Deferring a Dream: How one young woman blocked from teaching now runs a thriving tailoring business 

December 8, 2024

Rohullah Sorush • Roxanna Shapour

print sharing button

In this instalment of The Daily Hustle, AAN’s Rohullah Sorush hears from a woman who did most of her growing up under the first Islamic Emirate which banned girls of all ages from going to school. She came late to education, but strove to be a good student and managed to graduate from high school and secure a teaching qualification. Then, administrative corruption and bureaucracy under the Islamic Republic blocked her path into teaching and she had to put her dream of being an educator on hold. Instead, she began a tailoring business, working from home, in order to support her family. It is a reminder that barriers to Afghan women and girls fulfilling their dreams predate the current government’s restrictions on their work, education and movement.
This research has been funded by UN Women. The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of UN Women, the United Nations or any of its affiliated organisations.

A difficult start in life 

I was born in Jeghatu district of Ghazni province in 1988. My parents had moved back to our village from Kabul because of the war and also because my father didn’t want to serve in the communist regime’s army. We didn’t have much money and our family always struggled to make ends meet. I didn’t have an idyllic childhood. There were no carefree moments of child fancy and no time for kid’s games. It gets cold in our area long before winter arrives elsewhere in Afghanistan and children like me are sent to the hills to collect wormwood [artemisia, rawana in Dari] to burn as firewood. This was a very difficult task. For several hours each day, we gathered wormwood and other twigs, tied them up with twine, carried the bundles home on our backs and stacked them in a small shed.

I didn’t go to school back then because, by the time I was old enough in 1994, the Taleban had come to power for the first time and the only girls’ school in our area closed. But I went to classes at the local mosque to read the Quran and learn to read and write a little bit of Dari. My family stayed in Ghazni until 1999 when we moved to Kabul, where my father, a master tailor, had found a job working in a tailoring shop.

The chance to get an education

In 2001, two years after we moved to Kabul, the first Islamic Emirate fell and the transitional government led by Hamid Karzai was established. This marked a turning point not only for Afghanistan but also for me and my education. In 2002, my parents took me to one of the newly reopened schools in Kabul’s Dar ul-Aman neighbourhood. I had to sit for an assessment test and [at the age of 14] was enrolled in grade four. I can still remember my excitement on that first day of school. I wore my brand new uniform and white headscarf with pride and bore the weight of the books in my bag with delight.

In those early days, the schools were in a sorry state. Most of our classrooms didn’t have roofs and we had to sit on the floor because there were no chairs or desks. Things improved later when the government started building schools and hiring qualified teachers. I was determined to do well in school, but some classes, like maths and physics, were more difficult for me. Our school had a hard time finding qualified teachers to help us learn these subjects and I took to studying at home, spending most evenings pouring over textbooks. My efforts paid off and I quickly became one of the top pupils in my class.

I graduated from high school in 2010, but the gaps in my learning were not without effect and I didn’t pass the university entrance exam. This was a huge disappointment and it took me a couple of years to recover from the setback. But my parents encouraged me to look into enrolling in one of the private colleges that had opened since the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan was established. Unlike state universities, these colleges weren’t free, but I’d been working weaving rugs since childhood to help with my family’s expenses and I knew I could earn enough to pay the fees. My mother too had been putting a little money aside every month for a rainy day. This, they said, was that rainy day. The matter was settled. My earnings as a rugmaker and my mother’s nest egg would be an investment in my education, which would pay for itself a hundred times over once I graduated and found a steady job.

By then, I’d lost one brother and his wife to the conflict and my sister and brother had married and settled in Iran with their families. They did what they could to send money to Kabul, but they had very little to spare. It was up to me to plan for the future and make sure our little family would be on financially solid ground when my father was too old to work.

This was how, four years after leaving school, I enrolled in a two-year teachers’ training course at a private college. The tuition was 15,000 afghanis [USD 200] for each semester. Money was tight and, on top of my studies and weaving carpets, I had to get a second job working for a woman in our neighbourhood who ran a tailoring shop from her home.

Bureaucracy, corruption and unfulfilled dreams

I will never forget the pride on my parents’ faces when I graduated in 2016. All the years of hardship had finally paid off. I had dreams of getting a job teaching Dari literature, which I’d studied in college along with the teachers’ training course. Being a teacher would afford me a place of respect in the family and the community, and a steady pay cheque would finally help ease the financial hardship my family had endured for so many years.

Armed with my degree, I headed to the Ministry of Education to apply for a position. But my enthusiasm quickly gave way to frustration as I discovered that securing an application form would prove nearly impossible. On my first visit to the ministry, the staff informed me that all application forms had already been distributed. “Come back next week. We’ll have new ones by then,” they said. But when I went back the following week, they informed me that the forms had not arrived. I visited the office several times, but the response was always the same. People said I needed a contact at the ministry to let me know when the new forms had arrived, but I didn’t know anyone there. Then, one day, as I walked up to the counter, an employee reached under the counter and handed me an application form.

When I submitted my application for a teaching position, I was informed I’d need to wait for a call inviting me to sit an exam, and if I passed, I’d then enter a more formal hiring process that could lead to a placement at a school. I went to the ministry several times to ask when the exam would take place, but they kept telling me that I’d get a call when it was scheduled. It felt like they were giving me the brush-off. In conversations with family and friends, I learned about the unspoken realities of navigating the government’s hiring process. People said that only those with a waseta [contact] could secure government jobs. “If only you knew someone or had money to pay a bribe,” they’d say, their voices tinged with resignation.

Finally, I gave up on the idea of getting a job teaching at a state school and decided to try my luck with private schools instead. I can’t even remember how many schools I went to. They were all very polite as they looked over my transcripts and my college degree, but explained they couldn’t hire me because I didn’t have any teaching experience. But how was I supposed to gain teaching experience if no one was willing to hire me as a teacher?

A dream differed 

I’d learned tailoring at my father’s knee when, as a little girl, I watched his fingers deftly move over pieces of cloth to fashion clothes for his customers as the rhythmic sound of the sewing machine filled his workshop. During my two years of working for the tailor, I also honed my skills in the delicate needlework and embroidery required for women’s party dresses. Other than my teaching certificate, weaving carpets and sewing were my only marketable skills. I had to put away my dreams of teaching and start using my tailoring skills to make a living. I began to sew clothes for people in the neighbourhood at home.

Every morning, after prayers and helping my mother prepare breakfast, I get to work. I take a short break for lunch and, after a quick bite, I go back to my sewing machine and keep working until the call for the evening prayer. I do fine work, even if I say so myself, and my prices are reasonable. A simple dress costs around 200 Afghani [USD 2.30] and a more elaborate one is 350 Afghani [USD 4]. My reputation has grown with customers coming from all over the city to place orders not only for everyday dresses but also for garments that require fine workmanship – elaborate wedding dresses, elegant ones for special occasions like Nawruz or Eid and even smart overcoats. A couple of times a year, I get lucky and get an order for an entire wedding party – the bride, her sisters and mother as well as her in-laws. On those occasions, I can afford to bring on some help and teach my young helpers the finer points of tailoring.

Business is not as brisk as it used to be before the economy went bad. People now have a lot of financial problems; many, especially women, are unemployed, and new clothes are not top of their priorities. Still, I’m grateful that I have enough customers to give me financial independence and that the business gives my family and me a living, a roof over our heads and food on the table. That I can earn a living and care for my ageing parents is a blessing I don’t take for granted. Yet, I still dream of being a teacher one day, whenever that becomes possible. I hope such a day comes when all Afghan women and girls can work in their chosen fields and take up the work that interests them.

Edited by Roxanna Shapour

 

Deferring a Dream: How one young woman blocked from teaching now runs a thriving tailoring business 
read more

Afghanistan: Economy Shows Modest Growth After Two Years of Severe Contraction, But Recovery Remains Fragile

December 5, 2024 ,
World Bank
DECEMBER 4, 2024
WASHINGTON, December 4, 2024—The Afghan economy is showing signs of moderate growth, but still faces significant headwinds, including fiscal constraints, trade imbalances, and a limited capacity for public investment, according to the World Bank’s latest Afghanistan Development Update.Afghanistan’s economic recovery remains uncertain. Modest GDP growth of 2.7%, driven by private consumption, has recouped only about 10% of past economic losses, indicative of the slow and fragile nature of the recovery.This level of growth has done little to address deeper structural issues and significant vulnerabilities within Afghanistan’s economy. Enabling women’s participation in the economy, strengthening domestic resource mobilization, maintaining price stability, and addressing critical deficits in human capital—particularly in education and healthcare, and especially for women—will be essential for long-term recovery and reducing vulnerability to future shocks.“Afghanistan’s long-term growth prospects depend on tapping into the substantial potential of the domestic private sector and improving the overall business environment,” said Faris Hadad-Zervos, World Bank Country Director for Afghanistan. “Key to this is increased investment, providing access to finance to small businesses, and supporting educated and skilled women entrepreneurs so their businesses can thrive. Without this, the country risks prolonged stagnation with limited prospects for sustainable development.”

The partial recovery, coupled with falling food prices, has contributed to a gradual improvement in household welfare. But most Afghan households continue to struggle to meet basic needs and poverty remains widespread. Vulnerable groups, including women, children, and displaced populations, continue to bear the brunt of the economic hardship, due to the lack of social protection mechanisms. Night-time lights data analysis further indicates the uneven nature of economic recovery and the evolving landscape of economic activity in the country. In 2021, provinces whose economy was more heavily reliant on foreign aid and security spending —particularly Kabul and the southern provinces of Kandahar, Helmand, and Zabul—experienced the sharpest declines in economic activity compared to 2020. Similarly, by 2023, the level of economic activity captured by civilian night-time lights remains sizably below its 2020 baseline in Parwan, Kapisa, Zabul and, notably, in Kabul.

Afghanistan’s trade dynamics remain a significant challenge. In 2023-24, the country’s exports remained stable, but imports surged, leading to a widening trade deficit. However, the appreciation of the Afghani made imports cheaper, fueling demand for foreign goods, while domestic industrial activity revived, increasing the need for imported inputs. The trade deficit, exacerbated by Afghanistan’s reliance on imports for essential goods like fuel, food, and machinery, might pose a risk to the country’s economic stability.

The Afghanistan Development Update is part of the World Bank’s Afghanistan Futures program, which includes research, monitoring, and analytical reports on the Afghan economy and society. The program aims to support evidence-based policymaking and inform the international community on the economic developments in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan: Economy Shows Modest Growth After Two Years of Severe Contraction, But Recovery Remains Fragile
read more

Could the Islamic Emirate be the Inspiration for a New Crime Against Humanity? Prospects for the gender apartheid campaign

November 29, 2024

Rachel Reid

Afghanistan Analysts Network

email sharing button

In the spring of 2023, a campaign was launched to create a new international crime of gender apartheid. Campaigners argue that the oppression of women and girls is so total and severe in Afghanistan and Iran that it is akin to the systematic and hierarchical racist oppression practised by apartheid South Africa. Their hope is that gender apartheid will be included in a new Crimes Against Humanity Convention, which happens to be scheduled for negotiation in the coming years. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) shows no sign of moderating its policies towards Afghan women in the face of widespread global criticism, which it dismisses as foreign interference in domestic and religious matters. AAN’s Rachel Reid considers the campaign, the legal issues and how codification might happen. 
In March 2023, a group of Afghan and Iranian women launched the End Gender Apartheid campaign, which seeks to codify a new international crime of gender apartheid.[1] “The Taliban have sought not only to erase women from public life, but to extinguish our basic humanity,” women’s rights campaigner Zubaida Akbar told the United Nations Security Council on International Women’s Day, when the campaign launched. “There is one term that accurately describes the situation of Afghan women today – gender apartheid.”[2]

The term ‘apartheid’ originated in South Africa, where it described the system of racial segregation and discrimination towards black South Africans and other non-white South Africans by the minority white government. It lasted from 1948 to 1990 (for more on this history, see here). In 1976, apartheid was established as an international crime against humanity and defined by the Apartheid Convention as:

[I]nhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.

Campaigners argue that this same language fits the situation of Afghan women and girls if ‘gender’ is substituted for ‘racial group’. Gender persecution is already criminalised (see a discussion of it in relation to Afghanistan by Ehsan Qaane for AAN here). However, campaigners argue that it does not sufficiently capture the deliberate, ideological and systematic nature of discrimination and segregation seen in Afghanistan and Iran.[3]

Gathering support: from protestors to top UN officials

The campaign quickly took off, including inside Afghanistan where some women protestors incorporated the call for gender apartheid into their protests (see here). Key officials soon started to adopt the language. In June 2023, the demand for codifying gender apartheid was joined by UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in Afghanistan Richard Bennett and the UN’s Working Group on Discrimination Against Women and Girls in a joint report presented to the Human Rights Council. They argued:

[G]ender apartheid could be understood as inhumane acts committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one gender group over any other gender group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime. This is an accurate description of the situation documented in the present report, in which systematic discrimination against women and girls is at the heart of Taliban ideology and rule.

At the Human Rights Council session, their call drew important support from South Africa’s representative, who called on “the international community to take action against what the report describes as ‘gender apartheid’, much like it did in support of South Africa’s struggle against racial apartheid.” South Africa’s endorsement carried huge weight given how intertwined the term apartheid is with the struggle against racial apartheid there (though as discussed later, its support has since waned).

Another important voice in favour of codification was the Executive Director of UN Women, Sima Bahous, who in September 2023 told the UN Security Council:

[L]end your full support to an intergovernmental process to explicitly codify gender apartheid in international law. The tools the international community has at its disposal were not created to respond to mass, state-sponsored gender oppression. This systematic and planned assault on women’s rights is foundational to the Taliban’s vision of state and society and it must be named, defined, and proscribed in our global norms, so that we can respond appropriately.

The roll call of human rights grandees continued to grow, with UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk offering his support for codification in a speech in October 2024. In the same month, support also came from the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women in its General Recommendation 40 (accessible here).

Iran and Afghanistan

The End Gender Apartheid campaign was jointly launched by Afghan and Iranian women. Yet, many of those advocating for codification have highlighted the actions of the IEA, rather than the Iranian government. Even the legal brief of the End Gender Apartheid campaign itself only cites Emirate policies. While there are similarities in the experiences of women and girls in Iran and Afghanistan, Iranian campaigners are the first to acknowledge that the situation in Afghanistan is, quite clearly, more extreme.

Iranians, however, point to a range of restrictions on women and girls, not least the ‘chastity and hijab law’,[4]described by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Iran described in September 2023 as a form of gender apartheid, which imposes harsh punishments for violations of the compulsory dress code for women.[5] It also expands the authority of the intelligence agency, the judiciary and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to identify and prosecute violations (see this brief from Human Rights Watch). While Iranian women have greater freedoms overall – including to education and freedom of movement – their government has been brutal in punishing rule-breakers. After Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa Amini died in custody on 16 September 2022 after having been arrested on allegations of violating the hijab rule, protests sprang up, spearheaded by women and centred on women’s rights within a wider call for civil rights. The Iranian authorities killed hundreds of protesters, men and women, and detained thousands more, some of whom were later executed (see Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reports).

Despite Iran’s authoritarian fundamentalism resonating with campaigners, it is the policies of the IEA that has propelled their effort. Since 2021, the list of Emirate laws and practices that discriminate against women and girls in Afghanistan has steadily grown, from denying access to education for older girls to restrictions on freedom of movement, speech and employment (see here a list by the US Institute of Peace). In the face of protests by Afghan women, resolutions from the Security Council and statements from UN experts and special rapporteurs, the European (and other) parliaments condemning the mistreatment of women and girls, the IEA has dug in. Emirate officials have consistently dismissed accusations that the Emirate violates women’s human rights. For example, in a tweet on 26 September 2024, deputy spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat said:

The Afghanistan Islamic Emirate is blamed for violation of human rights and gender apartheid by some countries and factions. Human rights are protected in Afghanistan and no one is discriminated against.

Officials often argue that the Emirate is merely upholding religious values, sometimes also invoking cultural or Afghan norms. Emirate Minister of Higher Education Nida Muhammad Nadim, for example, on 4 December 2022, lambasted “Western-style” schooling for women as “against Islam and Afghan values” (see BBC Persian reporting). This was just before girls were banned from universities. In other comments by the minister, also cited in the same BBC Persian report, he referred to two earlier Afghan kings and how they had encouraged women’s education. King Amanullah (r1999-1929) had introduced the idea of women’s schooling, he said, from “the West and the infidels,” and had brought “a version of prostitution and blasphemy to Afghanistan.” The Emirate, he said, was just doing the same.[6]

IEA officials also frequently invoke Afghan sovereignty to defend their policies on women and girls, insisting that any criticism is an attempt to interfere in Afghanistan’s domestic affairs. Spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, for example, responding to a reporter’s question as to whether women’s rights would be on the agenda of the Doha III conference, said: “We acknowledge women are facing issues, but they are internal Afghan matters and need to be addressed locally within the framework of Islamic Sharia.” He told reporters that “IEA meetings, such as the one in Doha or with other countries, have nothing to do with the lives of our sisters, nor will we allow them to interfere in our internal affairs” (reported by Voice of America).

In response to IEA implacability and resistance to domestic or international pressure to amend its laws and policies on women and girls, Afghan women’s rights defenders have increasingly looked to international legal measures for relief and demanded international support in this effort. This has been seen not only in the gender apartheid campaign, but in the attempt to take Afghanistan to the International Court of Justice, explored by this author in an October report for AAN.

Proponents for the codification of the new crime argue that it addresses a gap in international law and that neither the crime against humanity of gender persecution nor the prohibitions on gender discrimination under international human rights law are sufficient to deal with the situation in Afghanistan. They say only gender apartheid captures the elements of animus and intent and is able to capture both the totality and the gravity of oppression. These are looked at in turn, below.

Reflecting the animus and intent

Proponents argue that gender apartheid, unlike other legal frameworks, captures the underlying ideology that considers women inferior to men and makes this a central guiding principle in the exercise of state power, just as black South Africans were cast as racially inferior and governed accordingly. One of the leading voices in favour of codifying gender apartheid is Karima Bennoune, a law professor and former UN Special Rapporteur for Cultural Rights, who writes that for the Taleban, “domination of women is a core element of the group’s ideology and a key prong of its governing platform.” Such animus is what legal scholar Patricia Williams referred to in the South African context as being “so deeply painful and assaultive” that it constitutes “spirit murder.” The crime of gender persecution, like racial persecution, does not require the presence of a motivating hatred or animus. Similarly, gender discrimination under international human rights law does not require intent to be present.

Reflecting the totality of the crimes

Proponents argue that the totality of the Taleban’s oppression of Afghan women and girls – its systematic and institutionalised nature – is better captured by apartheid than persecution. The crime of gender persecution can potentially be applied to severe abuses against women and girls, including widespread denials of education and freedom of movement or forced marriage, but it does not require that the persecution is institutionalised across the system of governance. An individual could, for example, be prosecuted on the basis of a narrow subset of acts that come under gender persecution, such as forced sterilisation, if it met the contextual requirements of all crimes against humanity.[7] This idea was captured by the written comments of the government of Malta in October 2023 in relation to the Draft Crimes Against Humanity Convention:

The codification of the crime of gender apartheid will enable victims and survivors – present and future – to hold perpetrators to account for the totality of crimes committed by systematized oppression which the crime of gender persecution alone cannot and does not capture.

It is worth noting that gender persecution has been sorely underutilised – there has been only one charge of gender-based persecution ever brought to trial at the International Criminal Court (which largely failed, for reasons explained in this analysis). The court is taking steps to rectify this neglect – in December 2022, it released a new policy on gender persecution, and a year later, released a revised policy on gender-based crimes. Consequently, the discussion about the distinction between gender apartheid and gender persecution takes place without much case law.

Reflecting the gravity of crimes 

A distinction that intersects with the arguments that only gender apartheid captures the elements of animus and can capture the totality and the gravity of oppression is that its codification would better convey the gravity of the harms, in terms of the severity of individual and collective acts. Human rights commissioner Volker Turk, when lending his support to the codification, spoke of gender apartheid better capturing “the extent and severity” of the impacts of “institutionalised regimes of systematic oppression and domination of women.”

Complicity by second states

Another benefit of codifying gender apartheid, say proponents, is that it would clarify the obligations of second states and international organisations, including the UN, because there would be a duty to avoid complicity in apartheid. The prohibition on apartheid contained in the Apartheid Convention, in addition to numerous resolutions at the UN General Assembly and UN Security Council condemning apartheid and reiterating states’ obligations, is seen as having made a significant contribution to ending the apartheid regime in South Africa. This was described in a 21 February 2024 letter of support to the gender apartheid campaign from South African jurists:

The international community responded comprehensively to the crime of racial apartheid, forcing accountability on the South Africa apartheid state, and imposing the obligation of member states at the United Nations to eradicate the institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination of black South Africans. Broadening the definition of the crime of apartheid to include gender would enable a structured global approach that is responsive to the institutionalized systems of domination and oppression of women, girls and others. 

Similarly, Karima Bennoune argued at the Security Council in September 2023 that a “powerful aspect of the ‘gender apartheid approach’ is that no Member State can be complicit in or normalize the Taliban’s actions, as was the case with racial apartheid in South Africa.” One of the women spearheading the campaign, an Iranian lawyer at the Atlantic Council, Nushin Sarkarati, believes codification of the new law could provide a degree of clarity about state engagement that is lacking at present: “When we call for principled engagement it’s not clear how the General Assembly can make that happen. To hold other states responsible, in terms of trade, interactions, even humanitarian aid, we need to create more proper monitoring mechanisms.”

Finally, campaigners argue that a simple question of equity in international law is at stake, a point made to AAN by Human Rights Watch’s Heather Barr: “The question experts and scholars keep asking is ‘Why should crimes that are identical be ignored if it’s about gender rather than race.’” If the need was felt to criminalise both racial apartheid and racial persecution, Barr asked, surely the same should be true for gender apartheid and gender persecution. Nushin Sarkarati told AAN she is familiar with this double standard: “Any time you try to improve gender justice norms the push back is – why isn’t what you have already enough? But nobody says – why do you need racial apartheid when you already have racial persecution and discrimination.”[8]

Support from LGBTQI+ groups 

Support for codification has also come from Afghan and international LGBTQI+[9] activists, who hope that persecution on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity would also fall under ‘gender apartheid’. Civil society groups have documented a worsening of abuses against LGBT people in Afghanistan since 2021, particularly those in same-sex relationships. However, an article supporting codification by an activist from the Afghan LGBT Organisation (ALO) and a women’s rights NGO Madre, also raised concerns about the risks of creating and interpreting new crimes involving the term ‘gender’ amid an increasingly fraught global discourse about definitions of sex and gender. Madre published an open letter to UN Secretary General António Guterres in September 2024, requesting a global study on the crime of apartheid to address this and other definitional concerns which one of the authors told AAN they expect “may be positively received” and be “completed within a year”.[10] This is well within the timeframe that codification of gender apartheid entails, as explained below.

Political Obstacles: Back pedalling from South Africa 

One potential political obstacle to the campaign emerged in 2024, when South Africa withdrew its support. This was a blow to campaigners since throughout 2023, it had been a prominent state supporters of codification in official venues, lending a degree of legitimacy that no other state could provide. At the Human Rights Council in June 2023 when  Bennett and the Working Group on Discrimination Against Women and Girls report that supported codifying gender apartheid was discussed, the South African representative had spoken in favour, saying:

As a country that prizes the promotion and protection of the human rights of women and girls, my delegation therefore calls on the international community take action against what the report describes as “gender apartheid”, much like it did in support of South Africa’s struggle against racial apartheid.

Again, on 22 September 2023, South Africa co-sponsored a side event on gender apartheid at the UN General Assembly. A delegation from the End Gender Apartheid campaign, including Pakistani feminist campaigner Malala Yousafzai and Afghan campaigner Metra Mehran, visited South Africa in early December 2023. Mehran told AAN that their meetings in South Africa were very positive:

Based on the interactions we had in South Africa and with South African missions, everyone is very supportive. They echo our arguments, and the arguments that the women of Afghanistan make, that what is happening in Afghanistan is apartheid – it is systemic and institutionalised. 

The ground shifted soon after this visit. By the time the Human Rights Council discussed gender apartheid again in June 2024, South Africa had reversed its position, expressing concern that the inclusion of gender apartheid might ‘dilute’ the original meaning of apartheid (see this summary of discussions).

What seems to have triggered this shift was South Africa throwing all its diplomatic weight into a legal challenge against Israel for its alleged genocide against the Palestinians; on 29 December 2023, it launched a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

The historical context for South Africa’s action was the alliance between Israel and apartheid South Africa and the decades-long common cause felt by the African National Congress (ANC) towards the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Palestinians in general. Since the end of white minority rule, the ANC as the governing party, has consistently used the term ‘apartheid’ to describe the Palestinians’ situation (documented in this timeline of the term in relation to Israel/Palestine; see also this Guardian article). This is also a position that has found recent legal backing at the International Court of Justice.[11]

The ICJ case was a bold move for South Africa. An editorial in The Conversation[12] argued that it has brought a politically weak government much-needed popular domestic support and burnished its image on the international stage. Mehran speculated that the South African government might be concerned that the gender apartheid campaign could “overshadow” the genocide case it is making against Israel at the ICJ. It may also feel it needs to use its political capital to garner support for the ICJ case, including, but not limited to, Muslim-majority states that might support Palestine but prefer to avoid the ramifications of gender apartheid being codified for conservative Islamic states.

Asylum, Potential Second State Responsibility and UN concerns

Another issue that may be problematic for campaigners is whether states fear that their asylum obligations might be affected by codifying gender apartheid. An article by human rights lawyer Mélissa Cornet cites a “European diplomat” admitting that many countries are concerned about “the political consequences of recognising gender apartheid, especially because it would bring pressure to grant unconditional asylum to Afghan women and girls.” It is not clear how much credence this position holds in practice, given that the European Court of Justice, the UN agency for refugees, and a growing list of countries have already said that Afghan women and girls should automatically be granted asylum based on the persecution they face as a class of people (as discussed in this AAN article). However, since one of the appeals for activists of codifying gender apartheid is that its recognition imposes greater responsibilities on second states, given the context of a growing hostility voiced by many Western states towards asylum seekers, this may be a factor in whether they support the gender apartheid campaign.

Another setback for campaigners appears to have come from the UN Secretary-General. AAN has heard from several sources that his office has circulated a memorandum, requesting UN staff to refrain from using the term ‘gender apartheid’. This does not appear to reflect a disagreement with the term itself, but a fear that by using it there could be implications for UN operations, even without it being codified in law.

Supporters of the gender apartheid campaign have speculated to AAN that for the UN to recognise that it is operating in a country where gender apartheid is practised would require it to distance itself for fear of being regarded as complicit with that apartheid regime. There has been a tense debate about degrees of diplomatic engagement and how humanitarian aid can be equitably delivered since the Emirate emerged in 2021, and UNAMA is already involved in a delicate dance around the employment of women in Afghanistan, where Emirate law banning the UN from employing women sharply diverges from the UN’s own equal opportunity employment obligations. The UN was also criticised for accepting IEA conditions for the June 2024 Doha III, in particular, that the only Afghans present would be its officials, with no other Afghans, including no women or civil society present (censure came from states, civil society and in this opinion editorial by UN Special Rapporteur Richard Bennett). For the UN to recognise gender apartheid would only strengthen the case of those who argue against its engagement with the Emirate.

AAN has not seen a copy of the memorandum and is unclear about the scope of the censorship it orders, but it would, at the very least, cover those staff who work directly for the Secretary-General, such as his Special Representative (SRSG). It would not, however, curtail the freedom of Special Rapporteur Richard Bennett, who holds a UN mandate but is independent of the UN (including not receiving a UN salary).

Overall, the alleged intervention by the Secretary-General is an irritant to the campaign. However, it can also be seen as confirmation of one of its driving ideas, that the language of apartheid itself has power in the real world.

How do you make a new international crime?

There would be two main pathways towards codifying gender apartheid. One is to amend the definition of racial apartheid under article 7(2)(h) of the Rome Statute, for which there are periodic opportunities for signatories. The other is to include gender apartheid in a new treaty that is due to be negotiated in the coming years on Crimes Against Humanity (CAH). The latter is the most promising route since the campaign to codify gender apartheid has emerged at a time when the process of creating a new treaty – that includes the crime of racial apartheid – is already underway. The hope for campaigners is that the definition of apartheid already contained in the draft treaty can be extended, or duplicated in large part, to include gender apartheid. Crimes against humanity are already codified under Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the ICC to include murder, extermination, enslavement, imprisonment, torture, sexual violence, and the crime of apartheid, when they take place within the context of a large-scale attack on civilians. Adoption of the CAH treaty would bring crimes against humanity in line with existing stand-alone treaties for other crimes – genocide, war crimes, torture and enforced disappearances.[13]

On 22 November 2024, the Sixth Committee of the UN General Assembly, which is responsible for legal issues, approved by consensus a proposal for a Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes against Humanity (UN press release here). It set out a timebound process involving preparatory sessions in 2026 and 2027, with negotiations in 2028 and 2029 (see AP report). That may seem like a distant horizon, but we are already several years into the process (discussions about the treaty began well before 2019, when the UN’s International Law Commission first completed draft articles).

So far, the focus has been on the treaty as a whole rather than substantive discussions about individual articles, such as gender apartheid, but campaigners have been able to put down a marker for the negotiations. With the help of comments and written submissions from supportive states, gender apartheid, which was not in the original draft articles from the Law Commission, is now included in the summaries of discussions and written commentary that will, alongside the original draft articles, be part of the negotiations. So far, campaigners say, so good.

During the treaty discussions, Afghanistan, represented by a former Republic official, advocated for the codification of gender apartheid, as did Australia, Chile, Malta and Mexico, while Austria, Brazil, Iceland, the Philippines and the United States expressed a willingness to engage in future discussions about the concept (the discussions can be watched here). Only one state – Cameroon – argued that gender persecution was sufficient.

Conclusion 

The debate about codification may feel like it happens in a separate realm from the reality of life in Afghanistan. For the Emirate, it may just be a note in the chorus of condemnation from around the world, dismissed as yet more international interference or hypocrisy.

Campaigners have a long road ahead to win broad enough state support to make codification a reality. Realistically, it could be many years before a new Crimes Against Humanity Treaty comes into force, with more years before prosecutors might try to test it. In the meantime, however, HRW’s Heather Barr thinks the campaign itself has played a mobilizing role:

While we are on the path, Afghan women have seen enormous benefits from the gender apartheid campaign. It has galvanised and united Afghan women’s rights defenders in a way that almost nothing else has. I keep hearing women’s rights defenders say they all agree on this. 

Mehran agrees:

It’s really the one thing that all women I speak to agree on. There is so much tension on so many issues, but regardless of differences between generations, or language differences or where you come from or where you live, we all agree on the need for a gender apartheid to be recognised. … In fact, there’s frustration from some women protestors I’ve talked to as to why it is not codified already.

The reported actions of the Secretary-General suggest the term gender apartheid itself has power. There is a growing list of states, senior UN mandate holders and officials, jurists and rights advocates that now frequently use the term in relation to Afghanistan. This suggests that, however long codification might take, the term resonates so widely that it is already entering the human rights lexicon.

Edited by Kate Clark 

References

References
↑1 The End Gender Apartheid campaign website includes a list of Afghan, Iranian and international signatories.
↑2 Some Afghan women prefer a purely Afghan-focused campaign, such as The Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan.
↑3 The term ‘gender apartheid’ was first coined, albeit not as a proposed legal term of art, in the 1990s to describe the first Emirate’s policy towards women and girls, used, for example in a reportby the UN Special Rapporteur on civil and political rights in 1999, and in a Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid by a feminist coalition led by the US-based Feminist Majority Foundation.
↑4 The law, officially called The Protection of the Family through Promoting the Culture of Hijab and Chastity law was passed by Iran’s parliament on September 20, 2023 and ratified by the legal body that has final approval of laws, the Guardian Council, in September 2024 (see the text in Persian).
↑5 See also Vakil, Sanam. “Women and politics in the Islamic Republic of Iran: Action and reaction”, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013 and Justice for Iran’s “Thirty Five Years of Force Hijab: The widespread and systematic violation of women’s rights in Iran.”
↑6 Education, especially of girls, has a century-long history of politicisation – promoting equal access to schooling, including non-madrassa schooling, to ‘modernise’ or ‘nation-build’, or opposing it as ‘unIslamic’ and ‘unAfghan’, previously explored for AAN by Reza Kazemi and Kate Clark. The current hardline position of the Emirate, however, has also drawn condemnation from global Sunni religious scholars, including the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University, Ahmed El-Tayyeb, who made a statement after women were banned from universities, in December 2022, describing is as “a fabrication” of Islam and calling for the ban to be reconsidered.
↑7 Crimes against humanity require that they happen within the context of a widespread or systematic attack on a civilian population.
↑8 It is hard to find legal scholars who question the case made for codification. Ahmad Ali Shariati, an Afghan PhD student writing for the European Journal of International Law blog, is one of the few. He questions the claim that gender apartheid would better match the gravity of the situation in Afghanistan, since the proposed crime of gender apartheid would also be a crime against humanity and therefore be ‘on a par’ with gender persecution. Both would have to meet the high bar of demonstrating the requisite systematic or widespread nature of crimes against humanity.
↑9 Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and other.
↑10 More background on this debate, as well a case for the deliberate non-definition of gender in international criminal law—the approach taken in preparing the draft CAH treaty—is made in Just Security here.
↑11 On 19 July 2024, the ICJ issued an advisory opinion finding multiple and serious international law violations by Israel towards Palestinians in the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem, that included finding Israeli policies violate the international prohibition on racial segregation and apartheid.
↑12 The Conversation website describes itself as “an independent source of news analysis and informed comment written by academic experts, working with professional journalists.”
↑13 The Rome Statute would impose additional obligations on states to act against perpetrators of crimes against humanity. The absence of a treaty is also seen as devaluing the seriousness of crimes against humanity. See Human Rights Watch’s 9 October 2024 ‘Towards a Crimes against Humanity Treaty’.

 

Could the Islamic Emirate be the Inspiration for a New Crime Against Humanity? Prospects for the gender apartheid campaign
read more

No Climate Change Deniers: The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan goes to COP29, as an observer

November 25, 2024

Thomas Ruttig

Afghanistan Analysts Network

The 29th UN Climate Change Conference, or COP29, which was hosted by the Republic of Azerbaijan, concluded on 24 November 2024 in Baku, with a delegation from the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in attendance. This was the first time the Emirate had participated in a UN-organised conference on climate, but only as an observer. The invitation was extended to the Emirate by the host country and not by the United Nations. The Emirate’s delegation was led by the National Environment Programme of Afghanistan’s new Director-General, Mati ul-Haq Khales. The UN, for its part, invited two Afghan NGOs and a civil society representative to participate in COP29 side events. AAN’s former co-director Thomas Ruttig delves into what prompted this invitation, as well as examining Afghanistan’s climate-related challenges and the Emirate’s words and actions on climate change.

The politics of an invitation

For the first time since it took power in August 2021, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) has taken part in a major conference organised by the United Nations,[1] the 29th Conference of the Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), or simply the COP29, which was held in the Republic of Azerbaijan’s capital Baku 11-24 November 2024. (The conference was scheduled to close on 22 November, but it overran for 33 hours because of bitter negotiations that came within inches of collapse, BBC reported).[2]

Notably, the Emirate was invited as an observer to the conference by the host country, Azerbaijan, rather than the United Nations itself, which is the COP29 organiser. Although Afghanistan is party to the 2015 Paris Agreement,[3] participation as an observer allows the IEA to take part in discussions without having the full voting rights or decision-making powers that a member state does.

For the IEA, attending the COP29 is a significant moment in its quest to end its international isolation and gain legitimacy and recognition on the world stage.

The UN cannot officially invite the IEA because the Emirate does not hold Afghanistan’s seat at the world body and — as of now — no UN member state has officially recognised the Emirate. This is despite the fact that several countries, particularly those in Afghanistan’s neighbourhood, namely Turkey, Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, most Central Asian republics and, less prominently, India – maintain more than just informal diplomatic relations (see a breakdown from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and more on India from The Diplomat). By now, many have exchanged ambassadors with Kabul.

Despite this, these countries along with all other UN member states continue to unanimously deny the Emirate a seat in the UN, which has long been a demand of the IEA. This year, the absence of an invitation to the 79th UN General Assembly session was notable, as it marked the fourth consecutive year that the Emirate had not received an invitation. In response, the Emirate protested and expressed its dissatisfaction with its continued exclusion (see ToloNews).[4]

This situation raises the question of whether a delegation from the Emirate should take part in UN conferences. It is, therefore, not only a climate policy issue but, indeed, also one of general foreign policy.

Similar to the UN’s controversial move to secure the participation of the IEA by excluding all other Afghan parties or relegating them to side events, including women and civil society actors, which led to widespread condemnations and a call from women’s rights activists to boycott Doha III (see USIP’s analysis here, MEMRI here and this DROPS video on X), the question whether to invite IEA representatives to Baku or not, regardless in what capacity, was also highly controversial. Leading civil society activists, mainly in the diaspora, and UN independent experts have decried every instance of the UN’s engagement with the Emirate, for example in this statement from 14 August 2024, signed by more than 20 Special Rapporteurs, Independent Experts and Working Groups. They argue:

There should be no move to normalise the de facto authorities, unless and until there are demonstrated, measurable, and independently verified improvements against human rights benchmarks, particularly for women and girls.

Before Doha III, other women NGO activists from inside the country stated that they found the UN’s approach understandable. In a recent online meeting the author attended, one of them said that “somehow a dialogue [with the Taleban] has to start.” However, she hoped that the UN would later bring women back into the Doha talks. She and others pointed out that their organisations, some of them still women-led, were already conducting an extremely difficult, discreet, topic-centred dialogue with the Taleban authorities. The Afghan woman quoted above said when, in advance to Doha III, UN special envoy for Afghanistan, Rosa Otunbayeva, held consultations, “the room was full” and she regretted that voices from within the country were less present in the public.[5] Even more so, those who argue for engagement were often denounced as ‘Taleban proxies’ or ‘appeasers’ by parts of the diaspora.

An invitation to observe 

Mati ul-Haq Khales, who is the Director-General of Afghanistan’s National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA) and heads up the Emirate’s three-member all-male delegation, confirmed that the invitation came from Azerbaijan’s Environment Minister Mukhtar Babayev, who is also President of the COP29 conference (see AFP). Khales, son of a prominent former Mujahideen leader, the late Mawlawi Yunus Khales,[6] said the Emirate “really appreciated” Babayev’s invitation and the facilitation of the visas by the government of Azerbaijan, according to AFP who spoke to him after he arrived in Baku.

Being an observer means the men representing the IEA at COP29 are not allowed to take part in the actual conference, have no voting rights and remain blocked from access to international funds under the UN which have already been created — or are meant to be created in Baku — intended to alleviate the effects of climate change. It can also not officially submit Afghanistan’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) — the national plan to reduce emissions and adapt to the effects of climate change — to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the UN entity responsible for convening the COP conferences. Notably, the UNFCCC’s Bureau of the COP “has deferred consideration of Afghanistan’s participation since 2021, in effect freezing the country out of the talks,” as reported by Reuters.

This, however, is not the first time the Emirate has been invited to environmental meetings, at least according to NEPA’s Director for Climate Change, Ruhollah Amin, who is also a member of Afghanistan’s COP29 delegation, who said that NEPA had been “invited to other [unspecified] environmental summits in the past but did not receive visas,” adding that “the agency has received an invitation and is working on securing visas to attend the U.N. summit on desertification in Saudi Arabia,” (as reported by Hurriyet Daily News quoting an earlier interview with AFP).[7]

Regardless of their status at COP29, Azerbaijan’s invitation put the IEA delegation in a position to “potentially participate in periphery discussions and potentially hold bilateral meetings,” as a “diplomatic source familiar with the matter” described to Reuters.

AAN has learned, from a source in Kabul who asked not to be identified, that the UN political mission in Afghanistan, UNAMA, which according to its most recent mandate, is tasked with “deepening engagement” with the Taleban may have supported or even initiated the invitation. According to a Security Council mandated report by the Special Coordinator, Feridun Sinirlioğlu, released on 8 November 2023, progress in a range of areas including women’s rights and political inclusion “would be necessary for any forward progress on normalization and recognition.” Despite UN engagement, the Emirate’s lack of progress on human rights clearly stands in the way of diplomatic recognition, as highlighted in various UN Security Council resolutions since August 2021 – not least because Afghanistan, as a UN member state, is bound by the relevant international conventions that it is signatory to.

The fact that UNAMA continues its work in Afghanistan, despite the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice announcing in September 2024 that it would cease all cooperation with the UN mission in Afghanistan as a result of “their repeated propaganda against the implementation of Sharia law,” (see Agencia EFE report quoting the ministry’s spokesman, Mawlawi Sabawoon) and that the IEA has not given any indications that it intends to cease its engagement with the UN, provides at least a theoretical basis for further talks.

There has also been speculation that the next meeting of the Special Envoys for Afghanistan and IEA representatives (Doha IV) would focus on climate-related issues, one of the three issues discussed during the previous meeting – the first of such meetings with IEA participation – on 30 June to 1 July 2024.[8] As of this writing, the future of the Doha format meetings remains uncertain and a date for the next round of talks has not yet been decided.

Afghan NGOs participate in COP29 side events 

The IEA delegation was not the only Afghan participant at COP29. The UN invited two Afghan non-governmental organisations and an individual civil society representative active in the environmental sector, which are not part of the official Emirate delegation, to participate in side events in Baku (see the list of NGOs accredited to participate in COP29 here). In addition, some individuals obtained permission to attend online sessions and there were also a few Afghan nationals who attended the meeting in Baku, but as representatives of organisations based outside Afghanistan, according to Afghan water resource management specialist (and frequent AAN contributor), Muhammad Assem Mayar, who works at the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research in Müncheberg near Berlin (see his post on X).

The two Afghanistan-based organisations officially invited by the UN were the Environmental Protection Training and Development Organisation (EPTDO) and The Liaison Office (TLO); the latter does not specialise in the environment but does run community-based environmental projects. Both organisations are based in Kabul. The third Afghan civil society participant, Marwa Alam Safa, represented Afghan youth at the COP29 side event, the UN Youth Conference. She works in the environmental sector at the Agha Khan Foundation in Afghanistan, is the country director of the international NGO EcoClimate Vision (according to her LinkedIn profile) and is part of the core team of the Climate and Environment Youth Initiative (CEYI) in Afghanistan (see One Million Leaders Asia for more information about her).[9]

In a post on the social media platform LinkedIn on 14 November, Safa wrote that she took part in Baku “with a simple but vital mission: to amplify the voices of Afghan youth, showing that we want to be part of the global climate solution and to fight for climate justice.”

Afghanistan’s climate issues

The UN and NGOs focusing on climate-related issues in Afghanistan as a way of engaging with the Emirate may seem tactical, which it certainly is, but it is also much more than that. Afghanistan is literarily feeling the heat of the climate crisis. With its estimated population of over 40 million, Afghanistan is one of the ten countries most affected by “extreme weather and severe disasters driven by climate change,” according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA). It is also the sixth most vulnerable country to climate change and fourth in overall disaster risk (see the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Resident Representative Stephen Rodriques’ interview on Tolonews, German NGO Germanwatch’s Global Climate Risk Index and this Radio Azadi report quoting the European Commission’s Inform Risk Index). At the same time, it “is one of the lowest producers of planet-heating fossil fuel emissions, accounting for less than 1% of the global total (more accurately 0.6 per cent, according to UNDP). In other words, Afghanistan’s emissions are 25 times less per capita than, for example, Germany and account for only 6.5 per cent of the global average (see Statstica).

Behind the numbers and statistics are the Afghan people who bear the brunt of the seemingly relentless climate-related calamities that strike Afghanistan (see this dossier of AAN’s extensive reporting on the environment and climate change here) –  from devastating multiyear droughts (see AAN report), to destructive floods that rumble through communities, sweeping away everything in their paths, including people, homes, harvests and arable soil, most recently in April, May, August and October 2024 (see AAN reporting here and here),[10] soil erosion and declining agricultural productivity, according to the UNDP representative in Afghanistan, Stephen Rodriques (see Arab News here). Drought precipitated by climate change, according to Mayar, reduces agricultural yields by around 30 per cent, which in turn leads to a ten per cent decline in the country’s entire economy (see his post on X here).

The international aid organisation Save the Children, citing data from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), reported in August 2024 that Afghanistan had recorded “the highest number of children [747,094] made homeless by climate disasters of any country” at the end of 2023 (see here). The report went on to say that 25 of the country’s 34 provinces are “facing severe or catastrophic drought conditions, affecting more than half of the country’s population.”

Despite the Emirate’s (albeit decreasing) international isolation and exclusion from various UN fora, the invitation to Baku may provide room to discuss ways to revive climate-related development cooperation. Some argue that Afghanistan’s population should not be punished for the impasse between the international community and its current government and certainly not for a crisis not of Afghan’s own doing.[11]

Occasions for dialogue, said Mayar, will allow the Emirate to present Afghanistan’s NDC in bilateral meetings on the margins of the conference and unofficially submit their plans to UNFCCC. However, the hope is that this will at least pave the way for negotiations. He also pointed out that money for climate projects in Afghanistan must solve “national infrastructure problems” and not be spent on small-scale projects such as livelihoods projects – which, he said, “are important but may not have the desired impact” (see his post on X here). He stressed that, over the last three years, climate impact adaptation projects for Afghanistan worth 826 million USD have been suspended as a result of the cancellation of western development cooperation. He, therefore, advocates for the “decentralisation” of climate impact financing, especially in countries affected by conflict or the consequences of conflict, such as Afghanistan (see his post on X here).

The Emirate’s position on climate change 

Pointing to Afghanistan’s climate crisis-related vulnerabilities, the IEA presents itself as a serious actor on climate issues. Its delegation in Baku struck a conciliatory and factual tone in Baku, chiming in with many COP29 participants to “deliver the message … to the world community that climate change is a global issue and it does not know transboundary issues,” the NEPA Director-General, Khales told AFP.

He also made clear the IEA positions and demands. The participants at COP29 should take vulnerable countries such as Afghanistan, which are most affected by the effects of climate change, into account “in their decisions,” he told AFP. Khales, who was a member of the Taleban negotiating team during the Doha talks between the US and the Taleban, which culminated in the 2020 Doha agreement, spoke of “climate justice” and described access to funds as his country’s “main expectation” from COP29: “Our people in Afghanistan should [be able to] access” climate-related funds, he said. Like other countries in the global south, the Taleban believe that wealthier countries, which are the greatest contributors of harmful greenhouse gas emissions, should compensate them for climate-related damages. In an apparent indirect reference to the Emirate’s contentious policies on women’s rights, Khales said that implementing climate protection projects would also be a “boost” for women.

Mayar told AAN he believed that the Emirate appointed Khales, who had been leading the Afghan Red Crescent Society (ARCS), to head NEPA “because he had already successfully raised funds and conducted negotiations there.”

In the lead-up to the Baku conference, NEPA’s Deputy Director-General, Zainulabedin Abed, called on the international community not to “relate climate change matters with politics” – a reference to the issues of contention between the Emirate and the world community. “Climate change is a humanitarian subject,” he said (see Hurriyet Daily News quoting AFP here). This can be interpreted as a willingness to negotiate, but also as a refusal to make concessions on other issues.

The IEA has not joined the ranks of so-called ‘climate change deniers’ nor has it indicated it intends to withdraw from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, which the previous government ratified. In fact, the Emirate organised an event billed as Afghanistan’s “international climate change conference” in Jalalabad (Nangrahar province) earlier this year, where it was affirmed that “climate change is real, that it’s destroying God’s work and that those in the world who reject the truth of climate change need to get on board” and asked imams in all Afghanistan’s mosques “to emphasize during Friday prayers the need for environmental protection” (see the Washington Post). A Kabul imam, Farisullah Azhari interviewed by the Washington Post at the event said: “Carbon footprints will weigh heavily on judgment day … ‘God will ask: How did you make your money? And then he will ask: How much suffering did you cause in the process?’”

Similarly, NEPA’s account on X has recently been overflowing with photos and short reports on IEA climate change events and the activities of its environmental protection programmes across many provinces, some of which reference stewardship of the environment as a religious obligation.

Afghanistan’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), a five-year plan that each country ought to prepare and submit to UNFCCC — which the IEA delegation took to Baku – has a budget of more than 17 billion USD for the period 2025-2030. Although NDCs have to be updated every five years, Afghanistan had not substantively updated its plan since it was drafted by the previous government in September 2015 (see here). The 2015 plan also required 17 billion USD , but for an entire decade from 2021 to 2030. Last year, according to NEPA, the Emirate decided to update Afghanistan’s NDC regardless of whether the UNFCCC Secretariat accepted it at COP29. In this update, the amount of funding sought in the previous plan remained the same, but the funding period halved. This, however, has no practical impact as long as the IEA is “frozen” by UNFCCC and thus lacks the ability to access global climate change funds.

On the UN side, UNDP was initially supposed to support NEPA in revising the NDC, but it backed out when it became obvious it would have to contribute to a document that would contradict the UN’s gender criteria, a source with knowledge of these discussions who asked not to be identified told AAN. Later, according to the same source, UNDP sought to fund a revision of NDC through the Afghan NGO REHA (Resilience, Environment and Humanitarian Aid; ‘Reha’ or ‘Raha’ means ‘rescue’ in Dari). This would have allowed UNDP to support the revision without being referenced in the document. NEPA, however, refused the proposal and said it would prefer to undertake the revision on its own.

A Kabul event to coincide with COP29

On the first day of COP29 in Baku, the Afghan NGO REHA held an event in Kabul titled ‘From Exclusion to Inclusion’, which according to the organisation sought to “make the voices of Afghan children, youth, women, the private sector, the ulama, local communities and experts heard” (see Mayar’s post on X here, REHA’s posts on LinkedIn and a position paper prepared by the organisation titled ‘From Exclusion to Inclusion Afghanistan’s urgent call for climate action at COP29”). In total, “over 160 representatives and officials from national authorities, UN agencies, NGOs, media, donor organisations, embassies and activists” took part in this event, according to REHA.

Among them was the Emirate’s acting Deputy Foreign Minister and former chief negotiator in Doha, Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanekzai, who blamed “NATO, America, Russia and all industrial countries” as the “general reason for the environmental problems we have in our country,” in his speech. “And today again they don’t want to cooperate with Afghanistan in order to solve the problems created by them,” he added (see his post on X here).

In conclusion, according to REHA, the participants, which were representatives from “diverse Afghan groups—academics, stakeholders, farmers, youth, & children from across the country – urged the @UNFCCC & @COP29_AZ  to re-integrate [Afghanistan] into climate finance, [and] to not ignore the severe consequences of the climate crisis in the country”(see REHA’s post on X here).

A call the Emirate is likely in agreement with.

What’s next?

Whether COP29 and the IEA’s participation in side events and bilateral meetings in Baku leads to progress for Afghanistan and helps the Emirate succeed in persuading UN member-states to reintegrate the country into the climate financing initiatives remains to be seen.

The meetings – at least those that have been made public– have not been too impressive, though, so far. NEPA published on its X account that the delegation met with the head of the South Asian Environmental Cooperation Program (SACEP); officials of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Ozone Secretariat; senior UNDP officials; the deputy head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Dragana Kojic; the Russian President’s Special Representative for Climate Change, Ruslan Edelgeriev and the Norwegian Special Representative for Afghanistan. It also participated in a meeting of “high officials” from Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, Mongolia and Azerbaijan on how to deal with climate change in mountainous areas (see NEPA’s post on X here). Apart from Norway, no representative from Afghanistan’s former major donor countries met the Emirate delegation, at least not on the record.

Apart from this, they met with members of the management boards of various UNFCCC-related multilateral funds in order to explore possibilities for access, an Afghan participant in Baku working for a third-country NGO told AAN. He was unable to say whether there was any progress. But apparently the IEA delegation said that it would support direct financing to Afghan environmental NGOs, should climate funds opt to support them.

Reuters quoted two UN officials as saying that that UN agencies were “trying to unlock” climate financing for Afghanistan. According to this report, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and UNDP were “currently drawing together proposals they hope to submit next year to shore up nearly $19 million in financing from the U.N’s Global Environment Facility (GEF), part of the financial mechanism of the 2015 U.N. Paris Agreement on climate change.”[12]

“We’re in conversations with the GEF, the Green Climate Fund, the Adaptation Fund – all these major climate financing bodies – to reopen the pipeline and get resources into the country, again, bypassing the de facto authorities,” UNDP’s Rodriques reportedly said. A Taleban spokesperson did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment. “If successful, this would be the first time new international climate finance would flow into the arid, mountainous nation in three years”, the agency concluded. It remains to be seen whether Afghanistan’s former major donor countries would agree to these moves.

For its part, the IEA was firmly looking to the future: “We are very interested to be as a party in the COP30 in Brazil,” said NEPA Director-General Khales (see Arab News here).

Edited by Roxanna Shapour and Jelena Bjelica

References

References
↑1 In the past two years, senior IEA officials have taken part in various forums in Russia, China and Central Asia, and the Emirate took part in the third UN-organised meeting on Afghanistan in Doha (Doha III), which was held on 30 June- 1 July 2024. They also made an appearance at the 2nd World Local Production Forum, as reported by Voice of America (VoA), organised by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in the Hague in November 2023. Before COP29, the Emirate had tried to establish relations with the BRICS countries, including Brazil which is slated to host COP30 in November 2025. It lobbied unsuccessfully for an invitation to the BRICS summit in Russia in October this year, according to Amu TV.
↑2 Azerbaijan opened its first-ever embassy in Kabul in February 2024 and sent an ambassador who had already been appointed in 2021, but resided elsewhere (see Radio Azadi). Foreign ministry spokesperson, Abdul Qahar Balkhi,  announced on X that the Emirate would also be expanding its presence in Baku. However, this does not appear to have happened and the Emirate is still represented in Azerbaijan by a chargé d’affaires, according to the IEA embassy in Baku’s website.
↑3 The Paris Agreement is a legally binding international treaty on climate change. It was adopted by 196 Parties at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris, France, on 12 December 2015. It entered into force on 4 November 2016.
↑4 The 79th session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA79) opened on 10 September 2024. The Credentials Committee, appointed at the beginning of UNGA sessions, is expected to address the issue of who holds Afghanistan’s seat at the UN at a designated session later this year – usually in December. That decision was deferred last year, on 6 December 2023, for the third time since the Emirate’s re-establishment. AAN’s Thomas Ruttig wrote in December 2023 about the deferrals in a report which also scrutinised UN procedures, intra-Republic rivalry as to who should represent Afghanistan at the UN and the impasse facing the IEA in its search for recognition.
↑5 She wished to remain anonymous because of the topics sensitivity.
↑6 See this the Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point 2013 report on the life of Yunus Khalid published on Jstor here.
↑7 The sixteenth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP16) of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) is scheduled to take place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on 2-13 December 2024.
↑8 The other two topics were counternarcotics and the private sector.
↑9 CEYI’s vice president, Naman Sajad, is also an Ozone specialist at NEPA, indicating that the initiative cooperates with the agency. See also CEYI’s report ‘Impacts of Climate Change on Afghan Women, Youth, and Children’, which also contains general information on the environmental situation in Afghanistan.
↑10 Afghanistan, up to the first half of the 1980s, used to have two predictable ‘rainy seasons’ per year, one of about two weeks in spring and one of about one weak in November.
↑11 See for example this opinion piece co-authored by Afghan and non-Afghan experts and published recently by Al-Jazeera: “Afghanistan: Caught between climate change and global indifference”, or this op-ed by leading Afghan media entrepreneur Saad Mohseni.
↑12 FAO “hopes to get support for a project costing $10 million that would improve rangeland, forest and watershed management across up to four provinces in Afghanistan, while avoiding giving money directly to Taliban authorities.” UNDP, meanwhile, “hopes to secure $8.9 million to improve the resilience of rural communities where livelihoods are threatened by increasingly erratic weather patterns, the agency told Reuters. If that goes ahead, it plans to seek another $20 million project.”

REVISIONS:

This article was last updated on 24 Nov 2024

TAGS:

Doha Talks clime change COP29

AUTHORS:

Thomas Ruttig

More from this author

 

No Climate Change Deniers: The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan goes to COP29, as an observer
read more

The Other in Me, The Other in You: Beyond the Burqa

November 22, 2024

By Sola Mahfouz

Middle East Center

Wilson Center

November 21, 2024

Sola Mahfouz reflects on representations of Afghan women in Western media and discourse. She argues that engagement with Afghan women’s full and complex lives is necessary for effective policymaking.

If the suffering of Afghan women is real and harrowing, then the global response often feels surreal, like a performance disconnected from the reality it claims to address.

To approach the Other “is to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I,” as Emmanuel Levinas wrote. The Other is not just a stranger that we encounter but is also a part of ourselves that defies full understanding. For me, the Other is both the self that I left behind at 20 and the version of myself imposed by Western narratives—the Afghan woman cloaked in a burqa, seen but never heard.

The burqa, while a potent symbol, has been overused to flatten the identities of Afghan women into a singular narrative of victimhood. But what lies beyond the burqa? To truly understand the Other, we must look past the veil of simplicity and engage with the layers of contradiction, agency, and resilience that define Afghan women’s lives, and, by extension, the infinite complexity of all Others.

Who is the Other?
When I moved to the United States, I encountered a new Other. It was not someone outside me, but a version of myself that existed only in the imaginations of others. My 20-year-old self, who had lived freely and without explanation, was replaced by the “Afghan woman” envisioned by Western audiences: oppressed, silent, and cloaked in a burqa.

This narrative was not mine, yet it followed me everywhere. My identity had been overwritten by a global script that reduced Afghan women to symbols of suffering and was used to justify interventions that seldom asked for our voices.

The burqa became the centerpiece of global narratives about Afghan women, used to project a singular image of oppression. TIME Magazine’s 2010 cover featuring Aisha, an Afghan woman mutilated by the Taliban, encapsulated this approach. While it drew attention to the horrors Afghan women faced, it reduced them to symbols of victimhood and sidelined their agency and roles in shaping Afghanistan’s and their own future.

In 2001, the Oprah Winfrey Show featured a theatrical performance involving the burqa. In the aftermath of 9/11, Oprah and her team featured models parading in burqas to dramatize the suffering of Afghan women. The show invoked gasps of horror from the audience, as though the garment itself encapsulated the entirety of Afghan women’s suffering. The performance was devoid of nuance, context, or any meaningful engagement with the lives of Afghan women. Instead, it was a spectacle that centered the Western audience’s feelings of pity and righteousness instead of the voices of the women it claimed to advocate for.

As if the absurdities of life under the Taliban weren’t enough, Afghan women must also endure the well-meaning but tone-deaf interventions of Western celebrities. Meryl Streep’s recent comments at the UN General Assembly offered a stark illustration. In a speech meant to highlight the plight of Afghan women, she declared: “a female cat in Kabul has more freedom than a woman. A bird can sing, but a girl cannot.”At first glance, these words might seem poetic, even compassionate, but they ultimately serve to obscure rather than illuminate. Instead of engaging with the lived realities of Afghan women, Streep’s metaphor reduces them to voiceless creatures, trapped in a narrative that exists more to elicit pity than to reflect their full humanity.

These spectacles of advocacy have turned Afghan women into objects of pity rather than subjects of their own stories, erasing their voices in the process. However, Levinas reminds us that the Other is infinite. It exceeds any attempt to define them.

Engaging with the Other

Afghanistan is a land of contradictions. The very allies that were ‘promoting women’s rights’ celebrated the warlords responsible for atrocities as champions of democracy. To understand the Other in Afghanistan is to confront these contradictions, not dismiss them as ‘cultural.’ The Other is not a fixed identity but a dynamic, evolving presence shaped by layers of history, politics, and personal experience. To approach the Other ethically, we must resist simplifying these contradictions and instead embrace the complexity they represent.

If the suffering of Afghan women is real and harrowing, then the global response often feels surreal, like a performance disconnected from the reality it claims to address. Advocacy, in many cases, has become a spectacle of symbolic gestures.

To truly engage with the Other, we must go beyond the burqa, the symbols, and our own need to feel like saviors. Afghan women are not waiting for poetic metaphors or viral campaigns. They are risking their lives every day to resist oppression. Ethical engagement requires humility, action, and, above all, a recognition of their agency.

“To have the idea of infinity,” Levinas writes, is to recognize that the Other exceeds our understanding at every moment. For Afghan women, this infinity lies beyond the burqa, beyond the symbols used to define them. It is found in their contradictions and their agency.

The views represented in this piece are those of the author and do not express the official position of the Wilson Center.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sola Mahfouz
Global Fellow;
Co-Author, Defiant Dreams

The Other in Me, The Other in You: Beyond the Burqa
read more

‘Bread & Roses’ Review: A Spirit of Resistance

November 21, 2024

The New York Times

Bread & Roses
Directed by Sahra Mani
Documentary
A woman in a head scarf holds up the palm of her hand, on which a message written in pen says: # stand with women in Afghanistan.

The documentary “Bread & Roses” follows the lives of three Afghan women in the wake of the Taliban’s return to power.Credit…Apple Original Films

When the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan three years ago, one of the group’s first orders of business was to systematically erase women’s rights. Girls’ schools shuttered, women were barred from public spaces and female professionals were told not to return to work.

“Bread & Roses,” which follows the lives of three Afghan women in the wake of the Taliban’s return to power, does not communicate these prohibitions in voice-over or title cards. Instead, the director, Sahra Mani, makes the deliberate choice to clear the way for her subjects to reach the audience directly, in their own words.

Through cellphone footage captured on the fly, the documentary zeros in on three subjects defying their loss of freedom: Sharifa, a former government employee stuck at home because of restrictions to being out in public; Zahra, a dentist taken by the Taliban after protesting for her rights; and Taranom, an activist sheltering in a safe house in Pakistan. Intercutting among scenes of these experiences, the film illustrates the effective options for women living under Taliban rule: house arrest, prison or exile.

As the three stories veer off in different directions, the film struggles to coalesce around a clean narrative. It doesn’t help that we often only receive snippets of episodes, with the contexts hazy and the relations among those onscreen uncertain. But while the immediacy of the storytelling may blur out precise details, it excels at building stakes. When, in one memorable scene, young girls address the camera to demand brighter futures, the movie’s message and ongoing mission are thrown into sharp relief.

Bread & Roses
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+.

‘Bread & Roses’ Review: A Spirit of Resistance
read more

Afghanistan: Caught between climate change and global indifference

November 21, 2024
Andreas Stefansson
Al Jazeera
Published On 21 Nov 2024

The world is facing a climate crisis, and few nations are feeling its impact more acutely than Afghanistan. It is currently ranked seventh on the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Index of countries most vulnerable and least prepared to adapt to climate change. Afghanistan’s population is caught in a vicious cycle of floods, droughts, cold and heatwaves, and food insecurity. For a country with the 11th lowest contributions per capita to global carbon emissions, the scale of the consequences it faces is a tragic injustice.

In 2024, Afghanistan experienced severe flooding that devastated vital agricultural land in the northern provinces, and hundreds of people were killed. Before this, the country was ravaged by drought for three consecutive years. Crops were destroyed, leaving millions of people without their primary source of income and food. And yet, despite the increasingly visible impact of climate change on the Afghan people, the country has been excluded from representation under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – the primary mechanism for global climate cooperation – since the Taliban takeover in August 2021. Major sources of funding for climate adaptation have also been suspended.

At the UN Climate Change Conference COP29, the country is once again excluded from the negotiations. However, in a positive step towards inclusion, Afghanistan’s National Environment Protection Agency has been invited as a guest of the host country and will hopefully be given the opportunity to present Afghanistan’s updated climate action plan. The country is also represented by delegates from two Afghan civil society organisations accredited as observers.

To withhold climate assistance is to punish the Afghan population for the acts of its leaders. The consequences are being borne by the people, not the de facto authorities. Afghanistan is being denied access to the Green Climate Fund, a crucial source of financing for developing nations to adapt to the effects of climate change. This exclusion strikes directly at the most vulnerable in Afghanistan and occurs at a time when international support to Afghanistan in general is rapidly decreasing.

The need for intervention is urgent. A total 12.4 million people are experiencing acute food insecurity, and four million people, including 3.2 million children under five years old, are suffering from acute malnutrition, according to the World Food Programme (WFP). Farmers need sustainable irrigation systems and more resilient crops, and communities need stronger disaster preparedness. Without these investments, poverty will deepen, and millions of people will face an even more severe humanitarian crisis. Women and children who are already bearing the brunt of food insecurity will suffer the most. Agriculture employs more women than any other economic sector in the country, and by excluding Afghanistan from climate financing, the international community is in fact punishing those it has vowed to protect.

Advertisement

The reluctance among predominately Western governments to engage with the Taliban should not come at the expense of the Afghan people. Experts and NGOs have proposed concrete strategies to ensure that climate funding reaches the Afghan people without legitimising the Taliban, e.g. through partnerships of international and national NGOs. The international community must listen to their recommendations and commit to finding constructive, long-term strategies to provide support.

The science is clear: if nothing is done, Afghanistan’s problems with drought and flooding will only worsen. Afghanistan had the highest number of children displaced by extreme weather in 2023, more than 700,000, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. Just last month, the WFP warned that the persistence of La Nina weather patterns through winter 2024 will likely lead to less rain and snow in Afghanistan, jeopardising the next wheat harvest and pushing even more people towards hunger.

Climate change knows no borders, and the international community must demonstrate solidarity with the most vulnerable. We cannot afford to turn our backs on Afghanistan. Every day of inaction deepens Afghanistan’s climate disaster.

Andreas Stefansson is Secretary General of the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan.
Afghanistan: Caught between climate change and global indifference
read more

‘I just felt desperate to do something’: Jennifer Lawrence and Malala on their film about the Afghan women fighting back

November 20, 2024
Emma Jones
BBC News
19 Nov 2024

Malala Yousafzai and Jennifer Lawrence tell the BBC about their new documentary Bread & Roses, which highlights the stories and voices of Afghan women resisting the Taliban.

It’s being called “gender apartheid” by the UN. In August 2021, the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan. A generation of women who had new opportunities to work, study and hold public office under the previous government, found their lives overturned. Girls are refused formal secondary and university education, women are banned from most work sectors, and from using parks and gyms. Beauty salons have been closed. Now female voices are even forbidden to be heard in public. The Taliban has said the new laws are accepted in Afghan society, and in accordance with Islamic Sharia law.

Bread & Roses is a documentary filmed from within Afghanistan by women who have resisted these restrictions on their lives. “I am taking a video, do not call me,” Dr Zahra Mohammadi tells a caller in the film, as she runs downstairs to her workplace.

Dr Mohammadi is a young dentist who celebrated her engagement just before the Taliban reached Kabul, a few weeks before the video is taken. She expresses hope to the audience that she can still work under the new government. “Up until now the Taliban have not bothered doctors, although they’ve just ordered me to remove my name upon the sign,” she tells the camera.

It was important for us to get eyes inside Kabul because that’s exactly what the Taliban did not want – Jennifer Lawrence

Dr Mohammadi puts her office sign back up in a prominent position on the street, with her name still on it. It’s also a sign of the courage she displays throughout the film.  Soon her dental practice is a secret hub for female activists, as the Taliban’s restrictions closes secondary and university education opportunities for girls. As the film continues, female resistance is met with arrests, prison sentences, and disappearances.

Filmed without a narrator and made in the Afghan languages of Dari and Pashto, Bread & Roses (the title is taken from a political slogan adopted by 20th Century suffragettes) is a mainly fly-on-the-wall documentary that relies upon the main protagonists to film themselves. Which they do, at demonstrations where they demand “bread, education and freedom”. They film when they’re arrested at the protests, when they’re sprayed with tear gas, and as their doors are being kicked down by the Taliban. “Girls educated up to 12th grade are stuck at home,” says one older protester of the situation. “They had dreamed of being doctors, engineers and teachers. It’s tragic. They had dreams.”

Jennifer Lawrence and Malala on their film about Afghan women

The film may be directed by an Afghan film-maker living abroad, Sahra Mani (also the maker of a hard-hitting 2018 documentary about the rape of Afghan girls, A Thousand Girls Like Me) but Bread & Roses is backed by Hollywood. It’s produced by Oscar-winner Jennifer Lawrence, and executive produced by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning activist, Malala Yousafzai, herself once the victim of a Taliban shooting.

Lawrence tells the BBC that it was watching the news after the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan, and what she saw unfolding for women, that spurred her into action as far back as 2021. “I just felt desperate to do something,” she says. “And cameras help with helplessness.”

Lawrence says that she wanted to know if anyone was filming what was happening to Afghan women and girls from within the country. “It was important for us to get eyes inside Kabul because that’s exactly what the Taliban did not want,” she says. “So when we reached out to Sahra, as we were already familiar with her work, we found that she was already collecting footage from girls on the ground in Kabul.”

The women in the film were taught how to use cameras, and how, if possible, not to get caught. “I spent time on the border of Afghanistan, to be able to be close to my team and to collect the material,” Mani tells the BBC. “We built a team to train our protagonists how to film themselves and to do it in a safe way, so if their cell phones were checked by the Taliban, they don’t find out about it.”

Making women’s voices heard 

Lawrence isn’t the first high-profile Hollywood celebrity to condemn the erosion of Afghan women’s human rights. In September, Meryl Streep told a UN General Assembly event that a cat had more rights than a woman living in Afghanistan, because a cat may go out “and feel the Sun on her face”.

But Lawrence’s activism follows other famous women who’ve put their names to documentaries highlighting recent experiences of Afghan women. Hillary and Chelsea Clinton were two of the producers on the 2022 film, In Her Hands, about Afghanistan’s youngest ever female mayor, and the turmoil she experienced in the months leading up to the Taliban’s takeover.

I think that film-making is how I deal with life. It’s my artistic process and that’s how I also process – Jennifer Lawrence

The Clintons and Lawrence have now also executive-produced a documentary on women’s rights closer to home – Zurawski v Texas (2024), about women who were denied an abortion despite life-threatening circumstances and sued the state of Texas. As some women in the US say their rights over their bodies are being eroded, while others support more restrictive stricter abortion policies, does Lawrence use film-making for what she considers to be good causes?

“I think that film-making is how I deal with life,” she replies. “It’s my artistic process and that’s how I also process. And in a lot of ways, it’s my only weapon when I’m watching something play out and you feel that impotent rage. Zurawski v Texas was extremely timely, as abortion was on the [US election] ballot.

Apple TV+ Bread & Roses is a mainly fly-on-the-wall documentary that relies upon the main protagonists to film themselves (Credit: Apple TV+)
Bread & Roses is a mainly fly-on-the-wall documentary that relies upon the main protagonists to film themselves (Credit: Apple TV+)

“Women are dying because Roe v Wade was overturned, and the dialogue in America around abortion is just so fraught,” Lawrence says. There’s just such a disconnect on what Americans even think abortion is, and so that was really important to lend my voice to.

“Bread & Roses was more born from just a necessity, just watching it happen in the moment and just needing to do something.”

Malala thinks that the very act of filming was these Afghan women’s own way of dealing with the heavy restrictions on their lives.

“It’s a very powerful way of resistance for Afghan women to make their voices loud and clear and to make themselves visible against the Taliban, when they are using everything they have in their power to silence women,” she tells the BBC. “In essence it’s systematic oppression that they’re imposing, they’re controlling literally anything to do with a woman’s life.”

To resist them, we have to do all that they don’t want us to do. Women have to be in those rooms. Women’s rights have to be on the agenda – Malala Yousafzai

Malala points out that since the documentary was made, Afghan women face even more challenges. A recent decree by the Taliban forbids a woman’s voice from being heard in public, which the Taliban says is based upon their interpretation of Sharia law. They cannot be heard singing or reading aloud from within their own homes. They must be veiled in public, including their faces.A Taliban spokesman told the BBC at the time that this edict is in accordance with Islamic Sharia law and that “any religious scholar can check its references”. They also said they are “working on” the issue of female education.

However, a psychologist working with Afghan women told the BBC this year that they were suffering from a “pandemic” of suicidal thoughts. “You closed the universities and schools, you might as well kill me now,” shouts one woman in Bread & Roses, when told by an official to “shut up, or I will kill you right now”.

“You have brought us horror instead of safety,” screams another woman at them in the documentary.

Although Dr Mohammadi opines in the film that “the Afghan woman is first oppressed at home by her father, brother or husband”, a striking feature of Bread & Roses is the number of supportive men and boys in these women’s lives, usually with their faces blurred for their safety. When the camera is focused on a night-time shot of the city of Kabul, female voices ring out shouting, “education is our right!” After a moment, a male voice is also heard clearly, joining in.

Malala tells the BBC she believes public pressure can ultimately force the Taliban into concessions. “They don’t want women to even be in talks that are happening with different countries’ representatives, they do not want women’s rights to be on the agenda,” she says.

“To resist them, we have to do all that they don’t want us to do. Women have to be in those rooms. Women’s rights have to be on the agenda, we have to call out gender apartheid and codify it into treaties, so that perpetrators like the Taliban are held accountable for the crimes that they’re committing against Afghan women.”

Such demands may feel far off. The BBC reported this year that female-led protests have stopped due to the reprisals, although some still post videos online with their faces covered. Sahra Mani says that with “safety as our main priority” when making the film, her main protagonists left Afghanistan before the film was released and their faces were shown.

Mobile phone footage, in a moving epilogue to the film, shows an older woman in hiding, teaching a group of young women in English. “Now this is useful for university entrance exams,” the woman says, as if nothing has changed.

The message of Bread & Roses is summed up in the words of one activist who has to flee, taking a last look at her home country.

“May history remember that once upon a time, such cruelty was permitted against the women of Afghanistan,” she says, as she crosses the border into Pakistan.

Bread & Roses is released on Apple TV+ from 22 November

‘I just felt desperate to do something’: Jennifer Lawrence and Malala on their film about the Afghan women fighting back
read more

How Can the West Handle the Taliban?

November 15, 2024
By , , and 
Foreign Policy Magazine

Regional engagement shows the possibilities—and obstacles—in Afghanistan.

Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid arrives to attend a press conference in Kabul.
Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid arrives to attend a press conference in Kabul.
Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid arrives to attend a press conference in Kabul on July 3, following the third Doha meeting.

  

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.

How Can the West Handle the Taliban?
read more

How Afghanistan’s Economy Can Survive Shrinking Shipments of U.N. Cash Aid

November 15, 2024

BY: William Byrd, Ph.D.

United States Institute of Peace

Thursday, November 14, 2024

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • 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
read more

Recent Posts