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Extensive but not Inclusive: Afghanistan’s growing list of national holidays

August 30, 2023

Fabrizio Foschini

Afghanistan Analysts Network

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August has already seen two days of national public holidays in Afghanistan and will see a third this week, celebrating the anniversary of the departure of the last United States troops on the 31st. That follows the celebration of Taleban forces’ entry into Kabul on 15 August 2021, which sealed the fate of the Islamic Republic and saw the re-establishment of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA). 19 August was also commemorated as the anniversary of the end of the Third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919; it has for decades been commemorated as Afghan Independence Day. In the century between Afghanistan’s oldest and newest public holidays, there has been a long list of victories, revolutions and other momentous occasions, some of which have been designated as national holidays – for a time at least. AAN’s Fabrizio Foschini has compiled a list of them, pondering on the divided memory they leave.
On 15 August (24 Asad in the Afghan calendar), the IEA celebrated the anniversary of their takeover two years earlier, in 2021. That day, the Taleban captured Kabul and took the world by surprise by sweeping back into power, after two decades spent fighting the Islamic Republic and its international supporters, primary among them the United States, which had ended their first emirate in 2001. What the IEA has called The Conquest of Kabul Anniversary has understandably become its main national holiday (read the official statement on the occasion here). This year, the occasion was marked by extensive celebrations in all Afghanistan’s main cities, except Kandahar, where Taleban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada reportedly “called off the parade himself so as not to disturb the public.” By contrast, many Afghans now in exile named it a day of national mourning and held public demonstrations against the Emirate in the countries where they now live (see for example here).

Given the various economic and diplomatic obstacles the IEA faces, the anniversary of their victory provided an opportunity for a display of euphoria. The symbolic value of military parades and motorcades was apparent, as was their importance in reinforcing the cohesiveness of a militant movement and rejuvenating enthusiasm among the rank-and-file with the day’s re-enactment of the Taleban’s triumphant entry into Kabul. However, such a celebration, in the wake of a bloody conflict whose scars have not yet healed, was very much a day for the victors.

However, throughout their two-decade-long struggle for power, the Taleban have repeatedly shown themselves to be aware of the need for crosscutting references to reach the broader population (see this AAN report on Taleban ideology), including marking events which underpin nation-building sentiments. For example, in their propaganda war against the Republic, they routinely used the symbolic arsenal of Afghan patriotism drawn from the Anglo-Afghan Wars of the 19th century. They compared President Hamid Karzai (and later Ashraf Ghani) to Shah Shuja, the puppet ruler installed by the British in 1839, and their own leader, Mullah Omar to Dost Muhammed, the king who was ousted by invaders, struggled to resist foreign occupation and eventually returned to the throne in a liberated Afghanistan. It was, therefore, logical that once in power, they would adopt some of these holidays as signifiers of national identity, at least those against which have no ideological objections.

19 August, Independence Day, marks the signing of the Treaty of Rawalpindi at the end of the Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919, which granted Afghanistan the right to conduct its foreign relations policies independent of the British Empire (read the author’s previous report on the Third Anglo-Afghan War and its outcomes here). Independence Day has been the mainstay jashn (celebration) in Afghanistan for over a century (read an AAN report detailing a century of Independence Day celebrations here). As the paramount symbol of national pride and freedom as well as resistance to colonial, non-Muslim attempts at conquest or control, the 19 August holiday has proved an evergreen. It has been celebrated by governments of very different political leanings, by the kings, communists, mujahedin, the Republic and the Emirate, both now and during its first period of rule (see for example this AAN report about Independence Day under the First Emirate here and the IEA celebrations last year here).

The Taleban do observe Independence Day, but its coincidental proximity to the Taleban takeover led to incidents in 2021, as the newly victorious Taleban clashed with locals celebrating the occasion in Jalalabad. Arguably overlooking one of the core meanings conveyed by the 19 August celebration, Taleban soldiers had forcibly replaced the traditional national tricolour flags – closely associated with the continuity of an independent Afghan statehood, as well as, more recently, the Islamic Republic – with their own white flags. The resulting clashes left several local youths dead or injured (see Al-Jazeera reporting here).

Thus, two weeks in August have come to include the oldest and the newest of modern Afghanistan’s political events as national holidays. The list of other national holidays is long and twisted, mostly consisting of anniversaries of violent takeovers. The following summary will help to explain why some have been retained but most dropped and why nearly all have failed to account for and include the Afghan population in its entirety.

A calendar crowded with takeovers

Before the staple national celebrations grew to include anniversaries linked to one faction or personality snatching power from another, Independence Day was the main celebration throughout Zaher Shah’s long reign (1933-1973). However, even then, there was already a taste of what was to come. The anniversary of the restoration of his Muhammadzai monarchy, after Habibullah Kalakani’s short stint as monarch in 1929, was celebrated every year at the end of October at least throughout the 1930s.[1]

A date that did not become a public holiday was 9 March 1963. It could be taken as the start of the so-called Constitutional Period (1963-1973), also termed the New Democracy (Dimukrasi-ye Naw) when Zaher Shah began, effectively, to reign. He had been proclaimed king following the death of his father, Nader Shah, in 1933, but had ceded power to a succession of older and more powerful male relatives, two uncles and then his cousin Sardar Daud. Daud’s decade-long authoritarian premiership ended in 1963, to be replaced by the Constitutional Period. It has been idealised by many Afghans as a time of progress, characterised by a new constitution, Afghanistan’s first elections and greater civil and political rights, including for women.[2] However, this turning point never acquired the status of an official holiday, possibly because the transfer of power had been peaceful.

Another day that did become a national holiday for a long time was Pashtunistan Day. This holiday had more to do with the discordant relationship between nation-building and state boundaries than it did with the competition for power. The day asserts the unity of Pashtuns (and Baluch) on both sides of the Durand Line[3] and hints at Afghanistan’s territorial claims on the areas forming Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, its North-Western Frontier Province (renamed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2010) and Baluchistan. Pashtunistan Day was fervently celebrated all over Afghanistan with the support of the state’s machinery, every 31 August from 1949 onwards, especially during the decade 1953-63, which saw Sardar Daud as prime minister.[4] Its importance was much reduced in 1976, when Daud, this time as president, found himself relying increasingly for economic and political support on the Shah of Iran. In the regional diplomatic balance of the time, Daud had to accept Tehran’s entreaties for reconciliation with Pakistan and an end to Afghanistan’s claims to territory on Pakistan’s side of the Durand Line.

Over the decades, the commemoration of Pashtunistan Day has been revived periodically, first, under the communist governments in the 1980s and then during the post-2001 Islamic Republic, though with much less emphatic state sponsorship. It seems unlikely that Pashtunistan Day will persist, if for no other reason than because 31 August has joined the Emirate’s crowded August calendar of festivities as the day when the last US troops left Afghanistan (see France24 report here).

The first date to be noted in Afghanistan’s calendar of temporary national holidays involves Sardar Daud again, but this time at the other end of the transfer of power. On 17 July 1973, while Zaher Shah was on holiday in Italy (a ‘holiday’ that was to last 30 years), Daud wrenched power from his cousin in an almost bloodless coup d’état and with the support of factions in the royal establishment and some progressist and leftist groups. Styling himself President, Head of the Cabinet and Foreign Minister, he proceeded to proclaim the first Afghan Republic – and a single-party state. The coup was termed a ‘revolution’ at the 1977 Loya Jirga and the day (26 Saratan in the Afghan calendar) was celebrated as Jashn-e Jomhuriat (Republic Festival). Three days of events at the Chaman-e Huzuri, a sports grounds in downtown Kabul, included competitions of equestrian tent-pegging. However, that holiday was not to last long, indeed only the few years that Daud’s Republic existed.

What had at first looked to many observers as just another power shift within the Musahiban family, that had held onto power since 1929, was actually the presager of unrest and an unparalleled downward spiral into violence. Daud’s seizure of power came at a time of social and economic change and increasing external tensions in the region. New players, such as the communist organisations, had been brought into the business of ‘kingmaking’ by Daud. Up till then, it had been the preserve of royal clans and tribes. However, he violently rejected them afterwards. The growing ambitions of these outsiders, who included the Islamist organisations, to ‘court politics’, coupled with police repression, radicalised politics. The end of Daud’s reign was, however, marked by a national holiday for more than a decade.

The post-1978 holidays

The next shift in power – and its resulting public holiday – came in another coup d’état, known as the Saur Revolution of 27 April 1978 (7 Saur in the Afghan calendar). (See the AAN dossier on the Saur Revolution and its consequences here.) On that day, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) and particularly the Khalq faction, which had strong support among the armed forces, attacked the Presidential Palace in response to the arrest of its leadership by the government. Daud and most of his family were killed, along with dozens of others from both sides, and two days later, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was born (see this AAN report for details).

The new government erected a monument to the revolution and its ‘martyrs’ in front of the Presidential Palace and for many years, 7 Saur was celebrated in all government-controlled areas. What followed the coup, however, was a guerrilla war, waged by the mujahedin against government forces and later also, the Soviet army, which invaded Afghanistan on 24 December 1979 to support its ally in Kabul. As the war caused increasing military and political difficulties for the government, the celebration eventually assumed more subdued tones. In 1986, for example, PDPA General Secretary Babrak Karmal, soon-to-be-replaced at the behest of Kabul’s Soviet patrons, failed to attend it altogether. The policies of his successor, Najibullah, aimed at distancing the Kabul regime from communism, further eroded the date’s significance in the following years. Yet, all official references to the Saur Revolution were dropped only in mid-1991 (as mentioned by Barnett Rubin in his The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, 1995, p154). Subsequent Afghan governments have all condemned the Saur Revolution as the root of all evil in Afghanistan.

A date from that period which is still remembered and celebrated to this day, is 15 February 1989 (corresponding to 26 Dalwa in the Afghan calendar), when the last Soviet troops left the country, crossing the Friendship Bridge over the Amu river (see AAN report here). The Soviet withdrawal has been celebrated as Liberation Day by the mujahedin governments, the Islamic Republic and the Islamic Emirate in both its incarnations. It may appear to resemble Independence Day and to vindicate the old colonial view that would have the quarrelsome Afghans able to unite only against an external foe. However, unlike the independence of 1919, the withdrawal of the Soviets did cast a whole segment of Afghan society in the role of losers, to bear the consequences of the political defeat of communism. Also, it did not usher in an era of peace, let alone prosperity.

The most obvious celebrants of 26 Dalwa were the mujahedin organisations which had fought the Soviets. However, a separate date marking their conquest of Kabul on 28 April 1992 has proved a more controversial celebration. This is not only because, as with all violent accessions to power, it also signified the downfall of another party, but also because the victorious mujahedin factions proved incapable of forming a united government and very soon began to fight each other in what led to a vicious civil war in the capital and elsewhere across the country (1992-1996). Victory Day (Ruz-e Piruzi), also called the Islamic Revolution Day (Ruz-e Enqelab-e Islami), was retained as a national holiday by the post-2001 government, largely at the behest of the mujahedin parties which had become constituent parts of the Republic. The celebrations would take place across the country, especially in major cities such as Herat and Mazar-e Sharif where former mujahedin parties still held considerable power. The main celebrations would take place in Kabul and usually consisted of a military parade which ended with speeches by those in the highest echelons of the state at the Chaman-e Huzuri near the Old City of Kabul. Ironically, it was one of the city neighbourhoods that had suffered the worst destruction during the mujahedin infighting.

Celebrating a day that marked the beginning of a new brutal chapter of the Afghan conflict was questioned by other Afghans on many occasions. One of the rare instances when this strife was made evident to external observers was when MP Malalai Joya was attacked and ostracised for condemning the protagonists of Victory Day in parliament in 2006 (see Reporters sans Frontières’ (RSF) report here); fellow MPs from mujahedin parties were so incensed at her repeated denunciation of warlords and war criminals in the chamber that they eventually had her suspended from parliament in 2007.

The Taleban, many of whom were among the mujahedin fighting in the 1980s jihad, have been keen to still commemorate that victory over communism, during both their first and the current emirates. Conveniently, also, it comes on 8 Saur (27 April), thereby helping to erase the ‘stain’ of the Saur Revolution on the 7th. (see this post on the Pixstory). They referred to it during their decades-long struggle to regain power and likened their fight against the Republic and NATO forces to the one against the Afghan government and Soviet army of the 1980s. In 2013, for example they timed the launch of one of their major spring offensives with the 8 Saur anniversary (see Khaama Press report here).

The same does not apply to another mujahedin-centred remembrance day, Ruz-e Shohada (Martyrs’ Day) that was established as a public holiday by the Afghan parliament in 2012. The date chosen, 18 Sonbola in the Afghan calendar, linked it to the anniversary of the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massud on 9 September 2001, which had already been commemorated by the state before 2012.

The day was supposed to honour all martyrs who had lost their lives fighting for their country. However, the choice of the date of Massud’s death was not universally popular and the character of this commemoration, which came to be known also as Hafta-ye Shahid (Martyr’s Week) or simply Massud Day, was transformed into something entirely different. This was especially the case after 2014, with the worsening military situation and growing political tensions between the various factions in the Republic.

Many of the former commanders from Massud’s Shura-e Nazar network within Jamiat-e Islami, especially those from the Panjshir and Shomali, who had initially obtained high-ranking positions in ministries or the armed forces, started to resent what they perceived as their having been sidelined from power (see this AAN report).[5] Building on the frustrations and fears of their community constituencies, they started to mobilise their networks to hold demonstrations on Massud Day. The commemoration was thus turned into a means for them to reassert their cohesion and power with friends and foes alike. From a state-organised commemoration of martyrs, the occasion grew increasingly out of government control, with motorcades and gatherings of armed men in and around Kabul coloured by intimidating political and ethnic connotations (see ToloNews here).

Once in power, the Emirate did not allow this celebration to continue. In early September 2021, as the Taleban were still trying to quell an armed resistance in Panjshir, they ruled out Martyrs Day celebrations in the name of security (see Pajhwok here). They removed the celebration from the calendar of public holidays in 2022 (see Pajhwok here). It is unclear whether they will cancel Martyrs’ Day altogether or select another calendar date for this purpose. That would allow the Emirate to honour Afghanistan’s martyrs, while at the same time delinking it from their former foes and denying their political opponents a highly symbolic date around which to rally.

Celebrating which past? Lost occasions under the Republic

What about those other major turnabouts in recent Afghan history, the fall of the first Taleban Emirate and the coming into being of the post-2001 institutions? Could 13 November 2001, when after weeks of US bombings, the Taleban fled Kabul, have been picked to mark such a change? Or would the UN-sponsored Bonn Agreement of 5 December 2001, when the Afghan factions who had opposed the Taleban, either within the country or in the diaspora, came together to establish a future government have been chosen? Or possibly, the Emergency Loya Jirga of 11-19 June 2002, or the establishment of the new constitution, ratified on 26 January 2004, could instead have offered occasions for a national celebration?

The Islamic Republic, however, was content to keep celebrating the 1919 Independence Day, the Soviet withdrawal and the mujahedin’s entry into Kabul, while adding the commemoration of the martyrs only. By refraining from commemorating an inception date of its own, the Republic in a way admitted the very disparate nature of the social and political groups constituting its elites, whose many internal differences were seldom worked out and more often subsumed under a tenuous set of common interests. The possibility of deciding on a new, comprehensive national day was blocked by many factors, not least the ongoing conflict and the new tensions it created, but also by the overly cautious and timid approach by the Republic’s cultural and political institutions towards the country’s recent history.

Born and developed with strong external input from foreign powers, the new institutions appeared, on the one hand, to lack the national legitimacy to proudly inaugurate a completely new chapter of the Afghan political life without being accused of being foreign puppets, so they always tried to refer to a few widely accepted old symbols or to national ‘forefathers’. On the other hand, the post-2001 institutions were still scarred by the violence caused by the internal ethnic or ideological strife that had devastated Afghanistan in the past decades. Leaders appeared unwilling to open a debate that would have put on the table and eventually account for – and maybe even heal the scars left by ­– the innumerable and conflicting lived experiences of various Afghan communities through the multiple decades of conflict. These experiences were obscured by a veil of silence and the communities cowed into begrudgingly accepting the (latest) winners’ version as the only mainstream narrative. In the end, the fault lines of fear and distrust left beneath the surface of the Republic’s façade were one of the weaknesses that brought about its collapse. Maybe this is a lesson that every government in power could benefit from.

Edited by Jelena Bjelica and Roxanna Shapour

 

References

References
↑1 The Muhammadzai are the branch of the Barakzai Pashtun tribe that had ruled Afghanistan since 1823, when Dost Muhammad Khan wrested the Kabul throne from the Popalzai, Ayoub Khan Durrani, who was the last in a line of kings stretching back to 1747 when Ahmad Shah Durrani founded his eponymous dynasty. Muhammadzai rule was interrupted for around nine months in 1929, when the unrest stirred by modernist reforms led to King Amanullah’s abdication and the throne was occupied by a rebel of lower social standing, a Tajik from the Shomali plain north of Kabul, Habibullah Kalakani. Muhammadzai rule was restored in October 1929 by Nadir Khan, then head of the Musahiban family, a distant paternal cousin of Amanullah and father of Afghanistan’s last king Muhammad Zaher Shah.
↑2 To this day, this brief but intense period is commonly idealised by observers as the brightest example of ‘normalcy’, if not of real prosperity or democracy, that Afghans can look back and aspire to. After decades of war and turmoil, this holds true also for many segments of the Afghan population, except for the most ideological among the mujahedin organisations, who have not abandoned their old anti-monarchy stance, and for the Taleban. Irrespective of their various political ideals, many Hazaras also do not idealise the kings’ time. Once the reformist experiments of Amanullah had derailed, Hazaras remained – except for a handful of urbanised civil servants or intellectuals – de facto second-class citizens in the Sunni-centric, Pashtun-dominated Afghan monarchy and languished at the bottom of the economic and social ladder, even during that eventful decade.
↑3 The Durand Line was established as a demarcation between the respective spheres of influence by British India and the Kingdom of Afghanistan in 1893 during the reign of Abdul Rahman Khan and eventually came to form the border between Afghanistan and present-day Pakistan. The line is a source of controversy, particularly for Afghanistan, because it runs through territory traditionally inhabited by Pashtuns, who have been split in two since it was established.
↑4 Muhammad Daud Khan was often styled ‘Sardar’ (chieftain) because of his royal lineage.
↑5 2014 saw the completion of the so-called ‘security transition’ from NATO to the Afghan security forces, which led to military and territorial gains by the Taleban (read AAN dossier ‘Looking back at transition’). Moreover, a political transition which would have seen the incumbent Hamid Karzai stepping down after more than twelve years and a new president being elected proved particularly difficult and divisive, with elections stalling into a tense stalemate solved only through an unhappy power-sharing deal between the two contenders, Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah, brokered by the US (see this AAN dossier on the 2014 elections).

 

Extensive but not Inclusive: Afghanistan’s growing list of national holidays
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 The Taliban is snuffing out hope in Afghanistan. It will fail.

August 25, 2023
By
The Washington Post
August 15, 2023 

It’s the small things that find you, and they can come without warning.

Not too long ago I was in Turkey, at the airport in Istanbul. My husband had gone to get us food, something to eat before our plane boarded. He brought it to where we were sitting in the departure hall: a simple plate, white rice and some beans. I had a bite, and I started crying.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, concerned.

“It’s Kabul,” I said. “It tastes like Kabul, like afternoons there. I’m in Kabul right now. I’m home.”

Two years ago today, Aug. 15, 2021, the Taliban swept into Kabul and the Afghanistan I knew disappeared. By the end of the month, the School of Leadership, Afghanistan (SOLA), my Afghan girls’ school that I’ve dedicated my entire adult life to operating, was in exile. We were in Rwanda, reestablishing our operations, all of our students safe, all of our girls free to learn.

But I can’t go back to Kabul. None of the Afghan women at SOLA can. None of the girls at SOLA can, these teenage girls and girls even younger, Afghan girls whose parents have entrusted us with their care.

And none of us know when that might change.)

The small things are the words of a SOLA student in Rwanda, a girl among her classmates.

We were together, these girls and I, talking about a beautiful hill in the countryside where we will build our new campus. We were getting ready to take a trip so they could see the land for themselves, and I was telling them about what would stand there one day: a school for Afghan girls where education will always be possible and where sisterhood will always exist.

This girl was part of the conversation, an enthusiastic participant. But in a quiet moment, as we all sat together under a clear sky, she asked: “When do we…?”

She didn’t finish the question. She didn’t have to. I knew what she was asking. All of us knew. And she knew we knew.

Home. Where women have been turned to ghosts, shrouded beneath the blue burqa. Where girls have reportedly been told, just this month, that there is no need for them to attend school past the age of 10.

The small things are things of honesty, and of truth.

“I don’t know,” I said, and paused.

“It’s not the answer you want. It’s not the answer any of us want,” I continued. “But it’s the reality. And so is this: The hope your parents have, and you have, and I have — that’s what we’re going to build on here.”

It was a sunny day. Peaceful and still. The hills of Rwanda rose all around us. We were Afghan women, together. Our voices, our faces, our tears.)

What does hope look like?

It looks like Afghan girls in school, whether they’re in diaspora communities or attending secret lessons at private homes in Kabul and in the provinces. Because every day these girls are in school, they chip away at the darkness that fell across Afghanistan two years ago.

Every day these girls are in school, they build the possibility of a different future. For themselves and for so many other girls, so many other sisters they’ve never met.

It’s been two years, and still, inside the sadness, inside the anger and the honesty, I choose to find the hope.

Shabana Basij-Rasikh is co-founder and president of the School of Leadership, Afghanistan.
 The Taliban is snuffing out hope in Afghanistan. It will fail.
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She was lucky to escape Afghanistan. Two years later, she’s stuck in limbo.

August 25, 2023

By

Columnist
The Washington Post
August 8, 2023

Mahnaz Akbari was supposed to be one of the lucky ones.

The former commander of an Afghan military all-female special ops team, Akbari was among the 77,000 U.S. allies successfully evacuated to the United States when the Taliban retook her country. An additional 200,000 or so are trapped abroad, awaiting processing by the U.S. government.

But her place in the country that took her in is precarious.

“I’m in a legal limbo,” she says. That’s because, almost two years after the United States withdrew its last forces from Afghanistan, Congress has failed to deliver on the promises made to our allies in America’s longest war.

The U.S. government pledged to protect those who aided our military and diplomatic interests. But it never fully developed the legal and administrative capacity to do so. Most of those we hastily evacuated from Afghanistan ended up coming here through a sort of short-term workaround measure, full of temporary and uncertain extensions, called “humanitarian parole.”

This means that people such as Akbari have no direct path to permanent legal status, leaving them unsure about their ability to stay and work in the United States. Akbari fears what might happen if she gets booted back to Afghanistan, and remains guilt-ridden over the family members she left behind, who are now in danger thanks to her work aiding U.S. interests.

Akbari had worked as a calligraphy teacher and supply-chain manager. Then, in 2011, she was recruited to accompany U.S. and Afghan forces on night raids against the Taliban, the Islamic State and other terrorist targets. During such actions, she and her fellow Female Tactical Platoon mates handled the terrorists’ wives, mothers, sisters, children — people who were often the keepers of SIM cards and other sensitive information, but whom, for religious and cultural reasons, Akbari’s male military counterparts were not allowed to touch.

Akbari’s work was critical to U.S. national security interests. It was also dangerous. Two American female soldiers were killed on such missions, she says, and six Afghan female colleagues were wounded. Akbari remains immensely proud of her service to her country. She is eager to resume serving by joining the U.S. military but cannot do so until she gets a green card.

Which, for the foreseeable future, is unavailable.

Like many other Afghans who entered through parole, she has applied for asylum — a separate, convoluted and notoriously backlogged process. It’s supposed to be expedited for Afghan parolees, but only a tiny sliver of Afghan applicants have been successfully adjudicated, with the rest stuck in what could be a years-long queue.

Akbari fears that, by the time her asylum application is settled and she subsequently becomes eligible to apply for a green card, she will be too old to serve in the U.S. military.

In the meantime, she says she’s grateful for opportunities she has been granted in the United States, including many facilitated by U.S. service members she once worked alongside. But she finds it difficult to plan a future, because many prospective employers are reluctant to hire someone whose ongoing work eligibility remains uncertain.

There is a solution to cases such as Akbari’s: the Afghan Adjustment Act.

This bill would, among other things, allow Afghans in the United States to apply for permanent legal status after undergoing additional vetting. This would be on top of the extensive vetting this population already endured when entrusted to protect U.S. service members’ lives in Afghanistan, and then again when paroled into the United States.

A version of the legislation was introduced last year and went nowhere. It was reintroduced last month, sponsored by a bipartisan group of lawmakers, and with modifications intended to address some Republicans’ stated concerns about security screening. Yet some GOP lawmakers, such as Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.), are still attempting to politicize the issue by tying Afghan evacuees’ legal status to unrelated immigration measures.

The Afghan Adjustment Act has the backing of a wide variety of groups. Human rights advocates and religious leaders support it because they worry about what happens to Afghan evacuees — particularly women and dissidents — who lose their legal status. National security experts fear that, failing this measure, we might struggle to recruit allies in the future. Local officials want the Afghan neighbors contributing to their communities to be able to stay.

But perhaps the loudest supporters are veterans’ organizations. They argue that our failure to patch this legal issue injures not only brave allies such as Akbari but also the U.S. service members whom they aided. Some veterans are distraught by the abandonment of their friends and comrades.

“Members of Congress keep coming back and saying, ‘Hey, thank you for your service. We appreciate you. We value your commitment to this country,’” says Chris Purdy, director of Veterans for American Ideals. And yet when it comes to our shattered duty to our allies, he says, Congress “won’t do what it needs to do to pick up the pieces.”

Catherine Rampell is an opinion columnist at The Washington Post. She frequently covers economics, public policy, immigration and politics, with a special emphasis on data-driven journalism. Before joining The Post, she wrote about economics and theater for the New York Times
She was lucky to escape Afghanistan. Two years later, she’s stuck in limbo.
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What Do Young Afghan Women Do? A glimpse into everyday life after the bans

August 25, 2023

Jelena Bjelica • AAN Team

 

Since coming to power, the Taleban authorities have issued many edicts, decrees, declarations and directives limiting, restricting, suspending or banning basic freedoms for women and girls. Afghan women are no longer free to go to public parks, gyms and other public spaces and are banned from boarding planes and leaving the country on their own; they cannot attend university and secondary schools for girls have also closed their doors; national and international NGOs and the United Nations have been instructed not to employ Afghan women. The AAN team has spoken to eleven young women who were either working or studying before the bans to find out how they are living and surviving in this suddenly, highly-restrictive environment. AAN’s Jelena Bjelica summarises what they told us about their everyday lives since the Taleban came to power. 
Introduction

Women make up almost half Afghanistan’s population (49.5 per cent according to the World Bank estimate). Yet, they have lost almost all of their basic human rights and freedoms since the Taleban took control of the country two years ago. A joint report published on 15 June 2023, by the two United Nations independent experts, Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Afghanistan Richard Bennett and Chair of the Working Group on Discrimination against Women and Girls Dorothy Estrada-Tanck, said that between September 2021 and May 2023, more than 50 orders were issued, but it listed by the date and content only 13 (see also this interactive timeline on the Taleban gender-related orders published by United States Institute for Peace). According to the report, “the edicts are believed to be primarily issued by Amir-ul-Momineen [Taleban Supreme Leader Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada] to relevant administrative entities, who then issue them to the public” in a multitude of ways – “official instructions… by central and provincial authorities, in speeches by officials and via social and mainstream media.” (see footnote 1 for a list of the orders).[1]

Among so many restrictions that suspend or severely limit the rights of women and girls to education, work and freedom of movement, the Taleban’s Supreme Leader issued only one decree affirming some rights. It stressed that “a woman is not a piece of property, but a genuine human being” in the context of her right to marry and inherit.[2]Taken together, the bans limit women’s active engagement in society and confine them largely to roles within the family. The recent UN joint report, assessed the bans to be “violating girls’ and women’s rights to education, work, freedom of movement, health, bodily autonomy and decision-making, freedom of peaceful assembly and association, and access to justice,” and amount to “gender persecution” (see this AAN report for a discussion of this term). They reported:

Women have described the continual announcement of restrictions as “day by day, the walls close in”, feeling “suffocated”, and the cumulative effect leaving them “without hope”. A journalist monitoring the announcement and implementation of restrictions since the Taliban came to power explained that “at early press conferences, we asked ‘what is your intention for women and girls?’ We were told, ‘wait, wait, you will understand our position on women.’ Initially, we thought this meant that a few small things would be changed, and we could continue to work, go to school, etc. But over time, we have come to the realization it was their intention to slowly erase women.”[3]

Unlike the 1990s, the Taleban have not issued an outright ban on paid employment for women. However, their many restrictions on where women can work outside the home has hit the female workforce hard. In addition, indications are that the economic crash hit women workers and business owners harder than their male counterparts. According to a World Bank report from November 2022, nearly half of women previously employed in salaried work had lost their jobs since the takeover.[4] Since then, the bans on women working for NGOs and the UN have further dented women’s right to paid employment. In another recent blow, the order closing beauty salons across the country, issued on 24 July 2023,[5] cost an estimated 60,000 jobs, according to the BBC. At the time the Emirate suspended the right to higher education for women until further notice, in December 2022, over 100,000 female students were enrolled in government and private higher education institutions, according to UNESCO estimates. It reported that the number of women in higher education had increased almost 20-fold between 2001 and 2018, and before the suspension, one out of every three young women was enrolled in universities. It also estimated that since the Taleban takeover, 1.1 million Afghan girls and young women were without access to formal education. Although not all Afghan girls were sent to school and indeed, not all Afghan children (boys or girls) had schools to go to, “by August 2021, 4 out of 10 students in primary education were girls,” UNESCO said.

Taleban officials do not always implement orders comprehensively; in some places, there is room for manoeuvre locally, on schooling, work, dress and movement, although in others, officials apply restrictions more onerously than official orders require. Even so, the overall trends are clear: there are now fewer women in paid employment, far fewer girls going to secondary school and none to university.

Afghans, generally, have seen basic freedoms diminished: since taking power, the Emirate has increasingly clamped down on freedom of assembly, of protest and of speech, including by detaining and ill-treating demonstrators and others accused of dissent, a trend widely documented by the United Nations Special Rapporteur for human rights and UNAMA. Yet, for women the new restrictions have been particularly heavy-hitting. Previously, some had public roles – in government, parliament, the civil service and as teachers in universities. Now, they are ruled by a government which believes that women should live lives largely confined to the home.

A day in the life of a young Afghan woman

While millions of Afghan girls and women face new restrictions on their lives, those who had been studying or working before the Taleban takeover have been particularly hard hit. They had a social life outside the family, regularly travelled to university or a workplace, frequently met with peers and dreamt of a life very different from the one the Emirate now has mapped out for them.[6] To understand how these women are coping with their new predicament, we approached 11 women aged 20 to 26 who had either studied and/or worked until recently with a questionnaire consisting of eight open-ended questions.[7]

A 23-year-old who was in her final year at Kabul University’s Psychology Faculty before the ban said that:

Before the Taleban, I was going to university, teaching freely and comfortably. There was motivation for work and life, and I was thinking about a better future. Now, my days are boring. Although I’m still teaching maths secretly, I’m unhappy because I can’t study anymore.

Another young woman, a 24-year-old high school graduate who has lost her job at a private company said:

My average day is very boring because I stay at home and I have no job. There’s not much to do except household chores, not only for me but also for most girls and women. We don’t even have [the right to] a recreation or a pastime. The Taleban have imposed a lot of restrictions on us.

Most of the interviewees said they were much more anxious now that they live in a restricted environment and are unhappy and depressed because of being confined to their homes.

I feel desperate because I can’t foresee my future. Even if I read or do something useful, I can’t see my place in the future. For instance, in the past, we [girls] could finish our schooling, participate in the kankor [university entrance exams] and enter a faculty that would help us find our place in the future. But now, no one’s place is definite, whether we study [at school] or at home [on our own]. Besides my madrassa studies, I do the simple chores that housewives do. For example, I do the washing-up and cleaning. Sometimes, when there’s no work at home, I move the furniture around to cope with the mental stress.

(A 20-year-old madrassa student)

My days are filled with worries. Every day there is a new restriction. My days are so different now. I was going to university, I was happier, I was able to meet my friends and I had freedom. Now, there is no freedom. I miss my university so much. Whenever I pass my university, only God knows the pain in my heart. I am asking what our sin is that we can’t go to university, but boys can go easily and study…. The boys who were my seniors have graduated, but we girls can only watch them finish their studies. I miss studying at university in the summer heat and the cold of winter, [I miss] being hungry and thirsty there. 

(A 25-year-old who was in her 4th semester at Kabul Medical University before the ban)

Our interviewees reported that they were now meeting with their peers online. The UN Special Rapporteur’s report highlighted that women face difficulty meeting in public with other women: “Groups of more than three or four women are routinely dispersed by officials, arguing the need to prevent protests.” Some of our interviewees said they did leave the house occasionally, but always in the company of a male family member. One described how even family picnics, a favourite Afghan pastime, have been subject to inspections and directives by Taleban officials:

We don’t enjoy going out anymore because there are so many restrictions. For example, they tell us where [we should] and where we should not go. They tell us not to go where men are [present] in places like Qargha or Paghman [favourite picnic spots on the outskirts of Kabul]. Both places are restricted for women [on their own] … This is why I prefer to stay home. About a month ago, I went to Qargha with my family; we were in the car when the Taleban told us to go to a place where there were no men. It’s the same with restaurants. Most of the time, they enforce restrictions so that families must eat in a dark and secluded place inside the restaurant.

(A 23-year-old who studied engineering at Kabul University’s Polytechnic Faculty before the ban)

Passing the time and meeting friends online

Confined to their homes, the interviewees described their social life as having moved far more online. They reported spending between half an hour and several hours a day on the internet chatting with friends and family in Afghanistan and abroad. Most of them use online communication platforms and/or messengers.

When I don’t read books or watch movies, I spend some time online every day. In fact, I am online more than before. I chat with my friends and classmates and stay in touch with them.

(A 21-year-old student at Kabul University’s Faculty of Language and Literature)

I spend almost two hours online every day. I meet and chat with my friends online. I WhatsApp them or chat with them on Facebook Messenger. I also talk to one brother in Turkey and another who works in Iran.

(A 26-year-old high school graduate who lost her job at a private company)

When I am done with the household chores, I spend some time online every day. When I feel unhappy, I visit social media and chat with my friends and classmates.

(A 20-year-old midwifery student)

However, scrolling through their social media accounts is not the only thing these young women do in their free time. Most of our interviewees said they read or watch television in their free time, if they have electricity. However, a 20-year-old former law student pointed out that all that she does feels like just passing the time.

I read, but not as much as before because I’ve lost my place in society. What can I do even if I read? Now, I watch more movies than before without knowing why I’m watching them. I just know that by watching movies, I can pass the time. 

(A 20-year-old former law student)

One interviewee, a 25-year-old, who was in her 4th semester at Kabul Medical University before the ban, was still trying to learn. She volunteers two or three times a week at a hospital in the city:

I go to the hospital from nine to three o’clock, two or three times a week. I work as a volunteer to learn from the doctors. I tried to join online classes but couldn’t [afford to] continue studying online. I also wanted to get a job, but I can’t because I don’t have a university degree. I am not hopeful that the universities will reopen [for women]. I have heard that the Taleban have closed them for girls permanently. 

(A 25-year-old student of medical sciences)

For such young women, the sudden end to their hopes, dreams, freedom of movement, social status and ability to earn a living is a calamity, but as the Special Rapporteur’s recent report underlined, the consequences for the nation as a whole will also be catastrophic. He cited, for example, a visible shortage of first-year interns in a maternity hospital in Kabul:

[T]he experts noticed the absence of first-year interns. It was a stark reminder of the longer-term prospects for women’s health care if the ban on education for girls continues. As girls and women can be provided care only by female doctors, unless the restrictions are reversed rapidly, there is a real risk of multiple preventable deaths, which could amount to femicide.

There is a long tradition of Afghan women trained in the medical sciences and working to aid their compatriots. The first Afghan girls’ primary school graduates from the Queens Soraya school, established in 1921, were sent to Turkey in 1928 to a high school for nursing. Trained nurses were needed for Afghanistan’s first women’s hospital, which opened in the late 1920s.[8] Today, we may be witnessing an end to this century-old tradition of educating Afghan women to help other women maintain and improve their health.

Déjà vu with a twist

If the Taleban’s restrictions on women and girls today feel like déjà vu, a return to the strict conditions placed on society during the first emirate (1996-2001), it is worth returning to one of the sharpest analysts of that time, Nancy Hatch Dupree, to try and understand what is going on. In a journal article[9] from 2004 about the Afghan family during times of crisis, she argued that Taleban restrictions on women – namely enforcing the wearing of burqas (chadari),excluding women from educational institutions and places of employment, inhibiting women’s movement in public except when accompanied by a mahram and rigorous segregation of men and women under all circumstances – could be seen as political acts. She contended that the restrictions were a means of controlling society and that they had a deep impact on the Afghan family, which she saw as the backbone of Afghan society. She wrote:

Taking advantage of the deeply embedded attitudes toward the centrality of women in the social concepts of family and honour, Taliban policies wrapped entrenched customary practices and patriarchal attitudes in the mantle of Islam. They were then manipulated to maintain power. By imposing strict restraints directly on women, the new rulers sent a clear message of their intent to subordinate the personal autonomy of every individual, and thereby strengthened the impression that they were capable of exercising control over all aspects of social behaviour. These policies were among the most potent instruments of their rule. […] Women eventually learned to cope, but beneath their burqas emotions boiled. At home, mental stress disturbed family harmony. Stricter seclusion curtailed the normal social interactions that formed an integral part of their daily lives, creating a sense of isolation. 

The more than 50 orders aimed at controlling women and girls issued by the Taleban since re-taking power suggests they are using the same strategy. Yet, unlike the 1990s, there are today many more Afghan women are who are educated and have had salaried employment, as well as millions of girls who have grown up believing they could contribute to society beyond household and motherhood. The statistics on schooling alone are striking. In 1995, just before the Taleban came to power last time, around 29 per cent of girls were enrolled in primary school by 1999, that percentage had dropped to only four percent of girls enrolled in primary school, according to the World Bank estimates. In 2019, 85 percent of Afghan girls were enrolled in primary schools.[10]

The young women we interviewed, as one put it, used to have a place in their own futures. For now, at least, they are reduced to trying to pass the time, without enjoyment or little to make them feel useful. As Dupree reported, during the first emirate women did eventually learn to cope, but at great cost to their mental wellbeing and that of their families. This time, our interviewees at least are still wondering how they are going to get through these days. As one 20-year-old former law student put it:

As our mothers say, when your heart is broken, nothing can be done, but if your legs are broken, you can still do everything. 

This in turn raises the question: What, this time, has been broken?

Edited by Roxanna Shapour and Kate Clark

References

References
↑1 The list below is based on that given in the June 2023 joint report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of women and girls in Afghanistan and the Working Group on discrimination against women and girls, along with a timeline by the US Institute of Peace and AAN’s own reporting and monitoring of the Afghan media and coverage:

27 August 2021: female employees of the Ministry of Public Health only told to report to work; most other female government employees have never been asked to return to work/told to stay at home (see this AAN report);

18 September 2021: schools not opened to girls beyond grade six (see this AAN report);

20 September 2021: ordered professional working women to stay at home until further notice (see USIP timeline)

23 December 2021: (male) drivers instructed not to accept female passengers who are not wearing what the Taleban consider to be hijab, or, for journeys greater than 72 kilometres, do not have a mahram (close male relative acting as a chaperone);

2 March 2022: women banned from entering health centres without a mahram (see USIP timeline)

13 March 2022: enforcement of segregation of women and men’s offices (see USIP timeline)

23 March 2022: girls secondary schools do not open or are quickly closed for the new school year following a last-minute, high-level order from Kandahar (see this AAN report);

27 March 2022: women banned from boarding domestic and international flights without a mahram;

7 May 2022: women ordered to observe hijab, defined either as a burqa or a black gown with face covering (niqab), or best of all, not to leave home without good reason (“the first and best form of observing hijab”) (see this AAN report);

21 May 2022: female television presenters required to cover their faces;

1 June 2022: all girls in fourth to sixth grades required to cover their faces while commuting to school;

23 August 2022: female moral police department under the Ministry for Preventing Vice and Promoting Virtue established (see USIP timeline);

25 August 2022: ban on women going to parks where park authorities cannot ensure segregation between men and women (see USIP timeline);

29 August 2022: female university students ordered to cover their faces in classrooms (see USIP timeline);

10 November 2022: women prohibited from using gyms and parks (see USIP timeline);

20 December 2022: the right of women to attend university is “suspended”;

22 December 2022: girls beyond grade 6 banned by Ministry of Education from attending private courses (see USIP timeline);

24 December 2022: NGOs instructed to “halt the work of all female employees… until further notice” (with subsequent unofficial exemptions for women working in the health and primary education sectors – see this AAN report);

3 January 2023: Taleban closed blind girls’ schools in Nangrahar and Kunar. (see USIP timeline);

12 March 2023: Taleban banned the issuing of transcripts and certificates for female university graduates (see USIP timeline);

4 April 2023: the United Nations and embassies told not to employ Afghan women (see AAN reports here and here);

24 July 2023: closure of all beauty salons across Afghanistan.
↑2 A Taleban decree concerning the “rights for women” (number 83/ Vol 1) published in the Official Gazette (see here) says that the consent of an adult woman is necessary for nikah [marriage] and that “a woman is not a piece of property, but a genuine human being. No one can trade her for peace in a bad [marriage, ie to assuage a blood feud]”. It also says that “a widow cannot be remarried to her brother-in-law or anyone else” and that “receiving a dowry is a widow’s Sharia right.” The decree says that “women have a fixed inheritance right when it comes to the property of their husbands, children, father and other relatives” and that “No one can deprive them of this right based on either fardiyat [primary heirs] or asabiyat[residual heirs]. As well as that, “those with multiple wives are obliged to give their wives their rights according to the rules of Sharia and to observe fairness among them.”

Interestingly the Taleban only published the above-mentioned decree in the Official Gazette. Other orders that limit or suspend women’s basic rights have not been published in the Official Gazette.
↑3 The quotes come for interviews with 79 Afghans (67 women and 12 men) and focus group with 159 women participants on the survey results in 11 provinces. A survey of 2,112 Afghan women across 18 provinces was conducted in March 2023.
↑4 The World Bank reported in November 2022 an increase in women’s participation in the labour force, as families try to maximise income in the face of economic difficulties. However, that participation is not generally as salaried workers: “Many who previously identified as housewives are now working, mostly as self-employed workers on the farm, tending to livestock, or engaging in small-scale economic activities from home, for example as seamstresses or mending or sewing clothes. Among women previously identified as students, approximately one-half have entered the labor force.”
↑5 In the first instance, Taleban authorities imposed some conditions on women’s beauty parlours in Herat province on 18 June 2023 when the provincial Amr bil-Maruf (the virtue and vice ministry) sent a letter containing 14 points regulating the work of women beauty parlours, as the news website Etilaatroz reported. These regulations included prohibition on the hair extensions and the eyebrow removal because they are seen as against Sharia, it also instructed women to perform ablution before applying make-up, and the makeup to avoid using substances that break the ablution. However, on 24 July 2023, the main Amr bil-Maruf issued a new order which said that the supreme leader had ordered the closure of all beauty parlours in Afghanistan.
↑6 See also two of our earlier reports on women’s lives under the Taleban, ‘How Can a Bird Fly On Only One Wing? Afghan women speak about life under the Islamic Emirate’ 22 November 2022 and ‘Strangers in Our Own Country: How Afghan women cope with life under the Islamic Emirate view living under Taleban rule’, 28 December 2023.
↑7 Questionnaire:

How do you spend your days? What your average day looks like?

Do you help more than before with the house chores?

Do you read more than before? Do you watch more movies than before?

How often do you go out of the house?

Do you miss being on the University campus/going to work?

How much time do you spend online?

Do you meet with your friends online?

Have you started any alternative online/in presence course or activity to make up for the lost (study/job)?
↑8 For little-known and interesting historical details about Afghan women, see Nancy Hatch Dupree’s timeless “The Women of Afghanistan,” published in 1998 by the Office of the UN Coordinator and available in an online archive of the Afghanistan Centre at the Kabul University (ACKU).
↑9 “The Family During Crisis in Afghanistan” by Nancy Hatch Dupree, published in Journal of Comparative Family Studies, Vol. 35, No. 2, (Spring, 2004), pp. 311-331.
↑10 Girls tended to drop out as they got older, but far more in some provinces than others. For more statistics and maps and a discussion of this and many other issues related to schooling, see AAN’s January 2022 report, ‘Who Gets to Go to School? (1): What people told us about education since the Taleban took over’.

 

What Do Young Afghan Women Do? A glimpse into everyday life after the bans
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The Last Afghan in Guantanamo: Pressure mounts on US to deal with the remnants of its ‘War on Terror’ 

August 25, 2023

Kate Clark

Afghanistan Analysts Network

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It is more than three years since the United States signed its peace deal with the Taleban and almost two since the last American soldier left Afghanistan. Yet the US still insists that the last Afghan it holds in relation to that war – at its prison camp in Guantanamo – would be a threat to its national security if freed. Muhammad Rahim from Nangrahar, held by the US since 2007 and tortured at a CIA black site, awaits his latest Periodic Review Board hearing, when US officials will decide to release him or keep him detained. During the Donald Trump presidency, the Board authorised just one detainee for release, but since Joe Biden took office, it has cleared more than a dozen detainees for transfer, raising hopes for Rahim, especially as he now has a lawyer in Guantanamo for the first time. Possibly, this time, he will also have a Pashto rather than an Arabic translator. Meanwhile, writes Kate Clark, a lacerating report by the first independent United Nations investigator to visit the camp has detailed the arbitrariness and abuse that characterises life in Guantanamo, and how the resulting harm continues to affect former inmates, of whom the largest national group are Afghans.
Introduction 

In total, the US rendered 780 prisoners to its detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, of whom 225 were Afghan. Out of that number, 221 have been released, among them Taleban military and civilian officials, but also shepherds, taxi drivers, shopkeepers, tribal elders, anti-Taleban leaders, abused boys and old men with dementia. Three Afghans died in Guantanamo. One remains.

Muhammad Rahim was the last Afghan to be taken to the prison camp, indeed the last detainee of any nationality to be rendered there, and the last man known to have passed through a CIA black site. The torture he endured was documented in a 2014 report by the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence into the CIA’s use of rendition and torture.[1] The fact that the US has kept this individual for so long and has wanted to detain him even after ending its war in Afghanistan is, as this report will show, mystifying. Rahim is currently waiting for a Periodic Review Board hearing, when a group of military, intelligence and civilian government officials could decide to release him or continue to detain him (or a third, largely theoretical possibility at this stage, send him for military trial). The hearing was scheduled for May, but was abruptly cancelled at the last minute and rescheduled for 15 August.

Before looking at Rahim’s case and his prospects at the upcoming Periodic Review Board hearing, the author first considers the report of the first independent UN investigator to visit Guantanamo. The report is replete with details of the “horror and harms” done to the hundreds of Muslim men and boys who were rendered to Guantanamo in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the US, and has implications for both Rahim and the other Afghans taken there.[2]

The “horrors and harms” of Guantanamo

Special Rapporteurs are appointed by the Human Rights Council but serve in their personal capacity. This is evident in the direct language of this report by the Irish academic lawyer, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism. She writes of how detainees were “rendered across borders, forcibly disappeared, held in secret detention, and subject to egregious human rights violations” by the United States in the years after the 9/11 attacks. The “vast majority” she notes, were “brought without cause and had no relationship whatsoever with the events that took place on 9/11.” They were subject to:

[W]aterboarding, walling, deprivation of food and water, extreme sleep deprivation, and continuous noises while in detention…. violently slapped, shaken, subject to mock executions, kicked, thrown to the ground, and held in solitary confinement for months … told that multiple serious harms would befall their family members including physical violence, economic distress, and social shaming … [and were] subject to sexual violence, including anal penetration. 

Ní Aoláin writes that: “Every one of the 780 Muslim men [and this author would add ‘and boys’][3] who was held at Guantánamo Bay” lived or still lives “with their own distinct experiences of unrelenting psychological and physical trauma of withstanding profound human rights abuse.” Detainee families, she says, have also “suffered immeasurably.”

The rendition, secret detention, torture and ill-treatment at multiple sites and at Guantanamo Bay was, she says, “structured, discriminatory, and systematic.”

The US government, she writes, “authorized and justified, and personnel enabled and sustained [the detainees’] torture.” Ní Aoláin underscores that the prohibition on both torture and arbitrary detention are jus cogens, one of several absolute principles of international law from which no state can exempt itself, nor make ‘legal’ through domestic legislation. Up to now, she emphasises, “there has been no adequate accounting of the international law violations including violations of jus cogens norms that occurred from September 11, 2001 onwards.” She underscores that the US government has “an ongoing obligation to investigate the crimes committed at Guantánamo, including an assessment of whether they meet the threshold of war crimes and crimes against humanity.” As part of that investigation, she says the US government is under a continuing obligation to:

[S]anction those responsible [for any violations], provide appropriate redress and reparation to all victims and adopt effective guarantees of non-repetition, such as legislative, administrative, judicial, and other measures to prevent and punish such violations going forward.

Ní Aoláin insists that: “The world has and will not forget. Without accountability, there is no moving forward on Guantánamo.” However, as things stand, it is impossible to see a US administration compensating victims of Guantanamo or apologising to them or prosecuting its own officials. Up to now, the US has only investigated individuals accused of using unauthorised interrogation techniques and even then, investigations have been administrative, rather than criminal, and into low-ranking officials, with any punishments limited to disciplinary actions, even when detainees were killed. Those ordering and sanctioning the breaches have remained untouched by the law.[4] Indeed, ahead of the publication of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s 2014 report into the CIA’s ‘detention and interrogation programme’, while Barak Obama acknowledged, for the first time by an American president, that the US had used torture, he also downplayed it, effectively ruling out prosecutions:

It’s important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had. And a lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots.[5]

As to non-domestic forums for accountability, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, has decided to ‘de-prioritise‘ the alleged war crimes of the CIA and US military in relation to the war in Afghanistan, along with those of the forces of the Islamic Republic, and instead focus on accusations against the Taleban and Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISKP) (for more on what AAN called his creation of a ‘hierarchy of victims’, see our report from 11 November 2022). The move by the prosecutor followed a period of significant intimidation of court staff by the United States under President Trump, as well as a long history of US belief in its exceptionalism, when dealing with the International Criminal Court.

The Special Rapporteur has much to say in her hard-hitting report about what could be done to make the regime in Guantanamo less unbearable for its current 30 inmates, whom she insists “must be treated with humanity and respect for their inherent dignity in line with the U.S. Government’s international legal obligations.” Recommendations range from better facilitation of communications with families to improving medical care, including treating ongoing medical conditions resulting from torture, to calling detainees by their names rather than their Serial Internment Numbers. However, as one detainee explained to her, “the conditions of confinement” have already improved since they were first brought to Guantanamo, but “the legal conditions are worse than ever.”

Ní Aoláin’s conclusions on the various judicial and administrative review mechanisms are, indeed, excoriating. On the Periodic Review Board, which decides the fate of detainees (transfer, continue to detain or send for military trial), she says:

The Periodic Review Board process lacks the most basic procedural safeguards, including because the process is a purely discretionary proceeding that is not independent and that is subject to veto by the political officials on the review committee. Further, the fact that 16 men have been cleared yet remain trapped in the Guantánamo detention facility is indicative of the Periodic Review Board process’ disconnect from any actual release and the arbitrariness of the cleared men’s ongoing detention. 

On detainees petitioning courts on the US mainland for habeas corpus – when the government has to convince the court that the detention of an individual is lawful, or release him or her, she says:

Regarding habeas remedies she finds it has been overwhelmingly ineffective both in efficiency of process and delivery of the remedy of actual release for detainees. Detainees have had access to habeas corpus since 2004, but most proceedings have languished in judicial pipelines undermining the requisite regularity of independent, impartial, review, and calling into question their effectiveness as a matter of international human rights law.

As to the ongoing trials by military commissions, she points to their “fundamental fair trial and due process deficiencies,” noting that:

[N]ine men involved in the military commission process are still in the pretrial phase after experiencing countless delays. As one detainee interviewed expressed with exasperation, the system is paralyzed but their only option is to engage. The defendants in the September 11 case were arraigned in May 2012, with pre-trial hearings suspended through at least early 2023. The endless delays in their cases, and the U.S. Government’s failure to even move past the pre-trial phase clearly fail to meet the “undue delay” threshold. She further expresses serious concern that the military commission hearings have been inundated with an array of procedural obstacles and legitimacy challenges, ranging from issues with interpretation –including due to alleged bias and lack of independence and impartiality – and significant technological failures in the courtroom, to abrupt prosecutor and judge retirements and resignations and conflicts of interest. 

In every aspect of life at Guantanamo, the Special Rapporteur reports of “cumulative and unrelenting” arbitrariness, uncertainty and the powerlessness of detainees. The longer a situation of detention lasts, she says, the higher the likelihood that the prohibition of torture, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment has been breached. In this, the case of the last Afghan held in Guantanamo, now waiting for his latest Periodic Review Board hearing, is illustrative.

Rahim’s case

Muhammad Rahim is one of three men still held in Guantanamo whom the US has not sent for military trial but continues to hold in indefinite detention because it deems them a risk to US security. He was detained by the Pakistan intelligence agency, the ISI, in 2007 and handed over to the CIA, which held and tortured him at a black site in Afghanistan before rendering him to Guantanamo in 2008.

Rahim, an Arabic speaker, has admitted to working with Arab fighters before and just after 2001. This was not in itself unusual or pointed necessarily to any shared ideological stance; getting paid employment was much sought after in this very poor country. The US military had previously claimed the job of another Afghan detainee, Abdul Zahir, for example, who had worked as a chokidar (doorman) and occasional translator for an Arab commander, was sufficient to detain him from 2002 to 2015, a position later overruled by a Periodic Review Board. When it was finally decided he could be released, the review board said he “was probably misidentified as the individual who had ties to al-Qaeda weapons facilitation.” (For detail on Zahir’s case, see pages 30-33 of the author’s 2016 special report, Kafka in Cuba: The Afghan Experience in Guantanamo.)

The US asserts – and Rahim denies – that he also cooperated with al-Qaeda beyond the immediate post-2001 era. The CIA told the press when it announced his detention that he was one of Osama bin Laden’s “most trusted facilitators,” “a tough, seasoned jihadist” who was “best known in counter-terror circles as a personal facilitator and translator” for bin Laden. It has asserted that Rahim was an al-Qaeda courier who personally transported “tens of thousands of dollars” for the alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, travelled to Iran to help the leader of Hezb-e Islami, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar come back to Afghanistan and coordinated “the movement of bin Laden’s wives and families.”

These claims have never been independently scrutinised or robustly questioned, for example, by an independent court of law. Moreover, they are difficult to square with what was revealed in the Senate’s 2014 report on the CIA’s use of torture, which revealed that the CIA’s interrogation of Rahim had “resulted in no disseminated intelligence report.” It suggested that the only information it had about him were the ISI’s allegations and nothing useful was ascertained from the interrogation.[6] Documents released in Rahim’s habeas petition also point to the basis of US accusations being hearsay, including ‘double hearsay’, ie what someone claimed someone else said about Rahim, testimony from detainees obtained under torture or duress, and unverified and unprocessed intelligence reports. Research by this author into other similar claims against other Afghan detainees point to a continued pattern of accusations that are fantastical, nonsensical and lacking in factual basis (see the ‘Kafka in Cuba’ report cited above and the detailed investigations into the cases of the last eight Afghans held in Guantanamo, including Rahim, for more on this).

The US classes Rahim as a ‘high-value’ detainee, as it does all the men who were held in CIA black sites, rather than detained by the US military.[7] Over time, it has become clear that this classification was given not because of their supposed high risk or high intelligence worth, but to protect the CIA: the label ensured detainees were kept in secrecy, segregated from other detainees, and for many years in solitary confinement.

According to the US’s own allegations, Rahim was, at most, a translator and facilitator for al-Qaeda. The US rationale, whether on intelligence or security grounds, for bringing him to Guantanamo and then detaining him for so many years is not obvious. However, once a person ended up in Guantanamo, getting released proved to be difficult. This was especially the case after Republicans gained a majority in the House of Representatives during the first Obama presidency and began blocking transfers (which they had not objected to when Obama’s predecessor, the Republican, George Bush, was president).

To leave Guantanamo, a detainee must first convince the Periodic Review Board that he is no longer a threat to the US and it is safe to transfer him to another country. The Board assumes the government’s accusations against a detainee are true and he must prove them false or – a more successful tactic – that he has turned a corner, is remorseful and no longer poses a threat. All this must be accomplished without access to normal legal mechanisms – including access to evidence or witnesses.

Rahim’s prospects from his 15 August Periodic Review Board hearing

Rahim, who has had three previous full reviews – in 2016, 2019 and 2022 – said at his last hearing that the Board had never given him the opportunity to have a lawyer present (transcript here; documents for this and other hearings for Rahim and the other detainees can be read on this webpage). Rahim does now have a lawyer at Guantanamo[8] to represent him on August 15, which raises his chances of being cleared for transfer considerably. This was certainly the case of the penultimate Afghan held in Guantanamo, Asadullah Harun Gul who finally secured his release last year (AAN reporting here).[9]

In her report, Special Rapporteur Ní Aoláin stresses that the right to legal counsel is well settled under international human rights law and international humanitarian law and is “vital to ensuring that the rights of all persons deprived of their liberty are respected.” It serves as a fundamental safeguard against torture and ill-treatment, arbitrary detention, and other breaches of fundamental freedoms and human rights and an entitlement on the part of all detained persons that attaches from the moment a person is detained. For Rahim, that right is finally being honoured 15 years into his detention.

What is also clear, however, from the transcript of Rahim’s last full review by the Periodic Review Board in April 2022 that not having a lawyer was not his only problem. The Board had employed an Arabic translator for Rahim. Even though he is an Arabic speaker and has at least some grasp of English, one would expect the Board to have provided a translator in his native language, which is Pashto. His responses do read as garbled and at times nonsensical: this may have been a language/translation issue. It is not clear, but that may be why the Board concluded he had shown “unwillingness to discuss pre-detention activities and beliefs,” and this prevented it from “assessing whether he has had any change in mindset or level of threat.” Even given that the set-up of the Periodic Review Board is fundamentally unjust and arbitrary, Rahim appears to have been treated particularly unfairly – expected to argue his case without legal advice and denied the opportunity to express himself or understand the Board’s questions properly.

The result was that the Board fell back on its default position of keeping him detained. It claimed he posed a “continuing significant threat to the security of the United States” and that it considered he was “a trusted member of Al Qaeda who worked directly for senior members of Al Qaeda, including Usama bin Laden.” Moreover, it asserted this “extensive extremist connection… provide[s] a path to re-engagement.”

It is unclear where it thought Rahim could “re-engage,” given the US no longer has a military presence in Afghanistan.

The Periodic Review Board under Biden

As well as now having a lawyer, the general environment for getting a decision from the Board to transfer is also more favourable since the advent of the Biden presidency. While Donald Trump was in power, although he never explicitly ruled out anyone leaving Guantanamo, the political drive to reduce numbers seen in the last year of Obama’s term ended abruptly. During his presidency, the Periodic Review Board judged just one person safe to be transferred, a Saudi Arabian citizen, Ahmed al-Darbi, who was repatriated and incarcerated in his homeland on 1 May 2018 (media reporting here). Since Biden came to power on 20 January 2021, 13 detainees, many of them held since the earliest years of the detention camp, have been cleared for transfer.

Rahim has already had one hearing during the Biden era when the Board decided against his release. However, this was also the case for some of the 13 men who it has subsequently cleared for transfer, so is not necessarily an indicator of what might happen this time. More problematic is that label, ‘high-value’: Rahim has always contended that the US has continued to detain him not because of anything he did, but because of what was done to him, that is, the CIA torture.[10] This accusation was echoed by Special Rapporteur Ní Aoláin, saying she was concerned that

[C]ontinued internment of certain detainees follows from the unwillingness of the authorities to face the consequences of the torture and other ill-treatment to which the detainees were subjected and not from any ongoing threat they are believed to pose.

She stresses that neither international humanitarian law nor international human rights law “countenances concealing evidence of prior misconduct by the detaining authority as a reason for continued detention.”

However, in one hopeful sign, the Board recently cleared one other high-value detainee for transfer, Guled Hassan Duran, a Somali national whom the US had incarcerated since 2006. Even more significant is the fact that the first ‘high-value’ detainee was actually released from the detention camp earlier this year. Majid Khan, a Pakistani national, who was born in Saudi Arabia, was transferred to Belize in February 2023 (see media reporting here).

If cleared for transfer, however, the fates of the 16 men before Rahim, all cleared and still detained, would then loom large. Being labelled as safe to transfer out of the detention camp is only the first hurdle: finding a country willing to take a detainee that he feels safe to go to and that the US believes will keep him secure and not torture him is the next.

Muhammad Rahim pictured at Guantanamo in recent years.
Muhammad Rahim pictured at Guantanamo in recent years.

The other route to freedom – habeas corpus

Rahim is pursuing a writ for his habeas petition in the US courts and is currently waiting for the court to rule on his Motion for Order of Immediate Release, filed 18 months ago, on 24 November 2021 (digital copy with AAN), an example of how petitions, in the Special Rapporteur’s words, “languish… in judicial pipelines.”

Rahim’s argument is that, in Biden’s words from 31 August 2021, “the United States [has] ended 20 years of war in Afghanistan — the longest war in American history” and therefore, as a prisoner of war, he should be released. The motion argues that “[t]here is no longer a battlefield for Rahim to return to.” The motion cites other statements from Biden, including this from 21 April 2021:

War in Afghanistan was never meant to be a multigenerational undertaking. We were attacked. We went to war with clear goals. We achieved those objectives. Bin Laden is dead, and al Qaeda is degraded in Iraq — in Afghanistan. And it’s time to end the forever war [emphases in original].

Hopes were raised for Rahim when the penultimate Afghan held in Guantanamo, Harun Gul, successfully petitioned for habeas corpus in 2021: it was the first successful petition in ten years. However, the court accepted Harun Gul’s petition because he was a member of Hezb-e Islami, which had signed a peace deal with the Ghani government. It ruled against his second argument that he should be released because the war in Afghanistan was over.

Instead, the judge accepted the US government’s position that, even though Biden had said the war was over, it was not. It accepted that the US’ authority to detain was not limited to the ground war in Afghanistan and that hostilities with al-Qaeda and its associated forces continued in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The judge said the court had to “afford the utmost deference to the Executive’s position on that question.” This was especially so, he said, in the absence of any declaration by Congress terminating the war.

The Kafkaesque contortions involved for the judge in accepting that a war could have been ended and still continue is, unfortunately, par for the course. Judges dealing with habeas petitions from Guantanamo detainees have proved supine in the face of an executive arguing its case on national security grounds.[11]

Indeed, the US Department of Justice has always fought habeas petitions tooth and nail. This has been the case whether the president was Republican or Democrat, and even while Obama and Biden had a declared policy of wanting to shut the camp down. The Department of Justice has argued for using secret evidence as well as ‘testimony’ and ‘confessions’ obtained from torture victims, has presented contradictory, discredited and worthless evidence and used procedural issues to delay the legal process for years. For administrations wanting to close the camp, the obvious way to bypass Congressional blocks on releasing detainees would be to reign in this fight by the Department of Justice against habeas cases.[12] Yet this is not a path that either Obama or Biden chose to take. Looking into the reasons for this, in her second special report on the Afghan experience in Guantanamo, the author concluded that not opposing habeas writs would mean recognising that detaining individuals outside a system of law is wrong.

Muhammad Rahim (centre back, wearing parol) teaching in a refugee school in Peshawar in the 1980s.
Muhammad Rahim (centre back, wearing parol) teaching in a refugee school in Peshawar in the 1980s.

Another anomaly

The strangeness of the Department of Justice and the Periodic Review Board both wanting to keep detaining this one last Afghan despite America’s war in Afghanistan being long over is not the only perplexing aspect of the US stance. They deem Rahim a threat because of his supposed al-Qaeda connections. Yet, as Trump and then Biden pushed to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan, they showed virtually no concern about the actual threat from al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

In talks with the Taleban, both administrations dealt with Taleban who had long and enduring relationships with al-Qaeda – more than a dozen of the movement’s senior officials and commanders, now government ministers, were under United Nations sanctions because of their alleged links to terrorist groups. They include acting minister of interior Sirajuddin Haqqani, who also has a ten million dollar FBI reward on his head which says he “maintains close ties to the Taliban [sic] and al Qaeda … and is a specially designated global terrorist.”

Trump was content to get only the slightest of concessions from the Taleban on al-Qaeda and other foreign internationalist jihadi groups in Afghanistan as part of his February 2020 deal to withdraw US troops (see AAN reporting here). Also, that deal involved Trump agreeing that the Afghan government would release thousands of Taleban prisoners and then his officials pressurising an unwilling President Ashraf Ghani to do so. Yet, during all this time, the supposed risk from Rahim, one prisoner, detained for 16 years away from his homeland, tortured and abused, has apparently been viewed as a greater threat.[13]

Conclusion

Ní Aoláin writes that she “accepts and affirms the positive engagement [from the Biden administration] that enabled her visit.” She recognises that Biden is dealing with a situation he inherited and acknowledges that “[f]ew countries take meaningful steps to address egregious past human rights violations or undertake action to undo the most shocking of harms.”

In response to her very hard-hitting report, the Biden Administration has stressed its welcome of her visit and its openness to scrutiny. It noted that it had:

[M]ade significant progress towards responsibly reducing the detainee population and closing the Guantanamo facility. Ten individuals have been transferred out of Guantanamo since the start of the Biden-Harris Administration – one-quarter of the population we inherited – and we are actively working to find suitable locations for those remaining detainees eligible for transfer.

The far greater number of detainees cleared for transfer by the Periodic Review Board since Biden took office does show his willingness to at least minimise the ‘Guantanamo problem’. Yet the White House also said: “For those few [detainees] not yet eligible for transfer, we conduct periodic reviews to determine whether continued detention under the law of war is warranted.”[14]

The Biden administration continues to assert its right to detain men like Rahim without trial and indefinitely, and under what are actually highly questionable legal grounds.[15] In the case of the last Afghan held in Guantanamo, the US has wanted to keep detaining Rahim even after it pulled all its troops from his homeland and ended its war there. He now awaits his hearing on 15 August, to see if the Board will prove any more favourable to clearing him for transfer than in the past.

Edited by Rachel Reid 

References

References
↑1 See pages 167-169 of Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, ‘Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program’, 12 December 2014.
↑2 Fionnuala Ní Aoláin’s 23-page report, ‘Technical Visit to the United States and Guantánamo Detention Facility by the Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism’ (14 June 2023) is in three parts. The first deals with the victims of the 9/11 attack, part of what Ní Aoláin says is mandated by her “abiding commitment to a human rights-based approach to victims of terrorism as victims of international human rights law and international humanitarian law.” The second deals with the Guantanamo detention facility and the third with resettlement of detainees and reparations.
↑3 At least 15 of the detainees were under-18s. They included two 14-year-old Afghans, Asadullah and Naqibullah, who had been kept and raped by a US-allied, anti-Taleban commander, who created so much mayhem and criminality that the US eventually detained him in Bagram. It sent the two abused boys to Guantanamo, eventually releasing them, with this justification:

Though the detainee may still have some remaining intelligence, it’s been assessed that that information does not outweigh the necessity to remove the juvenile from this current environment and afford him the opportunity to “grow out” of the radical extremism he has been subject to. 

See also ‘Guantánamo’s Children: The Wikileaked Testimonies’, Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas, University of California, Davis, 22 March 22, 2013. See also the New York Times’s “The Guantánamo Docket,” in particular  Asad Ullah, ISN 912, Assessment, 2003, and  Naqib Ullah, ISN 913, Assessment.
↑4 For more on the lack of accountability, see the author’s 2017 report into the civil case against the two psychologists who designed and oversaw the implementation of the CIA torture programme, which detailed cases.
↑5 For Obama’s comments, see Press Conference by the President, 1 August 2014, here. Reading this transcript in retrospect, what is interesting is that a journalist was able to ask a follow-up question, but chose not to.
↑6 The Senate report said:

The summary documents of the CIA’s interrogation emphasized that the primary factors that contributed to Rahim’s unresponsiveness were the interrogation team’s lack of knowledge of Rahim, the decision to use the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques immediately after the short “neutral probe” and subsequent isolation period,… the team’s inability to confront Rahim with incriminating evidence, and the use of multiple improvised interrogation approaches despite the lack of any indication that these approaches might be effective. The summary documents recommended that future CIA interrogations should incorporate rapport-building techniques, social interaction, loss of predictability, and deception to a greater extent. (p167)
↑7 Other detainees may have been held by the CIA briefly, but not for long periods of time at black sites before arriving in Guantanamo.
↑8 Rahim has had lawyers working pro bono on his petitions for habeas corpus, but none previously at Guantanamo. His former lawyer Carlos Warner wrote a castigating description of trying to represent a high-value detainee. He was legally gagged from speaking about most aspects of his case (which would reveal classified information) or even why he considered his client innocent. He said the government could say whatever they liked about Rahim, but he could not even discuss the government’s allegations with his client, let alone tell the outside world why he thought he was innocent. He says to his readers:

Imagine trying to get to the bottom of a bar fight that resulted in a death. I can’t tell my client who was killed or why the Government says he’s involved. I can’t even tell him when the assault occurred or in what bar the assault took place. I certainly cannot interview or cross-examine his accusers. Moreover, I can’t visit the bar or talk to any other witness to the fight. I am also prohibited from speaking with the coroner or any of the investigating officers. Sometimes, the Government will say “we have important evidence about your client regarding our allegation, but we can’t tell you what that evidence is.” Sometimes, the Government just tells the judge without telling or notifying me at all. All of my communications with my client are observed and recorded. All of my legal correspondence is read and inspected by the Government. Guantanamo has been referred to as “Kafka-esque,” and that reference is right. “Catch-22” also aptly describes the legal malaise that is currently called Guantanamo habeas corpus. Nothing in my legal training prepared me for this endeavor.

(‘Navigating a “Legal Black Hole”: The View from Guantanamo Bay’, Akron Law Review, 2014 (pp31-51).
↑9 Harun Gul finally got a lawyer just a few days before a Periodic Review Board hearing in 2016 and a relatively favourable assessment: the Board hinted that if he had had representation earlier, it might have deemed him safe to release. However, he was only cleared for transfer after Trump left office, at his first hearing during the Biden presidency, on 8 October 2021. That same month, on 21 October, Harun Gul also successfully argued that he should be released through a petition for habeas corpus: it was the first successful petition by a Guantanamo detainee in ten years (AAN reporting here).
↑10 “How come they make me admit to things in order to get out?” Rahim wrote to his habeas lawyer on 27 April 2016. “I am an innocent man. Parole comes after a trial, not before. They are holding me because I was tortured. Please give me a fair hearing, with my lawyer.” See the author’s 2021 report, ‘Kafka in Cuba, a Follow-Up Report: Afghans Still in Detention Limbo as Biden Decides What to do with Guantanamo’, p51.
↑11 “Careful judicial fact-finding [in habeas cases],” one 2012 study by the Seton Hall University School of Law found, has been “replaced by judicial deference to the government’s allegations,” with the “government winning every petition.” Following the denial of seven habeas appeals in 2010, The New York Times on 13 June 2012 described the development of “substantive, procedural and evidentiary rules” as “unjustly one-sided in favor of the government.” It said the rejected appeals had made it “devastatingly clear” that the current court system in the US “has no interest in ensuring meaningful habeas review for foreign prisoners.” For more detail on the habeas petitions of some of the last eight Afghans held in Guantanamo, see the author’s special report for AAN, ‘Kafka in Cuba: The Afghan Experience in Guantanamo’, November 2016.
↑12  

This was proposed in a piece for Just Security by Hina Shamsi (Director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project), Rita Siemion (Director, National Security Advocacy at Human Rights First), Scott Roehm (Washington Director, Center for Victims of Torture), Wells Dixon (Senior Staff Attorney, Center for Constitutional Rights), Ron Stief (Executive Director, National Religious Campaign Against Torture), Colleen Kelly (co-founder, September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows), ‘Toward a New Approach to National and Human Security: Close Guantanamo and End Indefinite Detention’, 11 September 2020:

[T]he executive branch can expedite transfers by not opposing detainees’ habeas cases. There is no requirement in law or in practice that the government contest detainees’ habeas petitions. [T]he foreign transfer certification requirements don’t apply when a detainee’s release or transfer is pursuant to the order of a U.S. court or competent tribunal that has jurisdiction over the case.
↑13 The author’s 2021 report, ‘Kafka in Cuba, a Follow-Up Report: Afghans Still in Detention Limbo as Biden Decides What to do with Guantanamo’ looked at why the last eight Afghan detainees had spent so long in Guantanamo:

A fundamental obstacle for these men is that they have been castigated as the ‘worst of the worst’. The phrase, used by US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld in early 2002 and repeated endlessly, created monsters in the public imagination of all the detention camp’s inmates. When Obama took office, and Guantanamo became a political football, the gap between the actual and the perceived – or portrayed – threat posed by the detainees widened yet further; Republican members of Congress who had been unconcerned about transfers suddenly strived to block them after Obama took office. In the absence of any proper scrutiny of allegations and evidence, there has been nothing to reduce these imagined monsters down to size or create a space to deal with them rationally. After scrutinising the files of all eight Afghans featured in this report in-depth, nothing suggested they were especially dangerous individuals. Yet, this is how the US state has treated each one, by default, and without regard for facts or evidence.
↑14 The statement went on to say: “Separately, the military commissions process continues for those detainees subject to criminal prosecution.”
↑15 That assertion that detainees are being held under the law of war is strongly contested, especially given that President Bush decided to house the detainees in Guantanamo so that they would not enjoy rights that might accrue from them being on the US mainland. Obama’s first Special Envoy for Guantanamo Closure, Dan Fried, for example said that: “Guantanamo was neither grounded in the laws of war nor in criminal justice.” His contention was that, “once you have established a system outside of either international or US law, which this was, then it’s very hard to reintegrate it back into a legal framework. (Quote from page 5, Kafka in Cuba, a Follow-Up Report: Afghans Still in Detention Limbo as Biden Decides What to do with Guantanamo). For more on the legal discussion and background, see Chapter 3: Sources of Information and the Shifting Legal Landscape (p16-21) in Kafka in Cuba: The Afghan Experience in Guantanamo.

 

The Last Afghan in Guantanamo: Pressure mounts on US to deal with the remnants of its ‘War on Terror’ 
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The Emergent Taleban-Defined University: Enforcing a top-down reorientation and unquestioning obedience under ‘a war of thoughts’

August 25, 2023

S Reza Kazemi

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Since the takeover around two years ago in August 2021, the Taleban have sought to overhaul and reinvent Afghanistan’s higher education. They have put their affiliates in charge at the ministry and many public universities, created new bodies to promote religious institutions and incorporate them into the higher education system and reshaped curricula with a focus on religious studies. They have undertaken to monitor conduct and imposed strict rules on appearance and behaviour on both male and female students, before banning women from higher education altogether in December 2022. This report, based on research by guest author Said Reza Kazemi* details this steady process of Talebanisation, theocratisation and instrumentalisation, fuelled by the Taleban concept of the fekri jagra, or ‘war of thoughts’, and explores its wide-ranging impact on students, lecturers and staff. It concludes that the Taleban-defined university, where reorientation is enforced from the top and unquestioning obedience is required, has already emerged, but questions about its (near) future are far from settled.
You can preview the report online and download it by clicking the link below.

A close reading of relevant sources and statements indicates that the Taleban believe they are engaged in a fekri jagra, a war of thoughts, which, in their view, has been imposed on Afghanistan, as part of a long historical process. This has sparked a series of swift and radical changes aimed at overhauling and reinventing post-2001 higher education and characterised by the enforcement of a top-down reorientation and unquestioning obedience. The little and fragile space for freedom and diversity that had developed in the period 2001-2021 has thus fast been disappearing in the emergent Taleban-defined university. More urgently, the full ban on women in higher education – and on girls’ education beyond the sixth grade – is rupturing the continuity, sustainability and meaning of all remaining education at any level.

While the Taleban have not dismantled higher education, they are seeking to make it an extension of their movement by theocratising and instrumentalising its structure and curricula and surveilling the people involved – all in the service of rationalising and strengthening the second emirate.

The Taleban authorities will likely continue to entrench this university in the foreseeable future. However, whereas the shape and direction of the changes are clear, questions remain about the (near) future of higher education in the country, including what a fully-fledged and articulated Taleban concept and structure of higher education would look and feel like. Most foundational is the question of what will happen as the Taleban continue their top down reorientation and expect unquestioning obedience in the context of an existing university that still embraces, in some way, both Taleban and non-Taleban.

Edited by Martine van Bijlert 

* Reza Kazemi is a visiting researcher (September 2021-August 2023) of the Philipp Schwartz Initiative of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation hosted at the Institute of Anthropology, Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies, Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg. He previously worked as a researcher at AAN.

You can preview the report online and download it by clicking the link below.

Higher Education Report Final Download

 

 

The Emergent Taleban-Defined University: Enforcing a top-down reorientation and unquestioning obedience under ‘a war of thoughts’
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Amid Taliban Repression, Afghan Media Are a Beacon of Hope

August 25, 2023

 Barry Salaam

United States Institute of Peace

Thursday, August 10, 2023

Since regaining power two years ago, the Taliban have largely discarded Afghanistan’s democratic institutions but have taken a somewhat accommodating, albeit contradictory, approach toward independent media. Instead of banning independent media altogether, they have implemented regulatory restrictions and punitive measures to limit free speech and control the media environment. This policy approach seems to be part of an evolving communication strategy that helped enable the group’s rise to power. Despite all the bad news coming out of Afghanistan, resilient, creative journalists and media outlets provide reason for some guarded optimism. The international community should do what it can to support the media sector, which is essential for advocating for citizen rights and providing an information lifeline to Afghans.

Free Media’s Emergence

The rise of independent media in Afghanistan was one of the most remarkable and celebrated achievements of the post-Taliban democratic era. Once an isolated country with no free press or internet access, Afghanistan quickly embraced the information age. Over the course of a few years, the country became an inspiring model of free media in the region, with unprecedented growth in news, entertainment channels, print publications and online platforms. Before the Taliban takeover, 543 local and national media outlets operated across Afghanistan.

The media also promoted pluralism in a highly fragmented society, drove democratic change and helped to empower women. New constitutional rights enabled marginalized ethnic and religious communities to establish for the first time their own outlets and pursue equal rights and opportunities.

In a culturally diverse society often beset by political turbulence and a compromised rule of law, free media emerged as a powerful tool for challenging corrupt officials and advancing government accountability.

The Taliban’s Evolving Communication Strategy

With the media landscape undergoing significant transformation after 2001, the Taliban began adapting its information strategy, as early as 2005. A notable example of its adaptive approach was the incorporation of visual communication tools in propaganda campaigns, including pictures, drawings, videos and online platforms, which the movement had opposed or banned during its first reign from 1996 to 2001.

In addition, several other distinctive elements characterized the Taliban’s evolving communication strategy, enabling the group to outperform its opponents.

Consistency and Resonance

From the outset, the Taliban framed its war as a jihad to expel foreign “invaders” and establish a Shariah-based Islamic system, replacing the U.S.-backed government. This overarching strategic goal remained consistent throughout the insurgency and was central to the Taliban’s master narrative. In addition, their messaging employed cultural, religious and nationalistic codes and frames such as colonialism, occupation, infidels, religious obligation, martyrdom and sovereignty, among others. These terms were used to draw parallels with the historical victories of Afghans in previous holy wars, further enhancing narrative resonance.

Targeted Messaging

Devising targeted approaches, the group tailored messaging to specific audiences with the aim of achieving specific outcomes. For example, they spread intimidating shabnamah (or night letters) to deter locals from aiding the “infidels” and produced videos of heroic attacks to glorify jihad and ramp up recruitment.

Through media manipulation, the Taliban sought to incite outrage by highlighting culturally sensitive issues like home searches, night raids, civilian casualties and the propagation of Western values. They also exploited people’s grievances around the endemic corruption of the state, and their political alienation, to widen the state-society gap while positioning themselves as potential saviors.

Media Weaponization and Savviness

By 2008, the movement had already developed a complex communications strategy. They utilized traditional means like night letters, religious sermons, poetry and print publications and leveraged modern methods including multilingual websites, cell phones and DVDs.

With the rising popularity of digital media post-2009, the Taliban’s sophisticated approach expanded, using platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and encrypted apps like Telegram and WhatsApp for broader outreach, real-time updates and interaction with the local and foreign media.

With hundreds of aggressive social media accounts, the media-savvy insurgents countered NATO messaging, demonized opponents, threatened critics and projected power.

Through these methods, they pervaded cyberspace and maintained a palpable psychological presence.

Exploiting Weaknesses and Opportunities

Ineffective messaging by the United States and Afghan governments also gave insurgents an advantage. President Hamid Karzai’s calling the Taliban “brothers” and President Ashraf Ghani’s hesitance to call them “enemies” were particularly self-defeating. Washington’s focus on troop withdrawal from 2009 on undermined any appearance of long-term resolve and negated potential gains. These inconsistencies provided rich material for the Taliban to underscore its own resolve.

Premature conciliatory overtures since 2010, including the 2013 opening of a Taliban office in Doha, pushed insurgents into the political limelight. Starting in October 2018, official U.S.-Taliban talks further boosted Taliban legitimacy. Upon securing the landmark withdrawal deal, insurgents astutely entered Afghanistan’s mainstream media and expanded international outreach. The agreement validated the Taliban’s anti-occupation narrative and won them the information war.

Opting For a Controlled Media Environment

The Taliban have strictly controlled non-state media since August 2021. This approach likely stems from the communication strategy and media exploitation skills crucial in their ascent to power.

Early in the insurgency, the Taliban proclaimed that “wars today cannot be won without media,” and to this day, they seem to value the media’s utility as a strategic tool, and a weapon, to promote their narrative and legitimacy.

However, the Taliban’s view of media is solely utilitarian, devoid of respect for democratic values. During the insurgency, they never wavered to threaten, attack or even massacre journalists. Post-takeover, they slashed media freedom using censorship and intimidation.

Yet, the Taliban’s control over independent media is not absolute, a situation potentially shaped by two key considerations. First, pushing for total control might lead to the closure or exile of more independent channels, a scenario the Taliban likely wishes to avoid due to losing their leverage and control. Second, outlets driven into exile have often reemerged with more assertive voices countering the Taliban narrative.

Thus, the Taliban appear to have opted for a relatively accommodating approach, allowing media operations in exchange for enhanced control and self-promotion. Media within the country also understand that to avoid retribution it is necessary to navigate a fine line between objectivity and fair treatment.

This balance presents a conundrum for the Taliban and a potential opportunity for the media to incrementally push for greater freedom. What dynamics may eventually shape a new equilibrium in the media space?

Tightening The Media Noose

Since August 2021, advocacy organizations have reported over 300 incidents against media personnel including violence, imprisonment and surprise raids. Summons, arrests and punitive measures are carried out mainly by the intelligence authorities against local and foreign journalists deemed non-compliant with regulations.

The Taliban have issued multiple decrees, vaguely worded guidelines and verbal instructions drawing ethical and Islamic boundaries for journalists, banning music and entertainment and suppressing news related to citizen protests and resistance forces. These rules also require female journalists to cover their faces and work in segregated spaces.

In a July 2022 decree, Taliban Emir Haibatullah Akhundzada expressly cautioned against criticizing Taliban authorities. Later, in a public tweet, his notorious minister of higher education warned that undermining the emirate, either by speech, pen or action is “punishable by death.”

With no laws governing the free press, authorities across the country have free reign to censor and deal with the media as they see fit. Some provincial officials even demand review and approval of content prior to publication. The suspension of the Republic’s mass media law obstructs legal boundaries, leaving journalists uncertain where to draw the line to avoid reprisals or seek legal protection against persecution.

To control the flow of information, the Taliban heavily scrutinize media content, issue warnings, implement corrective measures and limit access to information deemed harmful to their reign or reputation. They have banned and expelled several popular national and international news services including Hasht-e-Sob daily, Etilat-e-Roz newspapers, Kabul News television, Radio Liberty, BBC and Deutsche Welle.

Media advocacy organizations on the ground report that 40% (200) of media outlets, including 55 TV channels, 109 radio stations, 21 news agencies and 15 newspapers, have been forced to close due to repressive policies and financial struggles. This has led to 60% (4,932) of journalists and media workers losing their jobs. Additionally, 67% (914) of female journalists are out of work, and outlets led by women have dwindled from 54 to 10.

A rapidly contracting economy, aid reduction, cumbersome taxation and the widespread ban on income-generating entertainment shows have compounded the media’s sustainability crisis. Some outlets have reported as much as an 80% drop in their revenues since 2021. Surviving outlets also face a growing capacity deficit due to a lack of experienced journalists and editors, most of whom have left the country.

Emerging Trends and Pushbacks

Still, journalists have resiliently persevered to keep media alive. The continued operation of major national television and radio stations like Tolo, Shamshad, 1TV, Ariana, Killied and Salam Watandar is remarkable. In addition to national outlets, over 30 local televisions and 100 community radio stations operate across Afghanistan. Cable networks that carry foreign news and entertainment channels, including Turkish and Indian, have been largely unaffected by restrictions.

Tolo TV observes World Press Freedom Day with a talk show on Afghan media’s challenges, with active participation from an in-studio audience. (Tolo News)
Tolo TV observes World Press Freedom Day with a talk show on Afghan media’s challenges, with active participation from an in-studio audience. (Tolo News)

Additionally, media remains one of the few select sectors where women are still permitted to work.

Systematic harassment has undeniably led to increased self-censorship and the media cannot dismiss legally binding restrictive edicts. Nonetheless, journalists have time and again ignored potential reprisals and pushed the boundaries by raising critical voices, covering citizen protests and questioning Taliban edicts such as bans on women’s education and work.

Where access to information is denied, media intelligently resort to secondary sources of information, including social media and foreign-based news agencies.

Prominent advocacy organizations like the National Journalists Union, NAI and the Independent Journalists Association are reestablishing their presence. Notably, the Journalists Safety Committee (AJSC) has secured a seat at the Taliban’s media violations commission and has led numerous safety and resiliency training nationwide. AJSC also assisted with the reopening of Voice of Women radio in Badakhshan province in April.

Another exciting trend expected to deter Taliban from further media repression or shutdown is the emergence of digital outlets and advocacy organizations in exile. Many news outlets or reporters forced by Taliban into exile have reemerged with stronger and more critical voices.

The exiled Hasht-e-Sob and Etilat-e-Roz publications are rapidly recovering online audiences. VOA and Radio Azadi may no longer be conveniently accessible on FM networks but they have extended their broadcasts online, as well as on medium and shortwave frequencies, ensuring that they remain relatively accessible.

In addition, a number of prominent journalists have launched new digital, foreign-based outlets including Amu TV, Chashm News, Kabul Now, Farsi Times, Sicht TV and ABN.

On the advocacy side, the Afghanistan Journalists Center, which runs a press freedom tracker, has shifted its base to Belgium, and more entities are emerging across different continents.

Media in exile play a significant role in countering the Taliban’s disinformation campaign and taking the first shot at sensitive news stories, effectively paving the way for further follow-up coverage by local media. There also seems to be information sharing between foreign and local outlets, giving rise to a collaborative, hybrid media approach.

Online platforms continue to play an indispensable role in providing citizens with easier access to information. In addition, digital outlets have allowed audiences to record events and share valuable footage with media for wider public dissemination — a rising trend in citizen journalism.

There are no reliable statistics but de facto authorities have confirmed that at least one-quarter of the population has access to the internet via mobile phones. This corresponds with Meta’s figures that put Facebook users in Afghanistan at roughly seven million.

Pressing Forward

The Taliban’s strategic decision to allow media operations in exchange for enhanced control and self-promotion contrasts sharply with their 1990s rule. This shift provides journalists and the international community a rare chance to advance freedom of expression and push for greater civic space.

To achieve this goal, the international community should provide comprehensive technical and financial support to the media sector, with a particular focus on local media, and those pursuing a hybrid approach.

In addition:

  • It is vital to prioritize the protection and empowerment of female journalists through improved training, resilience building, salary and professional coordination. Local outlets should be incentivized to hire female journalists and produce content related to women’s rights.
  • While pressuring the Taliban to respect free speech, human rights organizations should monitor incidents and advocate for the right of journalists who are mistreated, imprisoned or prosecuted.
  • Local professional unions and associations must be sustained and strengthened in order to defend free speech and advocate for journalists’ rights inside the country.
  • Protecting journalists from intrusive surveillance requires technical support to shield sensitive information and confidential sources. Journalists should also be equipped with encryption tools and VPNs to bypass barriers that restrict access to information.
  • A workable emergency mechanism must be put in place to ensure the identification, sheltering and safe evacuation and resettlement of journalists faced with life-threatening dangers.
  • Thinking ahead on possible internet-related restrictions, it is advisable to engage with tech companies to explore possibilities for continued, seamless public access.

The Taliban are fundamentally opposed to democracy and its underlying values. Noting their relentless rollback of the democratic progress attained over the past two decades, there is little cause for hope in what lies ahead. Nonetheless, it is both pragmatic and wise to protect and enhance what remains of Afghans’ fundamental rights and liberties and push for improved conditions until a more favorable opportunity arises.

Amid Taliban Repression, Afghan Media Are a Beacon of Hope
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Two Years into Taliban Rule, New Shocks Weaken Afghan Economy

August 25, 2023

 BY: William Byrd, Ph.D.

United States Institute of Peace

Thursday, August 10, 2023

The opium ban, falling aid and regime actions against women will exacerbate poverty, worsen hunger and increase outmigration.
The Taliban have done a better job than expected in managing the Afghan economy despite some missteps. But nevertheless, the Afghan economy seems caught in a low-level equilibrium that leaves most Afghans poor, hungry and in need of humanitarian assistance. Moreover, new headwinds threaten to precipitate further economic decline, risking a repeat of the economic free-fall seen in the initial months following the August 2021 Taliban takeover. Much will depend on whether aid declines sharply or gradually, how seriously the opium ban is enforced for a second year during this fall’s planting season, and whether Taliban gender restrictions are tightened, maintained or weakened.

Looking Back at Two Years of Taliban Economic Management

Taliban macroeconomic management has been better than expected, as evidenced by the stable exchange rate, low inflation, effective revenue collection and rising exports. There is no comparison at all with their non-management of the economy during the Taliban’s previous 1996-2001 rule. That regime had no control over the afghani currency and there was hyperinflation; government revenue was negligible; the Afghan economy was largely moribund, especially after the Taliban’s first opium ban in the year 2000; people’s incomes were less than $200 average per-capita; and social indicators such as maternal and child mortality were terrible.

This time around, the Taliban have benefited from learning while facing adversity during their nearly 20 years as an insurgency. For example, they collected significant revenue in competition with the previous government, provided transporters tax receipts to prevent multiple taxation at their various road checkpoints, and issued mining and other permits.

With their unexpectedly rapid takeover, the Taliban inherited functioning government macroeconomic management institutions, namely the Ministry of Finance and the central bank (Da Afghanistan Bank, or DAB). This contrasts sharply with the 1990s, when government institutions had been largely destroyed by years of destructive civil war. Moreover, the Taliban have tried to maintain some capacity in agencies whose work is seen as beneficial for the regime (for example, revenue and budget), while discarding others like justice institutions and the Ministry of Women’s Affairs.

By all indications, the magnitude of corruption has been reduced, particularly in customs where there has been a crackdown on smuggling and bribery, as well as abolition of the separate trade levies previously imposed by the Taliban insurgency. More generally, the stoppage of most aid after August 2021 removed large amounts of money that had been vulnerable to corruption.

Relatedly, they have clamped down on the rampant capital flight that occurred under the Islamic Republic (as much as $5 billion per year or even more), by means of strict enforcement of rules against export of cash as well as tougher regulation of the hawala informal money market. As a result, the Taliban must have built up modest reserves in DAB, and they have held foreign currency auctions to stabilize the afghani.

The Taliban faced enormous macroeconomic problems when they took power. The abrupt cut-off of nearly all aid, amounting to some $8 billion per year (equivalent to around 40 percent of GDP) precipitated a huge economic shock that no country in the world could have managed without severe consequences. The shock was exacerbated by the stoppage of international financial transactions, ongoing collapse of the banking system, existing U.S. and U.N. sanctions against Taliban leaders, and the freezing of Afghanistan’s some $9 billion of foreign exchange reserves. Especially considering the headwinds and problems they faced, Taliban economic management has exceeded expectations.

Afghanistan’s GDP is hard to measure, but it is estimated to have dropped by around 20 percent in the aftermath of August 2021, further increasing hunger and privation in an already very poor country.

After a few months of free-fall, the economy showed signs of stabilizing at a lower level of activity, reflecting in part U.N. cash shipments to pay for humanitarian assistance averaging some $40 million per week that started at the end of 2021, but also Afghan government restrictions against smuggled imports and capital flight, limits on banking transactions to prevent banks from collapsing, tight macroeconomic management, and some adjustment away from the aid- and service-dominated economy.

Most recently there have been some signs of modest economic revival, most notably the 36 percent increase in imports in the first five months of 2023, suggesting that there may be some recovery of demand in the economy. However, the current equilibrium remains fragile, precarious and subject to severe downside risks. Moreover, it is a “famine equilibrium” that leaves most Afghans falling short of their subsistence needs, necessitating large amounts of humanitarian assistance to prevent an actual famine from materializing. U.N. cash shipments, which fund humanitarian programs in the country, reached $1 billion in the first half of 2023, compared to $1.8 billion in all of 2022.

An Authoritarian Regime Making Some Missteps

It must be recognized that the Taliban are focused on regime survival and strengthening, not the welfare of ordinary Afghans. This is not surprising since they came into power through their persistence as an insurgency and their military victory over the previous government — not because of their popularity with the Afghan people. There has been minimal attention to social service delivery or to providing a social safety net for the poor; these areas of governance have been largely ceded to international humanitarian assistance.

Much of what the Taliban have done is understandable as “good practice” for an authoritarian regime. However, the Taliban have made some significant missteps in their management of the economy:

  • The bans on female education and prohibitions against Afghan women working in NGOs and the U.N. will be extremely damaging to Afghanistan’s longer-term economic and social development.
  • They will also accelerate the “brain drain” of educated women and men — that Afghanistan can ill-afford to lose — leaving the country.
  • These restrictions have reduced donors’ appetite to provide continuing humanitarian aid let alone other assistance, probably accelerating declines in aid that were already expected.
  • The Taliban’s effectively implemented opium poppy cultivation ban has resulted in a roughly $1 billion per year loss of income for Afghan rural households.
  • Though effective in the short run, the Taliban’s aggressive revenue collection efforts risk dampening private sector incentives, thereby hindering economic recovery in the future.

Back to Humanitarian Crisis Mode?

The current low-level macroeconomic equilibrium is gravely threatened by two shocks:

  1. Declining humanitarian assistance, which in 2023 is expected to fall by at least $1 billion from last year’s level of $3 billion; and
  2. The Taliban’s successful opium poppy cultivation ban — resulting in something like an 80 percent reduction in acreage, which is depriving rural Afghans of $1 billion in incomes (though trade in opium continues, with associated incomes to large landowners, drug traders, processors and exporters).

These twin economic shocks — likely amounting to a double-digit loss for GDP if the opium ban continues to be enforced — will further worsen poverty and hunger. So, after two winters when humanitarian aid helped prevent the worst-case outcome of widespread famine, Afghanistan looks to be heading into another difficult winter.

As other coping mechanisms for poorer and mid-level households (selling remaining assets, eating less and lower-quality food, eschewing needed health care, in extremis marrying off underage daughters, etc.) become increasingly exhausted, outmigration will remain as the most viable if not the only option for those who can afford its modest costs. In some cases, this will involve entire households, but even more lone males who can seek work in Europe and elsewhere and send back remittances to their families.

International Policy Dilemmas and Options

What can other countries and international agencies do?

  • First, total aid (currently dominated by humanitarian support) should not fall precipitously but rather decline gradually along a predictable glide-path. This will limit further harm to Afghans and avoid another major macroeconomic shock, even though lower aid will have some adverse effects. Beyond slowing reductions in humanitarian aid, World Bank (including Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund) and Asian Development Bank funds could be deployed to help limit and smooth the decline in total aid.
  • Second, there needs to be a move away from humanitarian business as usual — using increasingly limited resources more effectively and in a cost-effective manner. Examples include reducing the size of administrative overheads and the multiplicity of overheads, making more use of the Afghan private sector to deliver aid, cutting back high-cost programs (for example, the cost per life saved of de-mining tends to be much higher than that of basic health and food assistance).
  • Third and related, there needs to be a shift in the composition of aid away from purely humanitarian support in favor of aid that promotes livelihoods and economic activities. There is some flexibility in what specific programs can be implemented under the “humanitarian” label, and such flexibility should be exploited if some donors are reluctant to provide aid except under that label. This money can be given directly to recipients rather than through the Taliban government or their budget.
  • Fourth and also related, aid needs to be better coordinated; a multilateral organization like the World Bank could help in this regard.
  • Fifth, more international engagement on the economy and private sector is needed. This would not entail financial support to the Afghan government but rather things like various forms of assistance to vetted private businesses, third-party monitoring of financial transactions to assess money-laundering risks, discussions on economic policy and macroeconomic management, and the like.
  • Finally, there are no good options for the international response to the Taliban’s opium ban. Particularly if the ban is maintained and at least somewhat seriously enforced for a second year as seems likely, it will grievously harm the Afghan economy, worsen poverty and hunger, not reduce drug use in other countries, perhaps weaken the Taliban (as happened after their 2000 opium ban), and lead to more outmigration. It is also clear that fully offsetting the adverse economic and humanitarian impacts of the ban, requiring an increase in aid of well over $1 billion given the extra costs and overheads associated with aid delivery, would be impossible. Whatever assistance is provided in response to the opium ban must not be for standalone alternative livelihoods projects. Instead, sound rural development aid is needed, even though it will make only a modest difference at best in the short run
Two Years into Taliban Rule, New Shocks Weaken Afghan Economy
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Two Years Under the Taliban: Is Afghanistan a Terrorist Safe Haven Once Again?

August 25, 2023

BY: Asfandyar Mir, Ph.D.

United States Institute of Peace

Tuesday, August 15, 2023

Two years into Taliban rule, the question of whether Afghanistan would once again become a safe haven for international terrorism remains alive. Longstanding fears were affirmed a little over a year ago, when the U.S. government located al-Qaeda leader Aimen al-Zawahiri in Kabul, Afghanistan, before killing him in a drone strike. The fact that the Taliban would bring Zawahiri back to Kabul, despite repeated assurances to U.S. negotiators both before and after the Doha agreement that they had distanced themselves from al-Qaeda, significantly elevated concerns.

However, the drone strike also allowed the Biden administration to argue that it has a workable counterterrorism strategy to mitigate the remaining threat from Afghanistan. Ever since, policymakers seem to draw comfort from the fact that the Taliban, at the very least, appear to be confronting the Islamic State in Afghanistan — with President Biden even suggesting, in passing, that the Taliban are helping contain terrorist threats from the country.

So, where exactly does the terrorism threat stand on the second anniversary of Taliban rule, and what is the Taliban’s role in incubating and checking various terrorist groups? What explains the Taliban’s choices? And what are the implications of the Taliban’s posture and the threat picture for U.S. counterterrorism policy?

The Threat Picture in Afghanistan

Terrorist groups in Afghanistan fall into two categories: those allied with the Taliban and those opposed to the Taliban. Among the Taliban’s allies are al-Qaeda, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), and a number of Central Asian jihadis. The main group of concern that’s opposed to the Taliban is the Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K).

In the first year of Taliban rule, al-Qaeda began to rear its head in Afghanistan. The group started messaging more actively. Its then-leader Zawahiri issued more statements than he had in a long time, with some inciting violence. Zawahiri’s presence in Kabul, Afghanistan, marked the peak of al-Qaeda’s post-takeover activity.

However, since then, al-Qaeda has been relatively subdued, even remaining silent about the killing of its leader as reports surfaced that the group appointed Saif al-Adl to succeed Zawahiri. Last week, in the most significant incitement of violence by the group over the last year, al-Qaeda central leadership issued threats against Sweden and Denmark, calling for the targeting of their embassies across the world. In a recently declassified report, the U.S. intelligence community assessed that al-Qaeda lacks the capability to pose a threat to the United States through 2024.

Compared to al-Qaeda’s central leadership, its South Asia affiliate, AQIS, was more active in messaging and seeking support for jihadist causes, in particular against India. Yet even AQIS hasn’t been complicit in any incidents of violence. There are reports that AQIS, as well as perhaps al-Qaeda central leadership in country, is now being handled by a department responsible for foreign fighters within the Taliban’s intelligence agency, the GDI.

In contrast to al-Qaeda, the TTP — with a presence of thousands of fighters across eastern Afghanistan — vigorously expanded and escalated its operations against Pakistan, killing hundreds of Pakistani security forces personnel and even some civilians. The group appeared to be easily marshalling material resources, from weapons to recruits, from its safe havens in Afghanistan, including some Afghan Taliban fighters.

Among Central Asian jihadis, Tajikistan-focused jihadis that are part of the Jamaat Ansarullah attempted cross-border infiltration and attacks, while the Turkistan Islamic Party also remained in the country.

As for ISIS-K, the group’s overall violence dropped over the last year and it also failed to expand its territorial presence, which was a concern when the Taliban first came to power. The Taliban have been working to neutralize ISIS-K and successfully eliminated some of its leaders this year, potentially including a commander involved in the attack at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul during the evacuation in August 2021.

However, ISIS-K still managed to conduct some high-profile attacks, including killing two Taliban provincial governors, as well as attacks in neighboring Pakistan and Iran. It has also demonstrated signs of integration into a strong transnational network, with reports that the group is receiving funding and guidance from ISIS in Iraq, Syria and Somalia and providing direction to operatives in Maldives. The group appears to regularly transmit funds for plotting activities, with indications of active and foiled plots. While there were reports of disruptions in ISIS-K propaganda, recent releases by the group suggest that its propaganda is back on track.

Taliban Policy Toward International Terrorists

On the face of it, the Taliban insist they are committed to denying the use of their territory by terrorist groups against other countries. However, closer examination reveals that the Taliban’s policy toward militants has three main facets: enablement, restrictions and crackdown.

The Taliban enable various militant groups by providing them continued haven and safety within the country. The Taliban also do not restrict the movement of at least some of these militants inside the country. Moreover, the Taliban provide welfare payments and access to weaponry and ammunition to allied groups, among other forms of material support.

Yet this enablement often comes with certain restrictions. For instance, the Taliban seem to have asked al-Qaeda to not undertake attacks against the United States and its allies, as indicated by both U.S. intelligence assessments and al-Qaeda’s own messaging. Additionally, the Taliban prevent groups within the country from disclosing their locations in their propaganda. This has led to AQIS releasing written materials without accompanying videos. The TTP also denies being based in Afghanistan.

More recently, the Taliban have attempted to discourage their own fighters from joining foreign jihadist groups. The extent to which the Taliban can exert actual control over this complex militant environment remains unclear, but indications suggest that the Taliban have a formal apparatus as part of the GDI to manage foreign fighters within the country.

Against ISIS-K, the Taliban’s crackdown seems to have at least three different verticals: targeting high-value targets such as top ISIS-K leaders; a large-scale counterintelligence campaign within the Taliban’s ranks in search of insiders working for ISIS-K; and punishing segments of populations perceived to be aligned with ISIS-K, such as the Salafi population in the east and north of the country. This campaign seems to be spearheaded by Taliban’s GDI with the involvement of forces from the Ministry of Defense as well.

What explains the terrorism threats and the Taliban’s policy?

Terror groups in Afghanistan appear to remain resolved to long-term campaigns against their respective adversaries. The TTP appears to be moving most aggressively, building up its organization and expanding, whereas others, like al-Qaeda, appear circumspect.

Some, including U.S. intelligence analysis, attribute the cautious approach of al-Qaeda to capacity limitations rooted in organizational weakness. But in Afghanistan’s highly permissive environment, capability buildup for most militants, including al-Qaeda, isn’t a challenge so long as they don’t directly contest the Taliban. A more likely explanation is that Taliban allied terrorist groups are working within the parameters laid down for them by the Taliban. If any group appears to be lower capacity and not rapidly building up organizational strength, most likely that is by choice, perhaps in deference to the Taliban.

When it comes to the Taliban, some analysts suggest that the Taliban have initiated a long and slow process of reining in militants. Others say that the Taliban perhaps lack the capacity to take on some of their allied militants and also fear provoking a backlash. A more plausible explanation is that the Taliban retain their longstanding political desire to be a host to foreign jihadists who are dissidents in their own countries, as well as a supporter of jihadist campaigns internationally — especially in Pakistan. The Taliban chief Hibatullah Akhundzada has spoken about a long, enduring ideological battle in general and with the Western world in particular. He has also spoken negatively about Pakistan’s political system.

At the same time, the Taliban are also attempting to strike a delicate balance between fulfilling their jihadist ambitions as well as obligations to jihadist brethren on one hand and restraining their activities for geopolitical ends on the other. This restraint seems to be intended to avoid jeopardizing their own regime’s survival due to potential actions outside powers can take, including by forging an international consensus and military action against them.

In the same vein, the Taliban’s crackdown against ISIS-K is rooted in self-preservation. The Taliban see ISIS-K as an implacable foe and the main opposition group that’s able to make political and religious appeals with the most direct potential to weaken the Taliban internally. Thus, the Taliban seek to forcefully counter it.

Implications for U.S. Policy

Current terrorism activity traceable to Afghanistan — and the Taliban’s aid and support for terrorists — falls short of the worst-case scenario from a U.S. policy standpoint: There hasn’t been a major attack in the United States; al-Qaeda or ISIS-K haven’t opened largescale training camps in the country; and the Taliban’s words and select deeds, like restraining al-Qaeda from attacks, are an improvement on the Taliban posture the last time they were in power.

As for the terrorist groups that are thriving under the Taliban, like the TTP, policymakers have reason to believe that they are not directly America’s problem — at least until they begin to seriously destabilize Pakistan and threaten the security of its nuclear weapons or demonstrate an intent to target the United States. The Taliban’s continued and forceful targeting of ISIS-K is also a favorable outcome. But despite some behind the scenes exchanges between the United States and the Taliban, it doesn’t appear to be a function of any incentive offered by the United States or the international community. The Taliban’s own threat perception motivates them to go after ISIS-K. And their decision to somewhat restrict al-Qaeda seems to be a result of the threat of U.S. targeting and diplomatic pressure — thereby constituting a case of deterrence.

Yet the distance between the Taliban’s stated position of preventing Afghanistan’s territory from being a threat to other countries and their actual policy of supporting several terrorist groups should be concerning. Whether the benefits accrued by terrorist groups that are not America’s immediate problem will begin to spillover or offer opportunities for terrorist groups that are of concern to the United States, such as al-Qaeda and ISIS-K, is unclear and should be a focus of counterterrorism strategists. It is also not clear that the Taliban’s ongoing campaign against ISIS-K will effectively degrade the group, especially when they are resorting to indiscriminate tactics against the country’s Salafi population.

Washington should communicate to the Taliban through a dedicated intelligence channel — as well as through shows of force when necessary — that in case of any attacks on the United States or core U.S. interests by the Taliban’s allied terrorist groups, the protections they have under the Doha agreement will go away and major consequences will follow. The channel should also be used to convey concerns and explore the possibility of exchanges on shared threats.

The United States should maintain the international coalition of withholding full normalization of ties with the Taliban and other terrorism-related sanctions until there is demonstrable proof that terrorist groups are being denied safe haven in Afghanistan. To reinforce the over-the-horizon posture, the United States should beef up counterterrorism-specific intelligence analysis capabilities consisting of analysts, linguists and screeners available to the military while also expanding the Rewards for Justice program to generate leads. The terror landscape in Afghanistan remains highly uncertain and dynamic, requiring significant vigilance.

Two Years Under the Taliban: Is Afghanistan a Terrorist Safe Haven Once Again?
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Don’t shut the door on Afghans. The people deserve connectivity and all its hope and promise

August 25, 2023

Nicola Gordon-Smith

The Guardian
Mon 14 Aug 2023

Western officials like me watched in despair two years ago on this day when the Taliban dramatically seized back control of Afghanistan, 20 years after the US-led invasion, toppling their regime in Kabul.

The Afghan people, especially women and girls, faced the new and grim reality of their lives dictated by ideologues and the deprivation of hard won freedoms during the two decades of west-backed fragile democracy. Documentaries detailing those dramatic days of the August 2021 fall of Kabul to the Taliban will soon be playing on our screens, bringing those shocking events back to the front of our minds.

As a former Australian ambassador to Afghanistan, I, like many colleagues, received calls, texts and emails from Afghans I had known and worked with, desperate for information, advice and help as the Taliban drew closer. Through a US-led effort large numbers of Afghans, especially those who had worked with western authorities, were evacuated from Kabul in a massive airlift.

Many still remain in hiding there including those in desperate wait to join their loved ones here in Australia.

I have not been able to delete the chain of messages from a special co-worker who tried again and again to reach the Kabul airport during the early days of the Taliban takeover. She texted as she negotiated her way through Taliban roadblocks, skirting mobs on the streets, protecting her young children from the threat of violent extremists, including those who launched a suicide bomb attack outside the Kabul airport, tragically taking the lives of 13 members of the US military and over 180 Afghan citizens.

My friend managed to find other people she knew. Sick with fear, they scaled barriers, squeezed through fences, and hid as darkness fell before retreating home to try again. After several days’ of this ordeal, they forded a sewage-filled channel, wading waist deep, to reach western soldiers protecting the airport perimeter. My friend and her colleagues managed to demonstrate their connection to Australia and were able to contact officials who helped them.

Let’s not abandon Afghans under the Taliban

Now, two years on, the international community is still conflicted about how to approach the country and the Taliban administration.

Some have called for rapprochement for the sake of the Afghan people, but significant parts of the western world remain steadfast in supporting isolation of the Taliban’s Afghanistan.

UN secretary general António Guterres has said that now is not the right time to engage with the Taliban. When will be the right time? The Taliban is a terrible regime, but it is important to differentiate between political isolation of the Taliban regime and the potential abandonment of about 40 million Afghan civilians.

Afghan people are already dealing with the day to day realities of Taliban rule. I cannot know what has happened to many of the people, especially the women – professional women, students, young and not so young – who I met in Kabul and in the provinces when I served there. Those people depend on the international community considering their welfare as separate from their current political leadership.

They need support beyond simple humanitarian assistance – they need investment, essential services and support for economic growth, in spite of their challenging conditions.

In order to know what might be possible, including what could be the best way to see Afghan girls back in schools, it will be necessary to have some engagement with the Taliban.

One way the international community can support Afghanistan is to ensure that Afghan civilians feel connected with the rest of the world. Internet access in Afghanistan is extremely limited, with reportedly only a quarter of men and about 6% of women able to access basic internet services. In an increasingly digital world, Afghans need connectivity.

It is the responsibility of the international community to make sure that Afghans, especially women and girls who are now deprived of basic rights and freedoms, are connected through adequate access to the internet. We must not shut the digital door on the Afghan people.

While Australia managed to get many locally employed Afghans and their immediate family out, many family members remain behind. And that is very hard for those people, who are experiencing fear and anxiety being separated from family members, loved ones. The issue of refugees requires regional approaches, and global. It is not simple, there are many aspects of domestic and international policy involved. It’s about people – it matters and it’s very difficult.

If we continue to abandon Afghanistan under the Taliban with the humanitarian crisis and climate change wreaking havoc there, things will get worse.

More people will become more desperate and will feel driven to leave. They’ll move first into the neighbouring countries where they can cross over the border and then they’ll go further, wider. That movement will bring instability and uncertainty, and increased risk.

As the anniversary of those extraordinary August 2021 events approaches the international community should recognise that the people of Afghanistan deserve connectivity and all its hope and promise.

  • Nicola Gordon-Smith is a former Australian diplomat. She served as ambassador to Afghanistan from 2018-2019 and head of the taskforce for Australia’s Afghanistan assisted departure team

Don’t shut the door on Afghans. The people deserve connectivity and all its hope and promise
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