemy, were impossible.
Gopal’s account forces readers to confront the harsh realities of war, leaving them questioning not just the war’s execution but its very purpose. This is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how Afghanistan’s history, shaped by both external and internal forces, led to turmoil.
While no single volume can fully encapsulate Afghanistan’s intricate history and its implications for the present, No Good Men Among the Living provides a critical and thought-provoking examination of how and why things went so tragically wrong. It prompts readers to wonder: Could Afghanistan have taken a more hopeful path if the US had better understood the country’s intricate socio-political fabric?
Ultimately, the book also compels reflection on the true meaning of victory in war. It challenges the conventional notions of triumph – planting flags, securing territory, or building institutions. It suggests that the war was not about democracy, jihad, freedom, or honour, but about resisting externally imposed categories and designs. Survival itself becomes the most enduring form of resistance. Gopal’s storytelling forces readers to ask: In a conflict so riddled with miscalculations and shifting allegiances, can anyone truly claim to have won?
Reviewed by Gulhan Durzai
Martine van Bijlert, Peace, Peace they say, Rainfed Press, 2024
We don’t often get the opportunity to recommend a book by one of our own, so it’s a special pleasure to highlight Martine van Bijlert’s collection of poems. Written over three years, from 2022 to 2024, during her participation in a peace poetry postcard exchange,[10]Peace, peace they say, is a profound journey of personal reflection and artistic expression, shaped by the echoes of war and highlighting the complexities of living in our time.
Each poem is as a window into van Bijlert’s thoughts as she grapples with the fragile interplay between peace and war, the longing for hope amid chaos and the unshakable resilience of the human spirit. In this way, she challenges the reader to bear witness not only to her own struggles but also to examine their own lives and consider the roles they have played – and continue to play – in shaping the world we live in. This collection is far more than mere personal reflections, it is a powerful commentary that is at once timely and timeless and is essential reading for all those who seek connection and understanding in a fractured world.
“I knew better how to talk about peace, before I worked in peace building,” she writes in the foreword, striking a chord with those who have borne witness to the chaos of conflict and the indelible scars it leaves behind on both the geography and the human spirit, and the price exacted by the quest for that precious thing we call peace:
In poem after poem, she reminds the reader of what it means to strive for peace only to find another war, of the resilience required to endure, and the emotional imprint that persists long after “the silence after the shooting stops,” long after “politicians come rushing in,” long after the drums of a new conflict that’s been smouldering in the shadows start beating again:
Through her poetry, she invites the reader to reflect on the meaning of peace: “We can’t call peace what isn’t peace, but we also can’t disparage what is or what could be. … We should speak of it, even if we can’t find the words. Because we need to hear from people who no longer know what to say.” In the end, the poems are overwhelming and comforting in equal measure because van Bijlert gives words to what many of us have witnessed, finding a language to articulate our collective longing for peace.
Reviewed by Roxanna Shapour
Jamil Jan Kochai, 99 Nights in Logar, Penguin, 2019and The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, Penguin, 2022
Afghan-American author Jamil Jan Kochai is acknowledged as one of the younger literary voices of the diaspora. Following his first novel, published to acclaim in 2019, 99 Nights in Logar, Kochai published a collection of short stories in 2022, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories. The two works differ in format and scope, but the common threads running between them are multiple – and this review will look at both.
99 Nights tells the story of American-Afghan children visiting their relatives in Logar province in 2005. Even before Kochai makes a direct reference to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – having the book as one of the kids’ summer reads – the tone of the narration and the narrator’s point of view cut a powerful and striking similarity to Mark Twain’s two masterpieces. The abundance of aunts and uncles in Kochai’s novel reinforces this, replicating a leitmotiv from the Mississippian Tom Sawyer-Huckleberry Finn universe.
That being said, the context in which the stories unwind are far apart. Twain’s tales were set in mid-19th century America, a time of wanderlust. The Afghanistan of the early 2000s is a place where just crossing out of the garden gates into the outside world represents a major breach of the rules, a source of danger and trauma for the protagonists – the Afghan-American narrator and three of his Afghan teenager cousins (though one is actually uncle to the others), on a hunt to bring back the house dog.
Anybody slightly familiar with the realities of out-of-home interactions in rural Afghanistan, with fellow humans and the landscape, cannot but recall how navigating the world just beyond one’s safety zone, whether home, street, or, at most, village, appeared at first inexplicably daunting. This before realising, out of experiences lived or related, the reasons for that: invisible dangers or red-lines connected to family rivalries, competition for resources, and social constraints, even before the risks of common criminality or political violence. During their quest to find the dog, the protagonists go through a series of extraordinary events, happening to or merely related to them. These are described in a peculiar mixture of the fantastic and the realistic, reflecting the different types of awe and exaltation felt by the diverse group of Afghan and Afghan-American boys, at their first adventure in the open.
After a cohesive and captivating start, the narrative does wander off, in the end, far more than the teenager runaways do. In the second half, the structure of the novel, as per the title, references A Thousand and One Nights. To the voice of the main protagonist, the quasi-autobiographical Afghan-American boy, Marwand, framed tales are added, interspersed within the overall storyline. These are told by different narrators and with a number of recurring characters met by the protagonist, who are sometimes heavily stylised figures bearing a symbolical value. For readers not accustomed to such narrative meandering, typical of magic realism from South Asia (think of some of Salman Rushdie’s work), the plot may seem to lose focus towards the end.
In the plot, there is a symbolic reference to the recent history of Afghanistan and the country’s relations with America. Budabash, the house guard dog, had suffered at the hands of the young American narrator during a previous visit to Afghanistan, made in the 1990s. Returning from America, wiser and guilt-ridden, the narrator hastens to greet Budabash with the brightest of intentions, hoping to reconcile and forge a friendship. But a decade on, the dog has turned into a monstruous wolf and bites the now grown-up boy – a wound that stays open and becomes infected. The missed encounter between the boy and the dog can be understood as symbolic of that between America and Afghanistan, together with the acts of retaliation that follow it – and that culminate in the dog running away and amok, and the narrator’s vain research for him. The metaphor can be extended as well to the complex relationship between the author and his ancestral abode (Budabash means ‘dwelling’ in Farsi).
Despite the book’s title, which sounds like it is intended to draw a Western audience in, hinting that the book aims at a broader public, the text includes a high number of Pashto and Dari words, with nothing but the context to help a non-Afghan reader understand them. Moreover, at the end, Kochai choses to have the narrator/author’s father relate events from the anti-Soviet jihad in a Pashto-only chapter, with no translation provided. This is a key episode, the fateful night when his father’s younger brother was brutally killed by the Russians and the family decided to flee to Pakistan, an event of recurring importance throughout the novel and others of Kuchai’s works. This raises a question of who Kochai’s targeted readership is. Should Afghan authors, who necessarily are now mostly in the diaspora, concentrate foremost on the Afghans outside the country as their readership who know both English and Dari and Pashto? The question is probably answered by Kochai’s second work, the collection of short stories titled The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories.
Unlike the novel, the short story format allows Kochai to explore a wider range of settings and tones, addressing in the process a broader audience of American readers who may or may not have previous knowledge of Afghanistan. Some stories actually achieve the remarkable result of shedding light on contemporary American society through the prism of the Afghan diaspora, a relatively small immigrant community, by using familial and intimate settings.
In the story that lends its title to the collection, an Afghan-American family comes under FBI surveillance. The FBI officer is himself the narrator. Through his eye, omniscient, yet run-of-the-mill, and ultimately unable to limit his role to that of an observer – quite the narrator’s position, though seldom acknowledged by authors – the people being surveilled shine out in all their humanity. This proves a perfect story-telling mechanism, ensuring no pauses or gaps in the narration’s rhythm. As readers, we see their characters develop as we eavesdrop on their casual chatter and daily routine. One takeaway here could be that the only way America is interested in observing and narrating the experiences of the Afghan community – and other Muslims in the US – is, because of its fears of radicalisation, by surveillance and attempts at control. This bitter consideration is only mitigated by the FBI officer’s realisation that, beyond security paranoia, “there is so much more to learn” about the intricacies of the Afghan family’s daily lives.
Despite Kochai’s eclectic choice of themes and settings, many stories bear proof of a profound unity in his work of so far. His own more or less fictionalised family members are easily recognisable in Hajji Hotak’s house and they and the characters from his novel also return in the short stories. The recurrent familial spirit of the martyred uncle haunts the pages of the short stories as well, as an inescapable presence in the family’s universe, no matter what continent they find themselves on – or in what dimension. The initial story, ‘Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain’, sees the protagonist dive into a popular action video game, whose newest instalment is set in the Afghan war, only to end up trying to sew back together his family’s torn past by, in the game, saving his uncle’s life.
Kochai’s returning over and over again to his own family’s history proves everything but repetitive. On the contrary, it creates a familiar universe which slowly makes it possible even for readers alien to any Afghan experience to grasp its underlying knots and fault lines. It is as if the author had decided to work his material, that which matters most to him, in order to get to know it more thoroughly, by looking at it and writing about it. This he does by treating it from a multitude of points of view. From the eyes full of magic of a young American-Afghan kid catapulted into mud-walled villages in the midst of nowhere, to the wrier glances of that same boy, grown-up and at home in California, from the attentive scrutiny of a FBI officer, to a formal resume, which lists the existential phases of the pater familias through jihad, exile and immigrant work in the US. This multitude of voices also deprives the reader of the comfort of knowing who is telling the true story and where the truth might lie.
Short stories seem the best format for Kochai to convey to readers his fascinating, deeply personal, yet poignant vision of Afghanistan and America. The very novel, 99 Nights in Logar, originated from a short story and – against the backdrop of the many masters in American literature who favoured this form of storytelling – one cannot but hope that Jamil Jan Kochai will write more. And if you missed his novel back in 2019, this author’s recommendation is to first get acquainted with Kochai’s universe through his second work, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak.
Reviewed by Fabrizio Foschini
Saad Mohseni with Jenna Krajeski, Radio Free Afghanistan: A Twenty-year Odyssey for an Independent Voice in Kabul, HarperCollins, 2024
Saad Mohseni’s memoirs of his and his siblings’ journey in establishing independent radio and later TV channels is an interesting read within the modern history of independent media in Afghanistan. His book is a reminder of some key political events between 2001 and 2023, such as the presidential elections, that also, simultaneously, offers an intimate account of the role of the national media mogul in these events
Mohseni’s family left Kabul in 1978 following the coup de état, when Saad’s father was posted to Tokyo. He was then 12 years old, the eldest of four siblings – his two brothers Zaid and Jahid and his sister Wajma. Later, the family emigrated to Australia after his father resigned his post on the eve of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. They settled in Australia, but nostalgia for the homeland was so powerful that the family kept looking for chances to work in or about Afghanistan. During the 1990s, Mohseni went to Uzbekistan on the Afghan border to look for business opportunities and started a newsletter – his very first and only experience of being a journalist.
After the fall of the first Islamic Emirate in 2001, the Mohseni brothers arrived in Kabul to find businesses to invest in. They were pursuing an idea for almond exporting until Afghanistan’s culture minister, who was also a friend of their father’s, planted an idea for a radio station. Arman FM was established with a small grant from USAID in April 2003 and from it, over the years, the Moby Media empire grew to include several TV and radio stations, not only in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan, India, the Middle East and east Africa, and a pan-regional Persian-language station, Lemar.
The book is a dynamic read that takes us into inner workings of Afghan society: Mohseni tells us about the importance of “a family connection” – family and friends’ relations – in starting and running a business. A careful sequencing of chapters maintains the book’s pace, as it jumps from nostalgic reminiscing about the early 2000s to events that happened as recently as 2023, that is Mohseni’s recounting of how TOLO TV covered the first presidential elections in 2004 just a few days after the station was launched, to a chapter on how it has been navigating the growing number of restrictions imposed on the media by the Islamic Emirate in 2023. Although Mohseni has not returned to Afghanistan since August 2021, he says he regularly participates online in the editorial meetings of his TV station.
Mohseni’s criticism of how the United States and the West in general left Afghanistan in August 2021 – sometimes interwoven with sardonic undertones – is memorable. For example, he writes:
I found myself, bewildered at an embassy reception or think tank meet and greet, comforting Western politicians as they confessed to feelings of guilt over the way the international community left so suddenly, abandoning Afghans. “It’s not your fault,” I’d tell them, as though they were a child and Afghanistan a glass of spilled milk. I’d started to feel like an aging actor at a Hollywood party, once attractive and now making a case for my own relevance.
Two chapters – one about his mother and the other about his sister – are a delicate attempt to speak about the position of Afghan women in society. He writes:
… my mother’s relationship to Afghanistan is different from mine. She was in her thirties when the country that she had grown up in changed so abruptly and then changed so many times more that it must have felt like living through a series of earthquakes. She is a woman in a country that by conservative tradition or through government decree has so often tried to control women’s lives and silence their voices. After she spends time with the women at Moby, she returns to Melbourne or Dubai a little depressed. “They say that the country and the government must think they are completely worthless,” she says. “And what can I tell them? They are right.”
Overall, this was a nice and entertaining read about Afghanistan – a welcome change from the norm.
Reviewed by Jelena Bjelica
Hassan Abbas, The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan after the Americans Left, Yale University Press, 2023
The Return of the Taliban by well-known Pakistani-American author, Hassan Abbas, looks in turn at specific topics to do with the post-2021 regime in Kabul, including its composition and structure, religious ideology, international relations and the challenges it faces.
For me, the chapter on the Islamic Emirate’s international relations was particularly interesting. Hassan Abbas explores its relations with Pakistan, China, Iran, Qatar, Russia and India. Regarding the Emirate’s Taleban’s relations with China, he quotes the acting Deputy Prime Minister of the IEA, Mawlawi Abdul Salaam Hanafi, saying:
Afghanistan can play a great role in creating important corridors. We want to be connected to China through our Badakhshan province. . . . The geostrategic position of Afghanistan could lead the country to play a positive role in linking neighbouring countries in the region and beyond.
The author delves into the Taleban’s relations with Russia. He describes how the Soviet Union’s failed invasion of Afghanistan drastically changed Moscow’s relationship towards Afghanistan. He describes how Russia initially extended its support to the United States in combat operations against the Taleban in the early years of the US intervention. He also describes the Afghanistan Contact Group (ACG) in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in 2005 to support Kabul’s fight against drugs and crime.
Abbas describes the pivoting of Russia’s calculations and approach after 2015 and how the Kremlin and the Taleban came together to cooperate because they both wanted to fight ISKP and its expanding presence in Central Asia. Russia opened up active channels of communication with the Taleban in a number of international forums, based on their mutual anti-US sentiment – a fresh start appeared to be established.
Additionally, Abbas writes, the SCO was crucial in “facilitating a conversation between the Afghan government and the Taliban, specifically during the withdrawal of NATO troops in 2016 [sic].[11] Russia invited the Taleban to several rounds of peace talks in Moscow, which helped, says Abbas, officials to understand the core interest of the Taleban. This was an insight into how Russia played a key role in helping the Taleban to better articulate their position, spread their narrative of the war and improve how they were perceived globally. Although the world has not recognised the Taleban government yet, certain countries do want to have relations with the IEA. This indicates the development of Taleban regional diplomacy.
According to Abbas, it is Pakistan that influences the Taleban more than any other country. He mentions former chief ISI General Faiz Hameed travelling to Kabul soon after the Taleban retook power and playing a key role in forming the first Emirate cabinet. Abbas says Hameed also resolved quarrels and helped the Emirate put aside their internal divisions. He quotes a Pakistani general saying he told the Taleban to give the former Chief Executive of the Republic, Dr Abdullah Abdullah and former President Hamid Karzai some symbolic position just to show the world that their government was an inclusive one, although the Taleban had their own ideas.
In another part of the book, Abbas mentions the Tehrik-e Taleban Pakistan (TTP), sister organisation to the Afghan Taleban. He says that a year after the return of Taleban to power in Afghanistan, Pakistan witnessed a more than 50 per cent increase in ‘terrorist activities’. Pakistan tried to negotiate with the TTP through the Afghan Taleban, but to little avail. According to Abbas, the Taleban have helped Pakistan only half-heartedly in pursing the TTP because both groups enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship for a long time. This, he said, has resulted in creating tensions between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
I highly recommend this book because, along with delving deep into the Emirate’s international relations, it provides the reader with an in-depth analysis of the events leading to the Taleban’s takeover as the US was withdrawing from Afghanistan. It gives the reader a more detailed and nuanced picture of the Taleban than one gets from media reporting.
Reviewed by Rohullah Sorush
Edited by Kate Clark
References
References
↑1
The Nuristan collection was permanently on display from 1970 to 2001. Currently, Moesgaard museum’s permanent exhibition concentrates on prehistoric and Viking history.
↑2
Local people were partly converted to Islam by force, the central temple of their religion, most shrines, carved statues and other expressions of their old faith destroyed. Others – mostly among the younger generation – joining voluntarily, hoping to become part of modernising Afghanistan and finding employment and education outside their own community.
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The museum holds the Nuristan material collected Edelberg, Siiger and also by Hamburg ethnologist Wolfgang Lentz (1900-86), participant of the 1935 German Hindukush expedition. Edelberg also worked in Luristan, Iran.
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Other well-known Danish specialists on Afghanistan include Klaus Ferdinand (1926-2005), who specialised in nomadism, anthropologists Jan Ovesen (1945-2016) and Asta Olesen (Islam and Politics in Afghanistan, 1995) and now retired ethnographer Svend Castenfeldt. Fortunately, there is also a young generation of Danish researchers on Afghanistan, for example Erik Hansen who worked for UNESCO in the Kabul museum and in Herat, and musicologist Christer Irgens-Møller.
↑5
According to Austrian Nuristan expert Max Klimburg, atrožan is only used by the Prasun-speaking Nuristani of the Waigal valley; the Kati Nuristani call them adze. The Nuristani are not one, but consist of various ethnic groups with different, mostly mutually incomprehensible languages. See a map in this article.
↑6
There are several towns called Barikot in Afghanistan and Pakistan, one in Kunar province, one at Swat River in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, kot being Pashto for dwelling place, related to kotá, room. There is also a Barikot area in Kabul, just west of Deh Mazang Square, which used to have a cinema of the same name but which was destroyed during the 1990s factional wars.
↑7
Earlier literature mentioning bari or other castes considered lowly include: Wolfgang Lentz and Albert Herrlich of the 1935 (Nazi) German ‘Hindukush expedition’ Herrlich calls the bari ‘slaves’ (in Deutsche im Hindukusch, Berlin 1937, pp 232-7) with its very detailed expedition reports also contains a very long chapter on skull-measuring and other methods that were designed to underpin Nazi racial theory in general and their idea they may find fellow-‘Aryans’ in the Nuristanis of the Hindukush (or more on this, see a 2015 article by the author for AAN).
Herrlich mentions another category of ‘slaves’, the lane (singular: lawin) but says they only exist among the Kantos Kafirs, whose social position he describes as Dienstknechtschaft (indentured servitude) but that, in contrast to the bari, they are considered – and consider themselves – part of the Nuristani ‘tribes’ and assumes they might be impoverished Nuristani but also says they could be sold and bought. This was confirmed in a 1974 paper by Jones who, however, calls this group the šewala and categorises them as “unspecialised labourers,” or rather labourers that produce low-tech items, such as “baskets, claypots, and leather goods” (p46-7). Particularly working with leather is considered unclean or at least lowly not only in Nuristan/Kafiristan but also other parts of Afghanistan’s and India’s societies. All this is reminiscent of India’s caste system; some researchers believe that Nuristan’s old religion was a branch of Indic religions.
↑8
Klimburg also does not elaborate beyond what we quoted above. Another short hint comes from Manuel Schmaranzer’s 2009 diploma thesis at Vienna University where he writes (my translation) that “after Islamisation, a separate form of ‘Nuristani Islam’ developed and one culture was not replaced by the other in a few years.” He also notes that “political reports from this period compiled by Schuyler Jones show that there were repeated uprisings against the [islamicising] Afghans” (p73).
↑9
Christoph Reuter, in his 2023 ‘road trip’ book reviewed by this author here, mentions that he saw a old-style carved chair when travelling in Nuristan, and the embarrassment he created when asking the owner, who had it hidden away by then, to see it again during a second stay.
↑10
This was an initiative where people wrote poems about peace and sent them on post cards to each other.
↑11
This appears to be a reference to the end of the NATO-led ISAF mission, which took place on 31 December 2014. That involved a drawdown of troops and handing over security responsibility to the Afghan armed forces. However, foreign troops stayed in Afghanistan as part of NATO’s (non-combat) Resolute Support mission, with the US alone also running a ‘can-be-combat’ mission, until the full withdrawal in August 2021.
Recommended Reads from AAN Writers: The poetry of peace, magical realism in Logar, class in Nuristan, Sufis
Between the crowd and the entrance to the airport, Pordale could see a Taliban checkpoint, where heavily armed men were holding lists in their hands and checking people’s documents. Pordale, whose father had until that morning held a high-ranking position in the democratic government, knew that their chances of getting to the airport and on to an evacuation flight were blown.
Pordale turned to tell his father that they had to get away, but he had disappeared, vanished without a trace into the crowd. “At that point I didn’t know I’d never see him again,” he says. “But I did know that I was now on my own and it was up to me to find a way of getting out of Afghanistan.”
The Taliban’s advance across Afghanistan in the chaotic days before the withdrawal of US and UK troops had been so fast and everything had unravelled so quickly that Pordale says he and his father had not thought of an escape plan. “My mother and my siblings were already in Turkey and I’d stayed in Kabul to help my father, but in those days when the provinces were falling to the Taliban, my father just couldn’t accept that this could happen and everything we’d been working towards would disappear,” he says. “It was only that morning of the 15th, when we woke up and realised that [President] Ashraf Ghani had fled, that we came to our senses.”
Sam Pordale with Coventry’s former lord mayor and lady mayoress, Jaswant Singh Birdi and Krishna Birdi. Photograph: Courtesy of Sam Pordale
Pordale’s life to this point had been spent in the highest circles of status and wealth in Afghanistan, thanks to his father’s positions in the military and government. But the huge security risks that came with his father’s work had also meant that his childhood was isolated and lonely. “Me and my siblings only really had each other because we weren’t allowed to go out and play. We only left the house to go to school and we changed schools all the time, so we didn’t have friends,” he says. “My mother would never let us sleep anywhere near a window, so we’d have our beds in the corridors because the house could come under attack. And my father was always facing assassination attempts. By the time I was a teenager I’d survived two suicide bombing attacks on different schools.”
Looking back, Pordale says that the isolation from everyday life had also made him arrogant and entitled. “We really had no contact with the outside world,” he says. “If we did leave the house, we would go with an armed escort. We grew up just accepting that our family had a lot of power.” Then all that wealth and power vanished overnight. “That morning the government fell, we called everyone we’d been working with in the US and UK governments to ask for help, but nobody answered,” he says. “All these powerful allies and friends were gone in an instant.”
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Getting closer to the checkpoint, Pordale knew he had to flee. He shouldered his way through the crowd and ran through the streets of Kabul before he found shelter in a shop. “I had nothing: no money, no luggage. We’d gone to the airport in such a panic,” he says. “The only person I could think to call was this dodgy guy who was connected to everyone, including the Taliban, but our family had helped his mother when she was sick. He was the only one who answered the phone to me that day.”
Pordale was told to wait, and after an hour someone turned up and said they were there to take him to Iran. He took a bus to the border, then crossed into Iran hidden in a compartment under the floor of a minivan.
In Iran, he was put under the floor of another bus, compressed into a small space just a few feet above the road for a journey that lasted nearly two days. Trapped in the dark, with the heat and the pain, he kept trying to locate parts of his body to make sure he was still alive. “It was like nothing existed outside the inside of the bus,” he says.
When he finally made it to Istanbul, he turned up dishevelled and filthy at his mother’s front door. “They hadn’t heard from me since Afghanistan fell,” he says. “So it was a shock to them all.” The family were reunited, but because Pordale had crossed into Turkey illegally he didn’t have the paperwork he needed to work or stay in the country. In 2022, a few months after he had arrived, Turkey began an aggressive deportation of illegal Afghan migrants back over the border into Afghanistan. “Many people I knew who had stayed in Afghanistan or who had got sent back were getting arrested or just went missing,” says Pordale. “I knew people who had been killed. I was terrified of being sent back.”
Like many other Afghans who had fled to Turkey, he felt that the only thing he could do was to move on towards Europe. Pordale called the people who had got him into Turkey and they told him to go to a market in the centre of Istanbul. “It was like a shopping centre for people smugglers,” says Pordale. “People would just be standing there outside shops yelling in multiple languages offering different packages to get you to Europe.”
Pordale was told that the cheapest route was overland through Bulgaria, with prices starting at £1,500. The most expensive, at about £8,000, was the sea crossing to Italy. He managed to get together the money to go to Italy and prepared to leave. The smugglers took Pordale and a group of about 60 others, mostly Afghans, to İzmir on the Turkish coast, and one night they did a long night trek in silence to a deserted beach to meet their boat. “When we saw the boat I thought, I’ve made a big mistake, because it was just this little fishing boat. It couldn’t have been more than 14 metres long,” he says. “People were sitting literally on top of each other, piled up. There were parents trying to keep hold of babies. I managed to sit on a small kitchen sink, sort of crouching on top of it but my legs were bent underneath me.”
Pordale is now co-president of Warwick Student Action for Refugees. Photograph: Courtesy of Sam Pordale
They were told the journey would take three days; in the end it took six. “On the third day everyone ran out of food and the sea was so rough that the water started coming in the boat,” he says. “We were all soaking wet and terrified. People were going crazy. One guy just started screaming, ‘We’re all going to die,’ and at that moment I did just want to die so this could be over.”
On the sixth day at sea, they were spotted by an NGO rescue boat and taken to Sicily, and then, after being processed, to a reception centre. After a few days there, Pordale decided to keep moving towards the UK. “My family had worked a lot with the British government and I felt this sense of brotherhood,” he says. He also spoke fluent English. “I experienced such bad racism in Italy that going to the UK felt like my only chance to be accepted and do something useful.”
He walked most of the way from Italy to France with another group of refugees. “Most of the time I was just putting one foot in front of the other but sometimes it would just hit me, what had happened in Afghanistan and how not just me but also hundreds of thousands of other normal people had been reduced to something that felt less than human. There were moments on that journey when I thought, if I die here, nobody will know what happened to me. I’m nobody, nothing. I barely exist.”
He describes his time in the migrant camps in Calais waiting to cross to the UK as “the most degrading, humiliating experience you could imagine”. He says there was no violence inside the camps from the Kurdish smugglers running the place, “but once you start the journey to the boat, that is when it starts”. He says that on his first attempt at crossing the Channel, the boat was in such a bad condition that the smugglers were beating people to make them get onboard. “I paid them £1,800 for the crossing and it took nine attempts to get to the UK.” He doesn’t remember much about the journey itself, “because by that point I didn’t care if I lived or died. It felt like just another thing that was happening to me.”
‘In Afghanistan it never would have occurred to me to do something purely to help someone else, but I discovered volunteering was something I loved.’ Photograph: Fabio de Paola/The Guardian
When he finally arrived in the UK (he says he has no idea where he landed) on 16 April 2022, eight months after he had escaped Afghanistan, Pordale says he was treated “like a human being for the first time in months. But when I spoke to my mother I just wanted to get off the phone. I had caused them all these financial problems and all this worry. They were alone in Turkey, and I had failed them.”
He was taken to an asylum hotel in Coventry, “where water was running down the walls and the toilets were broken”, he says. “After the first month I just felt myself slipping into this deep depression. I thought, this can’t be my life.”
At his asylum accommodation, Pordale had come into contact with the Red Cross, and he started walking three hours back and forth each day to one of their drop-in centres to volunteer as an English teacher. “In Afghanistan it never would have occurred to me to do something purely to help someone else, but I discovered volunteering was something I loved,” he says. “Just to feel active and useful and part of something, it brought me alive again.”
He also knew that his fluent English was the reason he had been treated so humanely by the immigration officials he had met since he got off the boat. “I could express what I’d been through. I could form a connection,” he says. “I wanted to help other people to do that too.”
His manager at the Red Cross put him forward for an interview for an academic research programme looking at the barriers that refugees faced accessing higher education. He was shocked to learn that he was allowed to apply to study at UK universities, so he applied for five undergraduate courses across the country.
Meanwhile, he was moved by the Home Office from Coventry to Stockton-on-Tees, where he started volunteering at Citizens Advice, helping local people navigate problems with benefits and jobseeking. “I would sit there and local people would tell me it was all the immigrants’ fault that they couldn’t get a job, and they should all go back to where they’d come from. I would say, ‘Well, I’m a refugee,’ and they’d say, ‘Oh not you, the others.’”
Pordale was profoundly shocked by the poverty and desperation he saw in Stockton. “Many people were living in worse conditions than people in rural Afghanistan,” he says. “So much poverty! Some people would sit and cry because they hadn’t eaten in three days. They felt that nobody cared about them and they were right.”
When protests kicked off in Middlesborough over the summer, Pordale watched the TV coverage of people attacking buildings housing asylum seekers and recognised some of the people he had helped get universal credit or housing benefit. “They were only believing what they’d been told, but they were angry with the wrong people, and the damage the riots have caused to the mental health of many refugees is huge.”
At the beginning of 2023, he was told he had been awarded a full scholarship to study politics and international studies at the University of Warwick. It was “the most miraculous thing that has ever happened to me”, he says. He started university in September 2023 with “no money, no clothes, no suitcase”, but now the campus feels like home. “I know everyone here,” he says. “From the lecturers to the cleaners, everyone is my family.” He intends to stay at Warwick to get a PhD and then spend his life trying to open up higher education opportunities to refugees and asylum seekers.
The first week he enrolled he also joined the university’s Student Action for Refugees group and is now the president. “I went back to the same asylum hotel I was first taken to in Coventry, but this time to teach English,” he says. Sometimes he thinks back to his life a few years ago and can’t believe what he has been through. “The idea I could become a refugee overnight would have seemed crazy,” he says. “But laws, governments, your rights, they can all disappear in a second and all you’re left with is yourself. I just want to make the best of every chance I have to live a good life.”
Six days on a small boat in rough seas: my terrifying, death-defying escape from the Taliban
Mike Stein would like the ICC to have the moral and political courage to lead a multilateral boycott
Two additional points come to mind. First, England acted alone in 1968 in cancelling their tour to South Africa after the prime minister, John Vorster, banned the team for including the “mixed-race” player Basil D’Oliveira. England’s decision put pressure on the International Cricket Council, which introduced a moratorium on all international tours in 1970, resulting in South Africa’s exclusion from international cricket until Nelson Mandela walked free from prison in 1990.
Second, as Liew suggests, India is the key player, holding both the cricketing and economic cards that represent major barriers to effective action: the former as a consequence of the individualisation and privatisation of cricket through the Indian Premier League, weakening players’ country ties, and the latter as a result of India’s economic self‑interest in Afghanistan.
The only hope would be if the ICC had the moral and political courage to lead a multilateral boycott, as it did in 1970, and the member states were prepared to back them. But that seems unlikely, as the England and Wales Cricket Board and other participants are refusing to take part in a boycott of an international competition. Gender apartheid remains unchallenged by cricket in 2025.
Mike Stein Pudsey, West Yorkshire
Cricket must challenge gender apartheid in Afghanistan
Afghanistan’s mineral resources harbour great untapped potential. The country sits on an estimated 2.2 billion tonnes of iron ore, 60 million tonnes of copper, 183 million tonnes of aluminium, and vast reserves of rare earth elements such as lanthanum, cerium and neodymium. In a world where access to these minerals is a matter of national security, there is a geopolitical race to secure control of critical mineral supply chains. While China currently leads, the US, EU, and others are seeking to establish and secure independent mineral supply chains.
Afghanistan is one of the theatres in which this race is being played out. The country’s resources are not just a matter of foreign economic interest – they are a potential for domestic economic development and growth. But they can also become a source for conflict and repression, depending on whether they are managed with the long-term welfare of the Afghan people in mind. The mining sector in Afghanistan is controlled by the Taliban, and it is unclear where the revenues end up.
Undermined
The new Taliban de facto authorities sought to capitalize on Afghanistan’s mineral resources after their return to power in 2021. Since then, they have awarded at least 205 mining contracts to more than 150 companies, and in September 2023 they announced new mining deals worth more than US$6.5 billion. In May 2024, the Taliban-controlled Ministry of Mines and Petroleum (MoMP) said that the group had secured investments worth more than US$7 billion from China, Qatar, Turkey, Iran and the UK. The details of these contracts remain undisclosed.
The Taliban inherited many of the Republic-era challenges in the country’s extractives sector, particularly the lack of a comprehensive regulatory framework and an effective oversight body. According to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, these challenges also include the country’s inability to reform mineral policies and regulations, corruption, unregulated artisanal and small-scale mining, and lack of infrastructure and security. The Taliban are navigating through outdated institutional structures, making changes along the way, while working on a complete overhaul of the extractives policy.
Although the MoMP claims to have taken steps to curb illegal mining, these measures lack a formalized structure with independent oversight. Workers can be subjected to exploitation in mining operations, including child labour. In addition, unregulated mining is often carried out in unsafe working conditions and can cause serious environmental damage.
Afghanistan’s suspension from the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative in June 2024 points to the problems around transparency and accountability mechanisms in the country’s extractives sector. Failure to follow clearly defined mining regulations prevents the equitable distribution of the country’s mineral wealth. With limited transparency around international mining contracts, the international community should consider the risks these pose for Afghanistan’s mineral sector, ranging from exploitation to monopolization by foreign actors.
Geopolitical relevance
Afghanistan’s reserves of copper and lithium, among other minerals, are crucial to the global shift towards renewable energy and reliance on digital technologies. China has shown a keen interest in securing access to Afghanistan’s resources and has invested heavily in its mining industry, signing multi-billion-dollar contracts for projects such as the Mes Aynak copper mine, one of the largest copper deposits in the world.
The investment is not only driven to secure critical minerals, but also by Chinese strategic considerations linked to its Belt and Road Initiative designed to enhance the country’s global influence and project its power. Taking advantage of the power vacuum created by the collapse of the previous government and the US withdrawal, China is becoming a valuable partner to the Taliban. China’s contracts and investments in Afghanistan’s mining sector are a sign of how it is seeking primacy in the region, which could deter other international actors from entering the sector. Afghanistan’s economic future could become increasingly tied to Chinese interests, reducing the country’s bargaining power and making it more difficult to establish trade relations with other countries.
Although China is leading the race, other countries, including Russia, are jockeying for access to critical minerals. The recent visit to Kabul by Sergei Shoigu, secretary of Russia’s National Security Council and former defence minister, sends a clear signal to the G7+ countries about which bloc has the most influence in the country.
An opportunity not to be missed
For Afghanistan to truly benefit from its resources, there needs to be a multilateral approach to mining, involving different international actors to ensure transparency and fair competition. Investment in Afghanistan’s mining sector could help develop the country’s infrastructure, creating roads, railways and facilities that would benefit the economy and enable resource extraction. This could provide jobs and strengthen capacities of Afghan workers, as well as a more stable revenue stream for the country.
The UN-led engagement with the Taliban in Doha is a potential opportunity to shed light on the sector and strategize on how the extractives sector could improve the economic situation for Afghans. The talks are designed to help Afghanistan integrate into the global community, with a focus on fostering dialogue between the Taliban and international stakeholders. So far, however, the process has yielded little other than a commitment by all countries to continue such discussions and the appearance of the Taliban on the international stage. While discussions have touched on security and political stability, the issue of natural resource management, particularly mineral extraction, has not been addressed. As natural resources play a central role in financing the Taliban, shaping power dynamics and post-conflict rehabilitation, linking resource management to social and economic development seems a potential area of mutual interest.
As the country navigates an uncertain path forward, its mineral resources should be treated as key elements in a broader strategy for stability, ensuring that resource wealth benefits all Afghans. If critical economic assets such as minerals are ignored in ongoing engagement strategies, they can become a force driving conflict or obstructing post-conflict rehabilitation. If left unaddressed, this pattern risks being replicated in Afghanistan. The country’s resources need to be more than just assets buried in the ground – they need to be an active part of the dialogue about Afghanistan’s future.
Why is Afghanistan part of the great extractives race?
Pakistan’s restive western border and Delhi’s outreach invited comment and analysis in the country’s press Aakash Joshi
Afghanistan, once seen by the Pakistani military and intelligence establishment as an instrument of its “strategic depth” against India, has become an albatross around Rawalpindi’s neck. For long, it propped up the Taliban in the hope of a proxy regime in Kabul.
The recent cross-border attacks by Pakistan – ostensibly to target the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan’s (TTP) infrastructure – in which civilians, including women and children, were killed show just how far ties have soured. The Taliban regime in Kabul reportedly responded to the strikes as well.
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In this context, the meeting between Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri and Amir Khan Muttaqi, acting foreign minister of the Taliban regime, has invited both comment and concern. Beijing, too, seems to be trying to open avenues with Kabul.
Dawn, in its editorial on January 11, writes, “The Indians have reacted cautiously with the Taliban, but matters are proceeding nonetheless. The Taliban also maintain significant links with China and Russia.”
“These developments,” the editorial argues, “should concern Pakistan, and make its policymakers revisit their Afghan strategy. The stark fact is that while the Afghan Taliban may be difficult customers, Pakistan cannot afford a hostile neighbour to its west.” It suggests a practical engagement with the Taliban, including the leaders in Kandahar, from where the “real power flows.”
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“The Taliban are welcome to keep the TTP, as long as they pose no harm to Pakistan,” Dawn says, and concludes, “As others are making diplomatic inroads with the Afghan Taliban, including unfriendly governments, Pakistan must reassess and readjust its strategy.”
Shazia Anwar Cheema, writing in The Express Tribune on January 10, writes, “We [Pakistan] used to blame (former Afghanistan president) Ashraf Ghani for being a stooge of New Delhi… while the Afghanistan Taliban had been called ‘brothers and friends’.” She argues that the situation seems to have reversed now and that Washington and New Delhi are acting in concert to make their presence felt in Kabul.
If this scenario is indeed coming to pass, argues Dr Cheema, Pakistan must act. “The reports of Pakistan’s first-ever friendly contact with the so-called Northern Alliance, which is made up of non-Pashtun Afghans can be a step towards this. Pakistan has been blamed for the fall of Panjshir Valley and its handover to the Afghan Taliban as well.”
Najm us Saqib, a senior Pakistani diplomat, takes a broader view of his country’s external orientation in an opinion article for The Nation: “The recent wave of terrorism—Afghanistan’s adamant stance on the Khawaraj (TTP) and the like; Washington’s total neglect of its erstwhile ‘strategic’ partner’s economic and security concerns; the region’s volatile predicament, particularly in the face of the ongoing Middle East crisis; and the West’s overall policy of leaving Afghanistan to its own devices—paints a grim picture for Pakistan.”
His argument, in essence, is that Pakistan now seemingly lacks a foreign policy and the country’s economic woes make matters worse. Unfortunately, “The economic crunch and the ongoing political uncertainty do not leave the present government with many options. Crisis management—as opposed to conflict resolution—seems to be the order of the day.”
aakash.joshi@expressindia.com
View from Pakistan: Discomfort over India’s meeting with Afghan Taliban
Dr. Stern is a research professor at Boston University and an author of “ISIS: The State of Terror.”
The New York Times
On New Year’s Day, a confused, disgruntled and indebted veteran drove into a crowd of joyful celebrants in New Orleans, killing 14 and injuring 35 more. The assailant said shortly before the attack that he had joined the Islamic State, the brutal terrorist movement that at one point controlled an area in the Middle East the size of Britain.
In its heyday, ISIS marketed itself as offering what one fighter called a “five-star jihad,” promising recruits a paradoxical mix of religious authenticity and material rewards, from free housing to a glamorous new identity to access to wives. At its height, it was the wealthiest terrorist organization in modern history.
Today, while the ISIS caliphate is gone, the group has cells and affiliates scattered across Africa, Southeast Asia, Afghanistan and Syria. It maintains an active online presence and is still a threat: With the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, the authorities are concerned about a potential resurgence by ISIS there, while an offshoot in Afghanistan, ISIS-K, claimed responsibility for a significant attack last year in Russia and is believed to be behind another in Iran.
But the twisted heart of the utopia ISIS was trying to build, and all that it claimed to offer, no longer exists. So why would the group’s extreme ideology — rejected by the overwhelming majority of the world’s Muslims — appeal to a down-on-his-luck American veteran five years after the caliphate’s fall?
For 20 years, I’ve been studying Western recruits to domestic and transnational terrorist organizations. I’ve interviewed jihadis, white-nationalist terrorists and eco-terrorists to understand their motivations and to prevent future violence. In my view, the appeal of some of the most crucial elements that ISIS offered to vulnerable or confused Western recruits — doctrinal certainty, identity, redemption and revenge — is as strong as ever and will continue to resonate with people who can find it online.
Most of us, as adults, live in a state of spiritual confusion and uncertainty. We rarely get to choose between good and evil but often face a frustrating choice between actions that lead to marginally better or worse consequences. Rewards for good behavior are often ephemeral, and punishment for bad decisions is mostly of our own making.
To some, ISIS offered a seductive alternative: moral certitude, backed by brutal enforcement. From 2013 to 2019, an estimated 53,000 fighters from 80 countries traveled to ISIS-held territories in Syria and Iraq to be a part of what the group sold as an idealized Islamic state. An estimated 300 individuals from the United States either made their way to ISIS-held territory or tried to. Some foreign fighters became notorious for perpetrating the caliphate’s worst atrocities.
For sympathizers unable to make the journey, the chief spokesman for ISIS,’ Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, called for supporters around the world to attack nonbelievers at home. In a September 2014 speech, Mr. al-Adnani said that if you were unable to bomb or shoot the enemy disbeliever, you should “smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car.” ISIS sympathizers began undertaking such vehicle attacks, including a truck assault in Nice, France, in 2016 that killed 86 people and injured 450. It was followed by many others.
In the last few hours before his suicidal rampage in New Orleans, the attacker, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, posted about his plans on Facebook. Perhaps the most telling recording was his confession that he had considered harming his family. “I don’t want you to think I spared you willingly,” he said. But Mr. Jabbar apparently worried that if he hurt only his family, news headlines might not focus on the “war between the believers and disbelievers” that he thought was taking place.
In my work, I have found that self-recruited, lone-actor terrorists are often motivated at least as much by personal grievance as their claimed ideals. In one recent study, many former violent extremists said that underlying social and emotional distress was as strong a factor in their radicalization as intellectual or religious adherence to extremist ideologies. Most reported having a history of mental health problems, such as depression, and suicidal ideation was common.
Obviously, most people experiencing a mental health crisis do not become lone-actor terrorists. But there is often so much distress in individuals carrying out attacks on their own that it is reasonable, in my view, to think of lone-actor terrorism as a crime of despair.
There is no single pathway into violent extremism, but many of the risk factors I’ve observed in my research seem to apply to Mr. Jabbar. He was a veteran who appeared to be having difficulty adjusting back to civilian life. He had been divorced for the third time. He had run-ins with the law. He may have been deeply distressed over his financial burdens. Revenge against his family — and a world that had disappointed him — appears to have been a significant part of his underlying motivation, with his allegiance to ISIS providing a perverse spiritual gloss.
The persistent appeal of ISIS in America was evident in a disturbing series of alleged plots in the last year alone: the arrest of an Afghan in Oklahoma accused of conspiring to commit an attack on Election Day; the arrest of an Arizona teenager accused of planning an attack on a Pride parade using a remote-controlled drone armed with explosives; the indictment of a Houston man on charges of attempting to provide material support to ISIS; and the arrest of an Idaho teenager accused of plotting to attack churches on behalf of ISIS. In December, the F.B.I., the National Counterterrorism Center and Department of Homeland Security warned law enforcement that pro-ISIS messages were calling for attacks at large holiday gatherings, pointing out the previous use of vehicles to ram victims.
Years after its zenith, ISIS has demonstrated remarkable adaptability. As an organization, it may yet grow stronger. After its territorial defeat in 2019, stated U.S. military strategy shifted its focus from counterterrorism in the Middle East toward nation-state adversaries, notably China and Russia. But the underlying conditions that first enabled ISIS’ rise in the region persist: Weak states, unstable governments, large populations of underemployed youth, and religious and ethnic conflicts all continue to create fertile ground for extremism.
No single solution exists for preventing terrorist attacks. But actions can be taken to reduce their impact, as well as their frequency. For cases like New Orleans, prevention is critical.
Perpetrators of targeted violence often “leak” their intentions ahead of time to family, friends, social media and even to the authorities, creating the opportunity for communities to step in to help people who are at risk. One approach to preventing violence like the attack in New Orleans builds on public health models that aim to reduce the rates of suicide, domestic violence and drunken driving. For it to prevent terrorist attacks, the authorities have to educate the public about the importance of bystander reporting and “off ramps” from violent radicalization.
The New Orleans attack serves as a grim reminder that the ISIS digital caliphate is still able to transform personal crises into public tragedy. The alarming reality is that many other people remain vulnerable to similar paths of radicalization.
2024 was another busy year for AAN as we tried to make sense of developments in Afghanistan. Our 51 publications ranged from snapshots of daily life – the Helmand labourer who, with his wife, took in an impoverished widow and her children, or the female student coming home for the holidays for the first time since the fall of the Islamic Republic – to in-depth reports, such as the effect of Pakistan’s fencing of the Durand Line on cross-border communities, or the place of poetry in Islamic Emirate propaganda. We also have exciting plans for 2025. Here, AAN’sKate Clark looks back at 2024 – what we wrote and what you read – and introduces some of our research agenda for the coming year.
What we wrote in 2024
In 2024, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) pushed onwards with consolidating its rule over Afghanistan, with new rules governing the lives of its citizens, women and girls in particular, and efforts to manage the economy and improve relations with the neighbours. We followed all these trends, often taking a sideways look at developments. So, for example, we fleshed out a major report on the macro-economy with interviews with businessmen and women on how they were navigating what the World Bank called a “stagnant economy.” We used the IEA ministries’ own reporting on their work to delve into how the Emirate wants to be perceived. In a report on the hugely consequential subject of remittances, we ended with a look at the social ramifications of younger men from Loya Paktia earning such good wages in the Gulf that it gave them greater power within the family, helping drive progressive change. We looked at the Emirate’s limiting of employment for female teachers through the lens of one district in Badakhshan, poor and isolated Shughnan. Its decades-long export of male and female teachers and literacy to other districts and to provinces is now severely curtailed, with huge consequences for the district’s economy and the well-being of many of its women.
Part of what we hope to bring to any research on Afghanistan is context, including providing a ‘long view’. In 2024, we marked a hundred years since the Khost Rebellion, when Pashtun tribes and mullahs sought to overthrow Amir Amanullah in what became a bloody contest between ‘traditionalists’ and ‘modernisers’ that continues to this day. Our first publication of 2025 partly followed the same theme with a look at the PDPA, founded 60 years ago, and how that same contest of ideas spawned a decades-long armed conflict, which was internationalised by the Soviet invasion and Western and other support to the mujahedin.
In 2024, we surveyed the various accountability mechanisms which could give some satisfaction to the victims of war crimes and crimes against humanity that all governments and armed opposition groups have perpetrated since the PDPA’s 1978 coup d’état. We also looked at the various international legal instruments women’s rights activists hope to deploy against the Emirate (for example, in this report).
Also notable in 2024, was the publication of an updated edition of the Afghanistan Analyst Bibliography, compiled by Christian Bleuer. This is an invaluable resource for those studying and researching contemporary Afghanistan, particularly the post-1979 period. It now covers some 8,000 titles.
What sort of reports were prominent in 2024?
Individual researchers at AAN generally focus on what interests them in the hope that this keeps our publications lively and fresh. At the same time, we try to cover a broad range of topics, aiming to cover eight thematic categories:
Culture and Context
Economy, Development and the Environment
International Engagement
Migration
Political Landscape
Regional Relations
Rights and Freedoms
War and Peace
As can be seen in the table below, which shows how many reports in 2024 fell into each of our eight categories, War and Peace – which topped the list in 2021, when two out of every five reports fell into this category, as did 14 of our 20 most-read reports that year – has quite fallen away as a topic. We published nothing in this category in 2024. Instead, reports about Rights and Freedoms and those tackling the Economy, Development and the Environment were at the fore.
Publications by Thematic Category
Rights and Freedoms
12
Economy, Development, Environment
10
Context and Culture
8
International Engagement
6
Migration
6
Political Landscape
5
Regional Relations
2
War and Peace
0
Resources (a bibliography of Afghanistan)
1
Dossier (of reports on international relations and aid)
1
Total
51
What you were reading in 2024
As to what you, our readers, were interested in, publications on women’s lives and possible international legal actions against the Emirate featured strongly in the list of AAN’s twenty most-read reports (see below). Also in our top-twenty were reports that delved into IEA thinking: ‘New Lives in the City: How Taleban have experienced life in Kabul’, by Sabawoon Samim from 2023, was again among the most-read reports. His interviews with five former fighters now living in the capital were a surprisingly positive read. They liked the modern facilities and cleanliness of the capital, its ethnic diversity and people’s devotion to Islam, but found office life dull. They longed for the freedom of the ‘jihad’.
Scrutiny of the Emirates’ international relations, including the various meetings and summits aimed at, but typically failing, to strengthen engagement, were widely read (for example here and here), as were some important reports on climate change, including a detailed and practical look at how to mitigate the risk of flooding. Publications from previous years have also proven evergreen: two reports on the cultural history of hashish in Afghanistan, on its production and consumption, both published in 2019, were in our top twenty, as were two reports from 2016 – on the origins of ISKP and the Afghan practice of ‘paying’ for wives.
As for readers of our reports in Dari and Pashto, a rare look at the portrayal of Afghanistan’s Uzbeks again topped that most-read list (English version: ‘From ‘Slavers’ to ‘Warlords’: Descriptions of Afghanistan’s Uzbeks in Western writing’), while a scholarly article on Afghanistan’s largest standing Buddhist stupa, at Topdara just north of Kabul, was popular with both Dari and English readers (again, see the list at the end of this report).
The year ahead
Readers wanting to better understand Taleban thinking will (hopefully) be pleased that we will be publishing a full translation of the Emirate’s 45,000-word-long Law to Promulgate Virtue and Prevent Vice (a basic translation was one of the twenty most-read publications in 2024), as well as a commentary by Islamic scholar John Butt. His 2023 report, the IEA’s Chief Justice’s theory of jurisprudence, about the key Emirate text (written in Arabic), Al-Emarat al-Islamiya wa Nidhamuha (The Islamic Emirate and its System of Governance), was our seventh most-read publication last year. We also hope to publish a review of Taleban narratives about themselves, writings in Pashto about their fight with the foreign forces and Afghan army, their time in prisons and the impact of the insurgency on fighters’ families.
We will continue to carry out research on the lives of women and girls, including publishing a major report about what Afghan men think of IEA restrictions on women and a new dossier bringing together all our reports on women since July 2021. That 2021 dossier, published three weeks before the re-establishment of the Islamic Emirate, topped our 2024 list of most-read publications – interest in Afghan women is undoubtedly still strong, and we hope to keep exploring new developments. One current piece of research, for example, is on women’s inheritance rights, which are explicitly laid out in the Quran and promoted by the Emirate, but blocked by cultural norms which consider it shameful for a woman to ask for her rightful inheritance.
In 2025, as in 2024, it seems inevitable that reports falling into the categories of Economy, Development and the Environment, and International Engagement (or non-engagement) will feature in our attempt to make sense of Afghanistan. Global warming is increasingly endangering Afghan lives and livelihoods, while Afghanistan is shut out of much of the help available to mitigate the climate crisis for the poorest countries. At the same time, the level of international aid – so crucial to many families, as well as the macro-economy – is only likely to diminish further and to remain focussed on humanitarian needs. A new American president comes into office this month. Whether Donald Trump turns out to be active or indifferent to Afghanistan, there will be consequences – for good or ill. Analysis of internal dynamics, such as how the Emirate raises and spends revenue, will also remain crucial to understanding the impact of the Afghan government on its citizens’ lives.
However complex the subject, we will continue to try to present topics, at least partially, through the experiences of individuals, whether via the first-person accounts of The Daily Hustle series, or as integral elements of our longer, in-depth research. Watch out for forthcoming reports on blood feuds, mining, the Emirate’s ban on begging and how the lives of village mullahs have changed over recent decades.
Finally, at the start of January, we wish all our readers – and Afghanistan – a very happy 2025.
The Taliban uses the success of its men’s team as propaganda – cricket’s powerbrokers should pursue a collective boycott
“There’s all types of lines you can draw. We’ve drawn a line.” So explained Mike Baird, the chair of Cricket Australia, last month in explaining the governing body’s stance on playing against Afghanistan, the country that has just banned women from looking out of windows.
According to a new decree from the Taliban government, new buildings must not be constructed with windows through which women can be seen. Existing buildings with windows must be walled up or covered. “Seeing women working in kitchens, in courtyards or collecting water from wells can lead to obscene acts,” said Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesperson for the government.
ECB urged to boycott Afghanistan game in Champions Trophy by UK politicians
At present Cricket Australia – in common with the England and Wales Cricket Board – are refusing to schedule bilateral series against Afghanistan out of concern for “the deterioration of basic human rights for women in Afghanistan”. But, confusingly, both countries are perfectly happy to play them in global competitions – Australia at last year’s Twenty20 World Cup, England at next month’s Champions Trophy.
Which, however you square it, is a weirdly precise place to draw your moral line. Our concern for the women and girls of Afghanistan apparently kicks in at 1.5 cricket matches. Two or more games in a single sitting: an unconscionable act of collusion in a murderous, misogynist, medieval death cult. Fewer than two: all right lads, crack on.
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At which point, we run into the equivocation and realpolitik of the cricketing establishment, arguing against a sporting boycott of Afghanistan on the grounds that it would extinguish the hope and joy generated by the men’s team over the past two decades, while achieving little tangible benefit.
“I don’t think it would make a jot of difference to the ruling party there to kick them out,” the outgoing International Cricket Council chair Greg Barclay said last month. Which, you have to say, is a pretty high bar to set for sporting activism. Fair enough, wave your banners. But until you’re actually capable of literally overthrowing the Taliban, then stop wasting our time.
We are warned not to punish the richly gifted men’s team for the sins of their government, as if the dignity and humanity of 20 million Afghan women were simply acceptable collateral damage against the wider backdrop of Rashid Khan’s availability for the next T20 World Cup. We are reminded that Afghanistan had little culture of women’s cricket before 2021 in any case, with the implication that – basically – the erasure of an entire international team is no great loss in the grander scheme of things.
To be blessed with this kind of benign adult wisdom! And yet, even to address this argument on its own terms is to subject it to greater strain than it can remotely handle. The very existence of the men’s team – pretty much the only representative side given official blessing – is evidence enough of its propaganda value.
High-ranking Taliban officials have posted photos with the team at official functions, called senior players to congratulate them after wins, allowed games to be shown on big screens in public parks to a grateful male-only audience. This is politics: how could it not be? Cricket is uniquely popular among the young Pashtun men who form the backbone of the Taliban’s appeal. This is the only reason the fun police have allowed it to continue: this team is now essentially a client outfit, a PR offensive, a form of cricketing diplomacy.
And of course the easy targets here are the empty shirts at the ECB, Cricket Australia and the ICC, trapped between two forms of countervailing cowardice. Cancelling a loss-making bilateral tour costs nothing. Boycotting a big tournament game has significant implications for broadcasters, sponsors and future commercial value.
But of course the ICC is basically an events management company now, a governing body that has largely given up on governance. The ECB and Cricket Australia are peripheral figures here, merely underlined by the response from the former’s chief executive, Richard Gould to calls for a full boycott. The centre of gravity in this issue, as with pretty much everything in cricket these days, is India. And so the relevant question here is less what “should” happen than: what is the realistic range of possibilities that Jay Shah, the new ICC chair and acolyte of Narendra Modi, will allow to happen?
Officially, the Modi government does not recognise the new Afghan regime. In reality, the past couple of years have seen a pragmatic rapprochement, in defiance of the cultural and religious divides between the two countries. Diplomatic ties were restored in June 2022. Meanwhile, the Afghan embassy in Delhi and its two consulates in Mumbai and Hyderabad are said to have passed quietly into the control of pro-Taliban officials.
Driven by an ever-present fear of Chinese influence, and encouraged by a slight frosting of relations with Pakistan, the Modi government has spotted an opportunity to build bridges. Naturally, cricket has played a prominent role in diplomatic ties: Afghanistan play their home matches in Greater Noida just outside Delhi, India invited them to play a white-ball series in January, and when Afghanistan reached the T20 World Cup semi-finals last summer they issued a statement thanking India for their “continuous help in capacity-building of the Afghan cricket team”.
And so, if India are overly perturbed by the disappearance of women’s rights under the Taliban, let’s just say it’s not immediately apparent. Afghan players continue to staff the Indian Premier League. Afghan men’s teams continue to be welcome to tour India, to use Indian facilities and draw on Indian expertise. The Afghan economy has collapsed since 2021 and is in desperate need of new trade partnerships. Anyone want to connect the dots here?
None of which is to argue against the power of the sporting boycott. But to focus on unilateral gesture at the expense of collective action is essentially to acquiesce to the status quo. To oppose the iron age misogyny of the Taliban must also be to oppose the structures of capitalist power that keep it in place, from the commercial cowardice of sporting administrators to the cynical collaboration of the Modi government. Too much? Too hard? Too radical? Then, like the factotums who run the game, you’ve also chosen to draw your line in an entirely pragmatic place.
Dignity and humanity of Afghan women must be worth more than game of cricket
Shabana Basij-Rasikh is co-founder and president of School of Leadership, Afghanistan (SOLA).
The Washington Post
January 6, 2025
Especially for girls, hope is difficult to come by. But it has not been extinguished.
This past December marked two years since women could attend college in Afghanistan. March will mark three years since girls could go to school past sixth grade. And only a few weeks ago, the Taliban barred women from studying to become midwives or nurses.
For a long time, Afghanistan was the country with the highest rate of maternal mortality. That’s no longer the case — that awful distinction is now held by South Sudan. But Afghanistan’s rate remains the highest of any nation outside Africa. And that’s only on the national level. Certain remote regions of Afghanistan see a maternal mortality rate that’s much higher than the national one, particularly regions such as Badakhshan in the northeast.
A few weeks ago, I talked to a 13-year-old girl in Badakhshan over Zoom.
She was telling me about her parents. Both are nurses. Her mother was no longer permitted to work in a clinic, but she could see patients at their home, and she saw many of them. These home visits inspired the girl.
“I want to be an OB/GYN,” she told me. “Women die here when they give birth. So many women die here. If I become a doctor, I can serve my people and I can change that.”
“If I don’t find a way to study, I’ll have a dark future here,” she said. “I’ll keep trying. Failure is a part of life. I have lots of plans. I will make them happen. I’m going to build a clinic in this village someday.”
“I want to study. I want to go to school. I’m living in a place that is two seasons under the snow,” she said. She’s right. Winters last a long time in Badakhshan.
Two days after the girl and I spoke, the Taliban issued their decree forbidding women to become nurses like the girl’s mother.
A different 13-year-old girl told me that she dreams of leaving Afghanistan to study. She said she sees many girls her age hoping to find some way out of their homeland, too, though via a different path. They are looking to find Afghan men living overseas to whom they can offer themselves as wives. Thirteen-year-old girls.
Some girls reach for the humor in anger. They bitterly mock the Taliban in private. One girl told me how proud she was to already be a graduate, which means she made it through sixth grade. What an accomplishment. And now a whole world of opportunity awaits.
Others keep working to get out despite the obstacles. One girl told me she was taking online classes to learn to code when she realized they wouldn’t help her get into any international university, as she still lacked some sort of widely accepted credential. Which is why she and a small group of her friends are working with a teacher online to get their GEDs, the U.S.-based high school certification.
I’ve spoken to girls who climb up on the roofs of their homes every day to get a usable cellular signal. One girl from the provinces would even climb into the hills so that she could be alone and speak freely.
As parents of older teens in the United States will know, it’s early decision and early action season for college acceptances. Recently, an Afghan high school student I had come to know, a girl enrolled outside of Afghanistan, invited me to virtually join her and her family on the morning she would learn whether she had been accepted to the college of her choice. There was a lot of excitement and plenty of nerves. The morning came and there I was online with this girl and her family who were dialing in from Badakhshan.
I saw her father, mother and siblings by the illumination of a solar-powered light. They were gathered near a sawdust-burning stove. There was a little girl there who looked quite young. I learned later that she’s 4, and she’s the student’s little sister. The sisters have seen each other in person only once ever.
We all watched as the student — their sister, their daughter — opened the message she’d received from the school she wanted so badly to attend.
Silence for a moment and then jubilation. She was laughing. We all were. I saw her father’s and her mother’s faces so clearly: They were crying. Happiness. Pride. She’d gotten in. She’d done it.
It’s easy to say there’s not much hope to be found in Afghanistan today. And there’s not. But hope is not extinct. It exists only in small bursts, in hidden places, under the snow. It exists in the relentless spirit of girls on winter rooftops. It exists in the faces of a father and mother in the Badakhshan cold, sitting by a sawdust stove, warmed and illuminated by a girl and a dream that she made real.
It’s rare and precious. But it exists.
A long time under the snow for the women of Afghanistan
Afghanistan Peace Campaign
