P.O.Box 21375, Washington, D.C. 20009

Polio Cases on the Increase in Afghanistan: How is the Emirate handling immunisation?

February 2, 2025

Jelena Bjelica • Nur Khan Himmat

print sharing button

After pausing the roll-out of the vaccination programme twice last year, the Islamic Emirate finally restarted polio vaccination for under-fives in late October 2024. However, it has restricted delivery of the vaccines to mosques and village centres only. No longer will vaccinators be able to go door-to-door. It seems that the pauses and change in delivery may have driven an increase in the number of positive polio cases in Afghanistan: in 2024, 25 positive polio cases were recorded, according to the World Health Organisation, the highest number in four years. The Afghan Ministry of Public Health spokesman denied the cases, saying “no polio case was recorded in the country.” AAN’s Jelena Bjelica and Nur Khan Himmat have been speaking to parents with children under five years of age in some of the 16 provinces that were targeted for polio immunisation in October and November, asking them how effective is the Emirate’s current approach to protecting children from polio. 

My brother was visiting and told me that the polio vaccinators had come and that they were immunising the children in front of the mosque. I asked him to help me take my two children. If he hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t have known about the campaign and my children wouldn’t have been vaccinated… 

My husband wasn’t in the mosque when they announced it. He was in the fields working. … This is very difficult for me… if my brother hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t have been able to get my children vaccinated. It’s difficult for a woman to take her children to a place where many people are gathered. I myself would’ve been ashamed to have gone…. I prefer door-to-door vaccination. I know that if men are not at home to take the children to be vaccinated, some women will never get their children vaccinated [if it means having to take them to] the mosque.

These are the words of Gul Sima, who has two children under the age of five, in Marja district in Helmand, a province which historically has had a high incidence of polio, an infectious disease that can lead to the permanent paralysis of parts of the body, and primarily affects children.[1] She is one of ten Afghans we spoke to in November and December 2024, as the polio vaccination campaigns resumed following the ten-week-long break, from 13 August to 28 October.[2]

Most of our interviewees, like Gul Sima, come from the southern provinces. Some, but not all, had heard about the vaccination; Gul Sima was not alone in having heard about it only informally, by chance. Some fathers described losing a day’s work to take their children for vaccination – others had to work and leave their children unprotected. Almost all the interviewees had experienced some level of difficulty or inconvenience and said vaccination on the doorstep would have made life easier and vaccination more feasible. Before hearing from these parents, this report opens with an overview of the polio situation in Afghanistan since 2001 and a recap of last year’s breaks in immunisation.

A brief look at polio in Afghanistan since 2001

It has been compulsory for children in Afghanistan to be vaccinated since 1978 when routine immunisation against polio was launched, under the name, the Mass Immunisation Programme. Since then, the number of polio cases in Afghanistan has decreased from the thousands in the 1980s to the hundreds in the 1990s to only handful each year in the 2000s.[3]

The lower number of positive polio cases since 2001 is the result of an increase in immunisation coverage. For example, while only around 25 per cent of children in 2000 received the third (and final) dose of polio vaccine, by 2023 that percentage had risen to around 68 per cent.[4]

However, there were years when the progress came to a standstill, or went backwards. For example, in 2014, the year when most foreign troops left Afghanistan and a presidential election was held, the number of children immunised dropped to 50 per cent. Both events led to a general deterioration of security and consequently less access for vaccinators.

Likewise, in the years preceding both 2011 and 2020, when a hike in cases, to 80 and 56 respectively, was recorded (see Graph 1 below), gaps in vaccination were caused by intensified fighting, a general lack of oversight of polio vaccination in the country as well as localised bans on door-to-door vaccination by the then Taleban insurgents.[5] In 2020, there were no vaccination campaigns from March to June due to the Covid pandemic, while a year earlier, the more stringently imposed Taleban ban on house-to-house vaccination, announced in May 2018, led to no vaccination campaigns the following year from April to July.

Graph 1: Data extrapolated from the World Health Organisation’s reports. Graph by AAN.

In general, since 2001, the poliovirus has most often been detected in the southern region and, to a lesser extent, in other parts of country.[6] In the south, the polio endemic is generally concentrated in Kandahar and Helmand and neighbouring provinces.[7] In 2011, for example, out of 80 cases, 62 were recorded in southern Afghanistan. Likewise, in 2020, out of 56 cases, 38 were recorded in the southern region (16 from Helmand, 14 from Kandahar, 4 from Uruzgan, 3 from Zabul and 1 from Nimroz province). In 2024, too, out of 25 positive cases, 21 were recorded in the southern provinces — 14 cases in Kandahar and seven in Helmand.[8]

The latest gap in the immunisation campaign

Usually, every month, a polio immunisation campaign takes place somewhere in Afghanistan, either at the national or sub-national level (targeting specific regions). Each lasts between three and five days. Additionally, smaller targeted campaigns – called ‘campaign responses’ – are also carried out regularly. The monthly campaigns target millions of children under five across all the districts of Afghanistan.[9] The two tables below show an annual overview for 2023 and 2024 of the type of polio campaigns carried out, the number of children vaccinated in each monthly campaign and the number of positive polio cases registered in each month. The two gaps in vaccination can be seen in the 2024 data.

Overview of 2023, broken down by month, of the types of polio campaign carried out, the number of children vaccinated in each campaign and the number of positive polio cases registered. Data collated from the WHO monthly and annual snapshots. Table by AAN.
Overview of 2024, broken down by month, of the types of polio campaign carried out, the number of children vaccinated in each campaign and the number of positive polio cases registered. Data collated from the WHO monthly snapshots.
Table by AAN.

There was a huge break. I’ve [also] been hearing from news since around last two months that the door-to-door vaccination was banned by the Emirate. I was really unhappy, and I was thinking that we won’t have polio drops for our children at all and that the Emirate will ban it for good. Thank God, it’s been resumed.

– Sayed Muhammad, father of three (all under five years of age) from Kajaki district in Helmand

Between 13 August and 28 October 2024, no Afghan child under five was immunised against polio after the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA), in the words of a health official speaking to The Guardian in mid-September, “temporarily suspended” the campaign. The official said immunisation had been suspended because of “issues with the modality of implementation,” listing them as security concerns and the involvement of women in administering vaccines. Radio Free Europe in their mid-September report quoted a polio worker in the eastern province of Nangrahar, who said the polio-immunisation campaign in the region was suspended because local Taleban officials were “demanding tax from aid organizations.”

As little was said about the suspension by the authorities publicly, the reasons for it remain uncertain. However, it was evident when vaccination resumed that door-to-door vaccinations had been banned, so presumably it was concern over this method of delivery that had made the authorities hesitate over letting the campaigns go ahead. They were now allowing vaccinations but parents would have to take their children to a temporary polio vaccination centre, such as a mosque.

The way vaccines are delivered has long been a point of contention for the Taleban. During the insurgency, they banned door-to-door vaccinations in areas under their control because of the fear that the vaccinators might be spies (see the AAN reports in footnote 8 for more on this). The health official who spoke to The Guardian said this was still a fear: “‘One of the reasons for banning door-to-door campaigns was security. The south, especially Kandahar, is where the Taliban leaders live, and they are concerned the campaigns could reveal their locations to foreign threats.’”

However, where concerns were expressed by officials they centred rather on public morality, with a local health worker telling The Guardian of the government’s dislike of female vaccinators going door-to-door. This has been hinted at in other statements, for example, as reported by BBC Pashto on 23 September. The BBC quoted the head of the polio vaccination campaign in the Ministry of Public Health, Dr Abdul Qudus Baryalai, as saying door-to-door campaigns had been banned by Supreme Leader Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada after it was requested by Kandahar’s Ulema Council and representatives of Helmand, Kandahar and Uruzgan provinces, at the “demand of the people of the region.” Baryalai said the Ulema Council’s concern, shared with Mullah Hibatullah, was that “when volunteers knock on their doors, men may not be home.” As will be seen below, this was not what we heard from parents interviewed for this report.

The ban is making health experts anxious because of the inherent benefits to children of door-to-door immunisation campaigns. Vaccinators going from house to house can reach new-borns, children who are sleeping or sick and visiting children. They can reach the children of parents who cannot leave the house: as will be seen, this is often the case for women who cannot leave home unaccompanied by a man, but parents might also be disabled or sick and unable to take their children, or not have transport, so cannot easily get to a far-away vaccination centre. Fathers might be away, or working. Moreover, facing a vaccinator on the doorstep makes it easier for parents to say ‘yes’ to getting their children protected, in contrast to having to actively choose to take them to a centre.

What do parents say?

We wanted to hear from parents about their experiences of polio immunisation since the late summer/early autumn pause and the country-wide ban on door-to-door delivery.[10] We conducted two rounds of interviews with ten parents, in total, who came from 5 of the 16 provinces where vaccination campaigns took place in October and December. We interviewed seven parents who had children under five – two from Kandahar, two from Helmand and one from each Uruzgan, Zabul and Kunduz provinces – just after the IEA resumed the polio vaccination on 28 October 2024.[11] Additionally, after the completion of the second polio vaccination campaign that started on 25 November 2024,[12] we interviewed three additional parents – one each from Kunduz, Kabul, and Zabul provinces. We also reinterviewed a parent from Kandahar who had missed immunising his children during the October campaign. The short questionnaire was a mix of open and close-ended questions.[13]

All our interviewees eventually got their children vaccinated – eight during the October campaign and two during the November campaign. Most had not heard about the campaign before it began. Some found out about it by chance, including Nur Muhammad, the father of two under-fives from Aino Mina in Kandahar province of the October campaign.

We didn’t hear any announcement and the vaccinator didn’t come to our house either. A few months previously, they’d come to our house and vaccinated our children. It isn’t difficult for us to take our children to the mosque or any other centre where vaccination is taking place. We’re an extended family and thank God, we have four cars between us. But if we aren’t aware of the campaign taking place, that’s a problem.

We interviewed him a second time, after the November campaign. Again, he had not heard about it, but this time, he found out by chance and in time.

They aren’t putting a lot of effort to make us aware of the campaigns. We were lucky – one of my friends called me on the fourth day of the campaign and asked if we’d got our children vaccinated. He knew they’d missed out in October. As soon as I heard, I took my children to the hospital in our area and got them vaccinated.

Similarly, Aziz Khan, the father of two under five-years from Kabul province also got to hear about the second vaccination campaign in November 2024 in a haphazard way:

I got vaccinated my children last week. I couldn’t get them vaccinated in the [October] campaign because we didn’t know it was happening. There wasn’t even an announcement in the mosque. I did hear about the latest campaign. I told my brother to find out where it was and take my children to be vaccinated. He searched for the vaccinators and when he found them, they asked him if they could use our house as a polio immunisation centre. They said people hardly ever give them their houses to use as a centre even for only an hour. My brother gave his permission. This way, we got vaccinated our children, as well. 

Rahmatullah, the father of three children under-fives from Dasht-e Archi district in Kunduz, told us he did know about the November campaign – it was announced every day in his local mosque. However, he decided his children would miss out on their November vaccinations because he was working and he’d got them vaccinated during in October (three doses of polio vaccine are necessary, so this decision may be detrimental to his children). “I didn’t take my children for vaccination,” he said, “because I’d recently found a job of digging a well. I go early to a village about three kilometres away from our house. I couldn’t lose that work.”

Similar dilemmas faced Muhammad Omar from Shah Joy district, Zabul province, in November: he was busy ploughing his land when that campaign took place. However, the father of three under-fives also objected to where the November vaccinations were taking place:

I got my children vaccinated around 40 days ago [in October]. I didn’t get them vaccinated in the recent campaign [November]. Last time, it was good. It was in the mosque and my wife took our children there. This time, our mosque’s mullah and some elders had decided the mosque shouldn’t be used as a centre for vaccination and selected two other places instead. [O]ne of the centres was very far away. I was working on my land and I’d rented a tractor for ploughing, I was busy with sowing the wheat. My wife didn’t take our children to the centre because she’s a woman. We traditionally don’t allow our women to go out, especially to far-off places.

The second centre was near to our house … maybe five minutes from us, but we didn’t take our children there because it was the house of a man with whom I have differences [a kind of enmity]. I told my wife not to take the children to his house for immunisation. 

Another parent, Bibi Aisha, who has four children, three under five, from Arghestan district in Kandahar, told us her husband had to take a day off work so they could take their children for vaccination:

My husband’s working in a pomegranate orchard. He goes there at 6 ‘o clock in the morning, every day. On that day, he didn’t go to his work because he had to go with me to get our three children vaccinated. They’re all under five years old. My husband would never allow me to go on my own to the mosque for vaccination because there are many men in the mosque. He tells me not to take the children for vaccination unless he’s with me. He’s telling me that the children won’t die, but please don’t go alone to the mosque. It’s our tradition. Women don’t go anywhere without being accompanied by a man.

Public information campaigns and clear announcements that campaigns were starting locally appear to have been only haphazardly undertaken. That further reduced the ability of parents to take up opportunities to get their children vaccinated. With door-to-door vaccinations, announcing the start of a campaign is useful, but if parents have to take their children to a centre, it is vital. Several of our parents were critical of the absence of public information. A few had a more positive experience, for example, Sayed Muhammad, father of three under-fives from Kajaki district in Helmand:

I heard about [the October campaign] on the radio and also from the vaccinators over the loudspeakers in our village. We took our children to the mosque and they were immunised there. The mosque isn’t very near to our house. I used to live in our village in the past, but two years ago, I built a new house near my fields, I prefer to live near to my agriculture land… 

However, he recalled with regret the convenience of the old door-to-door campaigns:

[The current way of doing things] is very difficult for me. If I’m not at home, my wife can’t take our children for vaccination. My wife is sick. She can’t take the children to the mosque. I prefer door-to-door vaccination. It used to be very easy for us. I don’t think anybody prefers mosque-to-mosque vaccination.

Hassan Khan, father of three (two under five) from Shah Joy district in Zabul province heard about the campaign when it was announced in the mosque.

I wasn’t at home, but my elder son had heard the announcement and took his two infant brothers to the mosque for vaccination. My brother is actually a vaccinator, himself, and was out in another village, vaccinating children. Yet, his two children weren’t immunised against polio because his wife didn’t want to take them to the mosque. Some women don’t go to the mosque for vaccination – they are either not allowed by their husbands or they themselves feel shy. I’ve heard of other children as well in our village that have remained without being vaccination.

Dost Muhammad, father of six (three under five) from Dasht-e Archi, Kunduz, said a campaigner had come to his mosque early in the morning and told all the men to bring their children to the mosque to be vaccinated, which he had done. Mullah Obaidullah Jan, father of eight, with three children under five from Chahar Chino district in Uruzgan, said he had himself announced to the people in his mosque that vaccination would be taking place. However, he said his elder children had had to bring their younger siblings because he was busy welcoming people to the mosque.

All our interviewees said that in their localities, the vaccinators, both past and present, were male. Aziz Khan, the father of two under-fives from Kabul province, was the only one with a different experience: in Kabul city, he said, “the mobilisers were female, but vaccinators were male.” Yet, the programme to deploy women to deliver the vaccine among other duties has expanded since a 2020 pilot project in three provinces. These are the ‘female vaccination mobilisers’, women from the local community who, despite not having the medical training to administer intravenous vaccines, can administer polio drops, be the first-line advocates for polio eradication and deliver health education more generally to other women. In 2024, the programme covered 20 out of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, with more than 600 workers; these reports by WHO’s Global Polio Eradication Initiative and UNICEF mention female vaccination mobilisers in Nangrahar, Helmand and Khost.

The theory behind the project is that women can more easily reach women: one mobiliser in Khost, Rezia, said to UNICEF that changing people’s minds is the first and biggest step toward getting more children vaccinated, and women are critical players: “I’m respected in the community. … I’m a mother, a grandmother – women listen to me. I can persuade the older women, and they want their daughters to have services they didn’t have. It trickles down.” UNICEF quoted the female vaccination mobilisers as saying that having mothers’ questions answered straightforwardly, by a trusted neighbour, has contributed significantly to changing attitudes toward vaccination in the districts where they work.

Regardless of who delivers the vaccinations, all our interviewees said they preferred door-to-door campaigns because they are convenient, save time and do not require additional logistics. That included the mullah from Uruzgan who said he preferred them because his elder children had had to bring the smaller ones to the mosque. In areas where women generally cannot go alone to the mosque or other centre and need a man to be at home to take the children, the end of door-to-door campaigns will, inevitably, mean fewer children vaccinated, as Nur Muhammad, father of two under-fives from Aino Mina in Kandahar province summed up:

We do indeed prefer door-to-door vaccination. If we’re aware of the campaign then [taking the children to a centre] isn’t a problem for us personally. But for families who only have one man in the family and he’s working, it’s difficult for women to take their children to the mosque or to a polio centre. Many people don’t allow their women to take the children out of the home – and that includes us.

What do the experts say?

It not only parents who prefer the door-to-door campaigns. Experts told AAN the two vaccination gaps in 2024 had caused some damage, but far worse had been the harm done by the ban on door-to-door campaigns. A former UNICEF communication manager told AAN that, in previous years, door-to-door campaigns had been able to reach almost 100 per cent of under-fives. “The mosque-to-mosque modality isn’t successful because people don’t bring their children to the mosque. The reason is tradition – women will not bring their children to the mosque if the men are not at home [to accompany them].” The contrast with the current delivery method, he said, was stark: “The teams could barely reach 60 per cent of children through the mosque-to-mosque approach in previous years. A successful campaign is when you vaccinate at least 95 per cent of children.”

This same conclusion was reached by a vaccinator in Nad Ali district in Helmand province who told AAN that in the November 2024 campaign, his team reached only between 700 and 750 children out of the 1,200 they would normally reach via the door-to-door campaign (less than two-thirds). He said people were not bringing their children to the mosque or village centre because the men might be busy at work and women could not go outside unaccompanied.[14]

The denial of the positive polio cases by the IEA Ministry of Public Health has added to the problem. It seems to be a bizarre exercise in semantics: the ministry’s claim that there is no record of positive polio cases in Afghanistan is based on the fact that, currently, samples are sent for examination to a laboratory in Pakistan. It seems that the ministry is spinning the narrative by denying the positive cases as a ploy to try to get funds to set up a laboratory in Afghanistan, according to several AAN sources, who wish to remain unnamed. However, that denial does not help parents protect their children from the spread of the poliovirus.

Afghanistan and Pakistan are the last two remaining countries in the world where polio is endemic, despite a great deal of resources and attention. Their eradication efforts are interlinked and the two countries are dependent on each other’s success in eliminating polio – or held back by the other’s failings. Pakistan has also seen an increase in positive cases last year; 72 cases had been recorded in 2024, an enormous increase from only 6 in 2023, according to WHO data. The epidemiological evidence suggests that the role of population movement is one of the key factors for poliovirus transmission across Afghanistan. The number of positive polio cases in Pakistan plays an important role in the virus spread through population movement across the border. This is why the intermittent breaks in vaccination, the ad-hoc shifts in approach, as well as unnecessary politicising of the issue, for example, the question of the laboratory location, does not help protect children. However, these particular problems have only existed since 2001 in Afghanistan.

In the past, access to children might always be limited by fighting and lack of security. Today, it is the government’s attitude towards women that is limiting the outreach of vaccinators, together with cultural restraints on women’s autonomy and movement. While the vaccination campaigns will, hopefully, be regular throughout 2025, unless door-to-door campaigns are resumed, it seems inevitable that many Afghan children will be left unprotected from the poliovirus.

Edited by Kate Clark and Rachel Reed 

References
↑1 Polio, short for poliomyelitis, is an infectious disease that is caused and transmitted by a virus called the poliovirus. Poliovirus only infects humans. It is very contagious and spreads through person-to-person contact. The virus is most often spread by the faecal-oral route, that is, if food or water is contaminated with faecal matter, it enters through the mouth and multiplies in the intestine. Infected individuals shed poliovirus into the environment for several weeks, where it can spread rapidly through a community, especially in areas of poor sanitation. One of the severe symptoms of polio in childhood is paralysis and the disease is therefore also known as ‘infantile paralysis’.
↑2 This was the second break in vaccination in 2024. The first, twelve-week-long break lasted from 1 February to 29 April.
↑3 For a more detailed historical analysis on the number of polio cases, see AAN’s report ‘One Land, Two Rules (5): The polio vaccination gap’ from 2019. The publicly available historical data on positive paralytic polio cases in Afghanistan shows that the number of cases dropped from almost 2,000 in the mid-1980s to a handful in the early 2000s; see the ‘Our World in Data’ by Oxford University.
↑4 See this World Health Organisation’s immunisation dashboard for an overview of the coverage as a  percentage.
↑5 The Taleban attitude towards polio vaccinators varied over time and geography, as described in the AAN report in Footnote 3.
↑6 In the eastern region, the epidemic is part of what is called the ‘northern corridor transmission zone’, extending from Nangrahar, Kunar and Nuristan into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, including what were formerly the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas in Pakistan (FATA). The one case in Kapisa since 2001 would probably be placed at the westernmost end of this corridor. There have been fewer positive polio cases further north, for example, in Kunduz and Balkh provinces. Herat province in the west of the country had also seen a few positive polio cases, as has Farah, which neighbours both Herat and Helmand.
↑7 AAN’s ‘One Land, Two Rules (5): The polio vaccination gap’, quoting WHO data, described cases in the south as concentrated in Kandahar, but with ‘spillover transmission’ into Helmand and Uruzgan.
↑8 See also these two in-depth AAN reports about polio in Kandahar: ‘Why does the Incidence of Polio Vary? A comparative study of two districts of Kandahar (Part 1)’ and Helmand: ‘Why does the Incidence of Polio Vary? A comparative study of two districts in Helmand (Part 2)’.
↑9 There are also special immunisation campaigns targeting older children (from 5 to 12 years of age), an example of which can be found in this 2023 WHO annual polio vaccination newsletter.
↑10 In the southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand the door-to-door campaign have been banned for some time.
↑11 16 of 34 Afghanistan’s provinces were targeted for the immunisation campaign that started on 28 October 2024: Helmand, Kandahar, Urozgan, Zabul, Nimruz, Farah, Kabul, Baghlan, Kunduz, Takhar, Khost, Paktika, Nangrahar, Laghman, Kunar and Nuristan.
↑12 The second campaign after the ban was carried in ten provinces: Kabul, Nangrahar, Laghman, Kunar, Nuristan, Kandahar, Helmand, Zabul, Uruzgan and Kunduz.
↑13 The polio questionnaire: 

When did you vaccinate your children last? (Yesterday, Last week, Several months ago)

How did you hear about the polio campaign in your village?

Was there any break in the vaccination campaigns in your village? For how long?

In the past, did the vaccinators come to your house or you took your child/children to the mosque/centre?

How far is the mosque/centre where vaccination takes place from your house?

How difficult was this for you, to take your children for vaccination?

Which one do you prefer: door-to-door vaccine or mosque-to-mosque?

Are the vaccinators male or female? What were they in the past?
↑14 A polio volunteer in Kabul told AAN that mullahs did not allow them to carry out vaccinations in the mosque in one area of Kabul. He said the mullah is the son of a community elder who is against polio vaccination and had banned the use of the mosque as a polio centre.

Polio Cases on the Increase in Afghanistan: How is the Emirate handling immunisation?
read more

Failure to Protect: The Taliban’s Reversal of Gender-based Violence Protections

January 22, 2025
By: Belquis Ahmadi
United States Institute of Peace
Wednesday, January 22, 2025
KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • The Taliban have dismantled mechanisms to address gender-based violence.
  • Instead, the Taliban’s judicial system now harshly punishes women who seek justice.
  • The international community should sanction Taliban officials that engage in human rights violations.
Before the Taliban’s return to power in 2021, Afghanistan had made strides in combating gender-based violence (GBV) — starting with the implementation of frameworks that criminalized acts such as forced marriage, underage marriage, rape and intimate partner violence.
Building on this foundation, Afghan civil society organized various mechanisms that provided crucial support for survivors: Hotlines offered immediate assistance, women’s shelters provided safe havens for victims, and legal assistance was available alongside specialized support centers throughout the country. Meanwhile, independent commissions brought together the Afghan attorney general’s office, the country’s Supreme Court and various government ministries to enforce the new frameworks and provide support. This collaboration between women’s rights organizations, law enforcement and judicial entities helped to create more timely and cohesive responses to GBV cases compared to past systems.However, since 2021, the Taliban have systematically dismantled these life-saving mechanisms. This rollback has left Afghanistan an increasingly dangerous places for women, ranking in the bottom three in the Women, Peace & Security Index. With patriarchal norms deeply entrenched, survivors now face overwhelming barriers to seeking help, including fear of reprisals from abusers, families and authorities.

Judicial Bias Against Women Seeking Justice

Under Taliban rule, the Afghanistan judicial system has been weaponized to undermine women’s rights and autonomy. In several cases, the Taliban have annulled divorce rulings granted under Afghanistan’s previous legal framework — even in cases of child marriage — and forcibly returned women to abusive husbands. This regressive policy strips women of their legal protection and exposes them to renewed cycles of violence and trauma.

The lack of legal avenues for separation leaves victims of GBV even more isolated and desperate. Women enduring domestic violence or forced marriage often see no choice but to flee their homes — a decision fraught with immense risks. Under Taliban rule, such actions are frequently recast as “adultery” or other moral crimes.

Under the Taliban’s oppressive system, women accused of these moral offenses are denied basic legal rights. They are stripped of due process and the opportunity to defend themselves in court and protection under the law. In the absence of a fair hearing, arbitrary and harsh punishments, such as public flogging and imprisonment, are imposed by Taliban judges with little regard for justice.

Since the Taliban’s emir issued an order for the imposition of Shariah-prescribed punishments in November 2022, at least 178 women have been subjected to public flogging for alleged offenses such as illicit relationships, running away from home, adultery or immoral behavior based on cases officially reported by the Taliban’s Supreme Court. Yet there are anecdotal indications that the full scale of such punishments is far greater, with many instances of flogging unreported. In many cases, women are whipped inside the courtroom by the judge, and some are imprisoned afterwards.

Others have been falsely accused of tazeer offenses — a category of Shariah law where the punishments are left to the discretion of a judge rather than prescribed by Islamic law. In the hands of Taliban judges, punishments for these offenses are devoid of even the pretense of standardized legal principles or procedural safeguards. The penalties are not only arbitrary but can be deeply degrading — with public flogging and extended imprisonment common — leaving survivors with no opportunity to contest the accusations or defend themselves in a fair and impartial hearing.

Social Stigma and Exploitation

After serving their sentences, women accused of adultery or other offenses are often forced to marry the man involved regardless of whether or not their guilt has been proven — and even if the situation constitutes rape. The Taliban and their interpretation of Shariah law do not recognize rape, instead considering any sexual contact between a man and a woman to be consensual, thus subjecting women to punishment regardless of the circumstances.

In some cases, a small number of women are eventually accepted back by their families after enduring humiliation and imprisonment. However, when families refuse to take them back due to the social stigma attached, women are either kept in prison indefinitely or coerced into marrying Taliban members. This practice highlights the systemic abuse and disregard for women’s autonomy under Taliban rule, further entrenching their vulnerability and suffering in a society that offers no protection or justice.

In the most extreme cases, women seeking justice for GBV are subjected to further exploitation and humiliation, deepening their already dire circumstances. Accounts from women who have turned to Taliban justice mechanisms describe abuses where Taliban police and judicial officials exploit GBV victims’ vulnerability rather than address their grievances.

In one instance disclosed to USIP by a relative, a woman who filed a complaint against her abusive husband was detained while Taliban officers called her husband in. The Taliban officiers then handed her husband a whip and ordered him to beat her as punishment for reporting him and defying his authority. Adding to the humiliation, the police allegedly taunted the husband, questioning his masculinity and ridiculing him for his perceived failure to control his wife.

In a northern province, a woman who had endured severe abuse at the hands of her husband filed a petition for divorce. According to a person close to the victim, she appeared before a judge, accompanied by her brother, to plead her case. After listening to her brother recount her ordeal, the judge summoned the woman to the center of the courtroom and began whipping her for disobeying her husband.

In another case relayed to USIP, a teenage girl accused of adultery was sentenced to two years in prison. However, the presiding judge arranged a forced marriage to an older Taliban member as a condition for her early release.

The Despair of Afghan Women

This dual exploitation of women both as survivors seeking justice and as targets of ideological repression further entrenches systemic gender-based marginalization under Taliban rule. The absence of oversight, accountability and any semblance of an impartial judicial process creates a fertile ground for abuses to continue unchecked. Without any meaningful legal recourse or avenues for redress, Afghan women are forced into a perpetual state of vulnerability.

Without any meaningful legal recourse or avenues for redress, Afghan women are forced into a perpetual state of vulnerability.

This toxic environment has profoundly exacerbated the mental health crisis for Afghan women. The constant threat of personal insecurity, coupled with strict control, pervasive restrictions, lack of protection mechanisms and social ostracism has created an atmosphere of fear, isolation, despair and hopelessness.Meanwhile, the Taliban’s Ministry of Public Health issued a directive in November 2023 prohibiting NGOs from providing mental health, women’s health, social services and public awareness programs outside of the framework of government-run initiatives. This has significantly restricted women’s access to essential care, exacerbating the challenges faced by vulnerable populations, particularly those affected by GBV.The shortage of mental health professionals, especially female counselors, compounds the crisis, leaving many women without the support they desperately need. For many, the despair becomes so profound that it drives them to attempt suicide as a last resort.

How the International Community Can Help Afghan Women

Countries supporting Afghan victims should prioritize the needs of GBV survivors by funding comprehensive response programs run by NGOs that integrate mental health services, shelter, legal assistance and medical care. While the Taliban has deeply restricted non-governmental programs, there is room to provide this needed assistance through avenues that the Taliban still approve of — namely, livelihood, general health care and income generation activities. These programs can be generally branded but focus on addressing GBV issues when appropriate in the privacy of a treatment facility.

Financial support should be directed to organizations with extensive experience and proven track records in Afghanistan working on women’s rights and women’s health issues, enabling them to establish secure, confidential platforms for reporting and documenting GBV incidents. These platforms would not only offer a lifeline to survivors but also create a robust evidence base to support future accountability and advocacy efforts.

Additionally, the U.S. should continue to amplify the voices of Afghan women on global platforms and advocate for the restoration and protection of their fundamental rights. Multilateral diplomacy must also play a critical role, leveraging collective international pressure on the Taliban to dismantle policies that perpetuate GBV and systemic discrimination against women. Together, these efforts can help address the immediate needs of survivors while challenging the structural injustices fueling the crisis.

The U.S. and the international community should continue supporting the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan and the efforts of the U.S. special envoy for human rights and women’s rights. These initiatives are crucial for maintaining pressure on the Taliban, raising awareness about the ongoing situation, and highlighting the far-reaching consequences of the Taliban’s oppressive policies both within Afghanistan and across the broader region.

One final option is to further leverage the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act to impose targeted sanctions on Taliban leaders and entities responsible for their ongoing violations of human rights, particularly those affecting Afghan women and girls. Sanctions could include asset freezes, strictly enforced travel bans and restrictions on doing business with these individuals or entities — all of which would send a strong message that the world will not tolerate actions that undermine the fundamental rights of Afghans. Furthermore, this approach would encourage broader international action, aligning with global efforts to hold perpetrators of human rights violations accountable.

Failure to Protect: The Taliban’s Reversal of Gender-based Violence Protections
read more

‘I Just Want to See My Mom and Dad.’ An Afghan Teen in the U.S. Yearns For Reunion

January 20, 2025
By Jazzmin Jiwa
TIME magazine
The story of Samir Ahmadi’s journey to America could have been written by Charles Dickens. But its author is the 14-year-old Afghan boy who, one week after the Taliban walked into Kabul, found himself walking away from it, jammed with his family and tens of thousands of others on the road leading to Hamid Karzai International Airport. The U.S. government, having pulled its troops out of Afghanistan, had announced that it would airlift two groups: Anyone holding a U.S. passport, and anyone who had worked for the Americans during the previous 20 years. But most of the throng was—like Samir, his parents, his older brother, his younger brother, and their 7-year-old sister—simply terrified of staying behind.

Then armed men in black turbans, as if to justify their fear, opened fire into the crowd. Samir was still with his parents when they saw a girl fall into a ditch, then a mass of people fall onto the same spot. When they climbed out, she lay dead. This was when, fearing for their own daughter, Samir’s parents decided to turn back.

Samir did not see them go. Only when he paused in the rush and scanned the faces surrounding him did Samir realize that his family was no longer in sight. He considered going back the way he had come, but someone said the Taliban was beating Afghans who came that way. When he finally reached the long line outside the airport gate, Samir approached an American soldier guarding it. He told the soldier’s interpreter that he could not find his family. They could be inside, he said. The soldier asked his age, and, hearing 14, moved him to another entrance. There, Samir began talking with an Afghan family with U.S. passports. When they went inside, so did he.

“Because Americans were taking their families, I made myself look like I was part of that family and I just kind of tagged along,” Samir says.

He had left home with his family at 10 a.m. Now, at midnight, he unwrapped the clothes he had bundled around his phone, saw that his battery was dead, borrowed a charger, and dialed his family. That’s when they told him

The plane he boarded carried Samir from the place that produced the iconic images of the American withdrawal—desperate young men dropping to their deaths after clinging to departing airplanes; the suicide bombing that Donald Trump invoked in the Presidential campaign, for the death of 13 U.S. service members (179 Afghans also perished). But after the chaos at Kabul, the places Samir went next proved, if anything, too ordered.

The process was not smooth. Though their physical needs were being met, many endured psychological distress. The trauma of their experience was aggravated, on the one hand, by frequent moves between shelters, and on the other, by the rules of those shelters—especially the severe restrictions limiting phone contact with the families they have left behind, according to the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights.

Samir’s flight out of Kabul landed in Qatar, the Persian Gulf kingdom where all evacuees were taken into U.S. government custody. After two months and 20 days, he was flown with other young people to Chicago. He remembers watching the snow fall from the window of bus that took him to Albion, Mich., and the 350-acres of Starr Commonwealth shelter. The Michigan shelter, Samir was taken to was one of the residential cottages where 13 Afghan children were already staying. As soon as he walked in, the staff took his belongings and gave him new clothes to wear. “The clothes felt like clothes from jail. Like for prisoners,” he says.

Samir says that in his first week at Starr, staff prevented him from calling his family at all. After that, they allowed him two 10-minute calls and one 15-minute call a week. He focused on his emptiness without his family, as there was little stimulation. The children’s days consisted of breakfast, a Netflix movie, lunch, playing cards, then another movie. They were offered no schooling and allowed outside for just an hour a day.

Samir was anxious to be with his family again. But his older brother, Najib, was the only one with a passport of any kind. Under U.S. policy, he could enter the U.S. because Samir was already living there, and Najib met the criteria of being 21 or younger and unmarried. The process involved four months of interviews with the Department of State. Najib had to propose a plan to support Samir in the U.S. as his legal guardian.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the Taliban was threatening to kill anyone who had worked for organizations linked to the U.S. or to the former government. Before it collapsed, Samir’s father had been employed at the Ministry of Interior Affairs. On one of Samir’s rare calls with his parents, wanting to know that his family was safe, Samir stayed on the call for three extra minutes beyond the allotted 10. For the rest of the week, Samir waited anxiously to speak to his parents again. When his turn finally came, the staff forbade him from calling because he had exceeded his allocation the last time.

To understand the rationale for the phone restrictions, the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights interviewed dozens of unaccompanied Afghan minors and shelter staff. What they found, according to Abena Hutchful, the center’s Policy and Litigation Attorney, was that children who had been placed in custody because the U.S. government had failed to ensure that evacuated families remained together, had, upon arrival in America, entered a culture of control and criminalization. “Punishing Trauma” was the title of Young Center report.

Policies for the children were made by former corrections officers or child welfare workers employed by the Office For Refugee Resettlement. “They have worked within cultures of punitive approaches to discipline,” Hutchful said.

Harsh punishment for traumatized children took its toll. Samir and other boys would run away from Starr four or five times a week, sometimes twice a day. When Samir felt most scared about being separated from his family, he would abscond to a lake or hill where he could sit alone and think. His return hours later was usually prompted by a police officer questioning him.

In January 2022, as authorities investigated abuse allegations, the ORR shuttered its program at Starr. One case involved a 16-year-old who said two workers shoved and yelled at him. Another worker was accused of kicking a boy while he was praying. No charges were brought in either case.

Meanwhile, Samir had been moved to another shelter. In October, he arrived at Samaritas, in Grand Rapids, Mich., which had taken in 19 unaccompanied Afghan minors. Sad to leave the 13 boys at Starr who were his first friends after leaving Kabul, Samir felt reassured when the Samaritas staff told him that all the children there could talk to their families for 10 minutes each and every day.

To make the calls, the staff gave the boys two iPhone 7s. It wasn’t enough. Desperate to connect with their families, the boys fought over phones. “There were a lot of broken noses,” Samir says. “Sometimes they would get mad and they would just take the phone, hit it on the floor and break it.”

The dynamic was understandable to Fatima Rahmati, a youth advocate for unaccompanied Afghan children in New York. She is among dozens of Afghan-Americans, most of whom fled Afghanistan in the 1980s, who have helped the Afghan children in the U.S. shelter system to feel more at home in the absence of their families. One teenager had been through seven different shelters in 10 months, Rahmati says.

“How can we ask a 15-year-old boy, who fled everything he knows, to ‘behave’ when he is angry? Control his anger to the point of docility and if he doesn’t comply, the clock resets on when he has the opportunity to be moved to a less restrictive setting?” she asks.

At Samaritas, Grand Rapids police responded nearly every other day to calls for incidents like missing persons, suicide threats, fights and assaults. Samir stayed for less than three months. After he left, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services began an investigation into reports of Afghan minors being mistreated. Samaritas also was cleared of any abuse allegations by the state and reopened the facility. Samaritas did not respond to requests for comment.

He had been there six months when the State Department finally gave Najib a visa and a week’s notice to leave Afghanistan. It was July 2022. But during his own stop in Qatar, he tested positive for tuberculosis. The brothers waited another nine months to be reunited, when Najib finally tested negative and traveled onward to the U.S.

Two shelter staffers took Samir to LAX at 1 a.m. to meet Najib’s plane. Afterward, they returned Samir to David and Margaret, where he had to remain until his brother had a full-time job and had officially become Samir’s guardian. That would take another five months. But the minute Najib touched down, on April 4, 2023, Samir felt part of his emptiness disappear.

“I felt relief because finally there was somebody with me,” Samir said. “All this time I was in the huge United States alone.”

Today their lives look American. Three years after the fall of Kabul, the brothers live in a one-bedroom apartment in Anaheim, home of Disneyland. Samir, now 17, attends Magnolia High School; his hair is cut close on the sides and bushy on the top in the fashion known as alpaca. Najib, 23, works nights filling boxes at Amazon.

But at home they speak Dari and sit on the floor to eat. Every morning before school, Samir calls Afghanistan. Fear of the Taliban is only one of the reasons the first names of his parents and siblings are not in this article. Torpekai Momand, an Afghan immigrant who looks in on the boys, explained that there are thugs in Afghanistan who have kidnapped the relatives of someone who now lives in the U.S., and demanded ransom. His parents, after seeing Najib make his way, acquired passports of their own. But they no longer hear from U.S. officials.

The uncertainty is a new point of stress. One night, Samir cried out in his sleep. In a dream, his mother had died. Four in the morning in California is 3:30 p.m. in Afghanistan, and he reached for his phone. His mother picked right up.

“I just want to see my mom and dad,” Samir says. “I don’t want anything more.”

‘I Just Want to See My Mom and Dad.’ An Afghan Teen in the U.S. Yearns For Reunion
read more

Trump 2.0: What difference will the new US president make to Afghanistan (if any)?

January 20, 2025

Kate Clark

Afghanistan Analysts Network

print sharing button

On Monday, 20 January 2025, Donald Trump will again assume the presidency of the United States. In his first term (2016-20), his administration negotiated the Doha Agreement and the near-unconditional withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan; his successor, Joe Biden, completed the pull-out seven months later, after the Taleban had already taken control of Kabul. Since then, US-Afghan relations have been at arms’ length. The Islamic Emirate has not been recognised by the US and American sanctions remain in place, albeit with waivers. The US remains Afghanistan’s largest donor, channelling largely humanitarian aid through the United Nations and NGOs. Kate Clark looks at whether there could now be change and explores the conundrum of why so many Afghans, both pro and anti-Emirate, are welcoming the return of Trump to the White House. She also looks at what the change in presidency means for the last Afghan held in Guantanamo.
Just ahead of the 5 November 2024 presidential election, we looked at what the two presidential hopefuls, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, had said in their one debate: “As to any thoughts on forward-looking policy on Afghanistan … there were none, from either candidate.”[1]

There were, however, mutual recriminations over the Doha Agreement, signed by the Trump administration in February 2020. Harris accused Trump of having negotiated “one of the weakest deals you can imagine,” one that even his national security adviser had said was “a weak, terrible deal,” that “bypassed the Afghan government” and which “involved the Taliban getting 5,000 terrorists, Taliban terrorists released.” She recalled Trump’s invitation in September 2019 to “the Taliban to Camp David” as an example of how he had “consistently disparaged and demeaned members of our military, fallen soldiers.”

Trump hit back, saying it had been a “very good agreement,” before embarking on a number of untruths: it had stopped the Taleban killing lots of US soldiers with snipers, he claimed, and that he had negotiated directly with “Abdul … the head of the Taliban” (assumed to be head of the Taleban Political Commission, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar) and, most egregiously, that he had broken off the deal because the Taleban had not met various conditions: “The agreement said you have to do this, this, this, this, this, and they didn’t do it. They didn’t do it. The agreement was, was terminated by us because they didn’t do what they were supposed to do.” In reality, Biden came into office with the agreement still in place and with just 2,500 US troops left on the ground: he extended the deadline for withdrawal from May to September, but kept his campaign promise to complete the pull-out.

It is an irony that as Trump returns to the White House, the general public views his record on the withdrawal as clean, even though his administration was its architect. Indeed, Trump had even promised ahead of the 2020 election to bring the final troops home by Christmas. Biden ultimately completed the withdrawal, with all that ensued: the shambles, mayhem and violence and, for the US, the humiliation of the Taleban driving into Kabul to retake power, all played out live on television. The withdrawal caused a fall in Biden’s public approval ratings from which he never recovered: “For the Bidens, Afghanistan was their [Iran] hostage crisis, which really hurt [Jimmy] Carter and his legacy. Afghanistan was the real hinge point for Biden’s approval ratings,” Barbara Perry, co-chair of the Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, told the Washington-based news website Roll Call. In the public imagination, Biden is remembered as the sole author of the catastrophe.[2] Subsequently, he acted as if he would rather Afghanistan had just disappeared completely, although officials, including (now former) Special Representative on Afghanistan Tom West, have striven to engage with the Islamic Emirate.[3] By contrast, for Trump, Afghanistan is not linked to his failure, which means that, if he wanted to, he does have the political space to do something different. The question is: Will he?

Afghan responses to Trump’s Election and his coming inauguration

The Emirate responded positively to Trump’s election victory. On 6 November 2024, the day after the announcement of his win, foreign affairs ministry spokesman Abdul Qahar Balkhi tweeted that his ministry:

In line with its balanced foreign policy, expresses hope that following the announcement of the U.S. election results, the incoming U.S. administration will adopt a pragmatic approach to ensure tangible advancement in bilateral relations, allowing both nations to open a new chapter of relations grounded in mutual engagement. The Doha Agreement signed between the Islamic Emirate and America under President Trump’s administration lead to the end of the twenty-year occupation.

More recently, reported ToloNews on 4 January 2025, acting Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Shir Mohammad Abbas Stanekzai said the Emirate had closed the door on enmity with the United States and was ready to engage with all countries, including the US. Hoping Washington would refrain from interfering in Afghanistan’s internal affairs and honour the Doha Agreement, Stanekzai said:

One or two weeks from now, he [Trump] will come to power. He should change his policy, abandon Biden’s policy, and create a new approach. From Afghanistan and the Islamic Emirate’s side, the path is open for them. If they intend friendship, we will extend a hand of friendship as well. An enemy does not remain an enemy forever, and a friend does not remain a friend forever.

The fact that the Doha Agreement was signed during Trump’s first term in office has encouraged some Emirate officials to believe he might change US policy to their advantage.

Meanwhile, the opposition was also delighted by Trump’s victory and Biden’s demise. Ali Maisam Nazary, head of foreign relations at the National Resistance Front (NRF),[4] tweeted his congratulations to Trump on 6 November, with hopes he would end Biden’s policy of ‘appeasing’ the Taleban. Nazary was confident, he wrote, that Trump would take “meaningful actions” to support and recognise the “people of Afghanistan’s resistance against global terrorism and their legitimate aspirations for a democratic, decentralized, and pluralistic Afghanistan.” They were, he said, looking forward to “collaborating with you and your esteemed team in the months and years to come.”

Former head of the NDS and former vice-president Amrullah Saleh, also part of the NRF, tweeting on 7 November, was more circumspect, warning compatriots not to get too emotional or place too much faith in the new American president, counselling that “change begins in our own villages.” More recently, though, he has appeared optimistic. On 15 January, he tweeted a question: “Is the era of hallucination ending in the White House?” Biden’s pursuit of a “pro-Taliban narrative,” he asserted, “played a significant role” in his defeat. In contrast, he claimed that “Trump’s unambiguous anti-Taliban stance” had been “crucial to his electoral success.” Saleh also said the “veteran community, highly influential and revered in America, appeared to significantly sway this narrative.”

The NRF has been buoyed up by two key Trump nominations: Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor and Marco Rubio as Secretary of State. The two men, who are among the most hawkish and most actively anti-Taleban American politicians, have also picked up some of the NRF’s talking points.

Senator Marco Rubio visiting Guantanamo Naval Base in May 2012. Rubio, Trump’s choice for Secretary of State, has been a strong supporter of the ‘War on Terror’ detention facility there. Photo: US government
Trump’s choice for Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, visiting Guantanamo Naval Base in May 2012. Rubio has been a strong supporter of the ‘War on Terror’ detention facility there. Photo: US government
Two key Trump nominees

Marco Rubio, a Florida senator since 2011, has long pushed for the US to take a far harder stance against the Islamic Emirate. In November 2023, he reintroduced a Senate bill (first proposed in September 2021) to designate what he called “the illegitimate Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan as a state sponsor of terrorism and the Taliban as a FTO [Foreign Terrorist Organisation],” saying:

A Taliban-controlled Afghanistan poses a direct threat to our national security interests as well as our allies and partners both in the Middle East and in Central Asia. The Biden Administration’s botched military withdrawal from Afghanistan has left the nation as a safe haven for anti-American terrorists. Designating the Taliban as an FTO is the next logical step.

Such designations would establish extra constraints on the US government, NGOs and American citizens, further to the sanctions already in place, as well as on other countries dealing with Afghanistan.[5] Currently, four countries are designated State Sponsors of Terrorism – Cuba, North Korea, Iran and Syria – while FTOs number in the dozens.

Trump’s nomination for National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, is a congressman from Florida, a decorated former colonel in the National Guard Special Forces, who served multiple tours in Afghanistan, worked as defence policy director at the Pentagon during the George Bush presidency and counterterrorism advisor to then Vice President Dick Cheney. “Following his time in the White House,” his biography reads, “Mike built a small business to over 400 employees, which was repeatedly listed in the Inc 500 index as one of the fastest-growing private companies in America” (further details here). This was Metis Solutions, which Waltz helped found in 2010. Described by one business media company as providing “strategic analysis, intelligence support, and training,” it had, according to The Intercept, offices in Arlington, Virginia, Tampa, Florida, Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates and Kabul and “won coveted contracts US government contracts, including to train Afghan special forces, including a controversial program to develop artisanal mining operations in strategic villages.”

The company was sold in November 2020 for “approximately $92 million in cash,” according to the buyer, PAE, one of the largest US defence contractors, which described Metis Solutions as a “leading provider of intelligence analysis, operational and tactical training and program management” with a majority of its “more than 450 employees” having “top secret clearances with subject matter expertise across a broad range of critical national security issues.”

Waltz expressed strong concerns about the Doha Agreement and the withdrawal, fearing it would open the way for the Taleban to return to power and strengthen al-Qaeda’s position. See, for example, his interview from 1 February 2019 on WBUR radio:

My first thought is will you verify by keeping a counterterrorism presence on the ground so that if the Taliban can’t — or won’t — stop al-Qaida, ISIS and terrorist groups from launching, then we can take matters back in our own hands? We also have to continue to build the Afghan army’s capacity to eventually do this on their own. And … those missions are what we currently have forces there for now. So it’s the withdrawal that really has me concerned.

Waltz agreed with the WBUR interviewer that the Taleban would rush into power if US troops withdrew and would then “repress the people,” saying:

We’ve made huge gains in the last 15 years in girls’ education and women’s empowerment and sowing the seeds of democracy, but it’s going to take a long time and I think the investment — look, we can debate this all day long. I really don’t think we have a choice. The United States must lead and we must keep our foot on the neck of these terrorist groups. There is a reason we haven’t had any major attacks in the last few years and that’s because these groups are on the run. They can’t plot, plan, and train and attack the United States. So we need to stay on offense, and we can fight these wars in Kabul and in places like Damascus, or we can fight them in places like Kansas City. I prefer the former.

In the last days of the US military presence in Afghanistan, on 16 August 2021, Waltz told CNBC: “I think at the end of the day you have two choices in Afghanistan, you have a small presence focused on counterterrorism and supporting the Afghan military, or you face what we’re facing now, which will be a cesspool of terrorism.” Waltz also predicted the resurgence of al-Qaeda, “working closely with the Taliban” and asserted that it does “intend to attack America again.”

Days after the fall of the Islamic Republic, Waltz, along with fellow Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, publicly backed the anti-Taleban ‘resistance’, which at that time, on 27 August 2021, was still holding out in Panjshir, as reported by Politico:

After speaking with Afghan Vice President Amrullah Saleh and representatives of Ahmad Massoud, we are calling on the Biden Administration to recognize these leaders as the legitimate government representatives of Afghanistan. … We ask the Biden Administration to recognize that the Afghan Constitution is still intact, and the Afghan Taliban takeover is illegal.

Mike Waltz in Afghanistan. Photo from the biography page of his website, https://waltz.house.gov/about/ (undated)
Mike Waltz in Afghanistan. Photo from the biography page of his website, https://waltz.house.gov/about/ (undated)
The question of the UN cash shipments

It is easy to see why Saleh and others in the NRF have become more optimistic since these two nominations were made, especially after one NRF talking point in particular was picked up, via friendly US Republican politicians, by Donald Trump himself – the shipments of US dollars sent by the United Nations to Afghanistan to fund humanitarian aid. Saleh has described the transport as “the Biden administration’s shipment of billions of dollars was a misguided endeavor to buy and bribe a semblance of calm under the Taliban, only serving to veil the pervasive corruption in the process.”

On 7 January 2025, Trump decried the Biden administration for giving “[b]illions of dollars, not millions – billions … to essentially the Taliban Afghanistan.” The US is currently the biggest donor to Afghanistan, spending approximately three billion dollars since August 2021, largely on humanitarian aid, channelled via the United Nations, the World Bank and NGOs. (For details, see the October 2024 Special Inspector General for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR) report.) However, Trump’s reference appeared most likely to be to those shipments by the United Nations of cash, in the form of US dollars. Getting money into Afghanistan via the banking system is so difficult – despite waivers to US sanctions, banks are reluctant to transfer money, even when it is legal under US law – and the shipments were the workaround to keep aid work going.

Trump’s remarks came after an intervention by US congressman Tim Burchett, a supporter of the National Resistance Front – on 2 December 2024, he tweeted he had invited Saleh to Washington to “discuss the future of Afghanistan and its people.” Burchett had written to Trump on 2 January 2025 about the cash shipments and introduced a bill, the ‘No Tax Dollars for Terrorists Act’, that would have specifically stopped “financial and material support from going to the Taliban.”[6] He launched the bill, he said in a 10 January press release, after:

It was brought to our attention that weekly cash shipments of around $40 million USD were being sent to the Afghanistan Central Bank. Additionally, after a hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee with Secretary of State Antony Blinken in December of 2024 Secretary Blinken admitted that around $10 million had been paid to the Taliban in the form of taxes.

UNAMA strongly refutes this evergreen claim that the shipments fund the Taleban. In a 9 January 2025 statement, it said the cash (amounting to USD 1.8 billion to date) was “essential in the provision of life-saving assistance to more than 25 million Afghans” and was:

placed in designated UN accounts in a private bank for use by the United Nations … distributed directly to the United Nations entities, as well as to a small number of approved and vetted humanitarian partners in Afghanistan … [and] is carefully monitored, audited, inspected and vetted in strict accordance with the UN financial rules and processes.

None of the money, it said, was “deposited in the Central Bank of Afghanistan nor provided to the Taliban de facto authorities by the UN.” Spokesperson for the US National Security Council, John Kirby, also stressed that the humanitarian aid was being sent to the Afghan people, not the Taleban (reported here).

A day after Trump’s remarks, on 8 January, IEA deputy spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat denied that his government had received “a single penny” from the US. “Instead,” he said, “it [the US] has confiscated and frozen billions of dollars that rightfully belong to the people of Afghanistan.” The Islamic Emirate “neither anticipates any assistance from the United States nor has it ever sought such aid,” he said, while also asserting that a “thorough analysis shows that the U.S. directed all of this money under the guise of supporting Afghanistan, primarily to serve its own interests, and is now exploiting it as a means of propaganda against the Islamic Emirate.”

The following day, acting Deputy Minister of Economy Abdul Latif Nazari also spoke, more mildly, about the cash shipments: the aid was “not handed over to the Islamic Emirate but is used to improve the economic and livelihood conditions of the Afghan people.” The quote was carried by ToloNews, whose evening news bulletin also reported Nazari saying that political and economic matters should be kept separate, and that aid should continue as the international community had the responsibility to assist the Afghan people.

Those dollars are important, not only for funding aid but also supporting the macro-economy. Similar to remittances, the money helps keep people in jobs, helps cover Afghanistan’s trade deficit and supports the afghani. Because NGOs, like private sector companies, are taxed by the IEA, they do contribute to government revenues.[7] Any disruption to the shipments – in the absence of an easing of international banking transactions – would be disastrous for beneficiaries, the aid sector, the Afghan economy and the Islamic Emirate’s government. Whether or not that happens under Trump, aid allocations seem likely to drop further than they have already over the last two years. The decline in aid flows is seen in most donor countries, a trend that also threatens the Afghan economy.

Looking ahead

Donald Trump has given few indications of how, or indeed whether, he would change America’s stance towards Afghanistan. In general, he is against the US getting involved in foreign wars and is also likely to push for cuts in foreign aid globally. As to Afghanistan, he might be the pragmatic president who can do deals with the enemy and normalise the Islamic Emirate’s relations with the world – the Emirate’s hope. Or he could be the leader who will renew the fight against the Taleban by supporting the armed opposition or at least by undermining the Afghan economy – the NRF’s hope. Or, US policy could just muddle along, as it has done until now, with the superpower’s attention focussed elsewhere.

… but what about Guantanamo?

In our look at the presidential hopefuls ahead of the election, we wrote that the policy most likely to be affected by the outcome of this year’s US elections was on Guantanamo, the prison camp set up by George Bush in January 2002 to house ‘War on Terror’ detainees outside the rule either of US criminal law or the Laws of War. Afghans were the largest national contingent to be held there, numbering 225 out of the 780 men and boys detained.

Today, just one Afghan remains, Muhammad Rahim from Nangrahar, who was rendered to Guantanamo in 2007, the last man to be taken there and also the last to go through a CIA black site. The account of his torture and interrogation by the CIA after he was rendered from Pakistan to Afghanistan is detailed in a Senate 2014 investigation.[8] Rahim has acknowledged that he translated for and worked with ‘the Arabs’, as al-Qaeda was called in Afghanistan before 9/11: he denies dealings with them much beyond the fall of the first Islamic Emirate. The CIA asserted that he continued to be one of al-Qaeda’s leader Osama bin Laden’s most trusted associates, although the Senate report revealed that its accusations were probably based only on information passed on by Pakistani intelligence, the ISI (see AAN’s most recent reporting on Rahim here).

Rahim is one of three detainees who are neither cleared for transfer nor among the seven slated for trial at Guantanamo’s military court, nor has he been convicted by that court. Rather, he is in indefinite detention: the US continues to claim that his repatriation would pose a threat to its national security despite not having had forces on the ground in Afghanistan for more than three years.

During Trump’s first term, just one detainee left Guantanamo, a Saudi, who was repatriated to a Saudi jail.[9] All other cases were effectively on hold. In AAN’s pre-election report, the author wrote: “If Trump wins, transfers out of the camp would likely dry up again. If Harris is victorious, Rahim might be freed.” That might have been the case if the panel which reviews cases, the Periodic Review Board, had considered him safe to transfer.

In the last few weeks of the Biden administration, it has undertaken mass transfers: twelve men have left the camp in recent weeks. Unlike Rahim, all had been cleared for release. It repatriated a Tunisian detainee – Ridah Bin Saleh al-Yazidi, who had been cleared for transfer in 2007 – and sent eleven Yemenis, including one cleared for release in 2010, to Oman (see Department of Defense statements here and here and news reports here and here). We saw a similar rush to clear as many detainees as possible from Guantanamo at the end of President Barak Obama’s second term. They included six Afghans sent to the Gulf, in what proved to be yet more indefinite detention and alleged torture for four in the United Arab Emirates, and happier circumstances for the other two in Oman. All were eventually allowed to go home, where one has subsequently died (for more details, see here and here). Another Afghan, affiliated to Hezb-e Islami, Harun Gul, was repatriated in June 2022 after a US court upheld his petition for habeas corpus, ruling that the US state was detaining him unlawfully (reporting here).

Trump has been strongly pro-Guantanamo, but even he may now be baulking at the cost. According to Carol Rosenberg, the last comprehensive study of the costs of running the prison, carried out by The New York Times in 2019, put the cost at more than USD 13 million per year for each prisoner. Most of that, she wrote, was spent on prison staff and the court. At the time, there were 40 prisoners and a Pentagon staff of 1,800 US forces. There are now just 15 men left. “By that measure,” she wrote on 9 January 2025, it would cost $36 million to hold each prisoner there in 2025.”

A possible prisoner exchange

In recent days, negotiations have come to light concerning the possible exchange of Rahim for three Americans, Ryan Corbett, George Glezmann and Mahmood Habibi. The Wall Street Journal reported the talks on 3 January. It is behind a pay wall, but the story was picked up, among others, by Reuters.

George Glezmann, an airline mechanic, writes the Foley Foundation, was visiting Afghanistan lawfully, as a tourist, when he was seized by the Emirate’s intelligence service, the GDI, on 5 December 2022.[10] It said he is being held without just cause or formal charge.

Corbett and Habibi were both detained in Kabul on 10 August 2022. Corbett had been in Kabul on a 12-month business visa when he was detained, says a website dedicated to getting him released, which said he had long worked with NGOs in Afghanistan and had been there to train staff working at his social enterprise, Bloom Afghanistan. The website says he was detained along with a German colleague (released in December 2022) and is held without charge in a basement cell. It alleges that “the only suspected reasons being their value as political leverage.”

Habibi’s case is more difficult. The Taleban deny holding him and the FBI speaks not of his detention, but his disappearance. In a request for information, it said Habibi was working as a contractor for Asia Consultancy Group, a Kabul-based telecommunications company, and that he was taken from his vehicle, along with his driver, near his home in Kabul. “It is believed that Mr. Habibi was taken by Taliban military or security forces,” it said. He has “not been heard from since his disappearance.” 29 other employees, also detained at the time, have since been freed, but not Habibi or “one other.” The FBI gave no information about that other missing person.

Corbett and Habibi were detained in the aftermath of the US assassination of then al-Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, by drone on 31 July, in the middle of Kabul (AAN reporting here). The Foley Foundation has explicitly linked Habibi’s detention to that strike. That the Taleban deny holding Habibi suggests he may no longer be alive.

It appears that the negotiations have been ongoing for a long time. Emirate spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid spoke publicly about Emirate demands at a press conference held on 3 July 2024, saying the US must accept its conditions for the release of two American prisoners, which were the freeing of Afghans held in US prisons and Guantanamo: “When American citizens are important to them, Afghans are important to us.”

Rahim’s lawyer, James Connell, told Reuters that neither the Biden administration nor the Taleban had informed him or Rahim of the negotiations. “It does seem important to include Rahim or his representative in the conversation,” said Connell. “As it happens, he is willing to be traded or exchanged.”

Mike Waltz, Trump’s nominee for national security adviser met Corbett’s family and warned, in a 14 January tweet: “We will do everything we can for these families and to stop this madness.” The next president, he wrote, “will not look kindly upon groups and countries holding Americans hostage.”

Edited by Roxanna Shapour

References

References
↑1 One line picked up by the Afghan media was an apparent threat by Trump, made in September 2024, to recapture Bagram airbase. ToloNews reported his rambling comments:

Speaking to his supporters, Trump said: “You take a look at the kind of things that we’ve given up, uh, we should be, we should have that air base we should have that oil, we should have, we would have had a whole different country, but to give up … to give up the biggest airbase military airbase in the world, and they left it — behind but we would have been, we would have been, we would have been a much different country right now but we’re going to get it back and I promise you we’re going to get it back.”

In another part of his speech, Trump mentioned that if he had been the US president, he would not have abandoned Bagram Airbase. Earlier in the campaign, Trump claimed China controlled the airbase (media report here).
↑2 For a longer look at why the Islamic Republic, in the end, fell so easily, including the US’s role, analysis of weaknesses and disastrous decision-making in the Republic and strengths in the insurgency, see the author’s December 2021 report, ‘Afghanistan’s Conflict in 2021 (2): Republic collapse and Taleban victory in the long-view of history’.
↑3 After three years in post, West left his role as Special Representative on 1 October 2024. West was a key figure in getting waivers to US sanctions and pushing for what the State Department called a “robust humanitarian effort that prevented a wider famine and met the urgent needs of millions of Afghans.” Engagement was difficult: moves towards an easing of the relationship in the days before girls’ secondary schools were due to re-open in March 2022 were stymied by their being almost immediately re-closed; moves were stymied once again when al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri was discovered living in the middle of Kabul and assassinated by US drone on 31 July 2022. West has not been replaced. Instead, chief of mission at the US embassy (located in Doha), Karen Decker now “leads on Afghan diplomacy.”
↑4 The National Resistance Front of Afghanistan (NRF) Resistance is a coalition of former Northern Alliance members and other anti-Taleban factions. It was founded by the son of the late Ahmad Shah Massoud, Ahmad Massoud, former first Vice President Amrullah Saleh and former Defence Minister, Bismillah Khan Mohammadi.
↑5 According to the US State Department website, a Foreign Terrorist Organisation (FTO) designation makes it unlawful to knowingly provide “material support or resources” to a designated group, while any US financial institution that becomes aware that it has possession of or control over funds in which a designated FTO or its agent has an interest “must retain possession of or control over the funds and report” it to the government. The designation also supports efforts to “curb terrorism financing and to encourage other nations to do the same, stigmatizes and isolates designated terrorist organizations internationally, deters donations or contributions to and economic transactions with named organizations” and “signals to other governments our concern about named organizations.”

Being designated a State Sponsor of Terrorism puts a country under “four main categories of sanctions,” including “restrictions on U.S. foreign assistance; a ban on defense exports and sales; certain controls over exports of dual use items; and miscellaneous financial and other restrictions.” It also “implicates other sanctions laws that penalize persons and countries engaging in certain trade with state sponsors.”
↑6 Bill HR 6586 passed unanimously through both the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the House of Representatives, but said Burchett, “unfortunately then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer refused to bring the bill to the floor for a vote.”
↑7 For a sober assessment of accusations that aid is diverted to the Taleban or indirectly benefits them, see Ashley Jackson’s 2023 report for AAN, ‘Aid Diversion in Afghanistan: Is it time for a candid conversation?’
↑8 See pages 163-169 of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, ‘Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program’, 9 December 2014.
↑9 Ahmed al-Darbi was transferred after a plea agreement which saw him plead guilty to charges relating to an attack on a French oil tanker in 2002 to serve out the balance of a 13-year prison sentence in his home country. See ‘Detainee Transfer Announced’, US Department of Defence press release, 2 May 2018.
↑10 The Foley Foundation advocates for American hostages and wrongful detainees held abroad and promotes journalist safety. In order to try to prevent future hostage-taking, it develops and shares tools that help journalists, aid workers and all Americans to stay safe abroad. It was established after the kidnap and murder of the journalist, James W Foley, by ISIS while he was reporting in Syria.

 

Trump 2.0: What difference will the new US president make to Afghanistan (if any)?
read more

Afghanistan: Taliban Repression Deepens

January 17, 2025
Human Rights Watch

17 Jan 2025

New Laws, Regulations Compound Abuses Against Women, Girls

(Bangkok) – Afghanistan’s human rights situation worsened in 2024 as the Taliban intensified their crackdown on women and girls and minority groups, Human Rights Watch said today in its World Report 2025. The Taliban authorities detained journalists and critics and imposed severe restrictions on the media. Afghanistan’s economic crisis left 23 million in need of humanitarian assistance, disproportionally affecting women and girls.

For the 546-page world report, in its 35th edition, Human Rights Watch reviewed human rights practices in more than 100 countries. In much of the world, Executive Director Tirana Hassan writes in her introductory essay, governments cracked down and wrongfully arrested and imprisoned political opponents, activists, and journalists. Armed groups and government forces unlawfully killed civilians, drove many from their homes, and blocked access to humanitarian aid. In many of the more than 70 national elections in 2024, authoritarian leaders gained ground with their discriminatory rhetoric and policies.

“Three years into Taliban rule, the suppression of rights and freedoms has only intensified,” said Fereshta Abbasi, Afghanistan researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Governments should press the Taliban to end their abuses against women and girls, while urgently supporting the creation of a comprehensive United Nations accountability mechanism.”

  • The Taliban announced a new law prohibiting women from traveling or using public transportation without a male guardian, and from singing in public or letting their voices be heard outside their home. The Taliban also detained women and girls for not abiding by the prescribed dress code.
  • The Taliban arbitrarily detained and tortured journalists and other critics. In September, they banned live broadcasts of political programs, criticism of the group, and limited interviews to individuals from a preapproved list.
  • The Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), the Afghan affiliate of the Islamic State (ISIS), carried out attacks that injured and killed civilians, on ethnic and religious minorities, especially the Hazara, as well as on the Taliban. On May 18, ISKP issued a statement threatening nongovernmental organizations, the media, and foreign aid agencies.
  • Afghanistan’s economic crisis left more than half of the population – 23.7 million people – in need of urgent humanitarian assistance in 2024, with 2.9 million at emergency levels of hunger.

Afghanistan’s donors should provide assistance aimed at reaching those most in need and crafting durable solutions to Afghanistan’s economic crisis, Human Rights Watch said.

Afghanistan: Taliban Repression Deepens
read more

Recommended Reads from AAN Writers: The poetry of peace, magical realism in Logar, class in Nuristan, Sufis

January 17, 2025

Kate Clark • AAN Guests • AAN Team \

 email sharing buttonprint sharing button

We thought we would start 2025 by asking AAN writers and friends to recommend books about Afghanistan. Their choices are eclectic, ranging across the academic and journalistic, memoirs and fiction, books written by Afghans and others. Our recommended reads include one book which its reviewer believes will become a standard work for universities teaching about Islam in Afghanistan and the work of a fiction writer who seemingly tells stories in an effort to make sense of Afghanistan’s violent history and its impact on his own life. Our reviewed books also include an excoriating scrutiny of the post-2001 ‘project’, which, its reviewer says, “forces readers to ask: In a conflict so riddled with miscalculations and shifting allegiances, can anyone truly claim to have won?” We hope you enjoy these reviews as much as we enjoyed reading the books. 

Annika Schmeding, Sufi Civilities: Religious Authority and Political Change in Afghanistan, Stanford University Press, 2024

Islam is everywhere in Afghanistan, in almost every facet of society, but despite this, it is underrepresented in the English-language academic literature. Annika Schmeding’s newly published book Sufi Civilities – based partly on her PhD dissertation work – is one of the few lengthy monographs fully dedicated to analysing a facet of Islam in Afghan society. As this is anthropology, the case study is not on the practice of the majority or the whole, but of a narrower group, urban Sunni Sufis.

There is a lot a reader can choose to focus on in this book. Someone with a background in international development may have their attention caught by the story at the beginning where a Sufi gathering is jokingly referred to by a local as the “real civil society,” while a reader like myself with a political science background will start scanning immediately for references to the political power and influence of Sufis – or lack thereof. An item of interest for scholars, students and adherents of Islam will be Schmeding’s analysis of Sufism’s relationship with those imams and ulama (Islamic scholars) who are outside Sufi circles – or even hostile to Sufism, and her clear description of the role within Sufism of leadership and leadership selection.

Readers less interested in the topics above, considering them mundane or exhausting (just more ‘politics and war’), may enjoy Schmeding’s lengthy analysis of the role of dreams and dream interpretation among Afghanistan’s Sufis, or her extensive discussion of the more common theme of gender in society and the surprisingly prominent role played by women in Sufi communities. Poetry is another topic that appears regularly throughout the book.

Overall, the adaptation of the Sufis of Afghanistan to the massive changes brought about by war, migration, ideological competition and the accompanying social upheavals is the main focus of Schmeding’s book. Adherents of various Sufi communities have both resisted and cooperated with and joined various state and insurgent forces over the last 40 years, what she terms as “alignment” versus “resistance”. Schmeding adds to these choices the third choice of “strategic distance” to describe Sufis seeking “distance from the source of power and the potential for violence,” with distance being both physical (relocating somewhere else in the country or abroad) and political/social (avoiding relationships with government officials or armed opposition groups).

Within the extreme upheavals of the last several decades, Schmeding convincingly argues for the Sufis’ “remarkable dexterity in their ability to adapt” as they choose between various strategic positions under changing conditions. Schmeding’s field research ended before the Taleban’s 2021 return to power. In her conclusion and epilogue, she discusses the urban Sufi communities’ adaptation to once again living under Taleban rule after a 20-year break. Past history suggests, she says, that Sufism will survive once again.

This book sits firmly with the sub-field of the anthropology of Islam. For those coming from the fields of history, political science and perhaps sociology, who want to comb the text for useful analysis, they can easily find a clear and focused discussion of the role of religion during times of war and social upheaval, with both individuals and institutions as units of analysis. Those readers who are rightfully wary of academic literature and its intentional and unintentional confusing and obtuse writing style, you can be assured that Schmeding’s writing is clear and easily understood. Her focus on people makes for engaging story-telling throughout the text. Sufi Civilities will remain for decades a mandatory (English-language) text for understating the role of Islam in Afghanistan.

Reviewed by Christian Bleuer

Ulrik Høj Johnsen, Schuyler Jones, Torkil Funder and Taj Khan Kalash (eds), Toward the Horizon: Lennart Edelberg and the Danish Hindukush Research, Moesgaard Museum, 2021

Moesgaard Museum, just south of the Danish university city of Aarhus, is a striking example of modern northern European (‘Skandinavian’) architecture. Built into the slope of a hill, its large glass windows look down on early 19th century Moesgaard Manor. Built as a poorhouse, today it is the home of the Aarhus university’s Department of Archaeology and Anthropology.

What’s more important to us is in the museum’s storage: a large Nuristan collection, that began to be compiled during the 1947-50 Third Danish Expedition to Central Asia, the first one going to Afghanistan. (The two earlier ones went to Mongolia.)[1] That expedition took place roughly fifty years after the area had been forcibly incorporated into Afghanistan by Abdul Rahman, the ‘Iron Amir’ (r1880-1901), in the winter of 1895/96. After that, Kabul changed the area’s name from Kafiristan (land of the heathen) to Nuristan (land of light), referring to the people having become Muslim.[2]

The 1947-50 expedition was led by ethnologist Henning Haslund-Christensen, who tragically died from illness in Kabul in September that year and is buried there. Its four other core members were: historian of religions Halfdan Siiger (1911-99), who later worked on the (not yet converted to Islam) ‘Kalash Kafir of Chitral’ across the Durand Line; zoologist Knut Paludan (1908-88), whose main work is Birds on Afghanistan, Copenhagen 1959, today a rare book; the film photographer Peter Rasmussen, who later produced the documentary ‘Kafiristan – the land of Heathens’; and Lennart Edelberg (1915-81), a schoolteacher who taught in Denmark’s oldest town, Ribe, and was a botanist-turned-ethnologist. One of their Afghan collaborators, Ahmad Ali Motamedi, later became the director of Kabul’s National Museum.

It was for the ethnologist Edelberg that, in 2021, Moesgaard Museum dedicated a set of articles brought together in the book, Toward the Horizon: Lennart Edelberg and the Danish Hindukush research. The collection is based on papers presented at a seminar held in 2016 by Moesgaard Museum, in cooperation with Aarhus University, in the tradition of earlier International Hindukush Cultural Conferences organised, among others, by Edelberg, in Denmark and Pakistan.[3]

Toward the Horizon is a richly illustrated tome that contains articles on new research on Nuristan (each with rich bibliographies) and posthumous tributes to Lennart Edelberg and his scientific career. Edelberg visited Nuristan four times, the last time in 1970. By then, he had become a paragon of Danish Afghanistan-shenasi (experts).[4]

While most contributors to this book are Western, there is also a Nuristani originating from Afghanistan, Kakhail Nuristani, and a Kalash from Pakistan, Taj Khan Kalash, who is also one of its editors.

In his article, Kakhail Nuristani related how a 2012 New York Times article by author Adam Klein helped re-establish contact between Nuristan and the Danish research community that had been lost during the most recent Afghan wars. Kakhail had met Klein at a workshop for Afghan writers in the United States and told him the story of his grandfather, ‘Wakil’ Abdullah (he became a member of parliament). Abdullah had hosted Edelberg during a Danish expedition in the 1960s and was even visited at home by Denmark’s king, Frederik IX, and the then crown princess, Margrethe, during a state visit to Afghanistan. (A Danish prince had also participated in Edelberg’s 1953/54 expedition.)

According to Kakhail, his grandfather’s knowledge had “greatly informed” Edelberg’s 1984 book on Nuristani architecture, Nuristani Buildings (published by Jysk Arkæologisk Selskab, Moesgaard). In return, Abdullah was invited to Denmark where he opened the Nuristan collection after it was moved from the capital Copenhagen to Moesgaard, which opened as a museum in 1970. During his stay, he was knighted by Denmark’s royal family.

The custodian of Moesgaard’s Nuristan collection and one of the editors of Toward the Horizon, Ulrik Høj Johnsen, came across Klein’s article and reached out to Kakhail. Nuristani-Danish contacts were revived.

There is plenty of interesting detail in this volume, but one paragraph was particularly intriguing and provoked ideas for fresh research. Co-editor Schuyler Jones’ contribution mentions the bāri, a caste of artisans in Nuristan (p180). (I use the phonetical transcription here to indicate the pronunciation, ie that the ‘a’ is a long one.) Jones – a United States-born, retired professor of anthropology at Oxford University with ten fields trips to Nuristan to his pedigree – writes of the bari and their relationship with the landowning atrožan:[5]

The social standing of the bari in Nuristani society is at odds with the contribution they make to the very people who hold them in such low esteem. The largest social and political group in Nuristani society is that of the land-owning and livestock-herding atrožan. The bari occupy a separate class, and the main rules they must follow are: they may not marry outside their class, they may not own livestock [and mostly not land and grazing rights], and they may not eat with atrožan. There are other restrictive rules, of course. And yet, the bari make all the houses and other buildings, they make all the furniture, they make the shoes, the blacksmiths among them make the tools, they do the [famous Nuristani] carving, and do the weaving. [They also make all the weapons the Nuristani warriors and hunters use and all the wooden bowls and clay pots and jars for their households.] In short, the bari produce all the material culture that is so characteristic of Nuristan…

The bari, whom the atrožan do not even address by name, just “bari,” live in separate, lower parts of the Nuristani villages that even have separate names.[6] They represent roughly ten per cent of Nuristani society and although not all Nuristan’s villages have them, most have one or a few families. Those who don’t, can ‘borrow’ or even ‘buy’ them.

This is unfortunately more or less all that you learn about the bari in Toward the Horizon  – and actually also in Edelberg and Jones’ standard work, simply entitled Nuristan, published in Graz, Austria in 1979 – apart from one more important thing: the reason why Wakil Abdullah was able to help Edelberg with his book on Nuristan architecture was – he was a bari himself (p106). This is why he knew everything about building in Nuristan.

For more information on the bari, you have to go back to other, partly much earlier literature.[7] Yet even there, there are only smatterings. One problem is that most literature on Nuristan only touches on this particular group and related aspects of class or caste in passing. Edelberg’s impressive bibliography, which is attached to Toward the Horizon, does not include any publications that have ‘bari’ (or something like ‘class structure’) in its title.

Another problem is that literature on Nuristan has concentrated and still concentrates mainly on its pre-Islamic culture. Even the book reviewed here leaves it unclear how the bari-atrožan relationship developed after the local people’s mass conversion to Islam. The fact that the paragraph about the bari quoted above is written in the present tense obscures this problem. It also omits to speak out that the bari were, as Austrian Nuristan expert Max Klimburg put it in a 2004 article, “socially stigmatized,” namely as “formerly enslaved” and then living “in a form of bondage.” This is the gravest shortcoming in Toward the Horizon.

To our rescue, Klimberg writes:

In theory, Islam liberated the bari, but their social position is still largely the same as before and intermarriage with any ‘genuine’ Nuristani is still all but impossible. … At present, the bari’s main problem is under-employment, as they face competition from outside craftsmen, called in to build houses in a new style.

The fact that the builder Abdullah became his area’s representative in the Afghan parliament under Zaher Shah (r1933-73), as Wakil Abdullah Khan, speaks for possible upward social mobility for former bari after Islamisation.

Apart from this, Taj Khan Kalash, in his article for Toward the Horizon, also looks at Muslim-Kalash interaction over the past century and in today’s Pakistan. This makes his contribution one of the most valuable.

In that sense, one important merit of Toward the Horizon is that it prompts two research questions. Firstly, how has Islam shaped, and is still shaping Nuristan and Nuristanis? [8] Secondly, did Islamisation, now complete, with only a few pre-Islamic artefacts kept in the community lead to greater equality between the former atrožan and the bari?[9] As a first step, it would be good if a researcher compiled what has already been published about Kafir/Nuristani class society in the existing literature, scattered as it is in its margins, to make it possible to move on from there. Does the fact that Wakil Abdullah made it, as a bari, to member of parliament show there could be more social mobility among the Nuristani than when they were all still ‘kafir’?

Moesgaard’s Nuristan collection, unfortunately, is no longer on permanent display. But Toward the Horizon provides insights into it, and for researchers, it should be possible to access this volume.

The book is available at the Museum’s shop or online via Unipress.

Reviewed by Thomas Ruttig

Anand Gopal, No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes, Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, 2014

Anand Gopal’s No Good Men Among the Living is a standout work of investigative reporting and storytelling that grips you from its opening pages and immerses readers in the tragic realities of America’s war in Afghanistan. Through the interwoven lives of three Afghans – a Taleban commander, a US-backed warlord and an Afghan woman – it provides a rare, deeply humanising perspective on the failures of the ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan.

Gopal traces the complex trajectories of his protagonists in vivid detail. Akbar Gul, a former Taleban commander, renounces violence and attempts to integrate into civilian life by opening a small business but is thwarted by corruption and police brutality that, eventually push him back to the Taleban. Jan Muhammed, warlord and close ally of Hamed Karzai, exploits American support to crush rivals, amass wealth, and terrorise civilians. Heela, a housewife, endures the horrors of war and personal tragedy yet rises to a position in the Afghan Senate, embodying resilience amidst chaos.

The book excels in showing how these personal stories illustrate broader failures. Gopal examines the unintended consequences of American actions, including civilians killed and injured, indiscriminate raids and support for corrupt warlords, all of which alienated many Afghans. The war also created a system where local leaders manipulated US forces for personal gain, fabricating enemies to get the US to target their rivals. By selectively targeting the Taleban while ignoring other factions’ crimes, the US deepened feelings of injustice and hindered efforts at reconciliation and peace-making.

Gopal’s ability to illuminate the nuances of Afghanistan’s shifting alliances is particularly striking. In a country where today’s ally can be tomorrow’s enemy, the rigid binaries imposed by the US were not only ineffective but also counterproductive.

The book’s title, drawn from a Pashtun proverb – “There are no good men among the living, and no bad ones among the dead” – captures the moral ambiguity that pervaded the war. No group, Afghan or foreign, emerged untainted. The US, ostensibly there to fight terrorism, found itself entangled in a war where clear distinctions between good and bad, ally and enemy, were impossible.

Gopal’s account forces readers to confront the harsh realities of war, leaving them questioning not just the war’s execution but its very purpose. This is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how Afghanistan’s history, shaped by both external and internal forces, led to turmoil.

While no single volume can fully encapsulate Afghanistan’s intricate history and its implications for the present, No Good Men Among the Living provides a critical and thought-provoking examination of how and why things went so tragically wrong. It prompts readers to wonder: Could Afghanistan have taken a more hopeful path if the US had better understood the country’s intricate socio-political fabric?

Ultimately, the book also compels reflection on the true meaning of victory in war. It challenges the conventional notions of triumph – planting flags, securing territory, or building institutions. It suggests that the war was not about democracy, jihad, freedom, or honour, but about resisting externally imposed categories and designs. Survival itself becomes the most enduring form of resistance. Gopal’s storytelling forces readers to ask: In a conflict so riddled with miscalculations and shifting allegiances, can anyone truly claim to have won?

Reviewed by Gulhan Durzai

Martine van Bijlert, Peace, Peace they say, Rainfed Press, 2024

We don’t often get the opportunity to recommend a book by one of our own, so it’s a special pleasure to highlight Martine van Bijlert’s collection of poems. Written over three years, from 2022 to 2024, during her participation in a peace poetry postcard exchange,[10] Peace, peace they say, is a profound journey of personal reflection and artistic expression, shaped by the echoes of war and highlighting the complexities of living in our time.

Each poem is as a window into van Bijlert’s thoughts as she grapples with the fragile interplay between peace and war, the longing for hope amid chaos and the unshakable resilience of the human spirit. In this way, she challenges the reader to bear witness not only to her own struggles but also to examine their own lives and consider the roles they have played – and continue to play – in shaping the world we live in. This collection is far more than mere personal reflections, it is a powerful commentary that is at once timely and timeless and is essential reading for all those who seek connection and understanding in a fractured world.

“I knew better how to talk about peace, before I worked in peace building,” she writes in the foreword, striking a chord with those who have borne witness to the chaos of conflict and the indelible scars it leaves behind on both the geography and the human spirit, and the price exacted by the quest for that precious thing we call peace:

In poem after poem, she reminds the reader of what it means to strive for peace only to find another war, of the resilience required to endure, and the emotional imprint that persists long after “the silence after the shooting stops,” long after “politicians come rushing in,” long after the drums of a new conflict that’s been smouldering in the shadows start beating again:

Through her poetry, she invites the reader to reflect on the meaning of peace: “We can’t call peace what isn’t peace, but we also can’t disparage what is or what could be. … We should speak of it, even if we can’t find the words. Because we need to hear from people who no longer know what to say.” In the end, the poems are overwhelming and comforting in equal measure because van Bijlert gives words to what many of us have witnessed, finding a language to articulate our collective longing for peace.

Reviewed by Roxanna Shapour

Jamil Jan Kochai, 99 Nights in Logar, Penguin, 2019 and The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, Penguin, 2022

Afghan-American author Jamil Jan Kochai is acknowledged as one of the younger literary voices of the diaspora. Following his first novel, published to acclaim in 2019, 99 Nights in Logar, Kochai published a collection of short stories in 2022, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories. The two works differ in format and scope, but the common threads running between them are multiple – and this review will look at both.

99 Nights tells the story of American-Afghan children visiting their relatives in Logar province in 2005. Even before Kochai makes a direct reference to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – having the book as one of the kids’ summer reads – the tone of the narration and the narrator’s point of view cut a powerful and striking similarity to Mark Twain’s two masterpieces. The abundance of aunts and uncles in Kochai’s novel reinforces this, replicating a leitmotiv from the Mississippian Tom Sawyer-Huckleberry Finn universe.

That being said, the context in which the stories unwind are far apart. Twain’s tales were set in mid-19th century America, a time of wanderlust. The Afghanistan of the early 2000s is a place where just crossing out of the garden gates into the outside world represents a major breach of the rules, a source of danger and trauma for the protagonists – the Afghan-American narrator and three of his Afghan teenager cousins (though one is actually uncle to the others), on a hunt to bring back the house dog.

Anybody slightly familiar with the realities of out-of-home interactions in rural Afghanistan, with fellow humans and the landscape, cannot but recall how navigating the world just beyond one’s safety zone, whether home, street, or, at most, village, appeared at first inexplicably daunting. This before realising, out of experiences lived or related, the reasons for that: invisible dangers or red-lines connected to family rivalries, competition for resources, and social constraints, even before the risks of common criminality or political violence. During their quest to find the dog, the protagonists go through a series of extraordinary events, happening to or merely related to them. These are described in a peculiar mixture of the fantastic and the realistic, reflecting the different types of awe and exaltation felt by the diverse group of Afghan and Afghan-American boys, at their first adventure in the open.

After a cohesive and captivating start, the narrative does wander off, in the end, far more than the teenager runaways do. In the second half, the structure of the novel, as per the title, references A Thousand and One Nights. To the voice of the main protagonist, the quasi-autobiographical Afghan-American boy, Marwand, framed tales are added, interspersed within the overall storyline. These are told by different narrators and with a number of recurring characters met by the protagonist, who are sometimes heavily stylised figures bearing a symbolical value. For readers not accustomed to such narrative meandering, typical of magic realism from South Asia (think of some of Salman Rushdie’s work), the plot may seem to lose focus towards the end.

In the plot, there is a symbolic reference to the recent history of Afghanistan and the country’s relations with America. Budabash, the house guard dog, had suffered at the hands of the young American narrator during a previous visit to Afghanistan, made in the 1990s. Returning from America, wiser and guilt-ridden, the narrator hastens to greet Budabash with the brightest of intentions, hoping to reconcile and forge a friendship. But a decade on, the dog has turned into a monstruous wolf and bites the now grown-up boy – a wound that stays open and becomes infected. The missed encounter between the boy and the dog can be understood as symbolic of that between America and Afghanistan, together with the acts of retaliation that follow it – and that culminate in the dog running away and amok, and the narrator’s vain research for him. The metaphor can be extended as well to the complex relationship between the author and his ancestral abode (Budabash means ‘dwelling’ in Farsi).

Despite the book’s title, which sounds like it is intended to draw a Western audience in, hinting that the book aims at a broader public, the text includes a high number of Pashto and Dari words, with nothing but the context to help a non-Afghan reader understand them. Moreover, at the end, Kochai choses to have the narrator/author’s father relate events from the anti-Soviet jihad in a Pashto-only chapter, with no translation provided. This is a key episode, the fateful night when his father’s younger brother was brutally killed by the Russians and the family decided to flee to Pakistan, an event of recurring importance throughout the novel and others of Kuchai’s works. This raises a question of who Kochai’s targeted readership is. Should Afghan authors, who necessarily are now mostly in the diaspora, concentrate foremost on the Afghans outside the country as their readership who know both English and Dari and Pashto? The question is probably answered by Kochai’s second work, the collection of short stories titled The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories.

Unlike the novel, the short story format allows Kochai to explore a wider range of settings and tones, addressing in the process a broader audience of American readers who may or may not have previous knowledge of Afghanistan. Some stories actually achieve the remarkable result of shedding light on contemporary American society through the prism of the Afghan diaspora, a relatively small immigrant community, by using familial and intimate settings.

In the story that lends its title to the collection, an Afghan-American family comes under FBI surveillance. The FBI officer is himself the narrator. Through his eye, omniscient, yet run-of-the-mill, and ultimately unable to limit his role to that of an observer – quite the narrator’s position, though seldom acknowledged by authors – the people being surveilled shine out in all their humanity. This proves a perfect story-telling mechanism, ensuring no pauses or gaps in the narration’s rhythm. As readers, we see their characters develop as we eavesdrop on their casual chatter and daily routine. One takeaway here could be that the only way America is interested in observing and narrating the experiences of the Afghan community – and other Muslims in the US – is, because of its fears of radicalisation, by surveillance and attempts at control. This bitter consideration is only mitigated by the FBI officer’s realisation that, beyond security paranoia, “there is so much more to learn” about the intricacies of the Afghan family’s daily lives.

Despite Kochai’s eclectic choice of themes and settings, many stories bear proof of a profound unity in his work of so far. His own more or less fictionalised family members are easily recognisable in Hajji Hotak’s house and they and the characters from his novel also return in the short stories. The recurrent familial spirit of the martyred uncle haunts the pages of the short stories as well, as an inescapable presence in the family’s universe, no matter what continent they find themselves on – or in what dimension. The initial story, ‘Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain’, sees the protagonist dive into a popular action video game, whose newest instalment is set in the Afghan war, only to end up trying to sew back together his family’s torn past by, in the game, saving his uncle’s life.

Kochai’s returning over and over again to his own family’s history proves everything but repetitive. On the contrary, it creates a familiar universe which slowly makes it possible even for readers alien to any Afghan experience to grasp its underlying knots and fault lines. It is as if the author had decided to work his material, that which matters most to him, in order to get to know it more thoroughly, by looking at it and writing about it. This he does by treating it from a multitude of points of view. From the eyes full of magic of a young American-Afghan kid catapulted into mud-walled villages in the midst of nowhere, to the wrier glances of that same boy, grown-up and at home in California, from the attentive scrutiny of a FBI officer, to a formal resume, which lists the existential phases of the pater familias through jihad, exile and immigrant work in the US. This multitude of voices also deprives the reader of the comfort of knowing who is telling the true story and where the truth might lie.

Short stories seem the best format for Kochai to convey to readers his fascinating, deeply personal, yet poignant vision of Afghanistan and America. The very novel, 99 Nights in Logar, originated from a short story and – against the backdrop of the many masters in American literature who favoured this form of storytelling – one cannot but hope that Jamil Jan Kochai will write more. And if you missed his novel back in 2019, this author’s recommendation is to first get acquainted with Kochai’s universe through his second work, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak.

Reviewed by Fabrizio Foschini

Saad Mohseni with Jenna Krajeski, Radio Free Afghanistan: A Twenty-year Odyssey for an Independent Voice in Kabul, HarperCollins, 2024

Saad Mohseni’s memoirs of his and his siblings’ journey in establishing independent radio and later TV channels is an interesting read within the modern history of independent media in Afghanistan. His book is a reminder of some key political events between 2001 and 2023, such as the presidential elections, that also, simultaneously, offers an intimate account of the role of the national media mogul in these events

Mohseni’s family left Kabul in 1978 following the coup de état, when Saad’s father was posted to Tokyo. He was then 12 years old, the eldest of four siblings – his two brothers Zaid and Jahid and his sister Wajma. Later, the family emigrated to Australia after his father resigned his post on the eve of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. They settled in Australia, but nostalgia for the homeland was so powerful that the family kept looking for chances to work in or about Afghanistan. During the 1990s, Mohseni went to Uzbekistan on the Afghan border to look for business opportunities and started a newsletter – his very first and only experience of being a journalist.

After the fall of the first Islamic Emirate in 2001, the Mohseni brothers arrived in Kabul to find businesses to invest in. They were pursuing an idea for almond exporting until Afghanistan’s culture minister, who was also a friend of their father’s, planted an idea for a radio station. Arman FM was established with a small grant from USAID in April 2003 and from it, over the years, the Moby Media empire grew to include several TV and radio stations, not only in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan, India, the Middle East and east Africa, and a pan-regional Persian-language station, Lemar.

The book is a dynamic read that takes us into inner workings of Afghan society: Mohseni tells us about the importance of “a family connection” – family and friends’ relations – in starting and running a business. A careful sequencing of chapters maintains the book’s pace, as it jumps from nostalgic reminiscing about the early 2000s to events that happened as recently as 2023, that is Mohseni’s recounting of how TOLO TV covered the first presidential elections in 2004 just a few days after the station was launched, to a chapter on how it has been navigating the growing number of restrictions imposed on the media by the Islamic Emirate in 2023. Although Mohseni has not returned to Afghanistan since August 2021, he says he regularly participates online in the editorial meetings of his TV station.

Mohseni’s criticism of how the United States and the West in general left Afghanistan in August 2021 – sometimes interwoven with sardonic undertones – is memorable. For example, he writes:

I found myself, bewildered at an embassy reception or think tank meet and greet, comforting Western politicians as they confessed to feelings of guilt over the way the international community left so suddenly, abandoning Afghans. “It’s not your fault,” I’d tell them, as though they were a child and Afghanistan a glass of spilled milk. I’d started to feel like an aging actor at a Hollywood party, once attractive and now making a case for my own relevance.

Two chapters – one about his mother and the other about his sister – are a delicate attempt to speak about the position of Afghan women in society. He writes:

… my mother’s relationship to Afghanistan is different from mine. She was in her thirties when the country that she had grown up in changed so abruptly and then changed so many times more that it must have felt like living through a series of earthquakes. She is a woman in a country that by conservative tradition or through government decree has so often tried to control women’s lives and silence their voices. After she spends time with the women at Moby, she returns to Melbourne or Dubai a little depressed. “They say that the country and the government must think they are completely worthless,” she says. “And what can I tell them? They are right.”

Overall, this was a nice and entertaining read about Afghanistan – a welcome change from the norm.

Reviewed by Jelena Bjelica 

Hassan Abbas, The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan after the Americans Left, Yale University Press, 2023

The Return of the Taliban by well-known Pakistani-American author, Hassan Abbas, looks in turn at specific topics to do with the post-2021 regime in Kabul, including its composition and structure, religious ideology, international relations and the challenges it faces.

For me, the chapter on the Islamic Emirate’s international relations was particularly interesting. Hassan Abbas explores its relations with Pakistan, China, Iran, Qatar, Russia and India. Regarding the Emirate’s Taleban’s relations with China, he quotes the acting Deputy Prime Minister of the IEA, Mawlawi Abdul Salaam Hanafi, saying:

Afghanistan can play a great role in creating important corridors. We want to be connected to China through our Badakhshan province. . . . The geostrategic position of Afghanistan could lead the country to play a positive role in linking neighbouring countries in the region and beyond.

The author delves into the Taleban’s relations with Russia. He describes how the Soviet Union’s failed invasion of Afghanistan drastically changed Moscow’s relationship towards Afghanistan. He describes how Russia initially extended its support to the United States in combat operations against the Taleban in the early years of the US intervention. He also describes the Afghanistan Contact Group (ACG) in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in 2005 to support Kabul’s fight against drugs and crime.

Abbas describes the pivoting of Russia’s calculations and approach after 2015 and how the Kremlin and the Taleban came together to cooperate because they both wanted to fight ISKP and its expanding presence in Central Asia. Russia opened up active channels of communication with the Taleban in a number of international forums, based on their mutual anti-US sentiment – a fresh start appeared to be established.

Additionally, Abbas writes, the SCO was crucial in “facilitating a conversation between the Afghan government and the Taliban, specifically during the withdrawal of NATO troops in 2016 [sic].[11] Russia invited the Taleban to several rounds of peace talks in Moscow, which helped, says Abbas, officials to understand the core interest of the Taleban. This was an insight into how Russia played a key role in helping the Taleban to better articulate their position, spread their narrative of the war and improve how they were perceived globally. Although the world has not recognised the Taleban government yet, certain countries do want to have relations with the IEA. This indicates the development of Taleban regional diplomacy.

According to Abbas, it is Pakistan that influences the Taleban more than any other country. He mentions former chief ISI General Faiz Hameed travelling to Kabul soon after the Taleban retook power and playing a key role in forming the first Emirate cabinet. Abbas says Hameed also resolved quarrels and helped the Emirate put aside their internal divisions. He quotes a Pakistani general saying he told the Taleban to give the former Chief Executive of the Republic, Dr Abdullah Abdullah and former President Hamid Karzai some symbolic position just to show the world that their government was an inclusive one, although the Taleban had their own ideas.

In another part of the book, Abbas mentions the Tehrik-e Taleban Pakistan (TTP), sister organisation to the Afghan Taleban. He says that a year after the return of Taleban to power in Afghanistan, Pakistan witnessed a more than 50 per cent increase in ‘terrorist activities’. Pakistan tried to negotiate with the TTP through the Afghan Taleban, but to little avail. According to Abbas, the Taleban have helped Pakistan only half-heartedly in pursing the TTP because both groups enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship for a long time. This, he said, has resulted in creating tensions between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

I highly recommend this book because, along with delving deep into the Emirate’s international relations, it provides the reader with an in-depth analysis of the events leading to the Taleban’s takeover as the US was withdrawing from Afghanistan. It gives the reader a more detailed and nuanced picture of the Taleban than one gets from media reporting.

Reviewed by Rohullah Sorush

Edited by Kate Clark

 

References

References
↑1 The Nuristan collection was permanently on display from 1970 to 2001. Currently, Moesgaard museum’s permanent exhibition concentrates on prehistoric and Viking history.
↑2 Local people were partly converted to Islam by force, the central temple of their religion, most shrines, carved statues and other expressions of their old faith destroyed. Others – mostly among the younger generation – joining voluntarily, hoping to become part of modernising Afghanistan and finding employment and education outside their own community.
↑3 The museum holds the Nuristan material collected Edelberg, Siiger and also by Hamburg ethnologist Wolfgang Lentz (1900-86), participant of the 1935 German Hindukush expedition. Edelberg also worked in Luristan, Iran.
↑4 Other well-known Danish specialists on Afghanistan include Klaus Ferdinand (1926-2005), who specialised in nomadism, anthropologists Jan Ovesen (1945-2016) and Asta Olesen (Islam and Politics in Afghanistan, 1995) and now retired ethnographer Svend Castenfeldt. Fortunately, there is also a young generation of Danish researchers on Afghanistan, for example Erik Hansen who worked for UNESCO in the Kabul museum and in Herat, and musicologist Christer Irgens-Møller.
↑5 According to Austrian Nuristan expert Max Klimburg, atrožan is only used by the Prasun-speaking Nuristani of the Waigal valley; the Kati Nuristani call them adze. The Nuristani are not one, but consist of various ethnic groups with different, mostly mutually incomprehensible languages. See a map in this article.
↑6 There are several towns called Barikot in Afghanistan and Pakistan, one in Kunar province, one at Swat River in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, kot being Pashto for dwelling place, related to kotá, room. There is also a Barikot area in Kabul, just west of Deh Mazang Square, which used to have a cinema of the same name but which was destroyed during the 1990s factional wars.
↑7 Earlier literature mentioning bari or other castes considered lowly include: Wolfgang Lentz and Albert Herrlich of the 1935 (Nazi) German ‘Hindukush expedition’ Herrlich calls the bari ‘slaves’ (in Deutsche im Hindukusch, Berlin 1937, pp 232-7) with its very detailed expedition reports also contains a very long chapter on skull-measuring and other methods that were designed to underpin Nazi racial theory in general and their idea they may find fellow-‘Aryans’ in the Nuristanis of the Hindukush (or more on this, see a 2015 article by the author for AAN). 

Herrlich mentions another category of ‘slaves’, the lane (singular: lawin) but says they only exist among the Kantos Kafirs, whose social position he describes as Dienstknechtschaft (indentured servitude) but that, in contrast to the bari, they are considered – and consider themselves – part of the Nuristani ‘tribes’ and assumes they might be impoverished Nuristani but also says they could be sold and bought. This was confirmed in a 1974 paper by Jones who, however, calls this group the šewala and categorises them as “unspecialised labourers,” or rather labourers that produce low-tech items, such as “baskets, claypots, and leather goods” (p46-7). Particularly working with leather is considered unclean or at least lowly not only in Nuristan/Kafiristan but also other parts of Afghanistan’s and India’s societies. All this is reminiscent of India’s caste system; some researchers believe that Nuristan’s old religion was a branch of Indic religions.
↑8 Klimburg also does not elaborate beyond what we quoted above. Another short hint comes from Manuel Schmaranzer’s 2009 diploma thesis at Vienna University where he writes (my translation) that “after Islamisation, a separate form of ‘Nuristani Islam’ developed and one culture was not replaced by the other in a few years.” He also notes that “political reports from this period compiled by Schuyler Jones show that there were repeated uprisings against the [islamicising] Afghans” (p73).
↑9 Christoph Reuter, in his 2023 ‘road trip’ book reviewed by this author here, mentions that he saw a old-style carved chair when travelling in Nuristan, and the embarrassment he created when asking the owner, who had it hidden away by then, to see it again during a second stay.
↑10 This was an initiative where people wrote poems about peace and sent them on post cards to each other.
↑11 This appears to be a reference to the end of the NATO-led ISAF mission, which took place on 31 December 2014. That involved a drawdown of troops and handing over security responsibility to the Afghan armed forces. However, foreign troops stayed in Afghanistan as part of NATO’s (non-combat) Resolute Support mission, with the US alone also running a ‘can-be-combat’ mission, until the full withdrawal in August 2021.

Recommended Reads from AAN Writers: The poetry of peace, magical realism in Logar, class in Nuristan, Sufis
read more

Six days on a small boat in rough seas: my terrifying, death-defying escape from the Taliban

January 17, 2025

Between the crowd and the entrance to the airport, Pordale could see a Taliban checkpoint, where heavily armed men were holding lists in their hands and checking people’s documents. Pordale, whose father had until that morning held a high-ranking position in the democratic government, knew that their chances of getting to the airport and on to an evacuation flight were blown.

Pordale turned to tell his father that they had to get away, but he had disappeared, vanished without a trace into the crowd. “At that point I didn’t know I’d never see him again,” he says. “But I did know that I was now on my own and it was up to me to find a way of getting out of Afghanistan.”

The Taliban’s advance across Afghanistan in the chaotic days before the withdrawal of US and UK troops had been so fast and everything had unravelled so quickly that Pordale says he and his father had not thought of an escape plan. “My mother and my siblings were already in Turkey and I’d stayed in Kabul to help my father, but in those days when the provinces were falling to the Taliban, my father just couldn’t accept that this could happen and everything we’d been working towards would disappear,” he says. “It was only that morning of the 15th, when we woke up and realised that [President] Ashraf Ghani had fled, that we came to our senses.”

Sam Pordale with Coventry’s former lord mayor and lady mayoress, Jaswant Singh Birdi and Krishna Birdi
Sam Pordale with Coventry’s former lord mayor and lady mayoress, Jaswant Singh Birdi and Krishna Birdi. Photograph: Courtesy of Sam Pordale

Pordale’s life to this point had been spent in the highest circles of status and wealth in Afghanistan, thanks to his father’s positions in the military and government. But the huge security risks that came with his father’s work had also meant that his childhood was isolated and lonely. “Me and my siblings only really had each other because we weren’t allowed to go out and play. We only left the house to go to school and we changed schools all the time, so we didn’t have friends,” he says. “My mother would never let us sleep anywhere near a window, so we’d have our beds in the corridors because the house could come under attack. And my father was always facing assassination attempts. By the time I was a teenager I’d survived two suicide bombing attacks on different schools.”

Looking back, Pordale says that the isolation from everyday life had also made him arrogant and entitled. “We really had no contact with the outside world,” he says. “If we did leave the house, we would go with an armed escort. We grew up just accepting that our family had a lot of power.” Then all that wealth and power vanished overnight. “That morning the government fell, we called everyone we’d been working with in the US and UK governments to ask for help, but nobody answered,” he says. “All these powerful allies and friends were gone in an instant.”

Getting closer to the checkpoint, Pordale knew he had to flee. He shouldered his way through the crowd and ran through the streets of Kabul before he found shelter in a shop. “I had nothing: no money, no luggage. We’d gone to the airport in such a panic,” he says. “The only person I could think to call was this dodgy guy who was connected to everyone, including the Taliban, but our family had helped his mother when she was sick. He was the only one who answered the phone to me that day.”

Pordale was told to wait, and after an hour someone turned up and said they were there to take him to Iran. He took a bus to the border, then crossed into Iran hidden in a compartment under the floor of a minivan.

In Iran, he was put under the floor of another bus, compressed into a small space just a few feet above the road for a journey that lasted nearly two days. Trapped in the dark, with the heat and the pain, he kept trying to locate parts of his body to make sure he was still alive. “It was like nothing existed outside the inside of the bus,” he says.

When he finally made it to Istanbul, he turned up dishevelled and filthy at his mother’s front door. “They hadn’t heard from me since Afghanistan fell,” he says. “So it was a shock to them all.” The family were reunited, but because Pordale had crossed into Turkey illegally he didn’t have the paperwork he needed to work or stay in the country. In 2022, a few months after he had arrived, Turkey began an aggressive deportation of illegal Afghan migrants back over the border into Afghanistan. “Many people I knew who had stayed in Afghanistan or who had got sent back were getting arrested or just went missing,” says Pordale. “I knew people who had been killed. I was terrified of being sent back.”

Like many other Afghans who had fled to Turkey, he felt that the only thing he could do was to move on towards Europe. Pordale called the people who had got him into Turkey and they told him to go to a market in the centre of Istanbul. “It was like a shopping centre for people smugglers,” says Pordale. “People would just be standing there outside shops yelling in multiple languages offering different packages to get you to Europe.”

Pordale was told that the cheapest route was overland through Bulgaria, with prices starting at £1,500. The most expensive, at about £8,000, was the sea crossing to Italy. He managed to get together the money to go to Italy and prepared to leave. The smugglers took Pordale and a group of about 60 others, mostly Afghans, to İzmir on the Turkish coast, and one night they did a long night trek in silence to a deserted beach to meet their boat. “When we saw the boat I thought, I’ve made a big mistake, because it was just this little fishing boat. It couldn’t have been more than 14 metres long,” he says. “People were sitting literally on top of each other, piled up. There were parents trying to keep hold of babies. I managed to sit on a small kitchen sink, sort of crouching on top of it but my legs were bent underneath me.”

Pordale is now co-president of Warwick Student Action for Refugees
Pordale is now co-president of Warwick Student Action for Refugees. Photograph: Courtesy of Sam Pordale

They were told the journey would take three days; in the end it took six. “On the third day everyone ran out of food and the sea was so rough that the water started coming in the boat,” he says. “We were all soaking wet and terrified. People were going crazy. One guy just started screaming, ‘We’re all going to die,’ and at that moment I did just want to die so this could be over.”

On the sixth day at sea, they were spotted by an NGO rescue boat and taken to Sicily, and then, after being processed, to a reception centre. After a few days there, Pordale decided to keep moving towards the UK. “My family had worked a lot with the British government and I felt this sense of brotherhood,” he says. He also spoke fluent English. “I experienced such bad racism in Italy that going to the UK felt like my only chance to be accepted and do something useful.”

He walked most of the way from Italy to France with another group of refugees. “Most of the time I was just putting one foot in front of the other but sometimes it would just hit me, what had happened in Afghanistan and how not just me but also hundreds of thousands of other normal people had been reduced to something that felt less than human. There were moments on that journey when I thought, if I die here, nobody will know what happened to me. I’m nobody, nothing. I barely exist.”

He describes his time in the migrant camps in Calais waiting to cross to the UK as “the most degrading, humiliating experience you could imagine”. He says there was no violence inside the camps from the Kurdish smugglers running the place, “but once you start the journey to the boat, that is when it starts”. He says that on his first attempt at crossing the Channel, the boat was in such a bad condition that the smugglers were beating people to make them get onboard. “I paid them £1,800 for the crossing and it took nine attempts to get to the UK.” He doesn’t remember much about the journey itself, “because by that point I didn’t care if I lived or died. It felt like just another thing that was happening to me.”

Sam Pordale, seated and smiling, on the University of Warwick campus
‘In Afghanistan it never would have occurred to me to do something purely to help someone else, but I discovered volunteering was something I loved.’ Photograph: Fabio de Paola/The Guardian

When he finally arrived in the UK (he says he has no idea where he landed) on 16 April 2022, eight months after he had escaped Afghanistan, Pordale says he was treated “like a human being for the first time in months. But when I spoke to my mother I just wanted to get off the phone. I had caused them all these financial problems and all this worry. They were alone in Turkey, and I had failed them.”

He was taken to an asylum hotel in Coventry, “where water was running down the walls and the toilets were broken”, he says. “After the first month I just felt myself slipping into this deep depression. I thought, this can’t be my life.”

At his asylum accommodation, Pordale had come into contact with the Red Cross, and he started walking three hours back and forth each day to one of their drop-in centres to volunteer as an English teacher. “In Afghanistan it never would have occurred to me to do something purely to help someone else, but I discovered volunteering was something I loved,” he says. “Just to feel active and useful and part of something, it brought me alive again.”

He also knew that his fluent English was the reason he had been treated so humanely by the immigration officials he had met since he got off the boat. “I could express what I’d been through. I could form a connection,” he says. “I wanted to help other people to do that too.”

His manager at the Red Cross put him forward for an interview for an academic research programme looking at the barriers that refugees faced accessing higher education. He was shocked to learn that he was allowed to apply to study at UK universities, so he applied for five undergraduate courses across the country.

Meanwhile, he was moved by the Home Office from Coventry to Stockton-on-Tees, where he started volunteering at Citizens Advice, helping local people navigate problems with benefits and jobseeking. “I would sit there and local people would tell me it was all the immigrants’ fault that they couldn’t get a job, and they should all go back to where they’d come from. I would say, ‘Well, I’m a refugee,’ and they’d say, ‘Oh not you, the others.’”

Pordale was profoundly shocked by the poverty and desperation he saw in Stockton. “Many people were living in worse conditions than people in rural Afghanistan,” he says. “So much poverty! Some people would sit and cry because they hadn’t eaten in three days. They felt that nobody cared about them and they were right.”

When protests kicked off in Middlesborough over the summer, Pordale watched the TV coverage of people attacking buildings housing asylum seekers and recognised some of the people he had helped get universal credit or housing benefit. “They were only believing what they’d been told, but they were angry with the wrong people, and the damage the riots have caused to the mental health of many refugees is huge.”

At the beginning of 2023, he was told he had been awarded a full scholarship to study politics and international studies at the University of Warwick. It was “the most miraculous thing that has ever happened to me”, he says. He started university in September 2023 with “no money, no clothes, no suitcase”, but now the campus feels like home. “I know everyone here,” he says. “From the lecturers to the cleaners, everyone is my family.” He intends to stay at Warwick to get a PhD and then spend his life trying to open up higher education opportunities to refugees and asylum seekers.

The first week he enrolled he also joined the university’s Student Action for Refugees group and is now the president. “I went back to the same asylum hotel I was first taken to in Coventry, but this time to teach English,” he says. Sometimes he thinks back to his life a few years ago and can’t believe what he has been through. “The idea I could become a refugee overnight would have seemed crazy,” he says. “But laws, governments, your rights, they can all disappear in a second and all you’re left with is yourself. I just want to make the best of every chance I have to live a good life.”

Six days on a small boat in rough seas: my terrifying, death-defying escape from the Taliban
read more

Cricket must challenge gender apartheid in Afghanistan

January 17, 2025
Letters

Mike Stein would like the ICC to have the moral and political courage to lead a multilateral boycott

Two additional points come to mind. First, England acted alone in 1968 in cancelling their tour to South Africa after the prime minister, John Vorster, banned the team for including the “mixed-race” player Basil D’Oliveira. England’s decision put pressure on the International Cricket Council, which introduced a moratorium on all international tours in 1970, resulting in South Africa’s exclusion from international cricket until Nelson Mandela walked free from prison in 1990.

Second, as Liew suggests, India is the key player, holding both the cricketing and economic cards that represent major barriers to effective action: the former as a consequence of the individualisation and privatisation of cricket through the Indian Premier League, weakening players’ country ties, and the latter as a result of India’s economic self‑interest in Afghanistan.

The only hope would be if the ICC had the moral and political courage to lead a multilateral boycott, as it did in 1970, and the member states were prepared to back them. But that seems unlikely, as the England and Wales Cricket Board and other participants are refusing to take part in a boycott of an international competition. Gender apartheid remains unchallenged by cricket in 2025.

Mike Stein
Pudsey, West Yorkshire

Cricket must challenge gender apartheid in Afghanistan
read more

Why is Afghanistan part of the great extractives race?

January 13, 2025
Global Initiatives

Posted on 08 Jan 2025

Treasure Hunt

Afghanistan’s mineral resources harbour great untapped potential. The country sits on an estimated 2.2 billion tonnes of iron ore, 60 million tonnes of copper, 183 million tonnes of aluminium, and vast reserves of rare earth elements such as lanthanum, cerium and neodymium. In a world where access to these minerals is a matter of national security, there is a geopolitical race to secure control of critical mineral supply chains. While China currently leads, the US, EU, and others are seeking to establish and secure independent mineral supply chains.

Afghanistan is one of the theatres in which this race is being played out. The country’s resources are not just a matter of foreign economic interest – they are a potential for domestic economic development and growth. But they can also become a source for conflict and repression, depending on whether they are managed with the long-term welfare of the Afghan people in mind. The mining sector in Afghanistan is controlled by the Taliban, and it is unclear where the revenues end up.

Undermined

The new Taliban de facto authorities sought to capitalize on Afghanistan’s mineral resources after their return to power in 2021. Since then, they have awarded at least 205 mining contracts to more than 150 companies, and in September 2023 they announced new mining deals worth more than US$6.5 billion. In May 2024, the Taliban-controlled Ministry of Mines and Petroleum (MoMP) said that the group had secured investments worth more than US$7 billion from China, Qatar, Turkey, Iran and the UK. The details of these contracts remain undisclosed.

The Taliban inherited many of the Republic-era challenges in the country’s extractives sector, particularly the lack of a comprehensive regulatory framework and an effective oversight body. According to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, these challenges also include the country’s inability to reform mineral policies and regulations, corruption, unregulated artisanal and small-scale mining, and lack of infrastructure and security. The Taliban are navigating through outdated institutional structures, making changes along the way, while working on a complete overhaul of the extractives policy.

Although the MoMP claims to have taken steps to curb illegal mining, these measures lack a formalized structure with independent oversight. Workers can be subjected to exploitation in mining operations, including child labour. In addition, unregulated mining is often carried out in unsafe working conditions and can cause serious environmental damage.

Afghanistan’s suspension from the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative in June 2024 points to the problems around transparency and accountability mechanisms in the country’s extractives sector. Failure to follow clearly defined mining regulations prevents the equitable distribution of the country’s mineral wealth. With limited transparency around international mining contracts, the international community should consider the risks these pose for Afghanistan’s mineral sector, ranging from exploitation to monopolization by foreign actors.

Geopolitical relevance

Afghanistan’s reserves of copper and lithium, among other minerals, are crucial to the global shift towards renewable energy and reliance on digital technologies. China has shown a keen interest in securing access to Afghanistan’s resources and has invested heavily in its mining industry, signing multi-billion-dollar contracts for projects such as the Mes Aynak copper mine, one of the largest copper deposits in the world.

The investment is not only driven to secure critical minerals, but also by Chinese strategic considerations linked to its Belt and Road Initiative designed to enhance the country’s global influence and project its power. Taking advantage of the power vacuum created by the collapse of the previous government and the US withdrawal, China is becoming a valuable partner to the Taliban. China’s contracts and investments in Afghanistan’s mining sector are a sign of how it is seeking primacy in the region, which could deter other international actors from entering the sector. Afghanistan’s economic future could become increasingly tied to Chinese interests, reducing the country’s bargaining power and making it more difficult to establish trade relations with other countries.

Although China is leading the race, other countries, including Russia, are jockeying for access to critical minerals. The recent visit to Kabul by Sergei Shoigu, secretary of Russia’s National Security Council and former defence minister, sends a clear signal to the G7+ countries about which bloc has the most influence in the country.

An opportunity not to be missed

For Afghanistan to truly benefit from its resources, there needs to be a multilateral approach to mining, involving different international actors to ensure transparency and fair competition. Investment in Afghanistan’s mining sector could help develop the country’s infrastructure, creating roads, railways and facilities that would benefit the economy and enable resource extraction. This could provide jobs and strengthen capacities of Afghan workers, as well as a more stable revenue stream for the country.

The UN-led engagement with the Taliban in Doha is a potential opportunity to shed light on the sector and strategize on how the extractives sector could improve the economic situation for Afghans. The talks are designed to help Afghanistan integrate into the global community, with a focus on fostering dialogue between the Taliban and international stakeholders. So far, however, the process has yielded little other than a commitment by all countries to continue such discussions and the appearance of the Taliban on the international stage. While discussions have touched on security and political stability, the issue of natural resource management, particularly mineral extraction, has not been addressed. As natural resources play a central role in financing the Taliban, shaping power dynamics and post-conflict rehabilitation, linking resource management to social and economic development seems a potential area of mutual interest.

As the country navigates an uncertain path forward, its mineral resources should be treated as key elements in a broader strategy for stability, ensuring that resource wealth benefits all Afghans. If critical economic assets such as minerals are ignored in ongoing engagement strategies, they can become a force driving conflict or obstructing post-conflict rehabilitation. If left unaddressed, this pattern risks being replicated in Afghanistan. The country’s resources need to be more than just assets buried in the ground – they need to be an active part of the dialogue about Afghanistan’s future.

Why is Afghanistan part of the great extractives race?
read more

View from Pakistan: Discomfort over India’s meeting with Afghan Taliban

January 13, 2025
AAKASH JOSHI

Indian Express

Jan 12, 2025
Pakistan’s restive western border and Delhi’s outreach invited comment and analysis in the country’s press Aakash Joshi

Afghanistan, once seen by the Pakistani military and intelligence establishment as an instrument of its “strategic depth” against India, has become an albatross around Rawalpindi’s neck. For long, it propped up the Taliban in the hope of a proxy regime in Kabul.

The recent cross-border attacks by Pakistan – ostensibly to target the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan’s (TTP) infrastructure – in which civilians, including women and children, were killed show just how far ties have soured. The Taliban regime in Kabul reportedly responded to the strikes as well.

ADVERTISEMENT

In this context, the meeting between Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri and Amir Khan Muttaqi, acting foreign minister of the Taliban regime, has invited both comment and concern. Beijing, too, seems to be trying to open avenues with Kabul.

Dawn, in its editorial on January 11, writes, “The Indians have reacted cautiously with the Taliban, but matters are proceeding nonetheless. The Taliban also maintain significant links with China and Russia.”

“These developments,” the editorial argues, “should concern Pakistan, and make its policymakers revisit their Afghan strategy. The stark fact is that while the Afghan Taliban may be difficult customers, Pakistan cannot afford a hostile neighbour to its west.” It suggests a practical engagement with the Taliban, including the leaders in Kandahar, from where the “real power flows.”

ADVERTISEMENT

“The Taliban are welcome to keep the TTP, as long as they pose no harm to Pakistan,” Dawn says, and concludes, “As others are making diplomatic inroads with the Afghan Taliban, including unfriendly governments, Pakistan must reassess and readjust its strategy.”

Also Read | India-Taliban talks — realism in Acting West

Shazia Anwar Cheema, writing in The Express Tribune on January 10, writes, “We [Pakistan] used to blame (former Afghanistan president) Ashraf Ghani for being a stooge of New Delhi… while the Afghanistan Taliban had been called ‘brothers and friends’.” She argues that the situation seems to have reversed now and that Washington and New Delhi are acting in concert to make their presence felt in Kabul.

If this scenario is indeed coming to pass, argues Dr Cheema, Pakistan must act. “The reports of Pakistan’s first-ever friendly contact with the so-called Northern Alliance, which is made up of non-Pashtun Afghans can be a step towards this. Pakistan has been blamed for the fall of Panjshir Valley and its handover to the Afghan Taliban as well.”

Najm us Saqib, a senior Pakistani diplomat, takes a broader view of his country’s external orientation in an opinion article for The Nation: “The recent wave of terrorism—Afghanistan’s adamant stance on the Khawaraj (TTP) and the like; Washington’s total neglect of its erstwhile ‘strategic’ partner’s economic and security concerns; the region’s volatile predicament, particularly in the face of the ongoing Middle East crisis; and the West’s overall policy of leaving Afghanistan to its own devices—paints a grim picture for Pakistan.”

His argument, in essence, is that Pakistan now seemingly lacks a foreign policy and the country’s economic woes make matters worse. Unfortunately, “The economic crunch and the ongoing political uncertainty do not leave the present government with many options. Crisis management—as opposed to conflict resolution—seems to be the order of the day.”

aakash.joshi@expressindia.com

View from Pakistan: Discomfort over India’s meeting with Afghan Taliban
read more

Recent Posts