With Donald Trump’s return to the U.S. presidency, the United States and the West face renewed opportunities and challenges in their approach to Afghanistan. His former envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, saw the election as an opening to fully implement the Doha Agreement, moving toward normalized relations, while the Taliban themselves have urged Trump for a “new chapter” in U.S.-Afghan relations.
Yet Trump’s new national security advisor, Mike Waltz, a decorated Afghanistan veteran, criticized the previous agreement, arguing that Washington had “unconditionally surrendered” and called for renewed U.S. fighting against the Taliban during the 2021 withdrawal. As the U.S. president who brokered the Doha Agreement, which set the stage for the complete withdrawal of all foreign troops from Afghanistan—and who once engaged in the controversial overture of inviting the Taliban to Camp David—Trump in his second term has a unique opportunity to build credibility with the Taliban to avoid past mistakes.
Trump will inherit a nearly deadlocked U.S. relationship with the Taliban, amid a waning Western focus. While Afghanistan’s neighbors are essentially moving toward de facto recognition, the recent closure of Afghan embassies in Europe and the quiet discontinuation of the position of the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan are signaling an increasing diplomatic decoupling between Kabul and the West. This has diminished the importance of formal recognition for the Taliban, eroding one of the West’s key leverage points.
The United States and its European partners have four key interests in Afghanistan: counterterrorism, counternarcotics, migration control, and the safe return of detainees held by the Taliban. Advancing these is fraught with challenges. Complicating matters further is a fifth, overarching concern—a moral obligation to protect human and women’s rights and preserve the gains from NATO’s 20-year intervention. Although promoting human rights was never the original aim of the U.S. intervention, and only part of European engagement, it has now become central to both genuine concerns and domestic political maneuvering.
For both the United States and Europe, the most pressing threat is the growing influence of the Islamic State-Khorasan Province (ISKP), a terrorist group that has established a foothold in Afghanistan and Pakistan. While the potential for this threat to be exaggerated exists, and alarmism should be avoided, ISKP has proved its capabilities, claiming responsibility for attacks that killed more than 200 people in Iran and Russia this year. Western intelligence agencies reported several foiled ISKP plots in Europe, including planned attacks at the Paris Olympic Games and a Taylor Swift concert in Austria—highlighting the group’s ambition and reach.
Navigating these complexities requires committed and coordinated U.S.-European diplomacy outside and inside Afghanistan. Just as they fought together, they must now present a united front in diplomatic efforts. While direct engagement with the Taliban remains controversial, positioning it as part of a broader trans-Atlantic effort makes it more politically viable. Instead of issuing ineffective demarches or hoping to fracture the Taliban from within, the West should accept Afghanistan’s current reality, engage where interests align, and practice strategic patience. The Taliban’s reclusive emir, Hibatullah Akhundzada, won’t live or lead forever, but the United States and Europe haven’t yet built ties with Afghanistan’s other key figures.
Demonstrating respect and granting legitimacy, such as formal recognition, are not the same. Since their first emirate in the late 1990s, the Taliban have sought international recognition, a U.N. seat, and diplomatic engagement, but more crucially, they have sought respect. Today, many senior Taliban leaders have spent years living abroad and have a stronger grasp of diplomacy than in the 1990s, spurred by the experiences, networks, and negotiating skills derived from the long process leading to the Doha Agreement in 2020. For the Taliban, de facto engagement and displays of diplomatic respect—such as Chinese President Xi Jinping personally receiving their ambassador—are far more significant than the de jure legitimacy of an international order they consider illegitimate.
There’s no shortage of engagement with the Taliban by non-Western powers. Aaron Zelin of the Washington Institute has meticulously tracked all Taliban diplomatic meetings since August 2021, nearly 2,000 in their first three years in power, with meetings accelerating year on year. When Uzbek Prime Minister Abdulla Aripov completed a formal visit to Afghanistan in August, it all seemed very “normal,” marking the highest-level visit since the Taliban took power. Hands were shaken, and trade deals were signed—and there was no mention of the Taliban’s policies toward women and girls or lack of inclusivity in government.
Countries such as China, Uzbekistan, and the United Arab Emirates are hosting Taliban ambassadors while avoiding the label of formal recognition or raising human rights concerns—a convenient diplomatic maneuver that the United States and European countries cannot replicate due to their own regulations and domestic politics.
However, while regional engagement enhances the Taliban’s legitimacy, it has yet to influence their behavior or prompt any meaningful compromises. Pakistani officials, for instance, are currently grappling with a surge in Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) attacks, which have claimed the lives of thousands of soldiers and police. Pakistan should have leverage in its relations with the Afghan Taliban, given that many senior Taliban leaders were educated in Pakistani madrassas, sought refuge in cities such as Quetta and Karachi after the 2001 U.S. invasion, received support during the war, and still have family in Pakistan today. Yet this leverage seems absent.
Pakistan does not need to rely on culturally alien diplomats using translators to engage with the Taliban. It has a direct line through a rotating cast of envoys, both formal and informal, such as political leader Fazlur Rehman—a Pashtun and graduate of the same Darul Uloom Haqqania seminary as many Taliban leaders—and Muhammad Taqi Usmani, the most revered living Deobandi cleric. Usmani has urged them not only to curtail support for the TTP but also to allow girls to attend school. Yet even these pleas from figures within their own tradition have been soundly ignored. If the Taliban are ignoring Usmani, they certainly won’t respond to Western criticism, which is often more performative than practical. Similarly, they are also unlikely to heed Islamic leaders or scholars from traditions far from theirs.
After all, the Taliban are victors, and victors are not inclined to listen. They are also ideologues, which sets clear limits on their pragmatism. In September, during a ceremony in Peshawar, the Taliban’s consul general theres refused to stand for the Pakistani national anthem because it featured music. This act of defiance sparked more outrage in Pakistan than the countless TTP attacks that the Taliban have enabled. This highlights a point often overlooked in U.S. and European diplomacy, not just in Afghanistan but across the region: Perceptions of respect—or disrespect—carry immense weight, even in the face of deep-seated conflicts. The Taliban’s refusal to stand was more than a snub; it was a reminder of their ideological intransigence, even toward their former hosts.
If regional engagement is yielding few results, why shouldn’t the United States and Europe keep their distance? Because disengagement offers even less. Up until now, the Biden administration has maintained an international consensus on withholding formal recognition of the Taliban, leveraging it as a potential bargaining chip. However, as regional players are prioritizing realpolitik over ideology, with increased regional engagement—approaching de facto recognition—a Western strategy of nonrecognition is no longer an effective coercive tool. More importantly, the illusory promise of recognition does not offer a meaningful way to compel the Taliban. Instead, it has led to a prolonged stalemate between the international community’s principles and the Taliban’s rigid, exclusionary policies, leaving the Afghan people trapped in the middle of this impasse.
In Western diplomacy, engagement is often viewed as a form of leverage, a key component of transactional negotiations. In Afghanistan, sitting with your adversary is simply the necessary starting point, not a sign of concession. By being present in Afghanistan, regional countries have leveraged aspects of the Taliban’s own values—rooted in its specific version of Pashtun culture, ideas around hosting outsiders, and religious sensibilities—to their advantage. If the West were to adopt a similar approach, it could help secure the release of detainees and address more difficult issues, such as terrorism or migration.
As Pakistan has learned, engagement is not a cure-all for the challenges posed by the Taliban. The West’s predicament is different, and its interests in Afghanistan are more straightforward and less entangled. Abandoning Afghanistan completely may be tempting, but it would echo the mistakes of the 1990s, which ultimately led to the events of 9/11. Rather than sticking to value-based or transactional diplomacy, clinging to ideals it cannot enforce on the Taliban, the West must adapt its approach to protect its interests. Disengagement or inaction risks losing influence and the ability to advocate for a more inclusive and stable Afghanistan.
For NATO states involved in the Afghanistan war, the legacy of two decades of conflict, compounded by the Taliban’s resurgence, has made it a “toxic issue” to revisit. Proactively and directly engaging with the Taliban is a serious political liability for Western leaders. As a result, meaningful diplomatic efforts have been stifled by domestic political concerns and the fear of legitimizing the Taliban government.
In October, Tom West stepped down as the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan without a successor. His responsibilities now fall on John Mark Pommersheim, the deputy assistant secretary of state for Central Asia, and Chargé d’Affaires Karen Decker in Doha. The lower-profile Afghanistan Affairs Unit in Doha could adopt a quietly proactive approach, out of the spotlight. Any meaningful progress will require political and bureaucratic backing, as well as strong leadership from whoever eventually takes over these roles. At some point, U.S. engagement with the Taliban will need to be conducted openly and within Afghanistan itself. Despite the fears of another Benghazi, Washington must find a way to deploy its diplomats, as it did in Cuba in the 1970s and in dangerous outposts today. Without a cohesive approach, it is likely that U.S. engagement with Afghanistan will become fragmented, with various agencies acting independently and ineffectively.
The West still has real interests in Afghanistan, with the growing threat of ISKP, which has proved its capacity for global reach. While the Taliban cannot be fully trusted, they can serve as limited counterterrorism partners against this shared threat. Afghanistan’s migration crisis poses a pressing issue for Europe. More than 100,000 Afghans made first-time claims for protection in the European Union in 2023 alone, making them the second-largest group of asylum-seekers. Driven by rising right-wing populism, even once welcoming nations such as Germany have adopted harsher migration policies.
The West cannot meaningfully influence Afghanistan’s future from a distance. This makes Western diplomacy inherently transactional when it needs to be personal and pragmatic, especially with a group such as the Taliban. Maintaining an arm’s-length approach will breed distrust and suspicion toward any Western efforts to benefit from future changes in the Taliban’s power structure or leadership. This distance also alienates Western countries from the Afghans who live within Afghanistan. Relying on a U.N. envoy is unlikely to change that.
Instead, the United States and Europe could move beyond occasional engagement in Doha and sporadic meetings in Kabul to take a long-term approach by meeting with the Taliban and the Afghan people inside Afghanistan. This approach must be coordinated, coherent, and grounded in personal diplomacy. Having a presence in Kabul is not a mere gesture of goodwill; it is a diplomatic necessity. By following the example of regional states in demonstrating respect through dialogue, Western diplomats can leverage the power of face-to-face interactions, recognizing that effective diplomacy is rooted in building personal relationships.
For the West, being present in Afghanistan could eventually pave the way for pragmatic progress, whereas maintaining distance only ensures failure. Trump should leverage his unique credibility with the Taliban, as the architect of the Doha Agreement, to pursue a forward-looking diplomacy, rather than return to the mistakes of the past.
Jens Vesterlund Mathiesen is a special consultant at the Centre for Stabilisation at the Royal Danish Defence College.
Adam Weinstein is deputy director of the Middle East Program at the Quincy Institute.
Galina Mikkelsen is a research assistant at the Centre for Stabilisation at the Royal Danish Defence College.
U.N. cash dollars for humanitarian aid also buttress Afghanistan’s balance of payments and inject liquidity.
A cash squeeze could destabilize a fragile economic equilibrium.
With good policies, the Afghan central bank and external donors can mitigate risks posed by dwindling cash flows.
Afghanistan’s precarious economy is facing a new set of multidimensional risks as humanitarian aid — delivered in massive shipments of U.S. cash dollars — shrinks rapidly amid competing demands from other crises around the world. The dollar inflows, moved under U.N. auspices, have helped stabilize the Afghan economy, cover its mammoth trade deficit, and inject monetary liquidity into commerce. With much smaller cash infusions, in line with a general reduction in aid, the suffering of Afghanistan’s poverty-stricken population is likely to increase.
Minimizing the potential economic damage will demand sound macroeconomic management by the Taliban regime. Among other measures, the country’s economic policymakers will need to organize a gradual depreciation of the excessively strong exchange rate and ensure that there are adequate amounts of Afghani currency notes in circulation.
Despite strongly disapproving of the Taliban’s destructive policies on gender, other countries and international agencies can play a supportive role by facilitating production of more Afghani banknotes as needed and allowing investment income from the Afghan Fund in Switzerland (comprising part of Afghanistan’s frozen foreign exchange reserves) to be used for macroeconomic stabilization. This can be done without turning any funds directly over to the Taliban.
Other countries and international agencies can play a supportive role … without turning any funds directly over to the Taliban.
How did Afghanistan arrive at this point?
After the severe economic shock that accompanied the final withdrawal of U.S. troops and the Taliban’s takeover in August 2021, international humanitarian aid ramped up and helped stem a months-long economic freefall. Humanitarian aid funding totaled $3.8 billion in 2022.
With normal international financial transactions blocked and some $9 billion of Afghan central bank reserves frozen after the American pullout, much of the aid had to be delivered in shipments of U.S. cash to a private Afghan bank. The bank, in turn, made the funds available to U.N. and other aid agencies to run their programs, pay salaries and distribute assistance. The cash shipments totaled $1.8 billion from December 2021 through 2022.
From a macroeconomic perspective, the deliveries replaced pre-2021 Afghan central bank (Da Afghanistan Bank, or DAB) imports of U.S. cash of a similar size. But serious technical and programmatic problems are associated with the cash shipments, including high costs from fees and overhead charged at each stage and risks that include potential security failures.
A Steep Decline in International Support
Previous advocacy for a gradual, pre-programmed reduction in humanitarian aid was belied by a sharp drop in assistance after 2022. Funding fell by half in 2023 to $1.9 billion and remains low this year, having reached only $1.2 billion by mid-November. By all indications, the U.N. cash shipments remained high last year, reflecting the pipeline of undisbursed assistance and the lag time between funding commitments for aid and actual delivery. But their level is falling now, probably by at least half in line with the decline in overall aid.
Various observers as well as this author have expressed concerns that the waning of cash injections, which have financed part of Afghanistan’s large official trade deficit, will destabilize the economy. The balance of payments issue is only part of the story, however; U.N. cash shipments also play an important monetary role.
Key features of the situation:
The Afghan economy functions largely on cash, with very low bank deposits as a share of GDP and little financial intermediation. Cash and hawala (informal money exchanges and transfers) are king.
The economy is also heavily dollarized, with U.S. currency circulating freely and used for sizable transactions. (The Taliban seem to have made progress in curtailing the use of Pakistan rupees and Iranian currency in the west and south respectively, but not so much with respect to the U.S. dollar nationwide.)
The Afghan banking system is largely dysfunctional, still suffering from the public’s loss of trust after the Kabul Bank disaster in 2010. Much of it is mired in bad loans, depositors are withdrawing funds within DAB-imposed limits. Furthermore, the system is hobbled by international banking restrictions that are due more to perceived reputational risks than to sanctions per se.
DAB faces great difficulty in implementing macroeconomic policy, having lost access to its substantial foreign exchange reserves, and perhaps continuing to encounter obstacles in printing domestic Afghani currency banknotes.
Finally, the large and growing official trade deficit is financed in part with humanitarian aid.
These economic characteristics leave U.S. cash comprising a core part of Afghanistan’s money supply and providing the liquidity needed to lubricate business and personal transactions. Indeed, the injections of U.N. cash shipments are akin to a central bank augmenting the money supply. Especially in the kind of recessionary situation Afghanistan finds itself, a too-constrained money supply is likely to exacerbate the economic downturn and may result in harmful deflation (i.e. price declines), which Afghanistan has been experiencing.
The U.N. cash shipments also have supported the exchange rate. In particular, DAB from time to time conducts foreign currency auctions — selling U.S. dollars that have accrued to it indirectly from the U.N. shipments — in exchange for Afghani currency. By injecting dollars and removing Afghanis from circulation, these auctions strengthen the exchange rate (the Afghani appreciated by some 25 percent against the U.S. dollar in the three years since the Taliban takeover, with some further appreciation since then).
Policy Options for Afghanistan’s Economy
The normal policy response to the balance of payments shock from declining humanitarian aid and U.N. cash shipments would be a gradual depreciation of the Afghani currency. That would help balance the demand and supply of foreign exchange while potentially stimulating exports and curbing imports by making both more expensive when valued in domestic currency.
A managed depreciation could be brought about by reducing the amounts and/or frequency of DAB’s foreign currency auctions. If that results in excess dollars, accumulating them as in-country dollar reserves in DAB would be beneficial for macroeconomic management in the future. However, this will be challenging to manage if DAB does not have U.S. dollars in vault to flexibly deploy in foreign currency auctions to ensure a steady, gradual depreciation.
It is crazy to let the vagaries of humanitarian aid and the ups and downs of the U.N. cash shipments serve as a de facto instrument of monetary policy. The shipments fluctuate from month-to-month depending on program needs, and strong seasonal elements such as preparing for winterization are also involved, so they may have little relationship with the liquidity needs of the economy.
It is crazy to let the vagaries of humanitarian aid and the ups and downs of the U.N. cash shipments serve as a de facto instrument of monetary policy.
The desirable direction over the medium term is to move away from both dollarization and the cash-based economy, which will obviate the need for sizable inflows of U.S. cash.
In the short run, DAB could encourage or pressure the U.N. and other agencies operating in Afghanistan to use only Afghani currency in transactions, not U.S. dollars. Most expenses such as cash aid and staff salaries are paid in small amounts, so using Afghanis would be appropriate.
Boosting Local Currency
Withdrawing cash dollars from deposit accounts and then turning them over to the informal hawala money exchanges to convert into Afghanis or for other purposes is unnecessary and harmful. So, when cash withdrawals are made from private bank deposits created by the U.N. cash shipments, they should be in the form of Afghanis converted at the market exchange rate. Making payments through electronic transfers or digital currency transactions should be encouraged wherever possible. Similarly, if U.N. or other agencies transfer funds electronically to Afghan banks, any cash withdrawals of those funds should be in Afghani currency, not in cash dollars.
These measures would require DAB to have sufficient Afghani currency in its vault. Printing banknotes faced difficulties earlier, and if there are still shortages of Afghani notes, more should be printed. Any obstacles emanating from the international side that hinder printing of more Afghani banknotes, such those related to sanctions, need to be urgently addressed.
Another attractive option is to begin to deploy the investment earnings of the Afghan Fund in Switzerland — cumulatively approaching $400 million and accruing about $150 million annually — to support exchange rate stability. This would be a normal, well-justified use of the foreign exchange reserves for the benefit of the Afghan people by helping with macroeconomic stabilization. The Afghan Fund’s board of directors should make a decision to move in this direction, and then commission technical work to determine specifically how this can be done.
The Afghan Fund needs to avoid providing any financial resources directly to the DAB, which some board members would likely find objectionable. Moreover, such an action might well provide ammunition for U.S. plaintiffs seeking access to the other $3.5 billion of Afghanistan’s foreign exchange reserves that remain frozen in the United States, protected so far from the litigants. Workarounds could be explored, such as commissioning a reputable third-party entity to conduct foreign currency auctions using some of the foreign exchange belonging to the Afghan Fund. The fund could also consider ways to facilitate international financial transactions and trade. Both of these options would be fully consistent with the goals of the fund.
How Afghanistan’s Economy Can Survive Shrinking Shipments of U.N. Cash Aid
The day after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Afghanistan’s Taliban offered its congratulations to the American people for “not handing leadership of their great country to a woman.”
Taliban leaders expressed optimism that Trump’s election would enable a new chapter in the history of U.S-Taliban relations. They noted that it was Trump who suggested a new international order when he inked the February 29, 2020, Doha Agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban. That deal cut out the Afghan government and committed the U.S. to leave Afghanistan by May 2021, closing five military bases and ending economic sanctions on the Taliban. This paved the way for the U.S. evacuation of the country in August 2021 and the return of the Taliban to power.
The Taliban prohibits girls’ education past the sixth grade and recently banned the sound of women’s voices outside their homes.
In Russia, Russian thinker Alexander Dugin explained the dramatic global impact of Trump’s win. “We have won,” Dugin said. “The world will be never ever like before. Globalists have lost their final combat.” Dugin has made his reputation on his calls for an “anti-American revolution” and a new Russian empire built on “the rejection of [alliances of democratic nations surrounding the Atlantic], strategic control of the United States, and the rejection of the supremacy of economic, liberal market values,” as well as reestablishing traditional family structures with strict gender roles.
Maxim Trudolyubov of the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan foreign affairs think tank, suggested Friday that Putin’s long-term goal of weakening the U.S. has made him more interested in dividing Americans than in any one candidate.
Indeed, rather than backing Trump wholeheartedly, Russian president Vladimir Putin has been undercutting him. He did not comment on Trump’s election until Thursday, when he said that the power of liberal democracies over world affairs is “irrevocably disappearing.” Although Ellen Nakashima, John Hudson, and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post reported that Trump and Putin had spoken on Thursday, Putin denied such a call as “pure fiction.”
Exacerbating America’s internal divisions and demonstrating dominance over both the U.S. and Trump might explain why after Trump became president-elect, laughing Russian media figures showed viewers nude pictures of Trump’s third wife, Melania, taken during her modeling career.
In an interview, Putin’s presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev said today: “To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.” Meanwhile, U.S. and Ukrainian officials report that Russia has massed 50,000 soldiers, including North Korean soldiers, to reclaim territory in the Kursk region of Russia taken this year by Ukrainian forces.
Trump claims to have talked to about seventy world leaders since his reelection but has declined to go through the usual channels of the State Department. This illustrates his determination to reorganize the federal government around himself rather than its normal operations but leaves him—and the United States—vulnerable to misstatements and misunderstandings.
The domestic effects of Trump’s victory also reveal confusion, both within the Republican Party and within national politics. Voters elected Trump and his running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, but it’s hard to miss that billionaire Elon Musk, who backed Trump’s 2024 campaign financially, seems to be “Trump’s shadow vice-president,” as Nick Robins-Early of The Guardian put it. Sources told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that Musk has been a constant presence at Mar-a-Lago since the election, sitting in on phone calls with foreign leaders and weighing in on staffing decisions. Yesterday at Mar-a-Lago, Musk met with the chief executive officer of the right-wing media channel Newsmax.
Exactly who is in control of the party is unclear, and in the short term that question is playing out over the Senate’s choice of a successor to minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). In the new Congress, this Republican leader will become Senate majority leader, thereby gaining the power to control the Senate calendar and decide which bills get taken up and which do not.
Trump controls the majority of Republicans in the House, but he did not control Senate Republicans when McConnell led them. Now he wants to put Florida senator Rick Scott into the leadership role, but Republicans aligned with McConnell and the pre-2016 party want John Thune (R-SD) or John Cornyn (R-TX). There are major struggles taking place over the choice. Today Musk posted on social media his support for Scott. Other MAGA leaders fell in line, with media figure Benny Johnson—recently revealed to be on Russia’s payroll—urging his followers to target senators backing Thune or Cornyn.
Rachael Bade and Eugene Daniels of Politico Playbook suggested that this pressure would backfire, especially since many senators dislike Scott for his unsuccessful leadership of the National Republican Senatorial Committee that works to elect Republicans to the Senate.
Trump has also tried to sideline senators by demanding they abandon one of their key constitutional roles: that of advice and consent to a president’s appointment of top administration figures. Although Republicans will command a majority in the Senate, Trump is evidently concerned he cannot get some of his appointees through, so has demanded that Republicans agree to let him make recess appointments without going through the usual process of constitutionally mandated advice and consent.
Trump has also demanded that Republicans stop Democrats from making any judicial appointments in the next months, although Republicans continued to approve his nominees after voters elected President Joe Biden in 2020. Indeed, Judge Aileen Cannon, who let Trump off the hook for his retention of classified documents, was approved after Trump had lost the election.
All this jockeying comes amid the fact that while Trump is claiming a mandate from his election, in fact the vote was anything but a landslide. While votes are still being counted, Trump seems to have won by fewer than two percentage points in a cycle where incumbents across the globe lost. This appears to be the smallest popular vote margin for a winning candidate since Richard Nixon won in 1968.
While voters elected Trump, they also backed Democratic policies. In seven states, voters enshrined abortion rights in their constitutions. Two Republican-dominated states raised their minimum wage to $15 an hour; three enshrined mandated paid leave. In exit polls last week, sixty-five percent of voters said they want abortion to remain legal, and fifty-six percent said they want undocumented immigrants to have a chance to apply for legal status.
The gap between what Trump has promised MAGA supporters and what voters want is creating confusion in national politics. How can Trump deliver the national abortion ban MAGAs want when sixty-five percent of voters want abortion rights? How can he deport all undocumented immigrants, including those who have been here for decades and integrated into their communities, while his own voters say they want undocumented immigrants to have a path to citizenship?
Trump’s people have repeatedly expressed their opinion that Trump was stopped from putting the full MAGA agenda into place because he did not move quickly enough in his first term. They have vowed they will not make that mistake again. But the fast imposition of their extremist policies runs the risk of alienating the more moderate voters who just put them in power.
In September, as the Taliban enforced new rules on women in Afghanistan, they also began to target Afghan men. New laws mandated that men stop wearing western jeans, stop cutting their hair and beards in western ways, and stop looking at women other than their wives or female relatives. Religious morality officers are knocking on the doors of those who haven’t recently attended mosque to remind them they can be tried and sentenced for repeated nonattendance, and government employees are afraid they’ll be fired if they don’t grow their beards. According to Rick Noack of the Washington Post, such restrictions surprised men, who were accustomed to enjoying power in their society. Some have been wondering if they should have spoken up to defend the freedoms of their wives and daughters.
One man who had supported the Taliban said he now feels bullied. “We all are practicing Muslims and know what is mandatory or not. But it’s unacceptable to use force on us,” he said. Speaking on the condition of anonymity because he feared drawing the attention of the regime, another man from Kabul said: “If men had raised their voices, we might also be in a different situation now.”
Although the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’s (IEA) ban on opium cultivation continues largely to hold, the area under poppy did increase in 2024, by almost a fifth, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) annual survey. Even with that increase, however, this year’s cultivation was negligible compared to pre-ban levels. What is more noteworthy is the shifting of the geographic centre of cultivation from Helmand in the south to the northeastern province of Badakhshan. More than half of the country’s total cultivation was grown there in 2024, said UNODC. The Emirate disputed these findings, saying that UNODC report did not take into account its eradication efforts. AAN’s Jelena Bjelica and Fabrizio Foschini have taken a closer look at historical opium cultivation trends in Badakhshan and probe why the IEA’s ban has not worked in this remote province, which borders Tajikistan, Pakistan and China.Last year, there was an absolute decrease – in the order of 95 per cent – in opium cultivation nationally. This year, the new UNDOC’s survey of Afghanistan, released on 6 November 2024, has found a reversal:[1] across 14 of Afghanistan’s provinces, farmers sowed an estimated 12,800 hectares with poppy,[2]an increase of 19 per cent compared to 2023, when an estimated 10,800 hectares were cultivated. This year’s opium poppy cultivation is still a fraction of pre-ban levels: in 2022, Afghans cultivated an estimated 232,000 hectares of land with poppy. The dramatic drop in cultivation during the 2023 season was a direct result of the April 2022 IEA ban, which came into force that autumn. It meant poppy cultivation was virtually eliminated across much of the country (see AAN reporting here and here).[3] This year’s increase in cultivation has also come with a shift in where most poppy is grown, reported UNODC:
The south-western provinces of the country have long been the centre of cultivation up to and including 2023. In 2024, this changed and now 59 per cent of all cultivation took place in the north-east, particularly in Badakhshan.
This is actually an underestimate of Badakhshan’s prominence. The only other province in the northeast to plant more than 100 hectares of opium poppy was Takhar and its contribution was only about two per cent of the regional total.[4] As will be seen below, the IEA believes that UNODC has got its data wrong and that the poppy that was sown in Badakhshan was completely eradicated before the 2024 harvest.
Also of immediate interest in the latest report is data on opium prices. These have now stabilised after steady upward shifts following the Taleban takeover. The long-running pre-ban average was 100 USD per kilo. By August 2023, said UNDOC, they had reached “a twenty-year peak” of 408 USD a kilogramme, surpassing even the price hike following the first IEA ban in 2000/2001. Yet, prices continued to climb. In December 2023, Afghan opiates expert David Mansfield reported they had reached as high as 1,112 USD per kilogramme in the south and 1,088 USD per kilogramme in Nangrahar (see this tweet). Only in early February 2024 did prices start to decline. In June 2024, they were back down to an average of 730 USD, which is still far higher than before the ban, or before the Taleban capture of power.
The extremely high farm-gate prices have produced windfall profits for those who have continued to grow and harvest poppy. The same is true for those who had opium stocks to sell because the IEA did not immediately target traders, although the April 2022 ban also covered trade. In March 2023 (a year after it announced the ban), according to Hasht-e Subh, the IEA issued a 10-month deadline to traders to export opium out of Afghanistan, waiving export taxes. The stated goal of the IEA, they reported, was to end the opium trade in Afghanistan by liquidating all remaining stocks and discouraging future poppy cultivation. However, according to UNODC, trade was continuing in 2023 and Mansfield and Alcis also reported, in April 2024, that:
[O]pium is openly traded in markets across the country even in those areas where there has been no crop since the 2022 harvest; and Afghanistan’s neighbours, including Iran, Tajikistan, and Pakistan, consistently make large seizures of opiates, even arguing that a drug ban is not in place. Evidence shows that the reason that drugs are still being trafficked cross-border is the substantial inventory of opium that remains in Afghanistan.
While traders and richer farmers able to store opium have made huge profits because of the ban on cultivation driving prices up, for land-poor farmers, and the labourers who used to rely on opium for paid work, the ban has been catastrophic. That inequity, between those benefitting from the ban and those hurt by it, could yet give rise to tensions, within or between regions.
All eyes will now be on Badakhshan, the new national leader in opium cultivation, in the coming months, including the Emirate’s. The focus of the rest of this report will be on that province, as we look both at the history of opium there and why many farmers have still been able to continue to grow it, unlike their counterparts elsewhere.
A brief history of opium in Badakhshan
In a major AAN report published in 2016, ‘On the Cultural History of Opium – and how poppy came to Afghanistan’, we quoted researchers like Katja Mielke who suggested that in several parts of Afghanistan, but especially Badakhshan, the “cultivation of opium poppy with the aim to produce raw opium for self-consumption had a long tradition.” It was used, for example, to counter pain, such as from snakebites, and to quell hunger. She and other sources do not say exactly how long ‘long’ may have been, but Jonathan Goodhand, from London University’s School of Oriental and Asian Studies, writes that poppy was introduced to Badakhshan from China and Bukhara via the silk route.[5]
Historically, opium cultivation played a crucial economic role in the province. After the British-Chinese agreement of 1907 had gradually eliminated the century-old trade of Indian opium towards China, Badakhshi traders took the initiative to exploit the large market for opium there, carrying the opium grown in their home province through the Pamirs to Kashgar and Yarkand.[6] However, Badakhshis not only traded in opium, they also grew it. A 1949 UN report mentioned two opium producing areas in the country, “one in western Afghanistan, adjacent to Khorasan province of eastern Iran [which may have been Herat or Farah], and the other in eastern Afghanistan, near Kashmir [probably Badakhshan and Nangrahar].” While the western zone would likely have been oriented towards the Iranian market, where the use of opium as a recreational drug was relatively widespread at that time, the eastern area had certainly developed in order to supply China. Even though that same year, the Chinese borders were closed after the victory of the Communist Revolution, production in Badakhshan continued and exports re-oriented to the rest of the region.
According to Adam Pain’s research on opium cultivation in Badakhshan, “by the 1950s opium poppy was an essential component of the crop repertoire along with wheat and patak (Lathryus sativus) [a legume grown to feed livestock].”[7] The long history of opium cultivation in Badakhshan, along with tradition, brought some to consider its opium to be of the highest quality in Afghanistan (Badakhshi cannabis enjoys similar fame; see AAN reports here and here).
Badakhshan’s opium farmers were, however, to receive a blow in 1958, when the central government made a concerted effort to wipe out opium cultivation, a response to international pressure to do so. However, the country-wide ban, instituted by the king’s prime minister, Daud Khan, was only enforced in Afghanistan’s most northeasterly province. At that time, Badakhshan had 3,000 farmers licensed by the king to grow opium, as Afghanistan in the 1940s and early 1950s was attempting to get an international licence to grow it legally for the pharmaceutical industry. The country’s frequent pleas for the licence at the United Nations had all been denied. Even so, wrote James Bradford, a scholar of drug policies under the Afghan Musahiban dynasty:[8]
The opium ban went into effect on March 21, 1958, stopping all opium cultivation on the nearly 3,000 small opium farmers in the districts around Faizabad, Jurm, and Kishim. All farmers who were licensed by the state were forced to transition to wheat and barley, and unlicensed farmers were being forced to transition as well.
Other provinces were growing opium as well, but were not subject to enforcement. Bradford said the Afghan government singled out Badakhshan in order to make a powerful statement, despite its marginal agricultural economy being quite heavily dependent on the narcotic crop:
In choosing Badakhshan, the Afghan government targeted the one area where opium played its most significant role. It was common knowledge at this point that opium was a staple crop in Badakhshan. Previous decades of trade had raised awareness to the superior quality of Badakhshan opium. Symbolism aside, this prohibition was a serious challenge for the state, not only because of the limitations of state power, but particularly because of the unique challenges the province provided.
For Kabul, keen to make a show of force directed at both internal and international audiences, Badakhshan was perfect. Famous as the centre of Afghanistan’s opium production, it was also very remote with limited state penetration and influence – until the ban, that is. Also, the local inhabitants mostly belonged to minority groups without the potential to lobby within or pose a military danger to the state, as Pashtun tribes had done until the 1940s.
Daud chose Badakhshan because it was inhabited by ethnic minorities who presented less of a threat to the stability of the state. … given the general reluctance of Musahiban leaders to provoke the Pashtun tribal base, Daud chose Badakhshan because it was inhabited by ethnic minorities who presented less of a threat to the stability of the state.[9]
The move devastated households’ food security, indicating the crop’s critical role in the province’s economy. Suddenly, tens of thousands of seasonal workers who had relied on opium harvesting, found themselves jobless. The New York Times reported on 16 June 1958 on the plight of Badakhshi residents:
[T]here [in Badakhshan] 100,000 persons, prohibited by law from growing the opium that has sustained them and their ancestors for centuries, are threatened with destitution … unless the loss of revenue from the highly remunerative opium crop can be at least partially offset.
The 1958 ban did not manage to stamp out opium production from Badakhshan completely. In the following years, as the five-year plan devised by the Afghan government with the help of the UN to provide residents with food aid and alternative livelihoods proved slow in materialising, some farmers resumed cultivation.[10]
The more recent history of opium in Badakhshan
Massive, illicit cultivation of opium in Badakhshan started up again in the 1990s, as elsewhere in Afghanistan, in the context of state dissolution and civil war that characterised Afghanistan during that decade. In the 1990s, Badakhshan also became self-sufficient in terms of drug processing, an important development, given that the province is enclosed by three international borders with China, Pakistan and Tajikistan.[11] As the only province that entirely escaped Taleban control during the first Emirate, it was not affected by the Taleban’s 2000 opium ban. That year, cultivation flourished: in 2001, Badakhshan contributed 79 per cent of the area under poppy cultivation nationally, a sharp increase from the three per cent of 2000.[12] In 2003, when opium production rebounded nationally, Badakhshan remained a top producer, second only to Helmand.
In the decades that followed, Badakhshan remained prominent in opium cultivation: it comprised an estimated 15 per cent of the total national area under poppy in 2003, compared to less than 5 per cent during much of the 1990s (see Graph 1 below, showing opium cultivation levels in Badakhshan province between 1994 and 2024).[13] The UNDOC and World Bank’s 2006 report ‘Afghanistan’s Drug Industry: Structure, Functioning, Dynamics and Implications for Counter Narcotics Policy’ commented:
Isolated, mountainous Badakhshan, where the Taliban were never able to consolidate their control, was relatively unaffected by the drought, and profited from the Taliban ban that affected the rest of the country. Despite a three-fold fall in farm-gate prices, opium poppy cultivation rose again in 2003/04, only to fall by 50% in 2005. Indeed, the increase in Badakhshan and the reductions in Helmand were so pronounced in 2003 that the district of Keshem in Badakhshan was listed as the district cultivating the largest area of opium poppy in Afghanistan. (page 50)
Graph 1: Opium cultivation levels in Badakhshan province between 1994 and 2024. Source of data UNODC Opium Surveys. Graph by AAN.
Badakhshan was almost poppy-free in 2008 (meaning it was close to cultivating less than 100 hectares of poppy), thanks to a number of factors – low yields brought about by poor weather and insufficient rotation of crops, development agencies’ assistance programmes and increased counter-narcotics law enforcement in the province. Cultivation eventually picked up though, a pattern shared with much of the rest of the country; it reached 8,300 hectares by 2017, just over half of the 2004 historical high of 15,600 hectares.
This year, opium cultivation has almost reached the levels of 2017, but is still only about half of the historic peak of 2004. This then, is the background to the latest attempts by the central government to ban opium and the reasons why Badakhshan is bucking the national trend.
The IEA’s ban and why its application in Badakhshan has been limited
The IEA’s April 2022 ban on poppy cultivation has been implemented to different degrees across the country and that variation has been the main factor in the changing geography of poppy cultivation. In 2023, the amount of land under poppy in Badakhshan was down, but far less than other provinces, a drop of 63 per cent, compared to drops of 99.99 per cent in Helmand, 97 per cent in Balkh and 90 per cent in Nangrahar (UNODC figures here). Most provinces saw further reductions in poppy cultivation in 2024, or tiny increases. The bounce back in Badakhshan in 2024 was unmatched.[14]
The peculiar situation of the province has pushed the persistence of Badakhshan’s poppy cultivation. Its farmers are poor, typically engaging in subsistence agriculture on small and often otherwise unproductive landholdings. When the ban was introduced, there was no high-yielding alternative crop they could grow, and they also lacked stockpiles of opium, which could have acted as a safety net. The sudden abandonment of opium production was utterly unfeasible. That might also have been the case in other provinces, for example, land-poor farmers in parts of Nangrahar. However, in Badakhshan, the local Taleban authorities, many of whom are connected to farmers through family and social ties, appear to have recognised the looming hardship and been encouraged to show a degree of tolerance (although this has obviously not been officially acknowledged). However, the differing local IEA attitude to enforcing the ban in Badakhshan is also based on other reasons.
Elsewhere, enforcement of the poppy ban has been based less on repressive action but rather mainly on persuasion as to the rightness of the ban and an expectation that rules would be obeyed, with messages conveyed from the pulpits of mosques and by the authorities enjoining local elders to uphold the ban.[15] That method depended heavily on the existence of a strong network of long-time supporters and allies of the Taleban. In Kandahar and Helmand, the IEA has also banked on the support and trust of the major local poppy planters, who moreover, benefited greatly from the ban-induced hike in the value of their large opium stockpiles. In Badakhshan, on the other hand, the insurgency had been far weaker and the IEA found itself trying to enforce a ban in a province where its networks inside rural communities were relatively few, and weak (see AAN’s themed report about IEA governance in the northeast)
When the ban was announced, local IEA officials in Badakhshan – former Taleban commanders who had usually not enjoyed mass community support during the insurgency – were still struggling to expand their influence. This was a region that had never previously experienced Taleban rule and which hosted significant remnants of the old anti-Taleban mujahedin networks. The new authorities were suspicious of the old local elites, who are largely of a Jamiat-e Islami background, considering them susceptible to being enticed to join the armed opposition – which is still active in parts of the province. During the first couple of years of IEA rule, some co-option strategies were put in place in order to win locally influential people over to the Emirate’s side. Local Taleban commanders, for example, were generally left in control of their home districts rather than shuffled around the province or even outside it – which is common practice elsewhere in the Emirate – in order to help them consolidate their local power bases. Moreover, veteran ‘tier 1’ Taleban leaders who hail from Badakhshan, like Chief of Staff Fasihuddin Fitrat, despite holding top-ranking positions in the IEA at the central level, have also been depended upon to solve problems and supervise policies and appointments in the province.
This comparatively secluded provincial political life contributed, at least for a time, to sheltering Badakhshan from the full enforcement of the opium ban and – together with the pressing economic needs of the residents of this poor mountain province – has allowed for a continuation of poppy cultivation in the province. Remarkably though, poppy growing in Badakhshan increased as a percentage share of the land area nationally under cultivation between 2023 and 2024 at precisely the time when the central government was bringing governance of the province more into line with the rest of the country.
Eradication in 2024
At the end of 2023, a reshuffle of the provincial authorities brought outsiders to govern Badakhshan for the first time. This coincided with the realisation or acknowledgement that, unlike the rest of the country, Badakhshis were still sowing and harvesting poppy. That posed a challenge to the IEA’s credibility and risked undermining adherence to the ban elsewhere. It spurred the government into pushing for greater eradication efforts in spring 2024. The newly-appointed provincial governor, Muhammad Ayub Khaled and his entourage, all men from Kandahar, found the local Taleban district authorities unwilling or unable to cooperate with the eradication campaign: in May 2024, Taleban troops from Kunduz and other nearby areas were brought in and tensions with the local farmers arose, leading to violence.
Farmers protesting in the districts of Argu and Darayem were met with violence, with some shot and killed in early May 2024 (see reports by Pajhwok and CIR), while a few days later, an IED attack (claimed by the Islamic State Khorasan Province, ISKP) killed three members of the IEA security forces sent to support an eradication mission (read AP reporting here). Eventually, the IEA’s unofficial plenipotentiary for Badakhshan, Fasihuddin Fitrat, arranged mediation and managed to defuse the situation. Eradication carried on in full swing for a few weeks and then continued sporadically throughout the rest of the spring and early summer; the protesting farmers obtained a minor but significant concession, that only local Taleban troops were to engage in it.
Faced with the need to cancel the impression that Badakhshan was being allowed to get off lightly from the ban on narcotics, it is no wonder that, contrary to UNODC reporting, the Emirate has been adamant that the 2024 eradication campaign in the province was carried out thoroughly and successfully. For example, in a response to the UNODC survey, the Ministry of Interior insisted that:
According to your report, the highest cultivation is in Badakhshan province. However, our regional reports indicate that the cultivation is concentrated in the districts of Argu, Khash, Jorm, Darayem, and Shahr-e-Bazarg, where the fields have been completely eradicated. The issue of eradication has been a major concern across all provinces where opium poppy is being cultivated.
Unfortunately, the UNODC office did not mention the eradication of opium poppy fields in its 2024 report. As you are aware, security forces in all provinces have taken serious actions against opium cultivation, compelling farmers not to grow poppy on their fields.
Our regional information indicates that approximately 16,000 hectares of opium poppy have been eradicated since the end of 2023 until now. Of these, around 6,000 hectares were measured using GPS technology. All GPS data has been shared with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). However, after reviewing the GPS data, it was noted that some GPS points were recorded multiple times on the same date due to GPS devices being left on, which resulted in inaccurate data collection. In some instances, barren land and other crops were mistakenly classified as poppy fields. While there may be discrepancies in the GPS data, this does not invalidate all the figures.
If opium poppy eradication efforts in Badakhshan province had been conducted with the technical cooperation of UNODC, it is likely that accurate GPS data for more than 7,000 hectares would have been recorded. The lack of cooperation from the UNODC office has negatively impacted these eradication efforts.
…
In Badakhshan, all opium poppy fields have been eradicated and your data should accurately reflect the situation, considering that the eradication process is ongoing, and images may have been taken before this was completed.
The IEA claim that the eradicated area equalled the totality of poppy cultivation in Badakhshan contrasts, however, not only with UNODC but also satellite imagery provided by Alcis and reports by locals. According to villagers from the main poppy-growing districts of Badakhshan of Argu and Darayem interviewed by AAN, eradication in 2024 was not full-scale, but rather ended up targeting mostly easy-access areas such as the outskirts of cities and stretches along the main roads, or those areas where farmers and landlords had no connections inside the provincial government to resort to who could help to save at least part of their crop. Locals also alleged the involvement of local officials involved in counter-narcotics operations in influencing which poppy fields were selected for destruction, keeping the eradication teams away from their own turf and even directing teams against their rivals – something also seen under the Islamic Republic.
The current sowing season – autumn 2024, and spring 2025
After last season’s eradication campaign, carried out on the crop that was harvested in late June/early July 2024, all eyes were on Badakhshan to see whether farmers would again defy the law. In this province, there are two main times of poppy cultivation. Autumn sowing (tirmai) usually happens in October, with the poppy seeds then staying in the ground under the snow through winter. Farmers will wait for a couple of good autumn rains before sowing, but if it does not rain, they can afford to wait even until mid-November to sow. This type of sowing is usually practised in higher-elevation areas. The second type of sowing, bahari, takes place as the name implies in late winter/spring and is more common in lower-lying and warmer areas where the snow melts earlier and poppies grow more quickly, allowing for an earlier spring sowing compared to higher area. Bahari also brings lesser yields; the main harvest centres around tirmai sowing.
According to locals interviewed, tirmai sowing is certainly now taking place in a majority of Badakhshan districts. The increased risks of opium cultivation, as shown by the eradication efforts in 2024, have not outweighed the incentives provided by high prices and a growing interest in Badakhshan’s produce shown by opium traders from other Afghan provinces. Also, the acquiescence of many local Taleban officers and the farmers’ ability to stand their ground, although at the cost of violence, in front of the eradication campaign, or at least to reach compromises through the mediation of powerful figures at the central IEA level, might have played a role in their decision to sow again.
Moreover, locals complain of the lack of alternative crops and government funding for them, despite promises they say were made at the time of the eradication campaign and more recent attempts to promote the cultivation of the cash crop, hing (asafoetida),a spice used in the Indian subcontinent.[16] Hing is actually not a good alternative to poppy in the short run because, like orchard crops, it takes several years to produce a return – unlike poppy which is an annual.[17] Interviewees said the lack of an alternative was why, in the higher areas of Argu, Darayem, Khash and Yaftal, farmers had already sown poppy. AAN also heard from locals that no action had been taken against the sowing so far: local Taleban officials have relatives or associates in the villages sowing poppy, we were told, and will not stop them. Also, as reported by locals, a number of farmers hit by past eradication have struck deals with district or provincial authorities in order to ensure next year’s crop will not be destroyed – in exchange for part of the profits.
Only in a few districts, where eradication was carried out more massively and many farmers lost the capital they had invested or barely regained what they had spent, does local behaviour appear more cautious. In poorer and less connected areas, such as the upper reaches of Jorm district, farmers hit by eradication simply do not have the relevant connections at the provincial or national level, or the money to bribe themselves out of trouble when and if eradication starts. Hence, according to locals interviewed, many have refrained from sowing the tirmai crop.
However, even this successful intimidation could turn sour: rugged and secluded valleys in this area, such as the Khastak Valley, have regularly offered shelter to anti-government groups. Already selected as a redoubt by the Taleban during the insurgency, the area has lately come to host ISKP sympathisers. Left without choices, the local villagers could turn to these armed opposition groups to protect their poppy crops from the central government, again, something also seen under the Republic.
The resilience of the drug economy
Badakhshan might represent an exception across an Afghanistan, where poppy cultivation is still at historical lows, but in the context of the rather integrated Afghan opium economy, the fact that poppy growing continues there is a matter of interest for all Afghan opium traders and the markets in neighbouring countries. Although Badakhshan, first and foremost, remains the key supplier for the illicit drugs markets and the traders in Tajikistan for trafficking onwards through the former Soviet republics,[18] in the past two years, informed locals told AAN, the major drug traffickers from Helmand and Kandahar have entered the Badakhshan market and struck deals with local producers (read also this report by the International Crisis Group). Farmers from southern Afghanistan might have complied with the narcotics ban, out of old alliances and respect for the IEA, but traders from there have been earnestly exploring ways to secure continued supply to their clients, without fully depleting their stockpiles. Thanks to their better connections inside the IEA, the ‘Kandaharis’ (as all Southerners are labelled in the north) have fewer problems circumventing police controls and transporting drugs across the country. According to locals interviewed, the Kandaharis initially tried to access Badakhshi producers directly and cut off local traffickers, for example, by having them arrested. However, after some violence was traded between the two groups, the Kandaharis gave up the idea of completely swaying the Badakhshi market and included the local traffickers, who have their own separate smuggling routes and contacts for taking opiates to Tajikistan – as intermediaries in the deals. Moreover, the higher prices of opium allow for an additional tier of middlemen to fit in without hurting profits.
As a province, Badakhshan is particularly vulnerable to the loss of income associated with the poppy ban. Its economy, always fragile and previously dependent on seasonal labour migration to other parts of the country and to Iran – both options now reduced by Afghanistan’s contracted economy and border closure – would be seriously harmed by a full implementation of the ban there. However, the ban has had consequences everywhere, as we explored when we heard from poor farmers in Helmand in the spring. Persistent high prices and lack of economic alternatives make it increasingly difficult for the IEA to achieve a full, nationwide implementation of the ban – in fact, other poor and peripheral provinces such as Badghis also seem ready to resume poppy cultivation (see footnote 13). That means the major political fallout likely to proceed from the ban on cultivation remaining fully in force might not be limited to provinces where the IEA traditionally faced opposition, such as Badakhshan. Where it leads, other provinces might follow: so far, opium farmers with large landholdings from Kandahar and Helmand have been benefiting from stockpiles, but once these are depleted, the IEA risks alienating many even from that area, which always constituted its major support base in the country.
Edited by Kate Clark
References
References
↑1
‘Afghanistan Drug Insight Volume 1 – Opium Poppy Cultivation 2024’ is the first of three in the annual series of UNODC reports on opium cultivation, production, trafficking and consumption in Afghanistan and it is a rather short report that shows data collected by UNODC through remote sensing techniques and rural village surveys, as well as through global data collection on drugs (the UNODC Annual Report Questionnaires and UNODC Drugs Monitoring Platform).
↑2
The 14 provinces were Kunar, Laghman, Badakhshan, Takhar, Balkh, Faryab, Jowzjan, Helmand, Kandahar, Uruzgan, Zabul, Badghis, Farah and Ghor. For an estimated hectarage for each province, see the table on pages 10 and 11 of the UNODC survey. Poppy-free provinces are provinces with less than 100 hectares in cultivation. The national total includes opium poppy found in poppy-free provinces.
↑3
Alcis, a company that also monitors illicit crops in Afghanistan, has provided slightly diverging estimates. However, as it is currently revising its data for Badakhshan based on a more refined method, we have not included its estimates in this report. For the latest Alcis estimates for Badakhshan, see here.
↑4
For UNODC, the northeast comprises four provinces: Badakhshan, which had 7,408 hectares of land under poppy in 2024; Takhar, with 165 hectares after being poppy-free in 2023; and Baghlan and Kunduz, both classed as poppy-free, ie planted with less than 100 hectares of poppy.
↑5
Katja Mielke ‘Opium as an economic engine: Drug economy without alternatives?’ in Wegweiser zur Geschichte: Afghanistan, Potsdam: MGFA, 2007, 207; Jonathan Goodhand, ‘From holy war to opium war? A case study of the opium economy in North Eastern Afghanistan’, Central Asian Survey, 2000, 19(2), 270.
↑6
Fabrizio Foschini, ‘Heretics or Addicts: The Ismailis of Afghan Badakhshan caught in the middle of the opium trade’ in ‘Uyun al-Akhbar. Islam, Collected Essays, Bologna, 2010, 241-263.
↑7
Adam Pain. ‘Between necessity and compulsion: opium poppy cultivation and the exigencies of survival in Badakhshan, Afghanistan’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2023, 51:4, 902-921, DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2023.2216145
↑8
James Bradford, ‘Drug Control in Afghanistan: Culture, Politics and Power During the 1958 Prohibition of Opium in Badakhshan’, Iranian Studies, 2014, p14, 19. doi:10.1080/00210862.2013.862456. The article explores the process leading to the Afghan government’s decision to implement a prohibition and eradication of opium in the northeastern province of Badakhshan – why Daud chose Badakhshan, the impact of the opium ban on the people of Badakhshan and the future of opium production and trade, as well as the evolution of drug control in Afghanistan under the Musahiban dynasty. See also his PhD dissertation, available here.
↑9
James Bradford, ‘Drug Control in Afghanistan’, 19.
↑10
James Bradford, ‘Drug Control in Afghanistan’, 18. Ultimately, the economic marginalisation suffered by Badakhshan in the 1960s and 70s was a primary factor behind the development there of a political movement, Sazman-e Enqelabi-ye Zahmatkashan-e Afghanistan (the Revolutionary Organisation of Afghanistan’s Toilers (usually known as Setam-e Melli or “National Oppression”) which criticised Pashtun hegemony and advocated an economic and political emancipation of the northern minorities.
UNODC reported opium cultivation in Badghis as also up, by 241 per cent to 1,255 hectares, and Helmand, up by 434 per cent to 757 hectares. However, these amounts are both dwarfed by Badakhshan’s 7,408 hectares.
↑15
As AAN reported in March 2024 about opium cultivation in Helmand:
An interviewee in Greshk district said that, last November, during the poppy sowing, the IEA had arrested some people and imprisoned them for between one and three months. He thought this was intended to frighten other farmers into not growing poppy.
↑16
It is an interesting historical fact that hing was mentioned as alternative crop to opium poppy in the 1958 New York Times article about Badakhshan quoted earlier in the text.
↑17
Asafoetida is deep-rooted plant from the carrot (umbelliferous) family, which produces a pungent spice widely used especially in Pakistani and Indian cooking. A wild plant, it is now increasingly cultivated, but unlike poppy, which is an annual, it needs several years to mature and produce an income. Harvesting involves tapping the roots to extract the gum, which usually kills the plant. Typically grown on rain-fed or waste ground, hing is also not an alternative to poppy in terms of land use.
↑18
Neither the seized amounts nor the frequency of seizures on the Tajik-Afghan border in the last two years indicate that any change has happened in the legal regime on drugs in either country, according to the Paris Pact Initiative data.
Opium Cultivation in Badakhshan: The new national leader, according to UNDOC
Some tales of generosity and compassion, of tragedy, heartache and life-changing decisions, span the generations. One such story is Ruzi Khan’s, a day labourer from Helmand province, who has opened his home to a destitute widow and her six young children. While the widow is his distant cousin, her late husband was the son of a Hindu boy who moved to Khan’s village in the 1960s with his mother and step-father and later converted to Islam. Ruzi Khan has spoken to AAN’s Ali Mohammad Sabawoon for the latest instalment of The Daily Hustle, and tells how, faced with a family in distress, he and his wife, while struggling to feed their own children, decided they could not stand idly by in the face of the suffering of others.
I’m not a man of means. I’m a 35-year-old father of five – three daughters and two sons – who works as a day labourer. Putting food on the table for my family isn’t easy. When there’s work, I earn enough to provide for them, but it’s difficult to make ends meet when work is scarce. Fortunately, my wife is a skilled manager of our finances and puts money aside to help us get through the lean times. This past summer, my wife and I decided to take in a poor family of seven, even though we barely have enough to care for our own children.
The Hindu who came to the village
To tell you about how we ended up taking this family into our home, I must start from the beginning. It’s a story that spans over sixty years and three generations, a story marked by life-changing decisions, family ties, tragedy and events beyond our control – from the challenges faced by immigrants in search of a better life to the displacement of refugees and the spirit of communities who come together to help those less fortunate.
It began when a man from our village went to India in search of work in the 1960s and came back with a Hindu wife and her son from a previous marriage. Later, his step-son, now a Muslim, married a woman from Paktika province and was blessed with a son of his own. But despite the respect the family received from their adopted community, the echoes of their heritage as Hindus from India continued to linger in the background. To this day, behind their backs, people call them the Hindu Bacha (the son of the Hindu) family.
About 14 years after the grandfather returned to our village with his new family, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. By this time, the man and his wife had passed away. The step-son (Hindu Bacha) and his family, like many other Afghans, fled to Pakistan. They settled in a refugee camp in Quetta, where they opened a small but successful grocery store to support themselves. But tragedy struck when the man’s wife suddenly passed away. Not long after, Hindu Bacha also died leaving their young son alone and without kin.
This is where my family comes into the picture. The young man, now completely alone in this world, turned to the camp community to help him find a wife so that he could start a family of his own. With help from community elders, he married a distant cousin of my father’s. He and his wife went on to have six children – three girls and three boys.
Tragedy strikes again
The young man continued running the family business, but the camp’s once-bustling community dwindled as families moved back to Afghanistan. This took a toll on his shop, which gradually lost many of its customers. The business declined until it became impossible for the shop to earn enough money to support the family. Just when it seemed things couldn’t get any worse, the young man was diagnosed with cancer. Faced with mounting medical bills, he tapped into the family’s dwindling savings, seeking treatment in the hope of a miracle. He died destitute, leaving behind a family struggling for survival without any support or resources. Finally, when the widow’s extended family moved back to Afghanistan, they brought her and the six children along with them.
When there is no hope
This past August, when I went back to the village for my uncle’s funeral, I asked after the Hindu Bacha family. People told me that the community was doing its best for them, but the villagers are all very poor and there isn’t much to go around these days. Despite their best efforts, they were finding it impossible to support them.
The widow and I had known each other since childhood and I was concerned about her wellbeing. So I asked one of my relatives to take me to see the family. I wanted to give them some money and see if I could help in some way. I was shocked to see the conditions they were living in. She looked frail and broken as she welcomed me into her impoverished room. The children were in an abysmal state, spindly and malnourished. I was really shaken. I didn’t give them any money. I could see that the little bit I could afford would only be a sticking plaster. I went back to my uncle’s house, lost in thought.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. The image of the widow and her children living in such distress kept haunting me. How could we allow such a tragedy to unfold? What will we say to God on Judgement Day if we disregard this suffering? Surely, we have a moral responsibility to prevent such hardships, especially for innocent children.
Desperate times call for desperate measures
When I got back home the next day, the situation of the widow and her children was still playing on my mind. My head kept telling me I had enough to worry about with keeping a roof over my own family’s head, but my heart kept asking that if I didn’t feed them, who would?
Finally, that night, I talked it over with my wife and we agreed we’d bring the family to our home and support them. I discussed it with the extended family and told them that if they agreed I’d bring the family to my house and take care of them, same as I do with my own family. I then asked the widow if she’d be open to living with us. I told her she’d be good company for my wife. She could help with chores around the house and her children would grow up in my home with my own.
All you have to do is open your heart
Our family has now doubled in size and we have seven additional mouths to feed. These days, jobs are increasingly hard to come by, but I leave the house every day hoping to find work and come home with enough to get us through another day. My wife and the widow have started a small vegetable garden and we’re also raising chickens, which provide us with eggs and occasionally meat. When I took this family into my home, I promised to treat the children as my own. So at the start of the school year, I enrolled my oldest son and the widow’s eldest boy in the local school. Since the school is too far to walk, I bought them two second-hand bicycles.
The arrival of seven children – eldest is a 12-year-old girl and the youngest a son of three – into our household has not been without its challenges. The house is certainly noisier these days. There’s still a lot to get used to and the kids are still getting to know each other and finding their place in our now expanded family. Still at night, I can put my head down and rest easy knowing that when I was called upon to act, I found it in my heart to open my home to a family in need.
***
Ruzi Khan’s actions exemplify the essence of a poem by Saadi, which celebrates the kind of compassion that is the cornerstone of Afghan identity and culture:
Human beings are members of a whole In creation, of one essence and soul
If one member is afflicted with pain Other members uneasy will remain
If you’ve no sympathy for human pain The name of human you cannot retain
Saadi
بنی آدم اعضای یکدیگرند
که در آفرینش ز یک گوهرند
چو عضوی به درد آورد روزگار
دگر عضوها را نماند قرار
تو کز محنت دیگران بی غمی
نشاید که نامت نهند آدمی
سعدی
Edited by Roxanna Shapour and Kate Clark
The Daily Hustle: The day labourer and his wife who took in a widow and her six children
David Page was the first editor of the BBC Pashto service when it was set up in 1981, and also served for almost 30 years on the Board of Trustees for Afghanaid, for ten years as the NGO’s chair. He has died after a brief illness at the age of 80. The spark that lit Page’s abiding interest in the region was a year spent in Peshawar in the 1960s, working as a volunteer English teacher. His life work focused on Afghanistan and South Asia and encompassed twenty years at the BBC, aid and development, academic research and writing, and stalwart support for journalists and media freedom. Kate Clark here remembers a gentle soul with a keen intellect and celebrates his abiding commitment to Afghanistan.
David Page visiting Khuram wa Sabarbagh, Samangan province, in 2014, where Afghanaid was rebuilding homes damaged by flash flooding. Photo: with kind permission from Afghanaid
David Page was born in Derby in 1944 and went to school in Loughborough in the English Midlands, winning a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, where he gained a 1st class honours degree in History. He then went on to teach English as a VSO volunteer at Peshawar’s Edwardes College in Pakistan. He returned to Oxford to study for a doctoral thesis on the constitutional origins of the partition of India. It became a book, ‘Prelude to Partition: The Indian Muslims and the Imperial System of Control, 1920-1932’, published in 1982 and, quite rarely for an academic thesis-turned-book, still available.
BBC Pashto Service’s first editor
Page joined the BBC Urdu Service in 1972 and became its editor in 1977. When, in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the British government – at that time the sole funder of the BBC World Service[1]– asked it to establish a Pashto language section, Page was tasked with setting it up, recruiting journalists and navigating many issues, including which dialect of Pashto they should broadcast in. This was important to Page, said one of his colleagues, William Crawley,[2] as he was committed to serving all the BBC’s audiences, including in this case, Pashto speakers on both sides of the Durand Line. He tried to get expert advice, said Crawley, but found that the only British academic expert was teaching in Germany at the time. They took the counsel of a retired Pakistani army officer, Colonel Yusuf, who recommended the dialect used by the Afghan state broadcaster, described by another former colleague, Shirazuddin Siddiqi, as a “softer dialect of Pashto from central eastern Afghanistan,” which Pakistani listeners had been exposed to through listening to Radio Afghanistan.
Another colleague, Safia Haleem, who joined the service in 1985 and also went on to edit BBC Pashto, recalls how Page would “always come round to say hello to that small team. Everyone spoke highly of him. I realised that he was a caring boss. … He was always cheerful and made jokes of bad situations with typical English humour.”
Page worked at the BBC for twenty years until 1994, eventually becoming responsible for all the language services of South Asia at the World Service, which then included Pashto and Persian. He left, relatively young, after a major reorganisation of the language services.
Voluntary work for Afghanaid
David Page had a rich intellectual and activist life after the BBC, including a long and deep association with Afghanaid. Set up in 1983, this was Britain’s Afghan ‘solidarity NGO’, a humanitarian response to the Soviet invasion. Page was associated with it from 1995 onwards and, said a statement from Afghanaid, was “a passionate supporter of the mission to support the rebuilding of Afghanistan, despite decades of conflict.” He joined its Board of Trustees in 1996, served as its chair for ten years from 2004 to 2014, and remained on the Board until the end of his life. Afghanaid said:
[David] played a key role in shifting Afghanaid’s focus from emergency relief to long-term development as we increasingly took on large-scale infrastructure projects such as the construction of roads and bridges, as well as micro-hydro and irrigation systems. During this time, our community-led approach became ingrained in our identity as we began forming and collaborating with local councils and self-help groups. We also launched our first long-term disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation programming, which remains central to our work. Additionally, David oversaw the expansion of our programming into Ghor and Samangan provinces, where we remain to this day.
Page with Afghanaid staff in Badakhshan province, Afghanistan, 2007, Photo: with kind permission from Afghanaid
In 2013, Page asked Orzala Ashraf Nemat, who would go on to become director of the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, AREU, to join the Board of Trustees. Nemat described how she had got to know Page when she began her PhD in London in 2010. “[I could] reach out frequently and get his advice on many matters related to my work,” she said. His advice was “always … reasonable and well-guiding, based on his years of experiences in leadership and management,” adding:[4]
As a true friend of Afghanistan, David kept himself very updated and well-informed on different matters that Afghanistan faced. From community development to women’s rights, issues around [natural] disasters and climate change, he was always a person with updated knowledge on matters related to Afghanistan.
Another member of the Afghanaid board, Shirazuddin Siddiqi, described how committed Page was:
He was always across all the nitty gritty. He never missed any detail, in the finances, the beneficiary selections, the programmes. A-Z, he’d know the design of every project, its location, its budget, how many people it reached. He was meticulous. That, to me, was very inspiring because this wasn’t something he was paid to do. He was giving his time voluntarily. But at the same time, he was absolutely great fun to work with.
Travelling with Page in Afghanistan, Siddiqi said, he connected with people straightaway, regardless of their level of education or language. “He made people feel so at ease,” said Siddiqi. “You hardly noticed he was speaking to them through a translator. His people skills were unmatched.” Siddiqi mentioned Page’s deep knowledge of South Asian media. The two co-authored the 2012 BBC Media Action publication, ‘The Media of Afghanistan – the challenges of transition’, which remains a baseline publication on Afghan media.
Pushing for freedom of the media
Page maintained a keen interest in media freedom, especially in South Asia. He co-edited ‘Embattled Media: Democracy, Governance and Reform in Sri Lanka’ with former BBC colleague William Crawley and journalist and lawyer Kishali Pinto Jayawardena (Sage, 2015). Page, again with Crawley, led the three-year-long Media South Asia Project, with more than 16 researchers and journalists in the region. The result was a book detailing the explosion of television in South Asia, ‘Satellites over South Asia: Broadcasting, Culture and the Public Interest’ (Sage OBIT, 2001). Indian journalist and filmmaker Nupur Basu made an accompanying documentary, ‘Michael Jackson comes to Manokganj’, and wrote:
I filmed from Peshawar to Kandy in five countries – India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. … David’s name opened doors in the corridors of power in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, India, and Bangladesh. Thanks to him, I got a visa to travel to Peshawar in North West Frontier Province (NWFP) – besides Karachi, Islamabad, and Lahore – where no Indian journalists are easily allowed.”
David Page was also remembered in an obituary for the Pakistan newspaper, Dawn, as “a towering figure in South Asian journalism.” He was a key figure in the Commonwealth Journalists Association, a member of the working group which drafted the Commonwealth Media Principles, that were adopted just days ago by the heads of 56 Commonwealth countries at their meeting in Samoa, 21-26 October. Noting that the “marked increase in the number of threats and violent assaults, including murders, as well as arrests and imprisonment in the course of [journalists’ and media workers’] work,” the Principles commit member states to “uphold the role of the media in good governance and to create a safe and enabling environment in which freedom of expression and information is safeguarded and journalists and media workers can do their work safely and without undue interference.” When he died, Page had been working on a status paper on the media for the summit.
Memories of David Page
I encountered David Page on his many visits to Afghanistan with Afghanaid and at fundraising and awareness-raising events in London.[5] He always asked probing questions, which made for consistently engaging conversations. His fine intellect, grounded in experience gained through extensive travel in Afghanistan and a solid knowledge of the country’s history and politics, will be missed by many. “He was quick-witted,” said Shirazuddin Siddiqi, recalling Page’s humour. “He was open-minded, very knowledgeable, but he wore his expertise lightly. He had a PhD, but never mentioned it. He was a man of great humility.”
The young David Page: Photo: with kind permission from his family, undated
In its statement on his death, Afghanaid spoke about Page’s “extraordinary life,” marked by a commitment to fostering “understanding, peace, and development through his work in media, academia, and humanitarian service.” Indian filmmaker Nupur Basu described him as a “mentor and a compassionate friend … a champion of media rights.” Nemat said he has left “behind a legacy of compassion, courage, and the belief that storytelling can bridge divides. He will be deeply missed by all who had the fortune of knowing him…” Safia Haleem recalled her first (and lasting) impression of him as a “proper English gentleman, of the sort I had only read about in Jane Austen novels.” Crawley described him as “a passionate South Asia watcher throughout his career” and noted that, along with a fascination in the politics of the region, he loved cricket.
Eternal is he whose heart is animated by Love Our enduring legacy inscribed in the universe’s chronicle
Hafez, Ghazal 11
هرگز نمیرد آن که دلش زنده شد به عشـق
ثـبـت اسـت بر جریده عالـم دوام ما
حافظ، غزل شماره ۱۱
David Page, born in Derby, 19 March 1944, died London, 10 October 2024, is survived by his partner, Ruth, sister Janet and their wider families.
Edited by Roxanna Shapour
References
References
↑1
The UK government funded the World Service until 2014. Its funding now comes largely from British television license payers, with some UK government grants. More information can be found here
↑2
Read William Crawley’s obituary for David Page, ‘David Page, passionate defender of media freedom’ on the Commonwealth Journalists Association
↑3
‘New Home, New Life’ was first broadcast in Pashto and Dari in 1994. Set in a typical Afghan village, it uses drama to explore topical, practical issues that might help listeners to manage and improve their lives. Recent storylines have included: returnees resettling, supporting widows and securing them jobs, including through training in poultry-keeping and tailoring, dispute resolution, baad marriage (women given to another family as brides to resolve a blood feud), landmines and education, including specifically girls’. Always broadcast on the BBC, ‘New Home, New Life’ was made by an allied NGO, the Afghanistan Education Project (AEP), which became an independent Afghan NGO, the Afghanistan Education Project Organisation (AEPO) in 2018 – more information here.
Read also AAN’s tribute to legendary actor, Mehrali Watandost, who played the iconic character, Nazir, in the show until his death in 2017.
↑4
Nemat’s thesis was ‘Local Governance in the Age of Liberal Interventionism: Governance Relations in the Post-2001 Afghanistan’ SOAS, University of London, 2015.
↑5
David Page was also one of the key figures behind establishing and running the Anthony Hyman Memorial Lecture, which is held annually at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and to which I contributed earlier this year.
Remembering David Page: Indefatigable champion of the media and dedicated advocate for Afghanistan
Afghanistan has barely featured in next week’s United States presidential elections except in the most minor way, as a political football kicked about by the two candidates seeking to blame the other for the debacle of the 2021 withdrawal and the Taleban’s capture of power. Even so, will who wins the 5 November election – former Republican president and current contender Donald Trump or current Democratic vice president Kamala Harris – have an impact on American policy towards Afghanistan? AAN’s Kate Clark has been looking back through the archives and seeing how, in earlier elections after the 2001 intervention, when the US became the single most powerful foreign player in Afghanistan, the country featured heavily in presidential debates and asks how much influence the outcome of US presidential elections has had on Afghanistan.
Americans, famously, do not vote on foreign policy issues, so the fact that Afghanistan has been mentioned so often by presidential contenders over the last twenty years is significant. Sometimes, the debate between the two candidates has been about policy. Sometimes, Afghanistan has been used to symbolize something else, for example, George W Bush holding it up in 2004 as evidence that “freedom is on the march.” Determining whether US policy towards Afghanistan might have differed if a different man (or, in 2016, woman) had won successive presidencies since 2001 is tricky and strays into the counterfactual. Also, as will be seen below, not everything promised ahead of elections, in the US as elsewhere, gets delivered – sometimes, the opposite. However, the question is at least worth asking.
2004: Bush v Kerry, freedom and the unyoking of Afghanistan’s presidential and parliamentary elections
For the 2004 incumbent, Republican George W Bush, Afghanistan represented everything he believed was liberatory about America.[1] During the presidential debates against his Democratic rival, John Kerry, he repeatedly held up the Afghan presidential election – polling day was a month before the US elections, on 9 October – as evidence of the United States’ great destiny in bringing freedom to other nations, for example, in the first debate, held on 30 September (transcript here):[2]
This nation of ours has got a solemn duty to defeat this ideology of hate [al-Qaeda’s]. And that’s what they are. This is a group of killers who will not only kill here, but kill children in Russia, that’ll attack unmercifully in Iraq, hoping to shake our will. We have a duty to defeat this enemy. We have a duty to protect our children and grandchildren. The best way to defeat them is to never waver, to be strong, to use every asset at our disposal, is to constantly stay on the offensive and, at the same time, spread liberty. And that’s what people are seeing now is happening in Afghanistan. Ten million citizens have registered to vote. It’s a phenomenal statistic. That if given a chance to be free, they will show up at the polls. Forty-one percent of those 10 million are women.
The yoking of Afghanistan and Iraq – and elsewhere – into a single theatre of battle and the portrayal of the US as a liberator, saving other nations from a poorly defined ‘the enemy’, bent on evil, was classic Bush-era War on Terror rhetoric. It was a narrative that had catastrophic real-world consequences for the citizens of Afghanistan and Iraq, but Bush used it to good effect on the 2004 campaign trail. In that first debate, he hammered the point home.
In Iraq, no doubt about it, it’s tough. It’s hard work. It’s incredibly hard. You know why? Because an enemy realizes the stakes. The enemy understands a free Iraq will be a major defeat in their ideology of hatred. That’s why they’re fighting so vociferously. They showed up in Afghanistan when they were there, because they tried to beat us and they didn’t. And they’re showing up in Iraq for the same reason. They’re trying to defeat us. And if we lose our will, we lose. But if we remain strong and resolute, we will defeat this enemy.
Bush held up the forthcoming Afghan election again in the second debate, on 8 October 2004, this time, casting it as one item on a list of the efforts he was undertaking to make America safe:
We’ll stay on the hunt of al Qaeda. We’ll deny sanctuary to these terrorists. We’ll make sure they do not end up with weapons of mass destruction. It’s the great nexus. The great threat to our country is that these haters under up with weapons of mass destruction. But our long-term security depends on our deep faith in liberty, and we’ll continue to promote freedom around the world. Freedom is on the march. Tomorrow, Afghanistan will be voting for a president. In Iraq, we’ll be having free elections and a free society will make this world more peaceful. God bless.
The third debate was held on 13 October 2004, following the Afghan poll, meaning Bush could then brag: “As a result of securing ourselves and ridding the Taliban out of Afghanistan, the Afghan people had elections this weekend. And the first voter was a 19-year-old woman. Think about that. Freedom is on the march.”
Kerry’s take on Afghanistan – he pretty much ignored the election, merely scorning its having been delayed three times – was to focus on what he called Bush’s “colossal error of judgement,” his distraction from what Kerry called the “centre of the war on terror,” Afghanistan, and his 2003 decision to invade Iraq. In the first debate of the 2004 contest, for example, Kerry accused Bush of having been so bent on invading Iraq that he left the Afghan battlefield open to America’s enemies, after foolishly allying the US with untrustworthy Afghan allies:
Saddam Hussein didn’t attack us. Osama bin Laden attacked us. Al Qaida attacked us. And when we had Osama bin Laden cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, 1,000 of his cohorts with him in those mountains. With the American military forces nearby and in the field, we didn’t use the best trained troops in the world to go kill the world’s number one criminal and terrorist. They outsourced the job to Afghan warlords, who only a week earlier had been on the other side fighting against us, neither of whom trusted each other. That’s the enemy that attacked us. That’s the enemy that was allowed to walk out of those mountains. That’s the enemy that is now in 60 countries, with stronger recruits.
Did moving troops to Iraq so that there were ten times more soldiers there than in Afghanistan mean that “Saddam Hussein was 10 times more important than Osama bin Laden”? Kerry asked.
One could today ask if Kerry’s reading of the situation, so different from Bush’s, would have led to a different US policy being pursued towards Afghanistan (and/or Iraq) had Kerry, not Bush won the 2004 election. It is at least possible that Kerry might have deployed more US troops to Afghanistan, as Barack Obama would do very decisively when he came to power in 2009, in the so-called surge (itself a copy of the second Bush term counter-insurgency surge of General David Petraeus in Iraq). Yet it is hard to see how more US fighting troops in Afghanistan on the ground could have been beneficial, given their actions were part of why an insurgency began.[3] Another question is whether the US, under a Kerry presidency, might have pulled back from working with ‘the warlords’. Here, it is difficult to see how, by this point, the civil war era strongmen could have been dislodged from the Republic’s political system: Bush’s decision in 2001 to work with anti-Taleban commanders and factions in toppling the first Islamic Emirate had put them firmly at the heart of the Islamic Republic.
Presidents Obama and Karzai on the White House Colonnade after meeting in the Oval Office. Photo: Pete Souza/White House photographer, 11 January 2013
2008, 2012: Obama v McCain, Obama v Romney, the ‘good war’, the surge and the transition
In 2008, Obama hammered home the very same message his fellow Democrat, John Kerry, had done four years earlier, this time against Republican contender, John McCain. Bush, he said, had fought the wrong war when he invaded Iraq in 2003. In the first presidential 2008 debate, held on 26 September, Obama promised to shift troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, “as quickly as possible, because it’s been acknowledged by the commanders on the ground the situation is getting worse, not better.”
We had the highest fatalities among U.S. troops this past year than at any time since 2002. And we are seeing a major offensive taking place – Al Qaida and Taliban crossing the border and attacking our troops in a brazen fashion. They are feeling emboldened. And we cannot separate Afghanistan from Iraq, because what our commanders have said is we don’t have the troops right now to deal with Afghanistan. So I would send two to three additional brigades to Afghanistan. Now, keep in mind that we have four times the number of troops in Iraq, where nobody had anything to do with 9/11 before we went in, where, in fact, there was no Al Qaida before we went in, but we have four times more troops there than we do in Afghanistan. And that is a strategic mistake, because every intelligence agency will acknowledge that Al Qaida is the greatest threat against the United States and that Secretary of Defense Gates acknowledged the central front – that the place where we have to deal with these folks is going to be in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.
As well as the extra deployment,[4] Obama said he would “press the Afghan government to make certain that they are actually working for their people” and deal with the “growing poppy trade.” He also promised to deal with Pakistan:
because Al Qaida and the Taliban have safe havens in Pakistan, across the border in the northwest regions, and although, you know, under George Bush, with the support of Senator McCain, we’ve been giving them [Islamabad] $10 billion over the last seven years, they have not done what needs to be done to get rid of those safe havens. And until we do, Americans here at home are not going to be safe.
Had John McCain won in 2008, however, US policy would probably not have been so different. Unlike Obama, he fully supported the war in Iraq, but he also wanted to copy the Iraq surge in Afghanistan and expand the US military presence there as well. McCain also spoke about the ‘problem’ of Pakistan. In that first debate, he said the US had to work with the Pakistani government, acknowledging that “the new president of Pakistan, Kardari (sic), has got his hands full” and that “this area on the border has not been governed since the days of Alexander the Great.” McCain had been to Waziristan, he said, and could “see how tough that terrain is. It’s ruled by a handful of tribes.” He said they would have to “help the Pakistanis go into these areas and obtain the allegiance of the people. And it’s going to be tough. They’ve intermarried with Al Qaida and the Taliban. And it’s going to be tough. But we have to get the cooperation of the people in those areas.”
Pakistan would remain a thorn in the side of the US military until it left in 2021 – it proved impossible to ‘deal’ with it when the bulk of US supplies to Afghanistan came over its land routes. Obama’s surge (opposed at the time by his vice president, Joe Biden, who pushed for a ‘light footprint’, counter-terrorism policy – see our 2008 reporting on his stance here) would prove futile and costly in both Afghan and foreign lives. Nevertheless, four years later, in 2012, Obama would assert the success of his Afghan policy. In the second presidential debate with his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, held on 16 October 2012, Obama said:
We ended the war in Iraq, refocused our attention on those who actually killed us on 9/11. And as a consequence, Al Qaeda’s core leadership has been decimated. In addition, we’re now able to transition out of Afghanistan in a responsible way, making sure that Afghans take responsibility for their own security. And that allows us also to rebuild alliances and make friends around the world to combat future threats.
Romney described the strategy he would pursue if he became president as “pretty straightforward”: “Go after the bad guys, to make sure we do our very best to interrupt them, to – to kill them, to take them out of the picture.” He also said US policy had to be broader than that. The key, in his opinion, was to pursue “a pathway to get the Muslim world to be able to reject extremism on its own.” To ensure there was not “another Iraq … another Afghanistan,” they had to go after “these – these jihadists,” but also “help the Muslim world.” That meant promoting economic development, better education, gender equality, the rule of law and helping “these nations create civil societies.”
Romney did agree with Obama that the surge had been successful, though, and asserted that Afghan forces were now stronger, larger in number and ready to “step in to provide security.” He explicitly said he would withdraw US troops by 2014, the date established by then President Hamed Karzai, the US and NATO to end the International Stabilisation and Assistance Force (ISAF) mission, when security would be fully in the hands of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF). The transition did indeed happen at the end of 2014, but under Obama’s leadership, the foreign troops morphed into NATO’s non-combat ‘train, advise and assist’ mission, Resolute Support, with the US retaining an additional can-be-combat mission until the end.
2016: Trump v Clinton, when Afghanistan fell off the agenda
In the three 2016 presidential debates, Afghanistan was mentioned just once and then only in passing by Democrat Hilary Clinton.[5]The Guardian’s Simon Tisdall was scathing about the two candidates ignoring what had become the US’s longest war. Clinton, he said, was keen not to “draw attention to unfinished business in Afghanistan,” given the war was “deeply unpopular with voters,” while for his part,
Trump seems to understand little and care less. He once said the war was a “terrible mistake” but has no known policy. Even the Taliban feel affronted. A Talib spokesman, quoted by analyst Yochi Dreazen, commented after the first debate that Trump says “anything that comes to his tongue” and is “not serious”.
If Clinton had won that election, we wrote, Obama’s Secretary of State could have been expected to maintain his policy as president. However, she lost and Trump had given no idea during the campaign as to what he would do in Afghanistan. We scrutinised tweets from his official account and other comments to try to glean his policy after winning the election. In 2013, he had favoured withdrawal: “Let’s get out of Afghanistan. Our troops are being killed by the Afghanis [sic] we train and we waste billions there. Nonsense! Rebuild the USA.” He had also tweeted: “It is time to get out of Afghanistan. We are building roads and schools for people that hate us. It is not in our national interests.” Interviewed live on CNN in October 2015, he had said the US had made a terrible mistake getting involved in Afghanistan in the first place, but asserted that he had never said the US made a mistake going into Afghanistan. Wondering whether US troops were “going to be there for the next 200 years?” he said, it would be a long time, but that:
OK, wouldn’t matter, I never said it. Afghanistan is a different kettle. Afghanistan is next to Pakistan, it’s an entry in. You have to be careful with the nuclear weapons. It’s all about the nuclear weapons. By the way, without the nukes, it’s a whole different ballgame.
Trump’s past comments had given little away: they were typically incoherent and contradictory, but did suggest he might favour ending the intervention. His plans, as president, did eventually materialise, far later, on 21 August 2017 (transcript here) when he admitted he had not followed his instincts. US forces would be staying in Afghanistan, he said, although he insisted the US would not be “nation-building,” but “killing terrorists.” It upset his conservative base. His former chief strategist, Steve Bannon’s Breitbart website, condemned the president for coming up with a strategy that was little different from Obama’s: the president, had “flip-flop[ed” (reporting here). “My original instinct,” Trump announced, “was to pull out.” Once in power, however, and having studied Afghanistan “in great detail and from every conceivable angle” and holding “many meetings over many months,” he had changed his mind about what America’s “core interests in Afghanistan” necessitated.
Trump’s Afghan strategy looked to be what had been drawn up by the US commander on the ground, General John Nicholson, in partnership with then President Ashraf Ghani and the Afghan government, seven months earlier. (Read a transcript of Nicholson’s testimony to Congress in February 2017 here and our analysis of the plan here). After months of mulling over what to do, Trump had accepted his military advisors’ counsel on the need to stay in Afghanistan.
If he had been a different man, so much of what Trump decided then might have come back to haunt him. He said the sacrifices already made by US servicepeople meant they “deserve[d] a plan for victory.” The US was going to fight to win and it would win, said Trump, because “the consequences of a rapid exit are both predictable and unacceptable, he said. “A hasty withdrawal would create a vacuum that terrorists, including ISIS and al Qaeda, would instantly fill, just as happened before September 11th.”
A core pillar of our new strategy is a shift from a time-based approach to one based on conditions. I’ve said it many times how counterproductive it is for the United States to announce in advance the dates we intend to begin, or end, military options. We will not talk about numbers of troops or our plans for further military activities. Conditions on the ground – not arbitrary timetables – will guide our strategy from now on. America’s enemies must never know our plans or believe they can wait us out. I will not say when we are going to attack, but attack we will.
His words were a reaction to Obama’s announcements of withdrawal dates as the US army went from surge to drawing down and handing authority for the security of Afghanistan to the ANSF. This move had satisfied anti-war Democrats, but effectively helped the Taleban with their war planning. His later fixed timetable for withdrawal under the 2020 Doha agreement would help the Taleban in just the same way.
Trump’s second U-turn committed the US to a withdrawal of troops, on a fixed timetable and with specific numbers being drawn down at each stage. The only real condition placed on the Taleban in the 29 February 2020 Doha agreement, reached by Trump’s Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation, the Afghan-American Zalmay Khalilzad, was that the insurgents should cease attacking foreign military and civilian targets. Their promises on foreign fighters were vague in the extreme.[6] The deal had been reached by Khalilzad directly with the Taleban and, at their insistence, had excluded the Afghan government from negotiations. As we wrote at the time, the US, by contrast, signed up to many specific obligations in addition to withdrawing its troops – albeit many of the promises were what the Kabul government would have to do, such as releasing thousands of Taleban prisoners. (see our analysis, and the simultaneously released Joint Declaration between the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the United States of America for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan).[7]
The ‘intra-Afghan talks’ between the Taleban and the Republic, also promised in the Doha agreement, given the waning and ultimately ending threat of US military power, always looked like a futile exercise. As the deal played out, the US threatened Ghani into compliance with the agreement, including a warning that Washington would cut USD one billion in aid unless the Afghan government released 5,000 Taleban prisoners. It also forced the ANSF to take up a defensive posture, only relenting to allow ‘active defence’ (that is, pre-emptive strikes against the Taleban were allowed, but not offensive strikes). These were intended to be confidence-building measures aimed at fostering an atmosphere conducive to the ‘intra-Afghan talks’. Not surprisingly, ANSF morale plummeted, while Taleban morale soared.[8] (For our analysis of this period, see The Taleban’s rise to power: As the US prepared for peace, the Taleban prepared for war and Afghanistan’s Conflict in 2021 (2): Republic collapse and Taleban victory in the long-view of history.)
2020: Trump v Biden, the withdrawal continues
When Americans went to the polls to elect their next president in November 2020, the Doha agreement had about six months to run. Trump had committed to withdrawing all US forces by the last day of April 2021. This was a momentous time for Afghanistan, with the US playing an outsize role. Yet, in the 2020 election debates, Afghanistan was, again, barely mentioned – just one passing reference by Joe Biden in the third debate, held on 20 October, who used the situation in Afghanistan to criticise Trump over his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.[9] In spring 2020, Biden had written that he wanted to end America’s “forever wars,” albeit presenting a more nuanced stance in a 10 September 2020 Stars and Stripes interview, which reported: “Biden said conditions in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq are so complicated that he cannot promise full withdrawal of troops in the near future. However, he supports a small U.S. military footprint whose primary mission would be to facilitate special operations against the Islamic State, or ISIS, and other terror organizations.”
In the end, the 2020 election exemplified how who won the US presidential contest had no effect on US policy. By the time Trump left office in January 2021, troop numbers were down from 15,500 to 2,500: indeed, he had hurried to withdraw troops in greater numbers than his deal with the Taleban merited ahead of the election and a month before the poll, on 8 October, had even promised to bring all the troops home by Christmas (tweet here). Trump had left Biden little room for manoeuvre, should he not have wanted to go ahead with the Doha agreement (see our analysis of his choices after his victory here). However, Biden embraced the deal. He kept Zalmay Khalilzad on and pursued Trump’s policy in full, only extending the deadline for the “final withdrawal” from 30 April to 11 September, in an announcement made on 14 April 2021.
President Biden chose to end his country’s military intervention on a date meaningful to Americans. They would “be out of Afghanistan before we mark the 20th anniversary of that heinous attack on September 11th,” he declared. As so often, US Afghan policy was shaped by what an American president assumed would be good news for his domestic audience, rather than taking into account the possible consequences for Afghanistan – good or bad. Others at the time were urging caution: many of his NATO allies were unhappy with the withdrawal, as were some of Biden’s advisors. However, he followed the Trump plan, with little thought for how it might actually play out, as we wrote:
How to keep crucial tasks going, such as maintaining aircraft, had not been considered. US air support to the ANSF fell away. Although it was eventually ramped up, it came late in the Taleban’s offensive, too late to demonstrate the support which might have helped rally Afghan troops on the ground. The withdrawing US forces appeared to coordinate more with their enemies than with the allies they were leaving behind: witness the unannounced overnight vacation of the Bagram airbase, with the electricity left on a twenty-minute timer. The US appeared driven by a desire just to get the withdrawal done and over, a ‘ripping-off of the Band-Aid plaster’ and a hope for the best.
In response to Biden confirming that US troops would be withdrawn, the Taleban intensified their attacks and, facing a demoralised and poorly led ANSF and a population which had grown to have little faith in their government, began to capture districts and then provinces, slowly at first and then, like dominoes (see an overview written in December 2021 here). They captured the capital on 21 August 2021. The troops left earlier than planned, on 30 August, presumably so as not to besmirch the 9/11 anniversary.
A joke in Washington DC in the months after that fateful withdrawal asked what Biden’s policy on Afghanistan was. The punchline: not to have the country mentioned in a Washington Post or New York Times headline. The world’s superpower had, in the end, dropped Afghanistan as swiftly and wholeheartedly as it had picked it up. In the single Trump versus Kamala Harris debate this year, held on 11 September 2024, Afghanistan was mentioned only eventually, after the moderator asked the candidates about Afghanistan three times before they responded.
Harris said she agreed with Biden’s decision to pull out: it had saved American taxpayers USD 300 million a day that they had been paying “for that endless war.” Donald Trump, she said, had “negotiated one of the weakest deals you can imagine,” one that even his national security adviser had said was “a weak, terrible deal,” He had “bypassed the Afghan government,” she said and negotiated directly with a terrorist organization called the Taliban. The negotiation involved the Taliban getting 5,000 terrorists, Taliban terrorists released.” She also recalled the September 2019 Trump invitation to “the Taliban to Camp David,” an example of how he “has consistently disparaged and demeaned members of our military, fallen soldiers.”[11]
In response, Trump defended what he called a “very good agreement”, saying it had stopped the Taleban killing lots of US soldiers with snipers (not true) and that he had decided to negotiate directly with “Abdul … the head of the Taliban” (presumably, Head of the Taleban Political Commission, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar). He also appeared to claim that his administration had broken off the deal because the Taleban had not met various conditions: “The agreement said you have to do this, this, this, this, this, and they didn’t do it. They didn’t do it. The agreement was, was terminated by us because they didn’t do what they were supposed to do.”[12]
As to any thoughts on forward-looking policy on Afghanistan, there were none, from either candidate. Whoever wins the race in November, neither has given any sign that US policy on Afghanistan might change, that American hostility to the Islamic Emirate might relent or ramp up, that sanctions – or waivers – be raised, or humanitarian aid stopped, rather than just, as it is now diminishing. One can envisage Trump taking a harder line on the Emirate than Biden has done and that he would also stop Afghans settling in the United States as refugees, currently possible for some under the Refugee Admissions Programme. Yet, it is also difficult to imagine Harris softening the US line on the Emirate and risk enraging the feminists among her domestic backers. However, there is no evidence of what either Trump or Harris might do, or that they have even given the matter any thought, should they win on 5 November.[13]
The Guantanamo exception
The one area of policy most likely to be affected by the outcome of this year’s US elections is something not yet touched on in this report, the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, which has held detainees outside the laws of war or criminal justice since January 2002, established as part of Bush’s War on Terror. Since 2009, changes in the presidency have affected not only Guantanamo, but also the United States’ use of torture.
When Obama came to power in 2009, he banned torture – which Bush had authorised – although he declined to bring anyone to justice for past abuses. He also vowed to close Guantanamo, but was thwarted by Congress, and his own poor planning (for more on this, see the author’s 2016 report, ‘Kafka in Cuba The Afghan Experience in Guantánamo’ and 2021 report ‘Kafka in Cuba, a Follow-Up Report: Afghans Still in Detention Limbo as Biden Decides What to do’). At the end of his second term, as the implications of the victory of the pro-torture, pro-Guantanamo Donald Trump in the 2016 election became clear, the outgoing administration scrambled to get as many detainees out of Guantanamo as possible – some with just hours to play. During Trump’s presidency, just one inmate was to leave Guantanamo.[14] Again, in 2020, with the election of Joe Biden, more inmates were to leave the prison camp, including the second but last Afghan to be held there, Asadullah Harun Gul. He was released in June 2022, partly because of earlier efforts of Hezb-e Islami elements within the Ashraf Ghani government before it collapsed to get their comrade home and also due to the tenacity of Gul’s American lawyers (see the author’s report, Free at Last: The Afghan, Harun Gul, is released from Guantanamo after 15 years).
30 men still remain in Guantanamo, including the last Afghan, Muhammad Rahim, who was also the last man to be rendered and tortured by the CIA (our latest report on him can be read here). If Trump wins, transfers out of the camp would likely dry up again. If Harris is victorious, Rahim might be freed. As to the camp itself, the two previous Democratic presidents promised but failed to close it down and administrations of both stripes have fought in the US courts in the dirtiest of fashions (for examples, see the author’s two ‘Kafka in Cuba’ reports) to keep men detained when detainees have petitioned for habeas corpus. Almost a quarter of a century after it opened, the closure of Guantanamo is still not in sight. Its existence has fallen off the US political agenda even more so than Afghanistan.
Conclusion: Afghanistan forgotten
Reading through the transcripts of the presidential debates, what is striking is that the leaders of the United States, who have held so much sway over Afghanistan for two decades, so often got their facts about the country wrong or have used them to promote whatever tack they were taking with American voters, from George Bush holding up Afghanistan as a symbol of liberation, onwards.
As to whether changes in the presidency made a difference to US policy, it seems that, until part-way through the 2016 Trump presidency, policy on Afghanistan was largely driven by the military and the perspective of generals on what was needed to fight the Taleban – and rationalised by the politicians. Biden had been an early advocate of withdrawing forces and argued for this when he became vice president in 2009. Obama, at that time, insisted that Afghanistan was ‘the good war’ and embarked on the surge. In the US, it is always more difficult for Democratic presidents to be seen to be shirking a fight: they risk a domestic backlash for being seen to be weak. Perhaps not surprisingly then, it was the Republican president, Donald Trump who withdrew the bulk of US troops, before Biden, as he had long wished, pulled the final soldiers out.
As for what lies ahead, the presidential campaign for 2024 has given no indication of whether current policy will be maintained or changed. What is certain, though, is that Afghanistan is no longer on the US political agenda.
Edited by Roxanna Shapour
References
References
↑1
The question could also be asked to whether, if John Kerry had won in 2000 rather than George Bush, history might already have been different by the 2004 elections, but that is beyond the scope of this report.
↑2
Transcripts of presidential and vice-presidential debates (1960-2020) can be read on the Commission on Presidential Debates website.
↑3
US actions included mass indiscriminate arrests, night raids involving the use of dogs in people’s homes and the stripping of men in public, the use of torture, being manipulated by Afghans keen to get US forces to target their personal or factional enemies, and alliances generally with local Afghan strongmen, increasing their ability to oppress the population and monopolise power. For a condensed look at this, focussing on detentions, and including sources for further reading, see pages 9-14 of the author’s ‘Kafka in Cuba The Afghan Experience in Guantánamo’.
↑4
One brigade consists of 3-5,000 soldiers. Obama’s ‘surge’ was to increase the US forces on the ground far more than he promised at the election, by 51,000, to more than 100,000 soldiers at their peak.
↑5
Clinton used as evidence that membership of NATO was useful for America the alliance’s invoking of article 5 and its collective defence principle following the 9/11 attacks, in the first debate, held on 26 September 2016.
This agreement puts few obligations on the Taleban. The movement has committed itself not to “allow any of its members, other individual or groups, including al-Qa’ida to use the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies.” The Taleban are also specifically committed to not allowing released prisoners to threaten the security of the US and its allies. The hope that US ‘allies’ might include Afghanistan, ie Afghan government forces and civilians living in government-controlled areas, was dashed by the Taleban’s resumption of violence against Afghan forces the day after the agreement was signed (more on which below).
As to Taleban commitments on al-Qaeda and other groups, they comprise: “send[ing] a clear message” that they “have no place in Afghanistan”; not hosting them; preventing them from recruiting, training and fundraising; instructing members of the Taleban not to cooperate with them; not providing visas, passports or other documents allowing them to enter Afghanistan and; dealing “with those seeking asylum or residence in Afghanistan” in a way “that such persons do not pose a threat” to the US and its allies. There is no provision that commits the Taleban to hand over or expel foreign fighters. Indeed, the term ‘foreign fighters’ is not used at all; rather they are referred to as those posing a threat to the US and its allies.
The movement has committed itself not to “allow any of its members, other individual or groups, including al-Qa’ida to use the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies.” The Taleban are also specifically committed to not allowing released prisoners to threaten the security of the US and its allies. … As to Taleban commitments on al-Qaeda and other groups, they comprise: “send[ing] a clear message” that they “have no place in Afghanistan”; not hosting them; preventing them from recruiting, training and fundraising; instructing members of the Taleban not to cooperate with them; not providing visas, passports or other documents allowing them to enter Afghanistan and; dealing “with those seeking asylum or residence in Afghanistan” in a way “that such persons do not pose a threat” to the US and its allies. There is no provision that commits the Taleban to hand over or expel foreign fighters. Indeed, the term ‘foreign fighters’ is not used at all; rather they are referred to as those posing a threat to the US and its allies.
↑8
AAN guest author, Andrew Quilty, documented in interviews conducted in summer 2020 with members of the ANSF and the Taleban how the US strategy helped boost Taleban confidence, while denting morale among government forces:
For the Taleban and their sympathisers, the [February 2020] agreement is seen as a reward for the sacrifices made during the 15-year insurgency. With the threat of being targeted by government or US forces now low, morale among fighters has soared. According to those AAN spoke with, the fight against the United States brought the agreement to withdraw and, in the meantime, to abstain from offensive operations…
Government forces are widely distrustful of American intentions and see the US as having made the Doha agreement in bad faith, with scant regard for the outcome for Afghans themselves. Most of those who spoke to AAN see the agreement as benefitting the US and the Taleban at the expense of the Afghan government and the ANSF, who, they point out, are still dying every day. Most members of the ANSF that AAN spoke with also expressed frustration over the government’s sudden passivity toward the Taleban. After the severe Taleban losses inflicted by last year’s intense US air campaign and the fear wrought by widespread night raids, Ghani’s orders after Doha – to defend only – have allowed the Taleban unfettered control in areas already under their sway and greater freedom to impose themselves in contested areas, most notably on major roads and highways. To many government and security officials, regardless of whether it might serve the purported goal of peace, the new orders are militarily weak and politically foolish.
↑9
In the third debate, held on 20 October 2020, Biden said:
I don’t understand why this President is unwilling to take on Putin when he’s actually paying bounties to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan, when he’s engaged in activities that are trying to destabilize all of NATO. I don’t know why he doesn’t do it but it’s worth asking the question. Why isn’t that being done? Any country that interferes with us will, in fact, pay a price because they’re affecting our sovereignty.
American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves. We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong — incredibly well equipped — a force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies.
We gave them every tool they could need. We paid their salaries, provided for the maintenance of their air force — something the Taliban doesn’t have. Taliban does not have an air force. We provided close air support.
We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.
There’s some very brave and capable Afghan special forces units and soldiers, but if Afghanistan is unable to mount any real resistance to the Taliban now, there is no chance that 1 year — 1 more year, 5 more years, or 20 more years of U.S. military boots on the ground would’ve made any difference.
And here’s what I believe to my core: It is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan’s own armed forces would not. If the political leaders of Afghanistan were unable to come together for the good of their people, unable to negotiate for the future of their country when the chips were down, they would never have done so while U.S. troops remained in Afghanistan bearing the brunt of the fighting for them.
↑11
The secret summit would have been held in September 2019, attended by Trump and then, in separate meetings, Ashraf Ghani and the Head of the Taleban’s Political Commission, their lead negotiator, Abdul Ghani Baradar. Trump announced that it had been cancelled after the Taleban killed a US soldier. See media reporting here and here).
On 1 October, we saw a change of leadership on Afghan policy. Tom West, the hard-working Special Representative, who had been in post since October 2021, has left (State Department here) and replaced by career diplomat John Pommersheim, who was most recently US Ambassador to Tajikistan and has also served in Russia and Kazakhstan (see his statement here).
↑14
The one detainee who left Guantanamo during the Trump presidency was Saudi Ahmed al-Darbi, who was transferred after a plea agreement which saw him plead guilty to charges relating to an attack on a French oil tanker in 2002 and serving out the balance of a 13-year prison sentence in his home country. See ‘Detainee Transfer Announced’, US Department of Defence press release, 2 May 2018.
America Decides: But will who wins the US election make any difference to Afghanistan?
Christina Goldbaum has reported from Afghanistan for more than three years, arriving in Kabul just before the Taliban seized power in 2021.
For three years, there was one powerful, elusive figure I wanted to speak with in Afghanistan: Sirajuddin Haqqani.
During the U.S.-led war there, he was known as one of the Taliban’s most ruthless military strategists, deploying hundreds of suicide bombers and raining carnage on the capital, Kabul. He developed ties with terrorist groups across the region and built a mafia-like empire of illicit businesses.
After the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan in 2021, Mr. Haqqani became one of the most important figures in the government. But he remained a mystery; he had given only one interview to a Western journalist.
Read Christina Goldbaum’s Exclusive Interview:
Is Afghanistan’s Most-Wanted Militant Now Its Best Hope for Change?
I had been trying for years to arrange an interview of my own. Earlier this year, Mr. Haqqani finally agreed to meet with me.
We spoke for three hours in a two-story mansion in Kabul, discussing his upbringing and the secret interactions between his family and American officials. I also spoke with more than 70 experts, diplomats, Afghan officials, Taliban soldiers and others, and reviewed hundreds of pages of documents, to glean insight into Mr. Haqqani’s life and politics within the Taliban’s government.
Here are the biggest takeaways from what I learned:
The Taliban have divisions below the surface
Since the Taliban returned to power, the group has tried to project an image of unity. But out of public view, Taliban officials have been at odds over their competing visions for the country. Those divisions have pitted the Taliban’s ultraconservative emir and head of state, Sheikh Haibatullah Akhundzada, against more pragmatic figures like Mr. Haqqani.
A photograph released by the Taliban in 2016 purporting to show Sheikh Haibatullah Akhundzada.Credit…Afghan Taliban
The majority of Taliban officials privately oppose Sheikh Haibatullah’s hard-line vision of Shariah law, according to experts and officials. But they are bound by a central pillar of the Taliban: total loyalty to their supreme leader. Those who have privately pushed for reform have been batted down by Sheikh Haibatullah, who has seized total control.
Today, Mr. Haqqani is a lone voice of dissent from behind the scenes. With most of his allies cowed into silence, he has increasingly looked for support outside the country to tip the contest in his favor. He has made diplomatic connections with some countries in Europe and the Persian Gulf, as well as Russia and China. The United States has been less eager to engage and still designates Mr. Haqqani as a wanted terrorist.
Women’s rights are a wedge
Under Sheikh Haibatullah, the Taliban’s evisceration of women’s rights has come to define his government on the world stage.
In the spring of 2022, Sheikh Haibatullah reneged on a public promise made by other Taliban officials to allow girls to attend high school. He has gone on to cement the world’s harshest strictures on women and girls, which some human rights monitors say amount to “gender apartheid.”
Behind the scenes, Mr. Haqqani and his allies have privately lobbied for girls to be allowed to return to school beyond the sixth grade and for women to resume work in government offices, according to several Taliban and foreign officials.
For Mr. Haqqani, his stance appears to be less about personal reform and more about pragmatic politics. Promising the restoration of women’s rights may help bring Western countries to his side. It could also help him gain the support of local leaders, particularly in urban areas that have been more resistant to the Taliban’s return.
The Haqqanis have been talking to the U.S. for years
Ties between the Haqqani family and the United States go back decades. Jalaluddin Haqqani, Sirajuddin’s father, cultivated close ties with the C.I.A., which sent him hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and weapons to fight the Soviets.
In the early days of the American invasion of Afghanistan, the Haqqanis tried to leverage those old ties to reconcile with American officials. Their efforts were rebuffed, and years of intense fighting ensued.
Around 2010, the Haqqanis secretly exchanged letters with American officials, and Sirajuddin Haqqani’s uncle, Ibrahim Omari, met with U.S. officials in 2011 in Dubai, according to two people with knowledge of the interactions.
Then, in a previously undisclosed meeting around four years later, Mr. Omari sat down with American officials in a European city in the hopes of finding a path to end the war, according to those people.
Seated in a private lounge of an upscale European hotel, Mr. Omari told American officials that he had been sent by his family to deliver a message. Both the Haqqanis and the United States wanted peace in Afghanistan, he said. The Americans had toppled the Taliban government, killed Osama bin Laden and established a democratic Afghan republic. So why, he asked, was the United States still fighting?
In response, a State Department official admitted that the United States did not have an answer to that question. The war would continue for many years.
Is Afghanistan’s Most-Wanted Militant Now Its Best Hope for Change?
Sirajuddin Haqqani has tried to remake himself from blood-soaked jihadist to pragmatic Taliban statesman. Western diplomats are shocked — and enticed.
Oct. 24, 2024
Christina Goldbaum is the Afghanistan and Pakistan bureau chief for The Times, leading the coverage of the region
What We Learned Talking to the Taliban’s Most Fearsome Leader
Wilson Center Fellow Gaisu Yari reflects on the outcomes of the All Women Summit in Albania, examines the various avenues being utilized to hold the Taliban accountable for their violation of women’s human rights, and recommends pathways forward for the global movement to uphold women’s rights in Afghanistan and for UN member states.
The Taliban’s narrative and war against women dominate televisions, radios, and the internet. But over the past three years, Afghan women have been changing that narrative by stepping into their own stories and making their demands heard.
The room buzzed with conflicting dialogues and disagreements over controversial topics that women in Afghanistan have struggled with for years. One group voiced concerns about the influx of humanitarian aid over the past three years, criticizing the lack of monitoring mechanisms despite the deepening humanitarian crisis. Another challenged the role of women protestors, who have recently mobilized into a movement against the Taliban’s brutal war on women.
Some questioned the legitimacy of women in exile and their efforts to sustain the movement on the global stage, while others critically examined the unity within the movement and challenges it faces. Meanwhile, some participants listened quietly to what was perhaps the most vibrant, diverse, and chaotic—yet productive—gathering at the All Women Summit in Tirana, Albania, held September 11–15. For four days, the space was led, organized, and filled by women leaders, protestors, practitioners, journalists, and entrepreneurs from Afghanistan and around the world.
A historic gathering
After three years of collapse, women leaders in exile, despite facing resettlement challenges, continued their advocacy, while women in Afghanistan resisted the Taliban’s strict policies. For all of them, the summit was a historic moment that pushed the women of Afghanistan to move from grief to solidarity building and strategizing. Throughout the All Women Summit, participants not only witnessed distinct exchanges, vibrant discussions, and disagreements but also came together during meals to grieve what they had lost and to create moments of strength, listening to each other despite the hardships of the past three years. Walking the hallways, the sight of women with different styles, colorful clothes, and bold red lipstick symbolized their determination to stand tall and commitment to advancing the movement.
Women of Afghanistan showed resistance to change narratives in the past three years, and the All Women Summit in Albania legitimized their unity, solidarity, and goal to change life for women in Afghanistan. The summit’s resolution and the experience in Albania conveyed a unified message, addressing the criticisms of disunity and scattered approaches over the past three years. It was a pivotal moment for the movement, clarifying its next steps, confirming women’s priorities, and laying the groundwork for developing a women’s political manifesto.
In the past three years, the Taliban banned women from all their basic rights. Twenty years of achievements, including the establishment of systems and legal mechanism to protect women have been erased. The Taliban drastically put in place hundreds of decrees banning women from public spaces, the right to education and work, and freedom of movement and speech. They essentially criminalized women’s general movement in Afghanistan. The Taliban’s frightening law banning women’s voices in public spaces was among the most recent actions that showed the reality of their fight against women and discrimination of women’s basic human rights once more.
The Taliban’s narrative and war against women dominate televisions, radios, and the internet. But over the past three years, Afghan women have been changing that narrative by stepping into their own stories and making their demands heard. Now, they are taking to the international stage to tirelessly advocate for change and engage with international accountability mechanisms to transform the regional landscape and uphold the rights of women in Afghanistan. For instance, women protestors have shifted the narrative from victimhood to stories of strength and reclaiming agency. They have organically formed and sustained grassroots movements to display resilience and resist the Taliban’s policies. This approach differs significantly from the experiences of women during the first Taliban takeover in 1996. Three years of resistance have been long and exhausting for the protestors and the movement at the international level, marked by constant loss, ongoing struggle, limited resources, and a lack of security or protection.
The “Bread, Work, Freedom” movement has a clear message from within. Chanting on the streets of Kabul for their rights and freedom, the movement builds on 20 years of work and investment from the international community. While the Taliban has not been stopping their policies, the “Bread, Work, Freedom” movement is a symbol of defiance against the Taliban’s control of the country by force, pushing women in their homes, and creating collective trauma for the population of Afghanistan. On one hand, these protests are applauded and receive international recognition; on the other hand, there has not been much change in Afghanistan for women.
International accountability mechanisms
What women face in Afghanistan is unprecedented, and experts are navigating different international tools, laws, and mechanisms to address violations. In March 2023, jurists, women activists, women leaders, and organizations started a campaign “calling all member states to recognize the crime of gender apartheid to counteract and end the systems of apartheid currently in place in Iran and Afghanistan.” In the past year and half, the campaign addressed issues such as education and the right to work and tracked all Taliban’s decrees against women to use in the international legal mechanism of UN’s 6th Committee on Crimes Against Humanity Treaty.
On October 10, the 6th committee started to discuss the convention and see if the treaty, which is set to conclude in 2026, will move forward to formal negotiation. The campaign is pushing for member states codify gender apartheid in the treaty on crimes against humanity. Legal experts argue that recognition of gender apartheid under the international law will tackle phenomena of systematic crimes against women that shows domination and oppression. It is this systematic oppression in Afghanistan that distinguishes gender apartheid from gender persecution under the international law.
In September 2024, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, and Australia, supported by many other countries, warned the state of Afghanistan of its violation of women’s rights would trigger an automatic referral to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) unless their policies are changed. This is an unprecedented announcement, as no countries in the history of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (which Afghanistan signed in 2003) were ever brought to the international’s highest court. The Taliban proudly rejected the warning and claimed that they have not been violating any laws and that human rights in Afghanistan are protected.
While the movement, experts, and member states use various tools to hold the Taliban accountable, the following recommendations are essential to consider when addressing the issues faced by women in Afghanistan. These recommendations are intended for both the women of Afghanistan and the member states engaging with the Taliban through different processes and mechanisms.
Recommendations for the women of Afghanistan
Platforms such as the All Women Summit in Albania should be further developed, and Afghan women should use them as opportunities to expand the resolution’s action points. This work requires cohesive financial support. The next summit should already be in the planning stages, ideally taking place in a regional country, such as Türkiye.
A women’s political manifesto should be initiated, as Afghanistan will soon face critical events like the 4th round of the UN Doha Process (Doha 4) and proceedings at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
Given the movement’s challenges with unified messaging and cohesion, Afghan women must sustain their engagement through conferences, strategic partnerships, and media platforms. Writing, sharing, and maintaining their narrative is essential to strengthening their position within the international community.
The movement must engage strategically with partners shaping the Doha 4 agenda, ensuring that discussions on Afghanistan include the voices of women. The agenda should serve the needs of all Afghan people, rather than focusing on narrow, specific areas.
Women inside Afghanistan and those in exile should push for constructive dialogue. Building solidarity through open conversations will strengthen the movement and unify strategies for future political decisions affecting Afghanistan.
Activists, organizations, and key actors should closely monitor the ICJ process and actively engage in consultations with countries such as Germany, Canada, the Netherlands, and Australia.
Recommendations for member states
The UN Doha Process on Afghanistan has not proven to be a successful platform for measuring impact or holding the Taliban accountable. Therefore, member states should not exclude Afghan women from these discussions, especially given the lessons learned from Doha 3.
Over the past three years, Afghan women have faced ambiguity regarding the engagement process with the Taliban and have not had clarity on the UN Doha Process. Moving forward, the international community should treat this as a lesson learned and provide clear guidelines on what engagement entails, along with outlining both long-term and short-term objectives.
With the upcoming Doha 4, the announcement of the ICJ proceedings, and the 6th Committee’s consideration of the treaty, member states should discuss and establish cohesive guidance in the UN Security Council. This guidance should be integrated into the UN-led process for Afghanistan. Afghan women perceive a paradox in the international community’s approach to addressing women’s issues in the country.
Gaisu Yari is a fellow at the Wilson Center and a former civil service commissioner in Afghanistan. She is currently leading the Afghan Voices of Hope Project.
Poetry forms a rich and popular strand of Afghan culture that can have real influence on society, and the Taleban, as insurgents, and now as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) have drawn on this. During the insurgency, poetry was an important propaganda tool used to promote jihad, mock the ‘invaders’ and venerate the martyrs. That poetry has continued since the 2021 takeover, but its style and content have changed dramatically. Patriotism and love of Afghanistan have replaced the themes of war and destruction, and the IEA is now investing some of its scant state resources into poetic public information campaigns. Given how many other forms of cultural expression are banned by the Emirate, unaccompanied, chant-like taranas have become the closest permissible thing to music. Given Afghans’ love of poetry, argues AAN’s Sabawoon Samim, it can touch at least some listeners’ hearts deeply.
When the Emirate came to power in August 2021, music was, as AAN reported in November 2021, “one of the first casualties,” even though, at first, it was only unofficially banned (see also our 2023 report on what had happened to five musicians, young and old). This prohibition encouraged the rise of the only songs that the Taleban believe Islamic law allows, those that are unaccompanied by instruments and are voice-only. Most famously are the taranas, with their “melodies and texts deeply rooted in Pashtun folk culture, but unaccompanied by instruments,” as described in our November 2021 report.
Taranas are closely associated with the Taleban and the author has observed that choosing to listen to them tends to be a good indicator of support for the Emirate. You hear them, especially in rural areas where the Emirate has a large constituency. In towns and cities, by contrast, many young people refrain from listening to them, given the taranas’ association with the IEA, and instead find ways to enjoy banned music privately online, on platforms such as YouTube.
Guests at wedding halls, restaurants and other public spaces might also prefer other forms of music, but given the ban, they turn to taranas as the only legal source of musical entertainment. One interviewee told the author: “Taranas are different from music both in content and the way they are sung, but they are better than nothing.” In Kabul’s restaurants, for example, taranas – many of which are the old popular songs now performed a cappella – have replaced other forms of piped music. In Kabul’s wedding halls, where once the sound of live music filled the air, wedding guests are now entertained by the melodies of taranas, while at graduation ceremonies, students and guests are serenaded by songs extolling the virtues of education. The same is true of what is on offer on domestic radio stations. Taxi drivers, who usually put the radio on to break the monotony of their days, now play taranas rather than what was ubiquitous pop music; callers now telephone in to stations to request their favourite tarana instead of their favourite pop song.
Interestingly, some of the taranas now duplicate musical compositions of Pashto, Dari and Hindi songs, sung accompanied by beatboxing – percussive sounds produced by the human voice – in lieu of instruments. Although these kinds of taranas are officially banned (see for example this Pajhwok News report), they have a wide fanbase among both Taleban and non-Taleban, given their more musical feel, and more and more are being produced in private studios (see, for example, this and this tarana).
Drawing on seven in-depth conversations with Taleban poets and members of the Cultural Commission of the Taleban’s shadow government during the insurgency, and analysis of more than two dozen poems from both the insurgency era and the present, this paper looks at how poetry and taranas have become key features of the second Emirate rule. It first explores the high status of poetry in Afghan society and how the Taleban, as insurgents, drew on a long tradition of using it to recruit and galvanise fighters. It then considers how, since the takeover, the IEA has systematically invested in taranas, including promoting new themes of patriotism, unity and development. It finds that poetry is also one of the few ways that members of the movement can convey criticism.
State-produced poetry
As taranas grow in popularity, filling the void left by the ban on other music, the Emirate authorities are investing considerable attention and state resources in creating and promoting them. The government’s aim appears to be fostering patriotism, promoting its religious ideology, sharing the Emirate’s narrative of itself as the liberator and protector of Afghanistan and attempting to gain greater legitimacy among Afghans. A Taleban-affiliated poet from Paktia described the usefulness of this policy more bluntly: “Poetry is an essential resource for a state to cleanse the toxins that infidels have injected into the hearts of Afghans.” Similarly, another interviewee, a Taleban official in Khost province, remarked:
In other societies, people may be less emotional, but in Afghanistan, emotions hold sway, shaping everything. The significance of poetry lies in its profound impact on emotions, which makes it highly effective here.
All our interviewees agreed that senior figures within the movement find taranas and poetry in general effective tools for fostering patriotism and unity as well as conveying the movement’s identity. One senior Taleban official in a civilian ministry presented it as a tool for reconciliation:
It’s very important for people with political differences to gather together. Discussing ideas and sharing thoughts is the first step towards understanding and knowing each other. Through these events, the Emirate wants to tell people that we are [all] the same. We don’t only know war, we also know peace and love.
Emirate officials believe this strategy is making headway, as highlighted by a mid-level Taleban official from the Ministry of Information and Culture: “On social media, we’re watching an increased number of Afghans from across the country listening to taranas, particularly those about the motherland.” The author has also observed Taleban taranas with over a million views on YouTube and hundreds of public comments (see, for example, videos here, here and here).
The Emirate has taken steps to regulate and control this growth with the establishment of the Taranum[1] and Culture Directorate under the auspices of the Technical and Vocation Education and Training Authority (TVETA). The Directorate is responsible for “organising poets and singers, overseeing taranas, aligning them with Islamic [values] and [Emirate] policies and removing instruments from them,” as its deputy Mawlawi Ghulam Said Ihsas said at the TEVET ‘Accountability Session to the Afghan Nation’ (televised by state broadcaster Radio Television Afghanistan (RTA) and accessible here).
The authorities have also taken steps to professionalise and enhance the quality of taranas. In contrast to during the insurgency, taranas are not only produced in audio but are now also available as music videos. (While videos are now illegal under the new Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice law, issued in August 2024, enforcement appears to be patchy at most.) TVETA has established a new studio for tarana singers, who are also given access to additional studios at the state-owned broadcaster, RTA and ministries, such as the Ministry of Information and Culture and the Ministry of Interior. By the end of 2023, according to Ihsas, TEVTA alone had published more than 200 taranas. State-produced taranas have also been published on official social media accounts such as RTA Music (see for example this and this video).
Another key step the IEA has taken is organising poetry programmes, most of which are also televised. These are large gatherings of poets, government officials and people from across Afghanistan held in different provinces where poets recite their poems to a wide audience. Although the Emirate’s poetry events are typically limited to recitations, RTA and other channels often broadcast poetry gatherings which include a type of poetry contest, musha’ara, that involves replying to one poem with another. RTA has a programme called ‘Cheena’ (spring water), where it invites senior figures, such as Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi and spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahed, alongside leading poets and tarana singers.
Regional Ministry of Information directorates also host annual poetry evenings, mostly in Pashto-speaking provinces, that can boast hundreds of participants, including Taleban-affiliated and other poets, young men and government officials. Famous non-Taleban poets, such as Pir Muhammad Karwan, Matiullah Turab and Alim Bismil join younger, emerging bards and are given the stage to declaim their poetry. Last year, poets from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on the other side of the Durand Line who hold a Pashtun nationalist political stance and supported the former Republic were invited to Nangrahar’s historical and famous Naranj Gul poetry event and VIP reception. The poetry at these events tends to be diverse, containing patriotic, romantic and satirical poems, as well as those condemning Pakistan, Iran and the West.
The Emirate also often uses taranas in its official media, ceremonies and propaganda. For example, when the Emirate announces a new reconstruction project, the video is often scored with a tarana (see, for example, this state-owned Bakhtar New Agency video on X).
The Emirate’s has embrace of poetry, especially the tarana, has arisen not only because it has banned or suppressed so many other cultural expressions but also because poetry is a bedrock of Afghan identity and culture and a potent force to be exploited. Poetry was especially important for inspiring fighters during the various phases of Afghanistan’s long war, a tradition which the Taleban as insurgents built on. These factors will be addressed in the following sections before the paper returns to how the Emirate is deploying taranas today, including the transformation of their subject matter.
Poetry in Afghanistan
Afghanistan’s culture boasts a rich and diverse poetic history that is deeply embedded in Afghan society in all linguistic traditions. Poems are used to welcome a newborn into the world and bid farewell to the deceased. When a child is born, their mother may sing spiritual poetry to instil a sense of connection to the divine. If a child cries, a parent, grandparent or older sibling might sing a soothing poem to calm or help them fall asleep. Poetry provides consolation and often carries valuable lessons in times of sorrow or hardship. More mundane examples include the rhyming couplets frequently seen stuck onto the rear windows of cars (see this AAN report for examples) or written by pupils in the margins of their school textbooks or on social media. A famous saying in eastern Afghanistan sums up the omnipresence of poetry in the country: “When you move a rock, you may find a poet underneath.”
Every ethnic group in Afghanistan has its revered poets, many of whom are treasured and shared across ethnic and linguistic lines. As the Afghan poet Reza Mohammadi notes in this editorial for the Guardian in 2012, “Whether we are Tajik, Hazara, Pashtun, Uzbek, Turkmen, Nuristani, Baluch, or any other of the hundreds of sub-ethnic groups, Afghans are threaded together by poetry.” Somehow it is the Persian poets, such as the thirteenth century ‘Mawlana’, Jalaluddin Rumi, born in Balkh in what is now Afghanistan, that have attained a global reach (though, as this essay notes, the price of his fame was the “erasure” of his Muslim identity for western audiences).
Poetry is also deeply intertwined in centuries-old Pashto literary traditions. The 8th century Afghan king, Amir Kror Suri, is regarded as the first Pashto poet whose work was recorded for posterity:[2]
I am a lion In the world there is none more powerful Neither In India, Sind, Takhar nor Kabul Nor is there any in the plains of Zabul There is none mightier than me The arrows of my strong decision, like lightning fall On the fleeing and escaping enemy l boldly recall Defeated in battle they have been all. There is no mightier than me.
One distinctive form of Pashto poetry is the landay or tappa, a 22-syllable rhyming couplet with a specific rhythmic and syllabic structure. This is a strong oral tradition, with landays mainly composed and recited by women. The female poets, themselves, are often unnamed and unknown. Landays address a wide range of daily issues and social themes and leave virtually no part of life untouched. (A rare collection of landays was made by the American poet Eliza Griswold, who worked with Afghan poets to translate their poetry for a 2015 book; some of the poems also feature in this essay).
Afghan literature also includes a rich tradition of epic poetry known as hamasi poetry.[3] Used to honour heroes and heroines of war and rally support for battles, hamasi poetry has adapted to changes in circumstances and typically reaches its literary peaks during times of war. For example, during the early 12th century, Pashtun poet and leader Khushal Khan Khattak deployed his poems against the Mughals, encouraging resistance against their invasion and cruelty. Similarly, during the second Anglo-Afghan war in 1919, Malalai’s two-line tappa rallied Afghan morale and spirit, contributing to their victory in the Battle of Maiwand against the British:[4]
Young love, if you do not fall in the battle of Maiwand, By God, someone is saving you as a symbol of shame!
In more recent history, the Soviet-Afghan war during the 1980s once again witnessed a surge in hamasi poetry. Poets captured the inhumane nature of the war and of Soviet aggression, inspiring resistance fighters such as in the poem below by the famous Dari poet, Khalilullah Khalili, which praises the mujahedin (see here):
Brave one, I admire your passionate eyes. The homeland is waiting for your strength. Fight fiercely – make [the enemy] bleed, thrash it, set it on fire. What could be worse than having the enemy in your own land? The homeland is looking to you, waiting for you to prove your skill in battle.
Even after the Soviets departed, poetry remained alive within the mujahedin factions. The themes, however, shifted to celebrating victory and praising commanders and leaders. The Taleban, who were part of the fight against the Soviets, fully embraced this poetic tradition. When they gained power in 1996, they banned music but encouraged taranas.
That said, poetry and taranas were not very pervasive in the early days of the Taleban movement. One interviewee claimed that only “a handful of poets existed and the taranas were also scarce.” During the first Emirate, taranas focused on specific issues, such as describing the Taleban movement, praising God and the Prophet Muhammad and highlighting heroism in their conflict against other mujahedin factions. Interviewees noted that at the time, the Taleban had not composed taranas of their own as they would in later years. Rather, theirs was a continuation of the poetry practice inherited from the jihad era and the earlier epic (hamasi) poetry.
A twentieth-century depiction of the most famous Afghan war poet, Malalai, whose two-line tappa rallied her comrades to defeat the British at the Battle of Maiwand in 1880 during the second Anglo-Afghan War (unknown artist).
The poetry of the insurgents
It was during the long years of insurgency against the Islamic Republic and its foreign backers that the Taleban movement began to effectively use taranas to inspire jihad. After the first Emirate collapsed in the face of heavy United States bombardment in 2001, the movement eventually regrouped as an armed insurgency. Again calling themselves ‘mujahedin’, their poetry echoed that of the anti-Soviet jihad. It was used to boost morale, call men to arms and legitimise the war effort. It soon became an essential feature of the post-2001 Taleban movement, with more poets and singers offering a growing number of poems reflecting the themes of the movement’s new jihad. The key poetic form was the tarana.
The taranas of the insurgency were so vivid and powerful that several Taleban interviewees believed they could by themselves rouse young men to take up arms. “When the youth would listen to these taranas,” said one interviewee, a local Emirate official in Khost, “their emotions would go up and the only place they could find relief was in action and by joining [our] ranks.” Another Taleban interviewee said they could also cause the enemy to defect: “The taranas were so powerful that if a soldier of the Republic listened to them, he might leave his post and join us instead.” A Taleban soldier from Nangrahar concurred that poetry had been a recruiting tool: “During the jihad, people did not listen much to taranas, but for those who did, it was nearly impossible for them not to join [us].” Another interviewee from Khost province recalled:
A soldier of [the Republic] had beaten one of my friends up badly, while he was still at school. He was very angry with the government. I took the opportunity to send him hundreds of taranas. A month later, he slowly reached out to our group and, in the end, joined us. He was later martyred.
According to a New York Times report) from 2019, Taleban suicide bombers who failed in their missions and were arrested were observed reciting poems to their fellow prisoners, suggesting their deep familiarity with the poetry. One bomber quoted in the piece, whose device detonated prematurely, sang a poem about what the prison was for him:
In our chains, there are lessons to be learned. The sun shines and reveals the secrets of our world. The chains are beautiful, creations of God: The chains on our hands hurt us, But the scars on our hands teach us.
Analysis created in support of the US military’s counter-insurgency operations during this period certainly saw the Taleban’s taranas as a threat to their own information war – see for example, this 2009 paper from the Naval Postgraduate School, ‘Understanding Afghan Culture’, which purports to:
Offer IO [information operation] practitioners and analysts valuable insight into the power of poetry within the Afghan battle space. … The intention of this paper is to help operationalize the many facets poetry offers U.S. and Coalition forces.
Another paper from 2011, casts the overlooked power of the Taleban’s taranas as emblematic of the West’s failure:
The Taliban taranas appear to be deeply rooted in the Afghan psyche. They appeal to emotions the West do not and have not tried to understand. This lack of understanding, in part, has ultimately doomed Western engagement in Afghanistan.
On this last point, the Taleban and Americans might now agree. The leadership of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan continues to appreciate the poetry of the insurgency. On a stand at the entrance of the Directorate of Taranum and Farhang (Singing and Culture) of the Technical and Vocational Education and Training Authority, it is written:
No one can be blind to the compelling role played by the singers of taranas in propaganda, intellectual and psychological warfare.
Poetry, then and now
Although a significant portion of the taranas during the insurgency revolved around the conflict, the poetry was diverse, lamenting the burdens of war and contrasting the oppression of foreign invaders with the heroism and resistance displayed by the ‘occupied’. Consider the following three poems: [5]
We’re not mad to seek death Our love for freedom drives us Our dignity endures We struggle for noble goals, suffering the mountains and sleepless nights Every step brings bitter memories Yet we walk barefoot through life’s ups and downs all in pursuit of the sacred.
***
If the entire universe conspires against me I shall still stand, unwavering on the battlefield of honour and dignity. My heart beats for sacrifices and freedom A living memory of the brave youth of Uhud.
***
Jihad is my path Through hardships, I embrace [my] love for freedom. A lone Taleb I step into the battle of honour – a thorn in the world’s eyes fuelled by love of liberty.
Such poems resonated with young Afghan men often disgruntled with the US-led coalition and what they saw as the foreigner-installed Republic. Listening to these taranas reminded Taleban fighters, as one interviewee put it, “not to forget what the invaders were doing and [also] that we were responsible for stopping them.” Another interviewee, now a member of the Emirate’s police force, recalled that during their stays in mosques, playing taranas would stir the comrades’ emotions and they would urge the commander in charge to begin the attack, demanding to know what he was waiting for and why they were just sitting around.
In those days, there were also taranas of victimhood, including memorialising the civilian victims of international forces. An English language 2012 anthology, Poetry of the Taleban, edited by Alex Strick van Linschoten, included a poem about a wedding party that had been bombed, killing both bride and groom: “But the news brings press releases from Bagram / Saying that ‘we have killed the terrorists” (p 41). Criticism of the United States and the Republic was a common theme, as was mockery, seen in this ode (p 118) to the end of President George W Bush’s tenure in 2009:
Karzai: Give me your hand as you go; Turn your face as you disappear. Bush: Sorrow takes over and overwhelms me; My darling! Take care of yourself and I will take care of myself.
For the Taleban, these poems served a purpose beyond mere propaganda; they were an attempt to humanise the war and Taleban suffering and express deep inner feelings. One interviewee, a Taleban poet who now works in a civilian ministry, said that for some mujahedin, fighting the enemy was not sufficient: they needed the powerful outlet of writing or reciting poetry to also satisfy their need for action. Poetry, the interviewee said, was also “the weeping that comes from the hearts of those who … were unable to physically resist the occupation and the injustice through [armed] jihad.”
How poetry changed after the capture of power
The wartime themes shifted after August 2021 when the Taleban gained control over all Afghanistan. Poets were quick to celebrate the victory they had secured and emphasise the defeat they had inflicted upon their enemies. After assessing more than a dozen poems from this early period of IEA rule, the author found they were exclusively focused on the victory, for example:
They have defeated the coalition of 40 countries The Taleb has won the 20-year war Their flag is white, flying high Their purpose and movement are white. This is the brave Taleb jan Who has crushed the puppet soldiers all the way to Kabul And won the 20-year war.
Another poem conveys a similar message: Felicitations on the Afghan victory I see the Taleban everywhere Congratulations These Crusaders have been ripped apart Praise be, they have turned to dust Blessings on this bittersweet victory.
After that initial ‘poetry of victory’ period, other themes have subsequently emerged in the three years since 2021. For example, the Taleban also tried to present themselves as the defenders and liberators of Afghanistan:[6]
From the long winter nights and the icy snow To fatigue on the battlefield And bruised and broken feet To the dark nights of the Tor Ghar We have long embraced the gunpowder and sacrificed Mansuri youth To discharge our debt to you O motherland, we offered our blood to you.
These poems have a strong narrative of sovereignty and independence. This reflects the Emirate’s boasts that it does not operate under foreign influence nor, as one interviewee from a civilian ministry put it, do its officials hold “the passports of other countries,” referring to the dual citizenships held by some of the officials of the Republic.
Our interviewees also highlighted a patriotic desire at this time, reflected in official taranas, to promote prosperity and development in Afghanistan after decades of conflict. One Taleban-affiliated poet said: “In the past, the sole goal was jihad, but now that era has ended. Instead of war, our current objective is to rebuild Afghanistan.” Poems such as this one capture the mood well:
What great transformation God’s mercy has brought about Those who made bombs are making pearls They have given everyone their rights They are rebuilding their devastated homeland.
Another poem conveys a similar sentiment:
Now that I have freed you I will rebuild you and make you shine again Homeland is the cure for hearts Life breathes, breathes and heals My desolate country, beloved homeland, needs our care It needs the lost Taleb inside its heart It is black, it is on fire, it wants to be rebuilt.
This poem suggests Afghanistan is now developing after years of violence:
Quickly progressing country You are flourishing again My beloved, beloved homeland None rival your beauty But the war-torn country is wounded. Advance! You will rise again You will flourish.
In this poem, patriotism is fused with a yearning for peace and normality:
I will envelope you with a green shawl I will make this country like a thousand others I will protect it with my life’s blood I will sacrifice for it my flesh I call this a marker of faith My soul is renewed and gleams I see the green panoramas of the country People from heaven shielded you, may God protect you from further adversity May God make no mother childless here Be strong and end the night of guns As we have freed you from occupation We stand with you.
Sacrifice, a common motif in wartime poetry, remained after August 2021, although now it was enjoined in the cause of development:
Afghanistan will grow green and flourish I have planted you in my heart Beloved Afghanistan When someone takes your name I roar that I will be sacrificed for you, Afghanistan. ***
We will rebuild you, homeland This promise we make We will sacrifice our life We will never let anyone [harm] you As in you roam the Taleban’s caravans.
Other poems urge the Taleban to be protectors of the realm:[7]
Be the guardian of the homeland
Rebuild the wasteland
This country, Taleb jan, wants reconstruction
Treat its wounded body sincerely
You are the ibn Qasim of the age
protect it by all means
Take care of this nation through education and instruction
Bring the people closer to you; bring them inside your heart
Rule their hearts
For all shall praise you
Personify Omari principles
History will honour you.
***
Let’s build our country, compete with the world We will make it flourish, like paradise We are bound to progress We are serving its beauty and unity
***
Long live the house of Muslims, beloved Afghanistan This homeland of martyrs The homeland of heroes It is a piece of our hearts Hell for others, heaven for its people Its air is heavenly, Every desert is heavenly It is bursting with rubies and gems
***
I am in love with you I am the guardian of this realm My purpose strong I am a Badri soldier I have no care for riches, no care for myself I am like a star Shining bright for you.
Another key aim of the poetry being disseminated is the promotion of unity among Afghanistan’s diverse ethnicities. The Taleban want to distance themselves from being labelled as a Pashtun movement (although senior appointments evidence otherwise – see AAN reporting from 2021 and, more recently, this 2023 report by a panel of UN experts). One interviewee said that content promoting harmony was effective in countering the divisive “propaganda” that anti-Taleban political groups propagate. The unity theme can be seen here, for example:
Light the light of unity Erase hatred with unity Even if the world tries to sow discord We are bound together in unity.
The poem below stresses that the varied ethnicities in Afghanistan make up a unified Muslim homeland:
This heavenly, heavenly country Shrines and dusty graves adorn the homeland May its tears become pearls and its wounds flowers May the strangers be gone forever May it never be soaked in blood again Tajik and Hazara are brothers here Be they Pashai, Pashtun or Uzbek, they are brothers The country is the home of Muslims, One nation, one united homeland.
The theme of obedience also looms large in the Taleban’s poetry, promoting loyalty to the Amir. See these two poems, for example:[8]
Do not be neglectful There is honour in obedience Obedience is the secret to success and happiness Do not build your life on betrayal O shepherd, gain high honours through obedience
***
Do not stray from obedience to these three
First Allah, second the Prophet, third the Amir.
These are the keys to exultation
First, intention; second, piety; third, planning.
Mujahed, always keep on your breath
First, hamd; second, prayer, third, takbir.
Beyond shaping public perceptions, Taleban poetry also reveals the movement’s conservativism. For instance, this poem by Ikram Maftun, a provincial official, highlights the dim views of his fellow Taleban towards NGOs and what he sees as trappings of modernity, such as television:
If the Quran’s commands are not fully applied Tell me, how would you protect its dignity? In the face of infidel NGOs how would you protect the honour, faith and values of Afghans? In the time of mobiles and television depravity How would you protect girls and the youth from immorality?
Not all taranas are officially sanctioned, however. Indeed, poetry has become one of the only platforms where Taleban fighters can voice criticism and alert the Emirate to potential problems. In public poetry events, one can hear poems that caution leaders and fighters not to deviate from the cause. In private gatherings as well, Taleban poets are blunt about the risk of power corrupting. This poem, for example, reflects the concerns of older Taleban members about their superiors practising favouritism:
Offices have changed the comrades Big positions and high ranks have changed the comrades They have forgotten the weary comrades of battlefields They have forgotten the friend of the bad days Now, they only remember and see their in-laws and brothers Now, they only know their tribesmen, villagers and cousins.
Another poem criticises nepotism within the Emirate:[9]
Thanks to nepotism and connections The arbakai has now become a mujahed There is no need for aptitude and piety The only thing you need is a connection with an official.
Conclusion
Since the re-establishment of the Islamic Emirate, The Taleban have endeavoured to reframe their identity from fighters to rulers. Not surprisingly, given the importance of poetry to the movement as a means of propaganda and recruitment during the insurgency, they have continued to turn to poetry. Taranas, in particular, sung as chants or a capella anthems, have real power in a society where the poetic tradition is part of everyday life. The Emirate’s campaign to systematically promote poetry using state resources is a sign of how successful they believe it was during the insurgency and how powerful it can continue to be.
As the context has changed, the Emirate’s strategy has also evolved. During the insurgency, the audience primarily consisted of rural Afghans, often Taleban sympathisers and their own fighters. Unlike today, resources were scarce and the movement struggled to reach a broader audience. Now, the IEA recognises it has new audiences, some of whom have long viewed them as adversaries. Correcting this perception is an urgent priority. It has therefore shifted its focus towards themes shared by both Taleban and non-Taleban Afghans, such as patriotism, unity and development. These powerful sentiments are now the arenas through which the Emirate seeks to influence hearts and minds.
For their own members, poetry is used to foster obedience to the Amir and the Emirate. The lives of former fighters have been dramatically altered by the change in their fortunes, with all the power and resources that such a position affords the victor. Taranas are being used to motivate their loyalty and – perhaps more optimistically – offer reassurance to any sceptics in the ranks. Some of those sceptics are disgruntled poets who use poetry to convey their concerns and caution their leaders – sometimes even face-to-face. In a video posted on X, a Taleban-affiliated poet, Nemat Lewanay, sitting with acting Defence Minister Mullah Yaqub cautioned him and other Taleban leaders against forgetting their jihad-era comrades and turning towards worldly pleasures:
I appreciate you are busy But not this much You no longer feel the old love Comfort brought extravagance Gone is our reverence for the mountains If vanity and prejudice do not unseat us No power in the world can stand against us Those who neglect old comrades have no honour.
Edited by Rachel Reid, Roxanna Shapour and Kate Clark
References
References
↑1
Taranum is the formal plural of tarana.
↑2
For a detailed background, see ‘Amir Korer Suri as the First Poet of Pashto’ by Ghulam Sakhi Himat and Azizurahman Haqyaar in the International Journal for Research in Applied Science and Biotechnology, 2021.
↑3
Hamasi means ‘epic’ in Pashto: hamasi poems are focused on war, heroism and commemorating heroes (read more about Pashto epics here). In modern times, hamasi cover all war-related issues.
The reference in the second poem to the ‘youth of Uhud’ is to the companions of the Prophet Muhammad who participated in the Battle of Uhud, the second major battle between the Muslims and the (non-believing) Quraysh of Mecca, fought in 625 CE. The Muslims, with an army of around 700 men, faced the approximately 3000-strong Quraysh and, despite being outnumbered, were victorious.
↑6
The reference to Tor Ghar (the Black Mountain) in this poem is to a mountain in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on the other side of the Durand Line, used here as a stand-in for all of Afghanistan’s high mountain chains. The ‘Mansuri youth’ likely refers to the 10th century Persian Sufi thinker, Mansur Halaj, who gained a large following as a preacher before becoming embroiled in a power struggle with the Abbasid court. He was executed after a long period of imprisonment on religious and political charges.
↑7
Muḥammad ibn al-Qasim al-Saqafī, mentioned in this poem, was the 8th-century military commander who led the Muslim conquest of Sindh in India for the Umayyad Caliphate.
The poet also lauds ‘Omari qualities’, referring to the virtues attributed to Mullah Muhammad Omar, one of the founders of the Taleban movement and its first supreme leader.
The poet also describes himself as a ‘Badri soldier’. This is a reference to the 313 companions of the Prophet Muhammad who participated in the Battle of Badr, an important early battle fought in 624 CE. Muslims honour these 313 men as a symbol of bravery, given they defeated an army of 1,000 non-believers.
↑8
The poem mentions ‘hamd’, a word from the Quran used exclusively to refer to the praise of God. ‘Takbir’ is the Arabic term for the phrase, ‘Allahu akbar’ (God is the greatest). This phrase is used to glorify God and is recited in Islamic rituals and events.
↑9
Arbakai is a term from Loya Paktia for tribally-raised and controlled temporary local militias. It became an insult during the Republic, used to describe pro-government armed groups, including the Afghan Local Police (ALP) and uprising groups.
The Poetry of the Emirate: From insurgent war propaganda to state-sponsored PR
Afghanistan Peace Campaign
David Page visiting Khuram wa Sabarbagh, Samangan province, in 2014, where Afghanaid was rebuilding homes damaged by flash flooding. Photo: with kind permission from Afghanaid
