NPR’s Sacha Pfeiffer talks to security and counter-terrorism Asfandyar Mir about how instability in the Taliban’s Afghanistan has spilled into Pakistan, after a suicide bombing that killeddozens.
SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
Funeral services were held today in Pakistan, which is reeling from a suicide bombing on Sunday that left 50 dead and hundreds more injured. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack. It targeted a rally for a Pakistani political party called JUI-F.
ASFANDYAR MIR: JUI-F has been an ally to the Taliban.
PFEIFFER: Asfandyar Mir specializes in South Asia and counterterrorism for the United States Institute of Peace. He says the attack was probably motivated by JUI-F’s alignment with the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan.
MIR: There are reports that some members of JUI-F have, in fact, directly supported the Taliban’s campaign against the Islamic State across the borders.
PFEIFFER: I spoke with Mir earlier today, and he said Pakistan’s growing violence and instability are linked to the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in 2021.
MIR: I think before the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021, relative peace and calm had been restored to Pakistan. There was much less insecurity in the country. But we’ve seen a steady rise since the Taliban’s takeover. Anti-Pakistan militants have found haven in Afghanistan, and they have been carrying out cross-border attacks. This attack, however, has been carried out by a group that the Taliban seek to fight – Islamic State Khorasan Province, which has claimed this attack. Look. These groups are trying to carve out space for themselves. So put simply, competition among militants is also contributing to this escalation that we see.
PFEIFFER: And it is a sad, terrible example of how one country being destabilized can destabilize other countries around it.
MIR: Right. That was a concern in the lead-up to the Taliban’s takeover and the U.S. withdrawal from the region. And what we’re seeing is that the first country to be affected by the insecurity that is sort of emanating from Taliban’s Afghanistan is, in fact, Pakistan.
PFEIFFER: There is also an election in Pakistan this fall. Any possible connection between the election and the campaigns and the suicide bombing?
MIR: I think that’s a possibility as well. JUI-F is one of the political parties, the religious political parties that have actively participated in elections. But in general, with the election season now looming in Pakistan, I’d say this attack – there a significant concerns that we might see more violence against political parties, not limited just to JUI-F.
PFEIFFER: How would you describe the overall political environment now in Pakistan? And then do you think that this bombing could have any impact on the political atmosphere?
MIR: So Pakistan has been reeling from multiple crises this past year. There’s been a major economic problem. Pakistan has been teetering on the cusp of a financial default. It barely averted that by signing an agreement with the IMF. There have been political challenges. There’s a lot of political polarization. And then, of course, this terrorism problem, which has been surging. So, you know, this attack increases the stakes of all of these crises because there is a concern that all these crises could come to fuse with one another and metastasize into something much bigger, more troubling, both for the country and its people, as well as for the broader region and the world.
PFEIFFER: Asfandyar Mir is with the United States Institute of Peace. Thank you very much.
MIR: Thanks for having me on.
How a suicide bombing in Pakistan shows spillover effect from Taliban’s Afghanistan
Despite publicly claiming to welcome international aid, the Taleban government has exercised a growing influence over humanitarian operations within Afghanistan at both national and local levels. This includes bans on women working for NGOs and the United Nations and, more recently, an order to hand over all internationally funded education projects to the Ministry of Education. These more high-profile national orders have been issued alongside hurdles and increasing suspicion at the local level, from demands for beneficiary lists to the detention of aid workers. In this report, Sabawoon Samim* and Ashley Jackson** look at the factors driving these restrictions on aid delivery and the dynamics that shape Taleban attitudes toward aid and aid workers.
You can preview the report online and download it by clicking the link below.
After assuming power in August 2021, the Taleban government was initially eager to reassure the United Nations and NGOs that they could continue aid operations. First impressions were of greater access, not surprising given that the establishment of the Islamic Emirate also represented, largely, an end to hostilities and greater security for aid workers. Nearly two years on, the Islamic Emirate has introduced restrictions on a number of issues affecting how aid is provided and by whom.
These restrictions ranged from limitations on female participation in aid work to demands for information about aid workers and aid recipients. This peaked with the bans on Afghan women working for NGOs in December 2022 and the UN in April 2023. At the same time, aid workers have reported increasing attempts by local officials to influence who receives aid, who is hired to work on aid projects and how aid projects are carried out.
The Taleban’s attitude toward aid is complicated. On the one hand, aid operations are vital to delivering certain services such as health and education and they employ many Afghans. Foreign aid has been integral to keeping the economy afloat, with UN shipments of cash supporting the aid effort, injecting liquidity into the economy, stabilising the currency and keeping inflation in check. On the other hand, many government officials are deeply suspicious of aid actors and the motives of most donors, who have so far refused to recognise their government. While the government wants aid, it also wants to influence how it is spent and programmed.
This report delves into Taleban views of aid and the factors driving their suspicion and hostility, starting with exploring the roots of Taleban suspicion and distrust of aid and subsequently heads to their concerns of corruption within aid actors. The report then assesses the consequences of this suspicion and how and why the Taleban want to regulate aid, explains the existing misunderstanding between the Emirate and aid workers and looks back at the missed opportunities early on after the takeover to influence Taleban attitudes more positively toward aid.
* Sabawoon Samim is a Kabul-based researcher whose work focuses on the Taleban, local governance and rural society.
**Ashley Jackson is co-director of the Centre on Armed Groups and author of ‘Negotiating Survival: Civilian-Insurgent Relations under the Taliban’, Hurst & Co, 2021.
Edited by Kate Clark
You can preview the report online and download it by clicking the link below.
The Taliban continues to claim that there are no foreign terror groups operating inside Afghanistan, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. The latest denial came this week when the Taliban was pressed about the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan (TTP), which shelters inside of Afghanistan while it wages a deadly insurgency inside Pakistan.
In response to Pakistan’s Defense Minister Khawaja Asif recent accusation that the Afghan “is not abiding by the Doha Agreement” and “terrorists who shed the blood of Pakistanis can find refuge on Afghan soil,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said that Afghanistan “is not used against Pakistan and Pakistan is a brother and Muslim country.”
Asif referred to the defunct Doha Agreement, in which the U.S. agreed to leave Afghanistan in exchange for nebulous and unenforceable promises from the Taliban. Under the agreement, the Taliban said it would “prevent any group or individual, including Al Qaeda, from using the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies.” [See LWJ report, Analysis: Taliban leader declares victory after U.S. agrees to withdrawal deal.]
Mujahid responded by saying that the Taliban “signed the Doha agreement with America,” implying that Pakistan was exempted, and perhaps is not a U.S. ally.
The Taliban, of course, has lied about not allowing Afghanistan to be used as a base for foreign terror groups. That was made fact on July 31, 2022, when the U.S. killed Al Qaeda emir Ayman al Zawahiri in a safe house in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. Zawahiri was sheltered by a subordinate of Sirajuddin Haqqani, the Taliban’s Interior Minister and one of the group’s two deputy emirs.
The Taliban has lied about Al Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan for the past two decades, claiming the group’s members left after the U.S. invasion in 2001. The Taliban has maintained this lie even as both Al Qaeda and the Taliban has admitted that top leaders of the group have been killed in the country since then.
In the past, the Taliban has also attempted to assure the U.S. that Al Qaeda leaders based in the country were no threat to the U.S. As the 9/11 Commission found, the Taliban told an American diplomat in April 1998 that it didn’t know where Osama bin Laden was and, in any event, he wasn’t a threat to the United States. Four months later, on Aug. 7, 1998, Al Qaeda operatives drove two truck bombs into the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. [See LWJ report, The Taliban promises China it won’t allow terrorists to use Afghanistan as launching pad.]
The TTP’s presence in Afghanistan is undeniable. Thousands of TTP fighters maneuver in southern and eastern Afghanistan, and the group played a key role in the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in the summer of 2021. In a 2020 video released by the TTP that celebrated its second emir, Hakeemullah Mehsud, the TTP admitted that both he and his predecessor, Baitullah Mehsud, fought alongside the Afghan Taliban in Afghanistan. The video stated that TTP’s men fought alongside the Afghan Taliban in Khost, Paktika, Paktia, Nangarhar, and Helmand.
In the mid-2000s, there were numerous reports of bodies of slain Pakistani Taliban fighters being brought back from Afghanistan to be buried. Faqir Mohammad, the former deputy emir of the TTP, was captured in Afghanistan in 2013 and freed after Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in Aug. 2021. The U.S. military struck a TTP training camp in eastern Afghanistan in 2018. After the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Afghan Taliban invited the TTP and the Pakistani government to Kabul to broker a ceasefire.
The ties between the TTP and the Afghan Taliban are also undeniable. The TTP’s emir has sworn allegiance to the leader of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Noor Wali Mehsud, the emir of the TTP, has said that his group “is a branch of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.”
The latest report on Afghanistan by the United Nations Security Council’s Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team, which was released on June 9, noted that Afghan Taliban is directly sheltering, supporting, and training the TTP with the help of Al Qaeda. TTP fighters are training at a camp in Kunar province run by Al Qaeda. The UN estimated that more than 4,000 TTP fighters, commanders and leaders are sheltering in Afghanistan.
The Afghan Taliban continues to lie about TTP’s presence in an effort to obscure its relations with foreign terror groups, even if there is evidence to the contrary in plain sight.
Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD’s Long War Journal.
After the Taleban came to power in August 2021, the flow of international funds into the country that helped prop up the economy declined precipitously, and a significant number of people lost their jobs. Women, facing new legal restrictions on work from the Islamic Emirate, have been hit disproportionately hard by unemployment. With few options available to them, an increasing number of women, especially widows and single heads of household, have taken to selling goods from handcarts in an effort to earn a living. AAN’s Sayed Asadullah Sadat has heard from three female street vendors. Their arresting accounts of how the lack of paid work or forced unemployment, driven by the Emirate’s mounting restrictions on women working outside the home, have pushed them into joining the ranks of their male counterparts as street pedlars in Kabul.
When the Taleban took power, they told the tens of thousands of women who worked for the government to stay at home.[1] The Emirate continued to pay these women. 26-year-old Nilofar was one of those to lose her government job. She said that the Emirate eventually stopped paying her salary. Faced with the responsibility of supporting her family of 10 – her two children, disabled husband and his father and four sisters, she took to street peddling to support the family.
Things took a turn for the worse for our family when my husband, who was in the military, lost both his legs and damaged his spine on the battlefield. Money-wise, we had to tighten our belts, but back then, I was working for the government and my salary was enough to keep us going. After the Taleban came to power, I lost my job. They kept paying my salary for a while, but eventually stopped paying me.
I used some of my savings to buy a karachi [handcart]. I sold soda, cigarettes and cold water, but my husband’s injuries required medical attention, so I had to sell the handcart to pay for his treatment. After that, I started selling ice cream. The company gave me the handcart and I get a percentage of what I sell – 2 afghanis [about two and a half US cents] for every small ice cream cone, which sells for 10 afghanis [12 US cents] and 5 afghanis [about five and a half US cents] for the large ones, which go for 20 afghanis [24 US cents]. It comes out at 100 to 200 afghanis [1.17 to 2.33 US dollars] a day. That is enough to pay for our basic needs, including rent and utilities.
Life is hard for a woman in this country and for women street peddlers, it’s doubly hard. We have to endure street harassment which is an unfortunate pastime of some Afghan men. They say and do disgusting things without a second thought.
The Taleban make it difficult for me to work. In the early days, they wouldn’t let me work. They kept telling me that I couldn’t do this work without a mahram. Eventually, a nice Taleb agreed to come to my home and see the situation for himself. He saw the house full of women, my elderly father-in-law and my bedridden husband for himself and helped me get official permission to sell my ice cream. He cautioned me to observe the hijab and stay in one place, but I have to move around. People are poorer these days, they don’t have enough money for luxuries like ice cream and I have to keep moving to crowded locations in search of customers. It’s a game of cat and mouse, evading the Talebs so I can sell my ice cream. Some of them are nice and when I explain my situation, they let me be, but there are those who have no sympathy for my situation at all, they make me move on and leave the area.
So this is how I spend my days, peddling ice cream from Kart-e Parwan to Shahr-e Naw and Wazir Akbar Khan and sometimes all the way to the airport. At the end of the day, I go back to the ice cream company, turn over that day’s earnings and they give me my share every day. I leave the karachi at the company and they fill it overnight with ice cream for me to sell the next day.
I take my meagre earnings and rush home. I pick up some bread along the way. Sometimes when I have the money, I get some vegetables or yoghurt, but I’m worried about the winter when people don’t buy ice cream.
Another Kabuli, 35-year-old Leilma, supports her two daughters and infant son by selling socks and masks in the west of the city. She said she had lost her stock several times after the Taleban confiscated her karachi because she was selling on a main road without a permit from the municipality.
I used to work for a private company as a cook. My husband worked too. We didn’t have an extravagant life, but we had enough money to live a good life and our children were in school. But after the Taleban took over, the economy went bad, and both my husband and I lost our jobs. Last year, after looking for a job in Afghanistan for over a year, my husband went to Iran in search of work. He was caught by the police in Iran and spent some time in jail. Finally, with the help of some friends, he was released. He has a job now, but everything is so expensive in Iran and he can’t send us much money. So it’s up to me to support the family.
I looked for work too, but there were no jobs for women. Finally, I decided to buy a karachi with the money I had left. I bought socks and masks from the Mandawi [Kabul’s central open-air market]. Now, I spend all day hawking my socks and masks. I make 2 afghanis [about two and a half US cents] in profit for every mask I sell and 5 afghanis [about five and a half US cents] for a pair of socks. People aren’t buying masks so much anymore, so I don’t make much money. Most days, I go home without enough money to even buy bread for my children.
My infant son is now malnourished. I heard some organisations give people food and treat malnourished children, but we haven’t received anything and I don’t know where to go to get help. We don’t have a man at home to follow up on these things and find the offices and I don’t have time to do it myself. I can’t miss time from work because every hour I’m not on the street is money lost.
Every day is like an obstacle course. I have to keep on the move because the municipality has rules about street peddlers staying in one place. The Taleban are always bothering me and telling me to move on. Sometimes, they confiscate my karachi and I have to go to the police station to get it back. When I do get it back, my stock is missing and I have to find the money to buy more things to sell. They made me sign a paper several times promising I would not sell on the main roads, but I don’t have a choice; there is no footfall and no customers on the side streets.
48-year-old Maryam has been her family’s sole breadwinner since her husband was killed by a suicide attacker several years ago. Her older daughters used to help her, but she finally decided to leave them at home to protect them from attention from the Taleban and street harassment.
I used to have a proper job working for an international organisation, but after the Republic fell, I lost it and couldn’t find another one. Now, they say women can’t work in offices anymore. I’m a widow with six daughters and a son. It’s up to me to feed my family. There is no one else to provide for us. So, I borrowed money from a relative, bought a karachi and started selling vegetables and greens on the street. At first, my eldest daughters would come along to help me, but they attracted too much attention and we were constantly harassed by men on the street. I finally decided to leave them at home and go it alone. I’m older and I don’t get harassed as much.
Most people are friendly and respectful, but there are always those few bad apples who say off-colour or hurtful things. What can I say? It’s the lot of women on the streets of Kabul. We hear a thousand and one unpleasant things every day. We have to tolerate it; there is no other way. Sadly, this is our culture. When you’re down, people look down on you.
Some Taleban treat me well, but most think women should not be working outside the house and definitely not as street peddlers where all the men can see us. They stop and tell me that I’m not allowed to operate a karachi on the street among non-mahrams [men who are not close relatives]. But I try to meet all obstacles head-on and find a way to get past them. What else can I do? I have to feed my family.
Life is getting more difficult every day. I wish the Taleban would let women work for the government or foreign organisations. Many women don’t have a husband to provide for them and have to find ways to provide for their children. If I could get a job, I could make as much as 5,000 afghanis a month [58 USD] – a living wage. I’m ready to do any kind of work, cooking, cleaning, anything really. I wish I had enough money to start a small business at home and put my girls to work. But I have borrowed money from everyone I know and no one will lend me any more money because they don’t think I can pay them back.
I earn about 150 to 200 afghanis [1.75 to 2.30 USD] a day; if I work every day, it’s enough to meet our expenses. But sometimes, when business is bad or when I’m prevented from selling by the Taleban, I don’t make enough money and we have trouble making ends meet. If I get sick, that’s one day’s earnings gone. Some days, I can’t afford to buy much stock from the vegetable market because the prices have shot up overnight. Still, I have to keep trying. I have no other choice. I’m two months behind on rent and the landlord has been hassling me. The rent is 3,000 afghanis [35 USD] and I don’t know how I’m going to find the money to pay him. I stay up nights worrying that we will end up without a roof over our heads.
At the end of the day, I take a look at what’s left on my cart. Some things will keep for another day, but people buy only fresh produce, so I take the wilted greens and rotten vegetables home and we eat them ourselves. It eats into my profits, but it keeps food on the table and keeps my losses to a minimum.
During the Republic, my husband and I had so much hope for our daughters. They were all in school and we helped them with their homework. We thought they would grow up educated, get office jobs and support us in our old age. Now that future seems like an impossible dream. I don’t know what to do. Where should I raise my voice to ask for help? There is no one to hear us.
Edited by Roxanna Shapour
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Shortly after the Taleban takeover women in the civil service were told to stay home until further notice. Over the ensuing months more rules and decrees were introduced preventing women from working in December 2022 for NGOs and eventually in April 2023 for the UN. Some working in foreign embassies have also been hit by this ban. Most recently, in July 2023, the Emirate ordered all beauty parlors to shut down, closing off one of the last all-female income sources for women in Afghanistan.
REVISIONS:
This article was last updated on 23 Jul 2023
The Daily Hustle: Women take to street peddling to feed their families
The decrees, edicts and instructions of Taleban supreme leader Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, from 2016, when he became leader, to May 2023, have been published. They make fascinating reading, tracing some of what the leadership felt was important to ban, make obligatory, organise or administer during the insurgency and since recapturing power. Some themes are repeated – land and land-grabbing, administrative corruption and treatment of prisoners, including using torture without a court order. Several orders enjoin Taleban fighters to good behaviour, such as not letting hair grow below the shoulders, not using profanities and avoiding cronyism and ethnocentrism. Alongside AAN’s English translation of the decrees, which can be found in the Resources section of our website, Kate Clark has been delving into their substance to see what they tell us about the Taleban’s leader and the Islamic Emirate.
65 decrees, edicts and instructions from Mullah Hibatullah have been published in the Official Gazette (announcement here). The original orders in Dari and Pashto, as well as an unofficial English translation by AAN are available in the Resources section of the AAN website.A list of the orders (brief title and number) can also be found here.
A forthcoming report on Taleban publications will examine, a book by their Chief Justice, Abdul Hakim Haqqani, “Al-Emarat al-Islamiya wa Nidhamuha” (The Islamic Emirate and its System of Governance), which may be the fullest and most authoritative account yet of the Taleban’s vision of governance.
Ruling by decree is nothing new. The Islamic Republic’s presidents, Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani, and before them, the first Taleban amir, Mullah Omar, also issued decrees and edicts which had the force of law. According to the 2004 Constitution of the Islamic Republic, the National Assembly, with its two houses, was the highest legislative organ in the country (the cabinet could also suggest laws to MPs). The president could issue decrees of two types: administrative (regulatory) and legislative only in emergencies and which were supposed to be temporary and needed parliamentary approval (if MPs voted a decree down, it would be rescinded). The cabinet could also issue regulations, and ministries could issue policy documents, such as action plans and other administrative documents, without the need for approval by the cabinet or parliament.”
The Islamic Emirate’s legislative process is far less clear and there is far less literature on its nature and organisation. Existing literature suggests that among the Emirate’s key attributes are that “all branches of government are subject to the authority of the emir” and that “basic rights are defined/limited by Sharia as interpreted by the emir/leadership” (see this USIP report).
Hibatullah is the highest authority in the Emirate, and his orders are the law. Under the Emirate, there is no parliament and legislative, executive and judicial powers are the exclusive purview of the amir. The 2004 constitution has apparently been suspended (according to UNAMA, quoting the acting Deputy Minister of Justice on 22 September 2022 in which he said it was unnecessary (see TOLO News, “Officials: Afghanistan Does Not Need a Constitution”, quoted in UNAMA’s May 2023 report “Corporal Punishment and the Death Penalty in Afghanistan” p10). Islamic judges and muftis, including the Emirate’s fatwa-issuing institution, the Dar al-Ifta, are also powerful and their rulings are enforceable. Relevant departments have the authority to draw up legislation. It is reviewed by the Ministry of Justice and a special commission before being sent to Hibatullah for sign-off (see decree (9) on page 67 of AAN’s unofficial translation dated 24 October 2022, which sets out the process and principles for enacting legislative documents).
Like his predecessors, the numbering of Hibatullah’s orders is inconsistent, for example, in his first year as leader, he issued four orders, numbered 82, 85, 86 and 87, with 83 and 84 missing. One of the orders from 2022 also refers to an earlier unpublished set of instructions by name, date and volume number: it had forbidden officials from holding “needless and lavish” wedding ceremonies when they married for a second, third or fourth time. The 2022 order instructed the Taleban’s ‘morality police’, Amr bil Maruf, to identify those disobeying instructions and report them to the leadership.[1]
Karzai and Ghani both issued decrees that were never published. It was unclear whether this was because they were too sensitive or too trivial or just because the system was not standardised. Maybe this is also the case for Hibatullah.[1] Whether or not this is a complete list, there is much in the 65 published orders[2] that is of interest: they point to what was important at the time to the leadership.
The orders span the last seven years, with the first issued in 2016, when Hibatullah took over as Taleban supreme leader following the killing of his predecessor, Mullah Akhtar Mansur, in an American drone attack (Hibatullah’s second order accepts and endorses all of Mansur’s orders). 19 orders were issued during the insurgency (four in 2016, six in 2017, none in 2018, seven in 2019 and two in 2020), and the bulk since the Taleban and Hibatullah captured power in August 2021.
The insurgency-era decrees are mostly to do with keeping control of fighters and commanders and ironing out arbitrary or potentially problematic behaviour. Some cover conduct in war – how to treat prisoners, not growing long hair and not using profanities in communications – this is “inappropriate” and gives the enemy “an excuse for insulting the mujahedin [as the Taleban call themselves].” Also important is curbing behaviour in the field which would harm higher-order priorities, for example, accepting government soldiers who have switched sides, even if they bring no weapons with them, and not persecuting defectors; the leadership wanted to encourage defections and government soldiers and officials needed to have confidence that amnesties would be honoured to come over.
Other insurgency-era orders are to do with quasi-state functions, sometimes with an apparent eye to trying to prevent administrative corruption in the ranks, for example the ban on seizing land, the order to hand over Emirate property to one’s successor upon redeployment, not publishing books without the leadership’s permission and the proper use of seals. One of the decrees, about how to certify a person is missing so that a widow can re-marry (the decree only refers to dead male spouses), looks to be a response to a need for legal clarity in an organisation which saw so many of its members killed.
After the Taleban’s capture of power and its transformation, once again, into Afghanistan’s rulers, many more of Hibatullah’s orders have been to do with administration and ensuring order within the state: which ministries should report to which of the acting Prime Minister’s deputies, relocating departments and courts, defining the duties of various government bodies, defining the stages legislative documents go through and ordering the Supreme Court to send its decisions to the leadership. A good number look to be trying to head off administrative corruption, while many deal with the security services, including purging the ranks of “undesirable and corrupt people.”
However, it is noticeable that the 46 orders issued since the Taleban’s return to power are not aimed at redesigning the administration of the Afghan state. The ideology and aims of the Emirate certainly represent a very clear break from the past. The Emirate’s leaders, from the amir down to many in civil service middle management, are also new to their posts, along with almost all the security forces and judiciary personnel. Yet, the Emirate has largely kept the administrative and financial systems and institutions of the Republic intact, and Hibatullah’s orders are not those of a leader seeking to overturn them. Rather, the changes they institute are largely marginal to the state’s bureaucracy, financial system and administrative systems, aimed not at nullifying them, but, as the Taleban presumably see it, improving what they have inherited.
Some themes running through the orders
Hibatullah appears particularly concerned with two areas of governance, both as leader of an insurgent movement and later ruler of a state – firstly, the courts and secondly, the fighters who would become the Emirate’s security services – with some overlap, for example, the treatment of prisoners of war and the role of military courts.
This attention is hardly surprising. The Taleban’s founding legend, from 1994 Kandahar, is that its formation was prompted by the need to deliver justice and free the people from tyranny. During the insurgency, Taleban courts, whether fixed or mobile, have been the key service the movement has delivered, including during the insurgency in areas under its control or influence (education, health and other services continued to be delivered by the Islamic Republic, as AAN’s 2018-2021 series on service delivery in insurgency-influenced districts detailed). As to the orders’ focus on fighters/the security services, from 1994 until 2021, the movement’s primary activity was fighting. Much of the leadership’s attention has naturally been devoted to organising and controlling its large body of armed men. Some themes emerging in the orders are looked at in more detail below.
Land grabbing and other corrupt administrative practices/abuses of power
Land is the subject of six out of the 65 orders – roughly ten per cent of the total – and features both before and after the takeover: state land can be leased to the public (2017) and; private land must not be seized by the ‘mujahedin’ or anyone else (2019). After the takeover, the first two published orders concerned land. In the first five weeks after the Taleban captured the Afghan capital, Hibatullah ordered the end to what he said had been “the norm” under the “puppet administration” – the usurpation of state land. He also ordered provincial governors “to rigorously prevent the grabbing of Emarati [state] land and hand over usurpers to face Sharia law.”
A month later, in October 2021, he again banned land-grabbing, this time for land whose ownership was not clear. Only the supreme amir, the order decreed, “Based on necessity and expediency, can give [such land] to a member (of the Muslim community) as property.” The decree drew a parallel with what it said was the amir’s right to “withdraw from the public coffer [bait ul-maal]” and presumably give money to someone, again because of expediency. This is something also banned for others, elsewhere in this body of orders. In March 2023, the ban on officials selling land, or transferring land to individuals or corporations, was repeated unless there was a specific decree from the amir.[3]
Land has always been and will remain a source of controversy and conflict in Afghanistan. Throughout the war, since 1978, it has been seized by successive administrations and victorious commanders, creating layers of claims and counterclaims. Even before the Saur Coup, rulers in Kabul ceded land, typically to particular ethnic groups and tribes for political reasons, making ownership an even more historic source of lingering conflict.[4]That land has emerged again as an issue requiring the amir’s attention is entirely unsurprising.
Another issue that has appeared both in insurgency-era orders and since the re-establishment of the Emirate concerns state property: officials who are redeployed should not take “office accessories and state equipment,” including vehicles, with them but hand the property over to their successor (2019). In 2022, that ban was repeated twice, and in the second became even stronger and more explicit – a part of a long decree outlining the formation, duties and powers of the Security and Screening Commission, whose main task was to purge the ranks of the security forces, the text said:
Any individual involved in looting or removing without authorisation from the leadership, equipment, military or non-military vehicles, ammunition or gear belonging to the Islamic Emirate will be hunted down and the property of bait ul-maal (public coffer) will be recovered. If felt necessary, they should be expelled from the defence and security organisations and introduced to the military court.
The amir is explicitly excluded both from the ban on taking from the public coffer and the ban on transferring ownership of land. In these areas, Hibatullah has taken on monopoly powers.[5] It is easy to see how new cycles of conflict could be set up by his giving away land, if the transfers are seen as biased or unfair. As to taking from the public coffer, if at scale, this would undermine the public finance system, given that budgeting and ensuring spending does not exceed revenues is so crucial to the steady running of government and stewardship of the economy.
There are also a slew of orders attempting to prevent different types of administrative corruption that have been issued since the Taleban recaptured power and its officials came to control so many resources. They include: a ban on double salaries (2022), that revenues must be collected transparently and then, “to avoid irregularities and chaos,” must be handed over to the Ministry of Finance, with no independent spending of them (2022), the establishment of a National Procurement Commission (October 2022), and various spending limits for ministries and departments set, above which the Commission has to approve procurements (also October 2022) and – because corrupt procurement was still a problem? – a ban on state officials and employees and private companies in which officials and employees have shares or management responsibilities tendering bids for goods, services or gaining contracts for building materials or mines (2023).
A particularly strong decree, quoting a Hadith threatening hell for perpetrators, was issued in 2022, forbidding ‘cronyism’ in public recruitments; officials should not award jobs to their relatives or friends, it said. The message was repeated in a later order that year in a long decree concerning the behaviour and attitudes of the ‘mujahedin’. They are ordered to act only for God, to be pious, fair, kind and just, to eschew arrogance, to “strictly avoid ethnocentrism, regionalism, language-centrism and cronyism and refrain from cheating the public coffer (repeated twice in the same order), to pray in the mosque and support the families of the martyrs. The order appeared aimed at closing the gap between how the movement views its ideal self and the reality on the ground.
Other orders look less concerned with preventing corruption and more to do with ensuring financial matters are regular and systematised: for example, aligning the financial affairs of state bodies when it comes to salaries, e’asha(lunch and other free food provided to staff) and other expenses within the financial system of the Central Bank and Ministry of Finance (2022) and aligning salaries in the three branches of the security services (Ministries of Interior, Defence and the General Directorate of Intelligence) (2022). In the same year, the amir also ordered the Commission of Economy to activate all idle state-owned sources of revenue generation and inform the leadership about them.
Justice: courts, prisoners, punishment and torture
15 orders, or just under a quarter of the total, deal with justice, including the courts, lawyers, prisoners and legislation. Before the takeover, the main focus was on the treatment of prisoners of war, with some orders repeated after the takeover, but concerning prisoners in general.
Hibatullah’s first published order, in June 2016, referred to what he said were recent instances of “captured prisoners of war being arbitrarily subjected to tazir [discretionary][6] or inappropriate punishment and, in some cases, even killing without the knowledge of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’s General Directorate of Courts.” No one has the right to punish a prisoner, the order insisted, nor exempt them from punishment, with the exception of the amir or his deputy. Furthermore, filming the scene of a killing was banned, and if an execution was ordered, it must be by firing.
In 2017, the ban on filming executions was repeated, along with a ban on filming the beating of enemy soldiers and implementing hudud and qisas punishments,[7] and all executions had to be approved by all three tiers of the justice system (primary, appeal and supreme) and the leadership.
Similar orders were given in November 2019 – quoting the Quran and Hadith, to treat captives well – and in November 2020, that “only a Sharia court has the prerogative to decide on the guilt of a suspect and punish criminals.” That order goes on to instruct all officials and mujahedin to pay the utmost attention to two points:
1. No one has the right to beat with sticks, [use] whips [dura] or cables or torture [a person] in any other way without a court order. When mujahedin take someone into custody, be they a political or criminal prisoner, they have no right to punish [that person] without a court order;
2. No one has the right to take photographs of the scene of a punishment or to film it.
Violators will be “considered criminals,” the decree goes on to say and will be punished for “disobeying Sharia norms and decrees, disturbing public order and defaming the Islamic Emirate.” In 2019, Hibatullah again ordered officials to refrain from torturing, because torture, like tazir punishments, could only be carried out with a court order. Also, suspects must not be kept under investigation for more than a month, unless, again, officials obtain a court order. Without court orders, it says, torture or punishment is “not justice, but oppression [zulm]. Preventing zulm is an obligation [wajeb], while allowing it to happen is forbidden [haram].”
For human rights advocates, this and some of the later orders are significant because, under International Humanitarian Law, torture is always illegal – regardless of whether a court or anyone else has authorised it. Others have deployed torture in Afghanistan in recent years, the United States military and CIA and the Republic’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS) in particular, but they either denied it was happening, insisted what they did was not really torture or implied it was necessary, even though it was illegal. Only the Emirate has been so frank about torturing detainees.[8]
After the takeover, in March 2022, all these commands were repeated: avoid torture and punishment of detainees – both are the “sole prerogative of the courts,” while keeping detainees under investigation was now not permitted beyond ten days, again, unless with a court order.
The frequent repetition of the same commands strongly suggests there has been a continuing problem with torture and arbitrary punishment. The latter has been tracked by UNAMA in its human rights reporting, most recently in a report published on 7 May 2023, which collated evidence both of non-court authorities, eg provincial and district governors, implementing punishments after a formal decision, and non-judicial officials, such as Amr bil Maruf, police and intelligence officials, carrying out punishments ad hoc. (See UNAMA, “UNAMA Brief on Corporal Punishment and the Death Penalty in Afghanistan” and AAN’s analysis.)
Since the takeover, the amir has placed an emphasis on the organisation of the justice system, especially the place of the military courts, setting limits on their jurisdiction (2021), ordering the establishment of an implementation force, merging military courts within the structure of the Supreme Court (2022) and finally, dissolving the Ministry of Defence’s military courts (2022).
Other orders have moved all specialisations in Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) and issuing fatwas from the Ministry of Justice to the Ministry of Higher Education (2022), with Justice also losing the Law Department, this time to the Supreme Court (2022). The time taken for laws to be drafted has been set (2022), as has the time given to law courts to consider cases (2023), while new procedures were established for licensing law firms (2022).
The Emirate’s fighters/security services
Many of the 65 orders focus on controlling the ‘mujahedin’ and, after the takeover, organising them into security services and purging their ranks. The last published order before the Taleban’s capture of power was a decree liquidating ‘general fronts’, issued in January 2021. Like the mujahedin factions before them, the Taleban recruited and organised themselves organically in a multi-level military hierarchy of district and provincial commanders, ultimately all falling under the movement’s Military Commission. A ‘mahaz’, usually translated – somewhat confusingly as ‘front’ – is a grouping of groups of fighters, totalling anywhere between 200 and 1000 men, led ultimately by a single commander. This was highly useful and effective for organising an insurgency, but was always risky for the leadership as it created the potential for rival centres of power to emerge if a commander’s influence extended too widely. This decree sought to limit fronts to their commander’s own province. It banned recruitment from other provinces and said that any group loyal to a commander, but active in another province should come under the orders of that province’s governor. “General fronts,” it said, were “forbidden in the structure of the Islamic Emirate.[9]
After the takeover, several orders were issued to do with ‘cleansing’ the ranks and ensuring those who fail vetting cannot join other services. The US military did not destroy biometric data gathered from members of the Republic’s Afghan security forces and NDS, which meant the Emirate had a database to work from (see reporting, for example, by Human Rights Watch, on 30 March 2022). In 2021, a new body, the Military Commission, was set up with the task of purging the Emirate’s security forces of “undesirable and corrupt people.” This was followed in 2022 by an order to the security services to register ‘mujahedin’ with biometrics taken and positions and salaries specified. Later that year, a very long and detailed decree set out the duties of another new body, the Security and Screening Commission, also with a mandate to purge.
Conclusion
The orders published in the Official Gazette give us insights into what was important to the leadership at particular moments. Where problems have not been resolved, orders have been repeated, for example, the multiple bans on various types of land-grabbing, officials taking state property when they are redeployed, arbitrary punishment and unauthorised torture.
The body of orders also gives insight into the thinking and principles behind the orders. References to consultations with the ulema and reference to Hanafi jurisprudence feature prominently in the texts. Citations backing up the orders include some verses from the Quran and Hadiths and named collections of fatwas and exegeses of the Quran (tafsir).
There are also insights into what appears to interest or annoy Hibatullah personally. Only ask for a fatwa – a religious decision on a particular matter – officials were told in 2022, if the issue you are concerned about has not already been decided in your ministry’s rules and regulations. Was the leader being pestered for decisions?
Another order, issued just before the start of the new university year in 2022, delved into the minutiae of the religious education curricula of university students, even referring to spelling mistakes in the draft. The length and detail suggest this subject is particularly close to the Taleban’s supreme leader’s heart.
All orders can be read in the Resources section of the AAN website, both the PDF original, issued by the Ministry of Justice and an unofficial English translation by AAN.
Edited by Roxanna Shapour and Jelena Bjelica
References
References
↑1
The Department for Invitation and Guidance on Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice (Dawat wa Ershad Amr bil-Maruf wa Nahi al-Munkar) is typically shortened by Afghans to ‘Amr bil-Maruf’ or, in English, ‘Vice and Virtue’. The same names are also used for its enforcers, also known in English as the Taleban’s ‘morality’ or ‘religious police’.
There are a few important orders that we know about that have not been published, for example, the insurgency-era set of instructions banning the cultivation of cannabis (4/8/1441 (29 March 2020) No: 86/5), AAN wrote about the ban and published a translated text of the instructions as an annex to our report, “What now for the Taleban and Narcotics? A case study on cannabis”.
↑3
The other decree concerning land ordered the transfer of the Land Department from the Ministry of Urban Development to the Ministry Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock in 2022.
↑4
For more on this, see Liz Alden Wiley’s 2013 paper for AREU, “Land, People, and the State in Afghanistan: 2002 – 2012”, which reviewed the formal treatment of land rights in Afghanistan over the post-Bonn decade (2002–2012). For a recent case study of the historical dispute between Kuchi nomad landlords and settled, largely Hazara farmers and how this was renewed by shifts in power after the Taleban takeover, see Fabrizio Foschini’s 2022 paper for AAN, “Conflict Management or Retribution? How the Taleban deal with land disputes between Kuchis and local communities”.
↑5
In its November 2020 report “The Nature of the Afghan State: Republic vs. Emirate” USIP describes the key attributes of the Emirate as: sovereignty is manifested through implementation of Sharia; leader is chosen by a select Islamic shura, or council; all branches of government are subject to the authority of the emir; and basic rights are defined/limited by Sharia as interpreted by the emir/leadership. Put another way: “The emir has near absolute executive, legislative and judicial authority, and while hypothetically having the same rights and responsibilities as other Afghan citizens [cites The Taliban’s draft Constitution of 1998, article 59] there are no provisions for accountability. Individual rights and freedoms are also subject to the limits of Sharia as determined by the emir and selected ulema.”
↑6
Islamic law has a standard three-way categorisation of offences and punishments (used by the Republic as well as the Emirate).
Hudud offences have punishments viewed as fixed by the Qur’an or Hadith and are perceived as offences against God; they include zina (sex outside marriage), accusing someone falsely of zina, drinking alcohol and some types of theft.
Qisas is a form of retributive justice between the victim, or their family, and the perpetrator. It allows for equal retaliation in cases of intentional bodily harm, up to and including murder. These crimes may also be forgiven by the victim or their family, or resolved between families with blood money or by giving a bride to the victim or a member of their family in what is called a bad marriage (this type of marriage was banned by Mullah Omar during the Taleban’s first emirate and in December 2021 (decree number 83, vol 1) by Hibatullah.
All other offences are given tazir punishments, which are at the discretion of a judge or ruler.
Different offences within all three categories may receive corporal, capital or other types of punishment.
↑7
For an explanation of hudud and qisas, see the previous footnote.
For more on the role and nature of fronts in the insurgency, see AAN guest author Rahmatullah Amiri’s second report in a two-part series from 2016 on how Helmand province was then falling to the Taleban, “Helmand (2): The chain of chiefdoms unravels”.
From Land-grabbing to Haircuts: The decrees and edicts of the Taleban supreme leader
In the nearly two years since the Taliban’s takeover, much of the Afghan population continues to struggle to meet basic daily needs amid a severe humanitarian crisis. The Taliban have imposed a raft of draconian restrictions on Afghan women and girls, effectively erasing them from public life. Yet, in a recent public address, the Taliban’s supreme leader, the emir Sheikh Haibatullah Akhundzada, claimed his government has provided Afghan women with a “comfortable and prosperous life.”
Setting aside the controversy of the emir’s brazen claim, his address illuminates some trends that have emerged in the Taliban’s recent public messaging. These trends might shed light on the Taliban’s still-quite-secretive policymaking process, increasingly steered by their reclusive leader.
The Emir’s Eid al-Adha address
For much of the two-decade insurgency against the U.S.-led intervention and partner Afghan state, the emir’s annual Eid addresses (issued for both Islamic holidays, Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha) were the most significant formal public statements issued by the Taliban. The group’s public messaging capacity has grown steadily over the past decade, with a significant jump after the takeover of the country in August 2021, when they appropriated the former government’s state media apparatus. Yet while the Eid addresses are no longer so exclusive, they continue to stand as a some of the only public statements issued by the supreme leader.
As a regularly scheduled formal statement, the emir’s Eid messages have grown relatively repetitious in style and in content over the years. Therefore, new topics or shifts in tone suggest what the Taliban’s leader deems important enough to address.
Overall, the language of this latest Eid message is much more confident in how it describes the accomplishments of the Islamic Emirate, as the Taliban refer to their government — even compared to this year’s earlier Eid message in April. It is more definitive, even celebratory, on how much progress the Emirate has made establishing an “Islamic system.” In previous statements, this had been described more as a work in progress, a still-aspirational goal.
As reported by global media outlets, the most notable new content is a lengthy bullet point arguing that the Emirate’s rule has improved Afghan women’s lives. It counters specific criticisms from Afghans and the outside world, citing new protections for women according to Islamic family law. The paragraph only vaguely refers to the drastic restrictions imposed over the last year, framing them as corrective measures: “the negative aspects of the past 20-year occupation related to women’s Hijab and misguidance will end soon.” A similar note is struck later in the message, on Taliban courts re-imposing Shariah across the country: “society is improving day by day and the evildoers are about to disappear.”
The statement also describes a process for reviewing and formalizing law and regulation. It said that ministries have been tasked to comprehensively review their portfolios for compliance with Shariah — which shall be reviewed by two separate commissions, one headed by the Taliban’s chief justice and the other by the emir himself. Though still quite vague, this may be the most substantive public explanation yet of the Taliban’s attempt to establish a regulatory framework for the state.
The Eid message contains nationalist language that is new for the emir’s office (though it has appeared in other Taliban leaders’ rhetoric, especially the acting minister of defense and son of the Taliban’s founder, Mohammad Yaqoub): “The independence of Afghanistan has been restored once again, brotherhood and national unity have been strengthened.”
Finally, in a bullet point that has been repeated since their takeover, on the Taliban’s desire to have good relations with the outside world, a small rephrase suggests a significant shift. Last year’s Eid al-Adha address specifically named the United States as a recipient of goodwill. This address only said that good relations were desired “with the world, especially with Islamic countries.”
Insights into Kandahar
What does the emir’s address tell us about attitudes and potential future actions among the Taliban’s leadership, especially those based close to the emir in Kandahar?
The confidence of the language extolling the Taliban’s achievements suggests the emir and his trusted circle(s) are much more comfortable with their control over the state, compared to a year ago. As USIP has assessed, many of the emir’s most controversial decrees have been motivated in part by the desire to clamp down on policy variation and potential disobedience. Bold statements on the implementation of Shariah may reveal Kandahar’s increased sense of “ownership” over the policy agenda, along with the emir’s adoption of starkly nationalist language.
More concretely, the proud claims of achievements and the rebuttal of criticism put to rest any hope that the Taliban’s gender-based restrictions will be reversed in the foreseeable future. If anything, the message’s tone carries a sense of triumphalism among the emir’s camp, which will likely drive the further advancement of restrictive social policy. This is reflected in recent edicts such as the impending closure of women’s beauty salons.
But the emir’s sharp rejection of foreign condemnation also reveals that Kandahar has been paying close attention to what the international community thinks. The level of detail on policies toward women suggests he feels compelled to explain and defend his government’s actions to the Afghan people and to the world. Across the emir’s public remarks, including a rare speech in Kabul last year, he characterizes the United States and the West as inherently hostile powers, still actively seeking to prevent the Taliban from achieving their objectives. In other words, defiance is not the same posture as dismissiveness.
Conceptions of the emir as a recluse, cut off from the outside world, may be overly and unhelpfully simplistic. The emir’s attention to foreign relations was underscored by news in late May that he met with the foreign minister of Qatar — a meeting significant enough to be reflected in the Eid address. While it is unclear if the emir will engage in much more high-profile diplomatic exchanges, his trend of comprehensively seeking to consolidate control over the state suggests his influence over foreign relations will grow.
If this hardens the Taliban’s diplomatic posture in some ways, it could also render their government more predictable to the outside world. The past year’s most surprising political developments emerged in moments when the emir overrode his ministers, who were in much closer contact with foreigners and sending signals that were ultimately rendered null and void. With the emir more securely in control, there should be fewer policies he deems necessary to suddenly overturn.
Inconsistent Messaging, and its Impact
The emir’s Eid message is just one notable instance of increasingly defensive Taliban public messaging. Their reactions to recent headlines and official reports have been intense. As noted above on the Eid message, the Taliban’s defensiveness reinforces how closely they follow global media coverage, and how concerned they are by narratives that could undermine their own. While the Taliban’s media arm has long been hyper-attentive to critical press, foreign and Afghan alike, the past few months have marked a particular sharpness in tone.
This has perhaps been exacerbated by the see-saw nature of official reports and remarks from Western institutions: depictions of the Taliban and Afghanistan under their rule have varied wildly from one week to the next. Take statements and reports from the United States and various U.N. bodies, alone:
On June 5, the U.N.’s sanctions monitoring team released its annual report focused on the Taliban. Taliban spokesmen reacted most vociferously to the section of the report that alleged infighting and competition, underscoring their historical sensitivity to external perceptions of the group’s cohesion. The report painted the Taliban in such a harshly critical light that U.S. officials joined the Taliban in rejecting its findings — which some in the Taliban held up as evidence of their own legitimacy.
On June 19, the U.N.’s special rapporteur for human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, presented his latest report, which characterized Taliban policies as gender apartheid and suggested they may constitute crimes against humanity. On the same day, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) published its latest report, which the Taliban immediately labeled as “propaganda.”
Days later on June 21, the head of the U.N. mission in Afghanistan, Rosa Otunbayeva, briefed the U.N. Security Council. She echoed the negative assessment of the Taliban’s gender policies, but also bemoaned inattention to “more positive achievements” taking place under their rule.
By July 3, in response to an after-action report about the 2021 U.S. evacuation from Kabul, President Joe Biden asserted the Taliban was helping remove al-Qaida as a threat. The Taliban held up Biden’s remarks as an “acknowledgment of reality.”
The United States, allied donor states, and the U.N.’s global leadership are all seeking a more effective way to tackle challenges in Afghanistan, some of them directly posed by the Taliban’s posture. Since their takeover (and long before), the Taliban have been characterized often as obstinate and unwilling to bend to demands from the international community. The key to breaking through may lie within the Taliban’s kneejerk defense of their own legitimacy. This impulse is so intense that the group is willing to cite Western officials whenever they offer positive remarks, even at the expense of providing conspiratorial propaganda fodder to the Islamic State and many other Afghans with anti-Taliban sentiments.
Doing so, however, will require strategic thinking about communications from the United States and other key international institutions and stakeholders. Each of the above actors are a critical part of monitoring and holding the Taliban accountable. Clearly, their findings prompt a reaction from the Taliban — most obviously in their public messaging, but likely in less visible ways as well. While the independence of monitoring bodies should be preserved, that impact should be carefully considered and coordinated as much as possible.
What the Taliban’s Defensive Public Messaging Reveals
My country, where the pursuit of knowledge was always venerated, is descending into darkness.
It has been almost two years since the Taliban took over Kabul. I, like many Afghans who worked hard to attain a good education, am struggling. Knowledge seems to be losing its value and books are no longer considered a precious possession.
When Taliban fighters arrived in the Afghan capital in August 2021, many of my friends rushed to the airport to try to leave, seeing no prospect for themselves in their home country anymore. The brain drain was immense.
People with masters’ degrees, PhDs, with multiple published books, professors, educators, medical doctors, engineers, scientists, writers, poets, painters – many learned people fled. A colleague of mine – Alireza Ahmadi, who worked as a reporter – also joined the crowd at the airport.
Before he left, he wrote on his Facebook page that he had sold 60 of his books on a variety of subjects for 50 Afghanis (less than $1). He never made it out of the country; he was killed in the bombing of the airport by the Islamic State in Khorasan Province.
I, too, decided to give away all my books – all 300 hundred of them, covering topics like international law, human rights, women’s rights and the English language. I donated them to public libraries, thinking that in a country ruled by the Taliban, they would be of no value to me.
I started searching for ways to leave the country. Evacuation was not an option for me so I decided to go to Iran, hoping I could find safe haven there like millions of other Afghans. But like my fellow countrymen and women, I faced contempt and hostility there. I soon lost all hope that I would be able to make a living in Iran. But I did find something that kept me going – my old love for books.
One day, as I walked along Enqelab Square in Tehran, I could not hold back from entering its bookstores. I ended up spending most of the little money I had on books about human rights and women’s rights that I had never seen in Afghanistan. Armed with these volumes, I decided to go back home and try to get back into my old way of life – surrounded by books and engaged in intellectual pursuits.
Upon returning, I started working on a book about the political rights of women within the international legal system and within Islam, which I managed to complete in about a year. I sent my manuscript to different publishers, but was repeatedly turned down because they found the subject too sensitive and thought that getting permission to publish it would be impossible.
Finally, Ali Kohistani of Mother Press agreed to take the book. He prepared the needed documentation and submitted the manuscript to the Taliban Ministry of Information and Culture to request formal permission to publish. Soon after, the committee tasked with book review sent me a long list of questions and critiques that I had to address.
I revised the book along the feedback they sent, but that was not enough to get permission. It has been five months now that we have waited for a final response and my despair is growing by the day.
Other publishers are also suffering from the arbitrariness of the commission’s decisions and long delays. They say books that the Taliban want to publish and that fall within their ideology do not face the same challenges. They see in this fraught process an attempt to suppress any thought that disagrees with the Taliban’s thinking.
Publishing permission delays and censorship are by far not the only problems Afghanistan’s book industry is suffering from.
Scores of bookstores and publishing houses have shut down in the past two years. In the book compound in the Pul-e-Surkh area of Kabul, which I use to frequent before the Taliban takeover, the majority of bookstores have now shut down.
The Taliban’s decision to ban girls and women from attending high school and university means they are no longer buying books as much. Boys and young men have also dropped out of school and universities, being demotivated to pursue an education that cannot guarantee them a job. This has severely shrunken the customer base of booksellers.
On top of that, the Taliban government has imposed high taxes on book sales, which have dwindled even further the declining income of bookstore owners and publishers.
Libraries throughout the country have also lost their readers, as fewer people go there to study or borrow books. Various book clubs, literary associations and reading initiatives have also stopped their activities. It is no longer seen as a value to own, read, or write books.
Overnight, Afghan book publishing has gone from being a flourishing sector – perhaps the most successful homegrown industry – to a struggling and risky business venture. Afghans have gone from being avid readers to not being able to afford books. I have gone from being a proud author and book owner to a despaired man who has tried and failed to hold on to an intellectual life in Afghanistan.
It is extremely painful to see this state of affairs in Afghanistan – a country with a long literary history and tradition. This land gave the world the likes of Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi (also known as Rumi), Ibn Sina Balkhi (also known as Avicenna), and Hakim Sanai Ghaznavi (also known as Sanai).
Reading, writing and disseminating knowledge were always highly regarded in my country. Afghan rulers of different dynasties have respected the freedom of thought and supported learning and knowledge production. Censorship, restricting education and devaluing books were never part of the Afghan tradition or culture.
No country in world history has ever prospered when its rulers had suppressed knowledge, education and free thought. Afghanistan is moving towards darkness and ignorance and that scares me. Killing books and killing knowledge will have horrible consequences for the future of this country.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Hujjatullah Zia is a journalist and senior writer in Daily Outlook Afghanistan Newspaper
Books are losing value in Afghanistan – this scares me
The time of the summer harvest has come, bringing with it some temporary relief to millions of Afghan households struggling to feed themselves. Standards of living, which had already worsened well before the Taleban takeover of August 2021, plunged further with their capture of power and the resulting economic collapse. The impact was most keenly felt by the under-fives and pregnant or lactating mothers. Rates of child malnutrition have soared. Diminishing aid budgets and the recent announcement by the World Food Programme that its already reduced rations will shrink again by the end of October unless it gets more funding are fuelling fears that the worse is yet to come. In an attempt to better understand child malnutrition in Afghanistan Fabrizio Foschini and Rohullah Sorush (with input from Gulhan Durzai) have been scrutinising the statistics and hearing from healthcare professionals and parents and finding out how it varies over both time and geography.
When it comes to child malnutrition, specialised terminology is unavoidable. We have put together a glossary explaining the terms in the infographics in this report. Briefly, some of the acronyms used in the literature and in this report are: Global Acute Malnutrition (GAM), which is made up of Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM) and Moderate Acute Malnutrition (MAM).
Afghanistan has long struggled with poverty and food insecurity, problems compounded by poor transport infrastructure and conflict which has hampered and fractured trade and aid logistics. These characteristics have historically made the remoter provinces of the country more prone to malnutrition. Yet all areas have suffered from the collapse of the Afghan economy following the Taleban takeover in August 2021. As documented in the three-instalment AAN series “Living in a Collapsed Economy” between 2021 and 2022 (see here, here and here), the livelihoods of nearly all classes of people have worsened. Three consecutive years of drought have only exacerbated food insecurity for many (see AAN reporting here and here).
According to the World Food Programme (WFP), Afghanistan is currently at its highest risk of famine in a quarter of a century, with nearly 20 million people – more than half of its population acutely food-insecure, including more than 6.1 million people who are on the brink of famine-like conditions. The situation has reached unprecedented emergency levels, and as always, it is taking a high toll, especially on children, with some 3.2 million under 5s and 840,000 pregnant and lactating women are suffering from severe or moderate acute malnutrition, according to the revised 2023 humanitarian response plan.
According to UNICEF, Afghanistan has one of the world’s highest mortality rates among under-fives. The World Health Organisation estimates that every day in Afghanistan, some 167 infants die of preventable diseases, while Save the Children has reported a 47 per cent increase in the number of malnourished children treated at its mobile health clinics from January to September 2022 (from 2,500 to 4,270). While food insecurity is the major driver in child and maternal mortality, lack of access to proper healthcare and medicine also makes illnesses such as pneumonia and measles so deadly in Afghanistan.
The most recent forecast from the Integrated Food Security Phases Classification (IPC) [1], the global standard for assessing food insecurity, “Afghanistan: Acute Malnutrition Situation for September October 2022 and Projection for April 2023”, was published in October 2022. It forecasted that in April 2023, 875,224 Afghan children would be suffering from Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM) and 2,347,802 from Moderately Acute Malnutrition (MAM), while 804,365 pregnant and lactating women would also have acute malnutrition. The maps below show the situation in autumn 2022 and the progress of malnutrition across the country throughout winter-spring 2023.
[M]ore than 4.3 million households have borrowed simply for securing food. Many households have mortgaged their future, having sold productive assets such as their last female animals (1.1 million) or other income-generating equipment or means of transport (over 0.6 million), and even their houses or land (over 0.3 million). In many cases, households were forced to mortgage their children’s future by seeking recourse to child labor (more than 850,000) or marrying their daughters earlier than intended (nearly 80,000), to combat extreme food insecurity. (pp 63 – 64)
Map 1: Acute Malnutrition in September – October 2022
Source: IPC Afghanistan Acute Malnutrition Analysis September 2022 – April 2023
Map 2: Projected Acute Malnutrition for November 2022 – April 2023
Source: IPC Afghanistan Acute Malnutrition Analysis September 2022 – April 2023
This report aims to navigate the data about child malnutrition and provide an overview of the situation in Afghanistan, how malnutrition is influenced by economic, geographic and even cultural factors, how it has worsened through the past decade and how it is experienced today by those affected by it. To this end, AAN has interviewed three healthcare workers, who work directly with malnutrition children, each from the provinces of Daikundi, Helmand and Takhar, as well as eight parents from Daikundi (one), Helmand (two), Kabul (two) and Takhar (three) whose children are suffering from malnutrition.[2]
The geography of hunger
Conflict, poverty, drought, food insecurity, limited or no access to health services, poor water quality and sanitation, insufficient maternal nutrition and low immunisation rates for children resulting in a high disease burden have all contributed to the high child malnutrition rates in Afghanistan. Malnutrition is widespread across the country, but its prevalence is greater in some areas and some sections of the population. In this section, we map the geography of hunger in Afghanistan based on both spatial and human characteristics. The next section will look at how and why it has varied over time.
Rural areas tend to be more vulnerable to malnutrition because of their greater poverty rates, difficult logistics and lower awareness of the symptoms of malnutrition, but even more significantly, the lack of nearby medical facilities and availability of suitable treatments. As a subset of rural areas, remote and/or mountainous places tend to be even more greatly affected – and at the same time, the increased distance and costs associated with accessing healthcare mean fewer malnutrition cases are reported compared to the actual number.
Thus, isolated provinces such as Ghor, as well as rural areas in Takhar and Badakhshan provinces in the northeast, all comparatively poor and highly dependent on local crops, have suffered heavily from the recent years of drought and crop failure. According to a nurse from Rustaq district of Takhar, whose work has focused on malnutrition for some years, large single-income households are typically worst hit by the problem:
Children who are malnourished are more likely to come from low-income families, with only one person serving as the primary earner and supporting a large extended family. Families in Takhar are extremely impoverished, earning just 180-200 Afghans [a day]. But the households are very large: as many as 15 people need to be provided for by only one person, which leads to insufficient and uneven access to food for all the family members.
In Helmand, malnutrition is present in all districts, but affects particular areas more severely. As one NGO healthcare worker from Lashkargah remarked, the hilly northern districts, such as Musa Qala and Nawzad, or the southernmost, the desert districts of Khaneshin and Dishu, register more malnutrition cases. When interviewed by AAN, the health worker explained that:
The reason for the high cases of malnutrition [in those districts] is the economic status of families who are farmers and livestock breeders and have been affected highly by the drought.
However, the impact of malnutrition is also felt inside the towns and cities because of the loss of income faced by many urban residents after the withdrawal of the international military and an influx of internally displaced persons from rural areas; they have been forced to settle in precarious living conditions without access to safe water and sanitation.
When families become food insecure, it is specific age and gender groups that are affected the most. Children under the age of five are considered most at risk of malnutrition and related illnesses, which is why this age group is usually featured in relevant statistics. Pregnant and lactating mothers are a second vulnerable group.
International organisations working in healthcare in Afghanistan have reported an increasing trend of more newborns and infants being admitted as inpatients to their nutrition centres than in the past. According to a recent report by the international NGO, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF),[3] the percentage of infants under six months of age admitted to their paediatric intensive nutrition centre in Herat has been reported “most concerningly” on the increase and reached 61.5 per cent of all patients in February 2023, while in MSF’s Kabul centre, the percentage of infants under one year old reached 67 per cent. According to the same MSF briefing note:
Breastfeeding in Afghanistan is challenged by the practice of child marriage, negative cultural beliefs related to breastfeeding, lack of family planning, poor access to clean drinking water, and limited access to information on optimal breastfeeding practices. (p 8)
These factors affect the above-mentioned age groups and are made worse by the absence or the prohibitive costs of safe replacement feeding, such as formula.
The healthcare worker from Lashkargah highlighted another pattern, that malnutrition takes a heavier toll on girls than boys, because in times of crisis, boys are more likely to be better-fed and taken care of – to the detriment of their sisters.
Girls are at risk in the family because of the culture and literacy levels. Boys are paid attention to and taken care of. I see it all the time that when boys are sick, their mothers bring them [to the hospital], but when girls are sick, [only] their grandmothers bring them to the clinic or hospital. When I ask why, they say boys are important and their mothers should take care of them. When there is little food, parents mostly try to feed their sons, rather than their daughters.
This trend is confirmed in reports from international organisations: for example, MSF reported that in 2022, girls faced a 90 per cent higher mortality rate compared to boys in their inpatient therapeutic nutrition centre in Kandahar, pointing to families’ deprioritising their daughters both in terms of providing food for them and seeking out medical care.
Such discrimination affects mothers as well. They are also deprioritised (or put others first) when it comes to food in the family, are then malnourished during pregnancy, often suffer anaemia after giving birth and have problems breastfeeding their babies, who in turn become victims of malnutrition. Other cultural traits, such as the frequent lack of family planning, only add to the problem, as one healthcare worker from Daikundi province described:
[I]lliterate families who don’t have any primary health education and only follow old traditions are also at risk of having malnourished children. They don’t have family planning, so they don’t consider intervals between births. Therefore, they give birth to children who are weak and then become malnourished. In addition, children who are born premature and children who are born on time but with low birthweights – because their mothers were malnourished during their pregnancy – are at risk of malnutrition.
Finally, some diseases with varying local or regional severity patterns, such as Acute Watery Diarrhoea (AWD) and Acute Respiratory Infections (ARI), often appear together with malnutrition, each contributing to the other’s morbidity. This is especially true in winter when food security deteriorates in many households. Malnutrition has, for example, been considered by some studies as a contributing factor – together with COVID-19 – to the deadly measles outbreak that hit many provinces of Afghanistan in 2022.
A chronology of hunger
While malnutrition has always affected some places more than others in Afghanistan, and girls more than boys, overall, it has been worsening over the last decade, and dramatically so after the Taleban takeover, which precipitated the collapse of Afghanistan’s economy.
In 2004, the National Nutrition Survey (NNS), which is conducted in Afghanistan every decade, found that 60.5 per cent of children under-five were suffering from stunting [4], while 8.7 per cent were suffering from wasting [5]. A decade later, the 2013 National Nutrition Survey showed a marked reduction in the number of stunted children under 5, down to 40.5 per cent, but the number of wasted under 5s had risen to 9.5 per cent. There was also an improvement in the number of underweight children from 33.7 per cent in 2004 to 24.6 per cent in 2013. The 2013 survey did, however, raise the alarm on the severity of child malnutrition, revealing eight provinces where general acute malnutrition levels were higher than the WHO threshold of 15%, marking a ‘Critical’ situation – Urozgan (21.6%), Nangarhar (21.2%), Nuristan (19.4%), Khost (18.2%), Paktia (16.7%), Wardak (16.6%), Kunar (16.2%) and Laghman (16%). In the decade that followed, the situation for children continued to deteriorate. After 2014, child malnutrition rates started to worsen (as the graph below shows).
The data for 2015 to 2020 were extracted from “2020 Afghanistan Nutrition Cluster Annual Report”; for 2021 and 2022 from the humanitarian response plan for each year respectively; and the 2023 revised humanitarian response plan.
Graph by AAN.
A key event affecting the incomes of many Afghans was the withdrawal of NATO troops from most areas of the country, as they handed over responsibility for security to the Afghan National Security Forces (further reading in this AAN Thematic Dossier). The transfer was completed by the end of 2014. It brought with it not only a deterioration of security but also a decline in the national income because the foreign armies had spent money and given aid. That income had been spread quite widely and often went to remote areas where the insurgency was strong. As bases and outposts closed locally, the loss of jobs and other sources of income was often substantial. Up to 2014, the standard of living had generally been rising in Afghanistan, but the NATO withdrawal marked the first of several economic shocks from 2015 to 2023 that had detrimental knock-on effects on the ability of many Afghan families to provide adequate nutrition to their children. The figures below tell this story.
In 2015, an estimated 1.2 million children under 5 (39% of this age group, based on WHO population estimates) suffered from general acute malnutrition (500,000 severely and 700,000 moderately) and some 250,000 pregnant and lactating women. That year, the Strategic Response Plan, published by OCHA and focused on addressing the most acute life-saving needs, aimed at assisting far fewer than that number – just under half a million under-fives (155,279 suffering severely and 210,265 moderately from acute malnutrition and 134,071 pregnant or lactating women) because, it said, the aid effort that year was “[c]onstricted by partner capacities, accessibility, and resource availability.”
By 2016, the number of malnourished under-fives had increased to some 2.9 million (some 58 per cent of the total), according to the 2016 Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP), which is the annual appeal for humanitarian aid. Nearly 1 million children were slated for assistance because they were acutely malnourished (365,000 severely and 632,000 moderately), twice as many as the previous year.
Malnutrition remained a heavy burden for the Afghan people in 2017, with 1.3 million under-fives in need of treatment for acute malnutrition, and with levels of SAM breaching emergency thresholds in 20 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, according to the 2017 Humanitarian Needs Overview (see also the 2017 Humanitarian Response Plan).
The prevalence of malnutrition continued to increase as the intensifying conflict endangered people’s livelihoods and made access to many areas more difficult for health organisations and other humanitarian actors. In 2018, acute malnutrition affected 2 million children under 5, with “a staggering 600,000 children (29 per cent) suffering from severe acute malnutrition (SAM)”, along with almost half a million pregnant or lactating women. 75 per cent of the affected children lived in 22 provinces, designated as ‘priority’ (see the 2018 Afghanistan Nutrition Cluster Annual Report).
2018 Malnutrition Severity Map, showing the prevalence of General Acute Malnutrition (GAM)
In 2019, the Afghanistan Nutrition Cluster Annual Report revealed two million acute malnutrition cases, including 600,000 suffering severely.
In 2020, the numbers again swelled, with acute malnutrition affecting 2.9 million children, 784,000 of them suffering severely (see the 2020 Afghanistan Nutrition Cluster Annual Report). There were also 650,438 malnourished pregnant and lactating women in need of supplementary nutrition. The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic that year had devastating consequences, pushing an additional 106,214 children into severe and 284,688 into moderate acute malnutrition and leaving 87,298 pregnant and lactating women in need of life-saving interventions. The number of provinces classified at emergency levels rose from 22 to 26 (for the economic effects of Covid-19, read this AAN report)
As the Taleban sued for control of the country in 2021, fighting intensified, making trade, travel, sowing and harvesting difficult for many. Malnutrition worsened, with an estimated 3.13 million children under 5 at risk of acute malnutrition, (895,000 severely and 2.2 million moderately) as well as 700,000 pregnant and lactating women (see this November 2021 Health Cluster Bulletin and the 2021 HRP).
The fall of the Republic in August 2021 and the ensuing economic collapse had pushed an unprecedented number of Afghan households into poverty by 2022. In that year, an estimated 3.88 million under-fives, with more than half facing acute malnutrition (1.08 million severely and 2.8 million moderately)[6], as well as 836,657 pregnant and lactating women. One million under-fives were believed to be at risk of death. (Figures from the 2022 HNO and HRP).
Child malnutrition in 2023: the view from the field
The Afghanistan Humanitarian Response Plan for 2023 estimated that acute malnutrition will affect over four million vulnerable individuals this year, including more than 840,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women and 2,300,000 children suffering moderately and 875,000 severely.
Interviews carried out by AAN with both health workers and the parents of children who have suffered or still suffer from acute malnutrition give an idea of how the situation is deteriorating due to the economic crisis and the shortages of medical care. Primary healthcare centres are often working under strained conditions, with reduced staff, equipment and stocks of medicines.
The country’s health system received a double shock in August 2021, both a brain drain of qualified staff, as reported by the media, and a reduction in international funding (see reporting by the Development News website, Devex), with primary and community healthcare suffering the most. The Taleban ban on women working, first to NGO workers in December 2022 and later to UN staff in April 2023, has further reduced humanitarian capacities to deliver programmes to fight malnutrition and poverty. Even though female healthcare workers are largely exempt from the ban, according to the Revised Humanitarian Response Planreleased by OCHA in June 2023, conditions on employing female healthcare workers, such as the necessity for them to be accompanied by a mahram (a close male relative), have resulted in, “additional costs and budgeting, shrinking donor funding, and potential challenges in meeting the minimum operational standards due to the limited capacity of implementing partners.” (pp. 38-39)
A glimpse at the increased difficulties encountered in helping malnourished children and their mothers can be gathered from these figures given by the Revised Humanitarian Response Plan:
[D]uring the first four months of 2023, approximately 14.7 million people received at least one round of food and livelihood support, compared to 19.1 million in 2022. Health care was provided to 5.4 million people, an increase from 4.7 million in 2022. Support to prevent and address acute malnutrition reached 2.4 million children and nursing mothers, down from 3 million in 2022. (p 11)
A veteran nurse from Takhar, interviewed in March, summarised standard procedures to treat malnutrition in place at her clinic, before detailing how they were now being forced to let patients down.
If the MUAC [measurement of the mid-upper arm circumference – a key indicator] is less than 11.4 cm, we usually treat [the child] in the clinic and they are hospitalised. If it’s between 11.5 and 12.5, we treat them by providing enough supplements and resources.… RUTF [ready-to-use therapeutic food] and RUSF [ready-to-use-supplemental food] are resources provided for malnourished children…. Children that weigh less than 3 kg, are shorter in height and have a poor appetite are usually hospitalised and given medication and milk. When they show improvements, or their weight increases to 4kg, we discharge them and give them the necessary resources.
Such standards, she said, have become difficult to adhere to since December 2022 because of faltering stocks of therapeutic food and the pressure on health centres brought about by the sheer number and desperation of ailing families:
For the past almost four months, we’ve have had very few resources left. The cases of severe and moderate malnutrition have increased significantly in this time. Because of fewer resources, we had to start providing patients with the foods available in our clinic…. Resources were not being cut before. I do not know if we are not getting any supplies because of the current government. We have been without resources for four months now. I believe the Agha Khan Foundation or the World Food Programme were providing for us, but this support has stopped…. Our clinic is very small. The rooms are cramped, we’re short on staff and we have a heavy workload.
Speaking to the interviewee again in June, she did say international support had now resumed, with resources being provided by UNICEF and the World Food Programme. However, her experience was not singular. Other clinics and healthcare centres are being put under pressure by a growing caseload and, often, fewer resources. According to a healthcare worker in Daikundi, in the past, the provincial hospital would not host more than 15 malnourished children at any given time, but in March 2023, the malnourishment ward was hospitalising 25 to 30 children every day.
Understaffed and overcrowded clinics mean severely malnourished patients get discharged as soon as they become even moderate acute malnourished levels. Ideally, they are provided with food supplements and all the necessary information and guidance to continue their treatment at home. However, this can result in improper handling of the therapy by families and cause recurring malnutrition in a child. The nurse from Takhar said:
Some children receive food from us, but we don’t see any improvement when they return. Most mothers have many children and distribute the food and resources we provide for the malnourished child to their other children. Some have even said their husbands or mothers-in-law eat the bars or biscuits we gave them for their malnourished children.
She added how, in winter, especially, it was not easy even to discharge patients:
When the children start to improve, we contact their families to come and get them, but they don’t show up. They choose not to pick up their wives and children because they are getting some food – beans and bread – and the clinic’s warm. [When they finally show up] their husbands tell us that they don’t have any food at home and it’s very cold there. Therefore, they should stay with us for some more days.
Family evaluation of the costs/benefit of referring their malnourished children for medical treatment can also get in the way of successful treatment, as is apparent from the nurse’s observations:
Some children receive only the first treatment, and their families don’t show up for the next appointment because of the cost of travelling long distances. They claim the cost of their journey is much higher than the food that we provide, so they don’t come back to finish the treatment.
In some instances, the opposite can also be true,she added:
Families keep coming back to us for support for their children, even when they aren’t classified as malnourished anymore, and when we can’t assist them, they become irate and shout that we’re lying and taking the aid for ourselves.
We heard several such accusations from health workers that families do not respect them – realistic reporting, especially for female staff. We also heard accusations about health workers from some of our interviews with parents, particularly that they keep the, by now, rare medicines from those most in need and put them instead on sale on the black market.
A mother from Takhar, her two-and-a-half son malnourished, claimed to have witnessed healthcare professionals taking some of the medical resources for themselves and their families. “They also sell products like ready-to-use therapeutic food in the form of biscuits and milk to the market,” she told AAN, adding that the abusive practice persisted notwithstanding inspection by a foreigner (whether a member of staff or monitor was not clear) and subsequent personnel changes or transfers in the hospital. She blamed the problem on the fact that most healthcare professionals had left after the collapse of the Republic and were replaced by new ones who were not satisfactory. She went up to say that the new doctors and nurses would provide good care only upon receiving gifts from patients and remarked – a Tajik herself – that they would be biased against Uzbek mothers, even uttering racist slurs against them.
Several parents also complained that their first visit to a clinic was the only time they received free nutrition treatment. Afterwards, they were told there were no resources to continue the treatment, as a forty-five-year-old mullah from Helmand recounted.
The first time we went [to the clinic], they gave us RUTF [ready-to-use therapeutic food] and some medicine. After that, every time we went, they said there was no RUTF and no medicine. Each time, they told me to visit the clinic next time because there might be RUTF and medicine, but there never was. I could buy the medicine in the bazaar but couldn’t find RUTF…. The medicine that comes for children is not given to anyone. They always make excuses and say nothing remains in the clinic. Now [my son] can eat bread little by little. He’s very weak, and when seasonal diseases come, he gets sick easily. He’s two years old but looks like he’s only one. He still can’t walk. He still crawls.
In the absence of therapeutic food, many families resort to the less expensive types of milk powder or, often, to even cheaper replacements such as sugar water. Another father from Helmand told AAN how all his four children suffered from malnutrition, but he was unable to provide them with nutritious food except, when possible, milk powder:
All my four children are malnourished. My eldest son is six years old, and he was very weak when he was born.… The village doctor told me I should take him to the clinic so they could give him nutritious food. I told him I couldn’t [because] the clinic is far from our home, and I didn’t have money to rent a car and take my son there. Then he told me to at least buy milk powder to help my son survive. Since he’s my first child and I love him, I borrowed some money from a neighbour and bought him milk powder.… The doctor also prescribed some vitamin syrup, but I couldn’t afford it. Then, when he grew a little bit, I soaked bread in water and gave it to him. He is still weak and thin.… My other children are malnourished too. My wife doesn’t have milk, so she can’t breastfeed. All my children grew up with milk powder. The first two can eat bread and other food now. But the other two are small and can only have milk powder. Sometimes I really can’t afford milk powder either. We boil water and add some sugar and give that to them instead of milk.
For him, the economic constraints leading to insufficient nutrition are at the roots of all the health problems of the family:
[Their] mother didn’t eat well during her pregnancy. Our [household] economy has not been good and she couldn’t eat well. I’m a farmer and have no other income. I get wheat, potato and beans from the farms. I work on another person’s land and the landlord only gives me one-quarter of the harvest…. Because of the drought, I can only keep a few sheep and those with a lot of difficulties. Everything’s expensive and there’s drought, so the harvest isn’t good. We can only have bread, potato and beans as our food. We can have meat maybe once in a few months.
The decline in household economies, coupled with a decline in available healthcare, is proving a lethal mix across the country. No longer limited to remote rural areas, malnutrition has crept into the very heart of Afghan cities. Here, a father from Kabul describes how poorly and weak his daughter has continued to be:
There wasn’t enough [food] at home when Mina was born. Her mother didn’t eat well either. Women need to eat well when they’re pregnant and breastfeeding, but my wife didn’t eat well because of our economic situation. She was anaemic and needed blood because she’d had an operation.… When Mina was born, she weighed one kilo and eight grammes, while a healthy newborn weighs three to four kilogrammes.[7]
I took [Mina] to a government hospital and they said she had mild malnutrition, so they didn’t give her nutrients. I took her to another hospital, and they gave her nutrients for one month. She is still weak and her hair doesn’t grow. If it grows, it soon falls out. When I take her to the doctor, they say she’ll be fine. But she doesn’t grow and I don’t know what to do. They don’t give her medicine or food when I take her to the clinic. They say that now she is fine and doesn’t need nutrients, or they make excuses and say they don’t have any nutrients. She’s three years old, but when you look at her, you think she’s less than a year. She doesn’t grow and she can’t walk. She’s very weak. Her bones can be seen under her skin. She can’t talk either. Now she’s almost three years old and she weighs only seven kilogrammes.
Mina’s story highlights the strong connection between mothers’ and children’s health. Pregnant women in Afghanistan are very much at risk of the same economic and medical shortages causing child malnutrition. Mothers are often the first to suffer when household economies weaken, as the nurse in Takhar recalled:
Just three days ago, we had a woman here who was eight months pregnant and in critical need of care: she was malnourished, which contributed to her anaemia, and desperately required a blood transfusion. The family lacked the money to locate and purchase blood, and because the transfusion wasn’t arranged on time, both the woman and the child died before her husband could secure transport from Takhar to Rustaq to donate blood. The woman’s husband was sobbing at her feet and asking how he would carry her [home]. The midwives gave him some cash by putting together 20, 30 or more afghanis, which they’d been given by patients as gifts. When he left, he said he could carry his wife home now, but who knows where he’d get the money for her shroud and funeral.
Conclusions
The economic and healthcare crisis, fuelled by the international withdrawal, the loss of capital and human resources and the discriminating policies by the Taleban that prevent women from studying, working and accessing healthcare, risk reversing one of the achievements of the past two decades in Afghanistan – the slow reduction in the country’s neonatal and child mortality rate (together with the maternal mortality rate, as pointed to in this recent article), previously among the highest globally and which risk returning so.
While the slow-burning, ever-intensifying humanitarian catastrophe befalling Afghanistan’s children is well-known to all international players, finding viable ways to prevent it seems elusive. The Taleban are unlikely ever to relent – or at least to take the first step in doing so – on their restrictive conditions for women working and other forms of gender-based segregation, while international donors are increasingly showing fatigue towards financing programmes in Afghanistan (see AAN report here).
Afghanistan has in the past been faring better, ie receiving more attention, than many other countries in crisis. However, that may be changing. The fact that donor commitments for the 2023 Humanitarian Response Plan have only been trickling in so far – only USD 632.2 million for an appeal of USD 4.6 billion as of this writing – leaves little room for optimism.
WFP announced in May 2023 that it would have to cut emergency assistance to four million people for the second month running due to severe funding constraints. Since the beginning of April 2023, eight million people have been left out of emergency food assistance due to persistent funding shortfalls. On 30 June, it had more bad news. “It’s five million people we are able to serve for another couple of months, WFP Country Director, Hsiao-Wei Lee, told Reuters: “But then beyond that we don’t have the resources. That I think conveys the urgency of where we stand.” She said the reductions would start in August, fall further in September and halt in October, according to the WFP’s estimates of current funds and financial assistance promised by donor countries in coming months.
Against the backdrop of this difficult scenario, the principal organisations focussed on delivering malnutrition support recommend against, among other things, financial cuts by donors and caution against the possibility of humanitarian actors disengaging from fieldwork due to the Emirate’s segregating policies. Instead, they advocate for prioritising feeding programmes for infants, young children and pregnant and lactating women to prevent dangerous forms of newborn malnutrition and trends of relapsing later. They also advocate for the timely treatment of moderate acute malnutrition to prevent these cases from becoming severe. They call for a redoubled focus on primary and secondary healthcare across the country to guarantee access to all portions of the population, improve the detection of pregnant and lactating women and child malnutrition and prevent cases from becoming too severe to be treated successfully.
The emergency assistance needed to fight malnutrition constitutes the most fundamental part of the humanitarian funding for Afghanistan, one that represents the future of Afghanistan embodied in the survival and the health of its next generation. To scrap it means to endanger the future for these children and for Afghanistan.
Edited by Roxanna Shapour and Kate Clark
References
References
↑1
IPC assesses acute malnutrition utilising anthropometric data, ie data related to measurements and proportions of the human body, from the National Nutrition SMART Survey (NNS), as well as other data related to the determinants of malnutrition, including feeding practices, morbidity, sanitation and hygiene, and food security.
↑2
All interviews were conducted by phone between February and March 2023. The provinces were selected because they have regularly displayed significant levels of child malnutrition and are representative of the situation in the central highlands, the south and the northeast, respectively. Interviews in Kabul offered insights on the situation in urban areas.
↑3
“MSF Briefing Note on Malnutrition and Health”, June 2023, pp 7, 8 (AAN has a copy).
↑4
WHO defines a stunted child as one who is too short for his or her age and is the result of chronic or recurrent malnutrition. Stunting is a contributing risk factor to child mortality and is also a marker of inequalities in human development. Stunted children fail to reach their physical and cognitive potential.
↑5
According to WHO, child wasting refers to a child who is too thin for his or her height and is the result of recent rapid weight loss or the failure to gain weight. A child who is moderately or severely wasted has an increased risk of death, but treatment is possible.
↑6
According to the 2022 National Statistics Yearbook the number of Afghan children under 5 years old stood at 6.17 million (see here).
↑7
The mentioned weight is very low indeed – typically babies require incubation if they are below 1.5 kilogrammes. The father made no mention of this having happened. It would seem a miracle if Mina survived without incubation at that weight.
The Taleban made their move against education for older girls about a month after they took over Afghanistan when they ordered secondary schools for boys to re-open, but made no mention of girls. Since then, there have been a few instances of false hope, notably in March 2022 when the government reneged on its promise to reopen girls’ secondary schools. Yet even before the fall of the Republic, many Afghan girls had no access to education – because of conflict in their area, or local conservative mores and a lack of female teachers, or because functioning schools did not exist. In this latest instalment of the Daily Hustle, we hear from one young Afghan woman about how elders in her community managed to open home schools for girls and appointed her as a teacher. That was five years ago. Now, there are rumours that the Taleban will close her school down. I live in one of the largest and most populated districts in our province in southeastern Afghanistan. During the Republic, there was a fight between the government and the Taleban over control of our province and danger was everywhere. We lived in fear of bombs, checkpoints and night raids, day and night. Because of the fighting we didn’t benefit as much as other provinces from the foreign aid that was coming into the country or from the development work the government was doing. There were few healthcare facilities in my area and the schools were closed most of the time, either because of the fighting or because there were no qualified people willing to come work here.
There are than 65 schools in my district – 20 of them are for girls – but the buildings are either neglected or were damaged in the fighting. Some only exist on paper. Over the years we learned that they call these ‘ghost schools’. In those years, the girls’ schools were not allowed to operate in the areas the Taleban controlled and where there were schools, there were few female teachers. But many people still wanted to educate their daughters. Finally, the tribal elders stepped in. They asked each village to find an educated woman in their own community who could teach girls ain their home. They asked the parents to pay the teachers whatever they could afford. This is how I came to run a school in our house five years ago.
A home school for girls in the village
I used to have big dreams of going to medical school in Kabul, but my father wouldn’t agree. He thought I’d be a burden on my brother and his family in Kabul and that I should stay in the village until my fiancé could get enough money together for us to get married. But my family could see that I was chafing for something to do and one day my father came home and said I could use the big room in our house as a classroom for girls. And so, armed with my high school diploma, I joined the ranks of literate women and older men who’d opened their homes to educate the girls of our district.
My home school started with 20 girls but as our reputation grew and people started to learn about the classes my class grew until I eventually had 50 students between 7 and 18 years old.[1] It was difficult for me to ask for money from the parents. I knew many of my students didn’t have enough to eat at home and paying fees for their daughters’ education was a hardship, so I didn’t press anyone to pay me. The parents gave me what they could afford, which came up to about 7,000-9,000 afghanis (100-150 USD at the time) each month.
A new curriculum
One day, after the Taleban came to power, UNICEF and an NGO came to our area. They said they wanted to establish community schools for girls and the elders told them there were already home schools in the district. So they met all the teachers and tested us to ensure we were qualified to teach primary school. They kept most of the existing schools and established some new ones. Now we have about 200 home schools in the district. UNICEF gives us educational materials including books, notebooks, school bags and pens for our pupils. They pay me 9,000 afghanis (now about 105 USD) each month so I don’t have to rely on the largesse of parents and it eases the financial burden on very poor families who’re struggling to survive.
The province’s Directorate of Education and UNICEF introduced new rules and a formal curriculum. They reduced the number of students from 50 to 35. Now the girls are between 7 and 12 years old. We cover two grades in one year, so it takes three years to complete the primary school curriculum. A team from the NGO and the district education office come twice a month to monitor my classes and make sure I’m sticking to the curriculum and the quality of teaching is up to par.
In the past, I taught my students Pashto, spelling, maths, religion, the biography of the Holy Prophet and the Quran. Now, with the new curriculum from the district’s education office, I teach Pashto, life skills, maths, calligraphy, art, religious education, which includes fiqh [Islamic jurisprudence] and hadiths[the sayings and actions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad], and the Holy Quran. The official school hours are 7 am to 12 pm. After lunch, I hold free Quran classes for the older girls.
My family is not in favour of the afternoon classes. They say I’m working too hard and that the girls tire me out. They’d like me to take a break in the afternoons and recharge my batteries for the next day, but I think it’s a good deed and will bring Allah’s blessings on our home and my life. It’s true, my pupils are lively and the classes can sometimes be raucous, but it makes me happy to educate young girls and make sure that they have literacy and numeracy skills and know the holy word.
Rumours fuel uncertainty
Lately, there have been rumours that the Emirate wants to close the home schools. People are very worried. I don’t understand why the government would do such a thing. The home schools use the official curriculum and, anyway, what could possibly be wrong with teaching girls to read, write and do arithmetic? There used to be war before, but now it’s their government [ie those who had been the armed opposition]. They are in charge and all the people want education. Now that the war is over, the government should create more facilities, refurbish the old schools and build new ones. Girls should be able to go to school, same as boys. If the Emirate has really made this decision [to close home schools], it could affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of pupils across the country. It seems like an injustice.
It’s not only education for girls [that is at stake] but also the livelihoods of the teachers. The salaries the teachers get also help keep their families afloat. People are suffering financially and the money they earn helps put food on the table. We are 12 in my family – my parents, four brothers, four sisters, my sister-in-law and me. I am the only one who works and my income supports the household.
My father used to work in the Gulf and send money home for the family, but times have been hard since he lost his job and came back home to Afghanistan. [One] brother has a university education, but he’s unemployed. He farms our land, but we have [only] a small plot and we don’t have water. We can’t afford to hire a drill to dig a well, so we have to buy water from other people. Another brother was a teacher in one of the schools in the district, but he lost his job after he fell ill and had to go to Pakistan for medical treatment. He’s trying to get a passport so he can go aboard for work. If he manages to get a visa and find a job in one of the Gulf countries, he can send money home and that will help ease our financial burdens. For now we must make do with my small income, and if the government closes the school, we’ll face serious difficulties. I’m not the only one. Times are hard for most families and for the teachers who have classes at home, the money they earn is a lifeline. Their lives will be devastated if the schools are closed.
Keeping hope alive
If there is one thing I’ve learned in my years, it’s that nothing is ever certain or forever. For now, we have the home schools and I must focus on the present and do my best to educate the girls that come to my classes. I’m hoping my fiancé will have enough money for us to get married this year. I don’t want the school to close after that, when I’m no longer living in the village. So I’m training my younger sister and my sister-in-law to take the school over when I move to Kabul with my husband. My fiancé is very supportive of my dream of becoming a doctor. Who knows, maybe by then the Emirate will allow women to go to university. Wouldn’t that be the best of dreams come true?
References
References
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Despite the age range, all were getting a primary education: it was an opportunity even for older girls who had missed out on schooling when they were younger.
Afghanistan Peace Campaign
