Civilian Casualties since the Taleban Takeover: New UNAMA report shows sharp drop – but some communities still under threat

June 30, 2023

Kate Clark

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UNAMA has published its first stand-alone report on conflict-related civilian casualties since the Taleban’s capture of power on 15 August 2021. Casualties have plummeted since the takeover, but the threat remains, especially to some communities, from suicide attacks and roadside and magnetic IEDs. UNAMA has also found that suicide attacks, of which the Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISKP) is now the main perpetrator, have become more deadly, ie greater numbers of civilians are killed and injured, on average, in each attack. UNAMA points to the many attacks on places of worship and on Hazaras as well as the Taleban’s heavy-handed approach to journalists trying to report attacks. AAN’s Kate Clark has been reading the report and brings her analysis of it here. 
UNAMA Human Rights Service’s report, “Impact of Improvised Explosive Devices on Civilians In Afghanistan (15 August 2021 – 30 May 2023)” can be read here.

The latest phase of Afghanistan’s decade-old conflict effectively ended soon after 15 August 2021 when the Taleban captured Kabul. In a matter of weeks, the movement would control the whole country as it defeated the last remnants of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) that had fought on and as the final American and other foreign troops left. The end to the conflict between the three major armed actors of the post-2001 period – the Taleban, foreign military and the Islamic Republic’s security forces – brought with it a dramatic fall in the number of civilians killed and injured, although not to zero.[1]

Between 15 August 2021 and 30 May 2023, when UNAMA’s data set for this report ends, it recorded 3,774 civilian casualties, 1,095 people killed and 2,679 wounded.[2] The figures for that 21 month period were substantially lower, in terms of the average monthly civilian casualty toll, than for any single year since 2009 when UNAMA began systematically recording civilian casualties. In 2009, the average number of civilian casualties per month was almost three times greater than in those 21 months; in 2016, it was more than five times higher.[3]

The reduction in civilian casualties since 15 March 2021 is even more striking compared to the especially brutal months leading up to the fall of Kabul. The final quarter of 2020 was the worst ever recorded for civilian casualties; they rose as autumn became winter for the first time ever (see AAN reporting here). Then, in the first six months of 2021, UNAMA recorded almost 5,200 deaths and injuries, with nearly half taking place in just two months, May and June 2021.[4] In the face of these terrible casualty figures, AAN wrote that “any notion that the Taleban capture of territory since 1 May has been virtually bloodless has been demolished by UNAMA’s mid-year report on civilian casualties… The surge in civilian harm coincided with the Taleban’s push to take territory.”

Over the twelve and a half years between 2009 and 30 June 2021, when UNAMA published their final pre-takeover report, they recorded 55,041 civilians as having been killed or injured in the conflict. These are the casualties that UNAMA was able to verify – the actual figure will be even higher.[5]The respite from conflict-related violence, which came with the Taleban’s return to power, was for most people, immediate and has been lasting. Many have been able to travel for the first time in years, to farm without fear of artillery shells or air strikes and shop or go to work without fear of attack. However, not everyone has seen the risk of attack reduced. Although violence is now at much lower levels, it is far more targeted at particular communities. Moreover, most civilian casualties appear to be not collateral damage in attacks on military targets but the result of deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian objects.

UNAMA’s focus on IEDs in the report

Roughly three-quarters of the total number of civilians killed and injured in the period covered by UNAMA’s report, 15 August 2021 to 30 May 2023, were victims of IED attacks; UNAMA includes in this category both suicide attacks (IEDs fixed to the person) and IEDs fixed to vehicles or laid on roads or in buildings. That high number is why it has focused this report on IEDs and the “casualties of indiscriminate IED attacks in populated areas, including places of worship, schools and markets.” It does also make mention of two other sources of casualties since 15 August 2021 – targeted killings (148 civilians killed and injured) and people harmed by explosive remnants of war (639 civilians killed and wounded).

UNAMA attributes the majority of casualties from IEDs in the 21 month period under study to ISKP (1,701), but says “[a] significant number of casualties (1,095) … resulted from IED attacks which were never claimed and/or for which UNAMA was unable to attribute responsibility.” The increase in ISKP-authored attacks came after a period in which their use of this means of attack had reduced (see chart below).

Source: “Impact of Improvised Explosive Devices on Civilians in Afghanistan, 15 August 2021 to 30 May 2023”, UNAMA.

UNAMA also points to how suicide attacks have become more deadly since the takeover, with greater numbers of civilians now being killed or wounded, on average, in each attack.  This is despite another trend, a drop in both the number of suicide attacks and resulting overall civilian casualties every year since 2018, from 50 attacks causing 2,473 civilian casualties in 2018 to 8 attacks causing 855 casualties in 2022 (see table below). However, from 2018 to 2020, the average number of civilians killed and injured in each suicide attack was never more than 49 (in 2018). In the period following the takeover in 2021, the number of casualties shot up to an average of 251 civilians killed or injured in each attack (all attributed to ISKP) and 75 per attack in the following year.

Data source: “Impact of Improvised Explosive Devices on Civilians in Afghanistan, 15 August 2021 to 30 May 2023”, UNAMA. Table by AAN.

Who is being targeted/harmed by IEDs? 

UNAMA highlights three areas of concern: attacks on places of worship, attacks targeting Hazaras, and the harm done to civilians in attacks targeting the Taleban.

More than one-third of all civilian casualties recorded by UNAMA since the Taleban takeover have come in attacks on places of worship. It had documented a fall in the number of such attacks over recent years, but since the takeover, they have shot back up again. There were nine in 2018 and in 2019 (435 and 219 civilian casualties, respectively); six in 2020 (34 civilian casualties); one in 2021 before the takeover (35 casualties); four in 2021 after the takeover (583 casualties) and; 14 in 2022 (631 casualties). UNAMA attributed the majority of casualties resulting from these attacks to ISKP – nine separate attacks resulting in 853 civilian casualties (284 killed, 569 wounded). The chart below shows the civilian casualties resulting from such attacks over the past five years.

Source: “Impact of Improvised Explosive Devices on Civilians in Afghanistan, 15 August 2021 to 30 May 2023”, UNAMA.

More than half of all civilians killed and injured in attacks on places of worship were Shia Muslims (686 out of 1,218). Others targeted were Sufis (331) and Sunnis (196) – going from press reporting, it seems likely that most of the Sunnis targeted were Salafists, although UNAMA provides no detail here. Five Sikhs, among the last remaining members of what was a thriving community before the 1978 Saur Coup, were also deliberately killed and injured.

Ethnic Hazaras, the majority of whom are Shia Muslims, were killed and injured in large numbers not only in their places of worship, but also in schools and educational facilities, on public transport and in the crowded streets of neighbourhoods where they form a majority. Since the takeover, UNAMA has documented 345 Hazara civilians killed (95) or wounded (250).

UNAMA has detailed some of the attacks suffered by Hazaras in Kabul in this period, including two attacks in Muharram in August 2022, an IED explosion killing three civilians and wounding 54 others in a market on 6 August and an IED attached to a minibus that killed two people and wounded 22 others the following day. ISKP claimed both attacks.

That same year, three attacks on educational facilities in the Hazara neighbourhood of Dasht-e Barchi in Kabul also caused at least 236 more civilian casualties. On 19 April 2022, consecutive IED attacks were carried out, on the Abdul Rahim-e Shahid High School (18 killed, 44 wounded) and Mumtaz Educational Centre. Among those killed and wounded were 47 children (12 boys killed and 34 boys and one girl wounded) and four women (one killed and three wounded).

Later in 2022, on 30 September, a suicide attack against Kaaj Educational Centre, also in Dasht-e Barchi, left 168 people either dead (54) or wounded (114): most were young women and girls (48 killed and 67 wounded). The youngest victim was a 14-year-old girl injured in the attack.

If the number of civilian casualties in attacks on Shia places of worship and Hazaras are added together, the scale of the onslaught on these overlapping communities[6] is clear: out of a total of 2,814 civilians killed or injured in IED attacks in the 21 month period under study, 1,031 were Hazara and/or Shia. UNAMA attributed the majority of attacks against Hazaras to the sectarian ISKP, but a significant number, including the three attacks on schools and educational centres detailed above, remain unclaimed and unattributed. UNAMA gives no breakdown of the number of attacks on Shia places of worship it attributes to ISKP, but overall, it said a majority of attacks in the period against all places of worship were by the ISKP (9 out of 15.) Unfortunately, this is a pattern of targeting that predates the Taleban’s return to power, as can be seen in our in-depth January 2022 report by Ali Yawar Adili, which explored attacks on Hazaras/Shias and the authorities’ response, both during the Republic and the Emirate, “A Community Under Attack: How successive governments failed west Kabul and the Hazaras who live there”.

A final focus in UNAMA’s report are the civilians caught up in IED attacks that target the Taleban. It has verified 426 civilians killed (63) or wounded (363), both bystanders and civilian officials of the Islamic Emirate. More than two-thirds of these attacks, it said, were claimed by ISKP.

Conclusion

In its report, UNAMA calls on armed groups to “[c]ease the indiscriminate and disproportionate use of all IEDs, particularly in populated areas, and the targeting of civilians and civilian objects, such as places of worship and educational facilities.” It has also asked the Taleban to conduct “independent, impartial, prompt, thorough, effective, and transparent investigations into IED attacks, making the utmost efforts to identify and prosecute perpetrators of attacks” and, “[i]n consultation with affected communities, particularly Hazaras, increase efforts to strengthen security and protection measures in places of worship, educational facilities and other areas at risk of attack from IEDs.”

The Taleban, in their response to the report made by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, have said Emirate security forces are actively and successfully pursuing ISKP and “the level of civilian casualties has dropped and is dismounting and with the passage of time, we will witness absolute decrease in insecurity.” The ministry also said the “security of places of worship, holy shrines, Madrassas, Shiite places of worship and learning centers … is a priority for the security forces.” Its attention to its duty to protect all Afghans, including Hazaras, was clear from the fact that “on some occasions, even the Mujahedin of the Islamic Emirate [have been] martyred defending the Shiite. For instance, on August 5, 2022, as a result of a huge explosion during Ashura ceremony in Sar-e-Kariz area, near Imam Baqir Mosque, several Mujahedin of the Islamic Emirate lost their lives.”

For the majority of Afghans, a major consequence of the Taleban takeover of Afghanistan to their daily lives, as the Taleban point out in their statement, has been the sudden drop in civilian casualties and an end to the threat of conflict-related violence. However, not everyone has been able to stop fearing attacks. For Afghanistan’s Hazaras/Shias, the risk of violent death from ISKP and others unknown has yet to diminish, as they go to school, to work, to the market or to pray in congregation.[7] Other groups are also at higher risk of attack – Sufis, Salafists and Afghanistan’s Hindus and Sikhs.

UNAMA’s report also points to another type of violence facing Afghan civilians – allegations of the Taleban’s heavy-handed approach to journalists trying to report on incidents.

UNAMA recorded a number of incidents in which journalists were prevented from accessing sites of mass casualty IED incidents for reporting purposes, including through excessive or inappropriate use of force, threats and arbitrary arrests and detention. For example, on 11 February 2022, de facto security forces beat a number of journalists who were attempting to report on an IED explosion which had occurred in the Grand Mosque of Qala-i-Naw, Baghdis province. The de facto security force members reportedly also fired in the air to disperse the journalists and prevent them from filming at the scene of the incident.

The Taleban’s statement responded by saying these accusations of curbs on journalists’ reporting of attacks were actually attempts to protect reporters:

If there were some instances of violence against journalists on the fields, the reason has been to prevent journalist casualties in case of a potential follow up explosion because the enemy always tries to add to the number of casualties by carrying out explosions among journalists and first responders and such prevention might have led to some grievances.

Both UNAMA in its July 2022 report and the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, have alleged other threats to citizens from the state itself, including, in Bennett’s words from his February 2023 report, the Taleban government’s increased flouting of “fundamental freedoms, including the rights of peaceful assembly and association, expression and the rights to life and protection against ill-treatment,” his contention that it was “ruling Afghanistan through fear and repressive policies” and that the authorities’ “systematic violation of the human rights of women and girls” had deepened. (See AAN’s analysis of Bennett’s reports from September 2022 and February 2023; original reports can be found here). Taleban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahed called the September 2022 report “biased and far from reality”, containing wrong information which had been misused. The rights of women and minorities and human rights were protected in Afghanistan, he said. (See reporting by to Bennett’s February report ToloNews in English here and in Dari here.)

UNAMA’s July 2022 human rights also documented a “clear pattern with regards to the targeting of specific groups by the de facto authorities.” These included former members of the ANSF, former government officials, individuals accused of affiliation with the armed opposition groups, ISKP, the National Resistance Front (NRF), journalists and civil society, human rights and women’s rights activists and those the Taleban authorities accuse of ‘moral crimes’. UNAMA also alleged that the Taleban’s general amnesty for former government officials, especially former members of the ANSF, had been violated. Mujahed called the report “inaccurate” and “propaganda.” There were no extrajudicial killings, he said, and if anyone did commit them, they would be punished based on sharia (see media reporting here).

What the various human rights reports point to is that, despite the end, largely, to armed conflict in Afghanistan and the falling away of the threat of conflict-related violence for most of its citizens, this is not yet a country at peace.

Edited by Roxanna Shapour

References

References
↑1 UNAMA says that: “a large proportion of the attacks carried out over the period covered by this report do not have a clear link to a situation which can be qualified as armed conflict.” Nevertheless, it says that for the purposes of this report, ‘civilian’ “refers to anyone who is not, or is no longer, a member of the armed forces of the parties to an armed conflict and was affected by an attack which may or may not have a clear link to a situation which can be qualified as an armed conflict.”

It outlines the legal context on pages 7 and 8 of the report, saying:

Widespread or systematic attacks directed against a civilian population (including religious and/or ethnic minorities) in which civilians are intentionally killed may constitute crimes against humanity. In addition, attacks deliberately targeting civilians and the murder of civilians are serious violations of international humanitarian law that amount to war crimes. International humanitarian law prohibits, and international criminal law criminalizes, attacks directed against places of worship which constitute cultural property.
↑2  UNAMA’s last report on civilian casualties was its mid-year 2021 report (read all reports on the protection of civilians in conflict here). It also reported briefly on civilian casualties in its report, ‘Human Rights in Afghanistan 15 August 2021 – 15 June 2022’ (p10-12), published in July 2022.
↑3 In 2009, the year which previously had had the lowest number of civilian casualties, an average of 497 civilians were killed and injured each month (5,969 in total that year) while in the bloodiest year, 2016, there was an average of 954 casualties a month (11,452, in total that year). In comparison, since 15 August 2021, there has been a monthly average of 175 civilian casualties.
↑4  On average, 864 civilians were killed or injured each month from January to June 2021 (5,183 in total), rising to 1,196 civilians killed or injured in May and June 2021 (2,392 in total).
↑5 On its methodology, UNAMA says:

Civilian casualties are reported as ‘verified’ where, based on the totality of the information reviewed by UNAMA, it has determined that there is ‘clear and convincing’ information that civilians were killed or injured. In order to meet this standard, UNAMA requires at least three different and independent types of sources, i.e., victim, witness, medical practitioner, local authorities, community leader or other sources. Wherever possible, information is obtained from the primary accounts of victims and/or witnesses of incidents and through onsite fact-finding.

UNAMA does not claim that the data presented in this report are complete and acknowledges possible underreporting given the limitations inherent in the current operating environment in Afghanistan.
↑6 Afghanistan’s Shia population includes Sayeds, Qizilbash and Farsiwan, with Hazaras by far the largest group. Among ethnic Hazaras, the overwhelming majority are Shia ‘Twelvers’ (believing in twelve divinely appointed imams after the Prophet Muhammad), but there are also smaller communities of Sunnis, including Ismaili Shias that parted ways with Twelver Shia based on their belief that Ismail the son of the sixth imam should have succeeded him as the seventh imam).
↑7  For more on how Hazara/Shia leaders have tried to position themselves to advocate for more decisive action from the Emirate to protect their communities from ethnic and/or sectarian attack, see Ali Yawar Adili’s February 2023 report for AAN, “The Politics of Survival in the Face of Exclusion: Hazara and Shia actors under the Taleban”.

REVISIONS:

This article was last updated on 27 Jun 2023C

 

Civilian Casualties since the Taleban Takeover: New UNAMA report shows sharp drop – but some communities still under threat
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Where Did We Go Wrong in Afghanistan?

June 27, 2023
By Andrew J. Bacevich

The New York Times

BY ALL MEANS AVAILABLE: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy, by Michael G. Vickers
Michael Vickers, wearing a suit jacket and a golden tie, stands in front of a wall of rifles and speaks to a soldier wearing fatigues and a navy blue beret.

Michael G. Vickers speaks with a member of the Yemeni special forces in Sana.Credit…via Michael G. Vickers

An implicit question haunts this illuminating and richly detailed memoir by Michael G. Vickers, the senior intelligence official at the center of America’s long war for the greater Middle East. It’s a question that has acquired greater immediacy since it was posed in 1998 by Jimmy Carter’s former national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski: “What is more important in the history of the world?” he said. “Some stirred-up Islamists or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”

That comment appeared in an interview with the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur. Asked whether he regretted sending covert U.S. aid to Afghanistan in 1979, all but ensuring the Soviet invasion and the subsequent rise of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, Brzezinski demurred. “Drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap,” he replied, had been “an excellent idea.”

In 1983, a few years into the Russian invasion, a 30-year-old Vickers left an early career as a Green Beret to join the C.I.A. The Cold War of the 1980s was mostly quite cold; covert operations promised action. At the agency, Vickers rose fast. Before the end of the decade, the young operative had become an architect of the Russian defeat in Afghanistan. This was, he writes, the “decisive battle” in the struggle that brought “an end to the Soviet Empire.”

After a stretch of graduate education and a turn at a Washington think tank, Vickers earned a new job, this time at the Pentagon. For eight years, he oversaw operations in various far-flung theaters of the global war on terror. Yet it was Afghanistan, occupied by U.S. forces beginning in 2001, that once more became the focal point of his attention.

In America’s very long confrontation with stirred-up Islamists, Vickers became the nation’s pre-eminent silent warrior. He brought to the science of war the same qualities that Ted Williams brought to the science of hitting a baseball: preternatural aptitude coupled with a relentless determination to master his craft.

The combination can cause myopia. In Vickers’s case, it manifested as a lack of appreciation for war’s political dimensions. His military strategy reduces to a single imperative: the pursuit of “escalation dominance.” When embarking upon war, “go in on the offense and with what it takes to win.” Don’t pussyfoot. Don’t worry about costs. A well-endowed nation like the United States always has another log to throw on the fire.

Vickers writes that Afghanistan in the ’80s was “my great war of liberation.” Other members of the U.S.-led anti-Soviet coalition — Pakistan, China, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Britain — entertained their own disparate notions about the war’s purpose. Few of them were seeking to advance the cause of human freedom. Vickers suggests he was also heeding a more basic impulse: “I wanted to follow the sound of guns.”

His keys to victory were a plentiful supply of advanced arms — especially U.S.-manufactured Stinger antiaircraft missiles — plus “the indomitable fighting spirit, toughness and resilience of the Afghan people” along with the “wildly unrealistic” Soviet expectations of creating in Kabul a “foreign-dominated, centrally directed, secular, cohesive” state.

Vickers’s C.I.A. training included disguise work and not-quite-simulated torture survival tests. But he was not into spycraft. “Charlie Wilson’s War,” the Aaron Sorkin-scripted 2007 film about covert ops in Afghanistan, presents Vickers as a wiry, hyperconfident wunderkind with a deep knowledge of military weaponry.

The portrait is largely accurate. In addition to providing munitions, he orchestrated a comprehensive suite of logistical support for the Afghan resistance fighters known as the mujahedeen. The insurgents got sophisticated “frequency-hopping” tactical radios, and new training camps offered courses in command. By the end of 1987, Vickers writes, the mujahedeen “had become equipped with more technologically advanced weapons than any insurgent force had been in history.” (They also got 20,000 mules shipped in from China for battlefield transport.)

The pain inflicted on Russian forces proved to be more than the sclerotic Soviet regime was willing to endure. In the winter of 1989, the Russian military withdrew. Three years later, the Kremlin-installed government in Kabul collapsed. Washington lost interest in Afghanistan and Vickers retreated into studies of Thucydides and Sun Tzu. The Afghans, meanwhile, claimed the fruits of their victory: anarchy and civil war leading to draconian rule by the Taliban.

The events of 9/11 prompted senior members of the George W. Bush administration to rediscover Afghanistan and to embark upon their own wildly unrealistic state-building project there. In 2007, the Pentagon called up Vickers to be its point man in this ill-fated enterprise. This time, he trained his strategy of “escalation dominance” against the indigenous resistance, now backed by elements of Al Qaeda.

The book loses its swagger as it moves closer to the present, reading less like an action-packed memoir and more like an official history. There is much to account for. Afghanistan was only one front in what Vickers characterizes as the “Battle for the Middle East.” His fight against Qaeda franchises and offshoots unfolded in Libya, Yemen, Syria and the Indian subcontinent, with Marxist insurgents and drug cartels in Colombia and Mexico thrown in for good measure.

Vickers addressed this hydra-headed threat with a buildup of Predator drones, the tool that would become part of Barack Obama’s legacy in the region. Critics have charged that this reliance on drones resulted in many needless civilian deaths. Drone warfare is not “collateral-free,” Vickers writes. But Predator strikes, he insists, “are what has kept America safe.”

Michael Vickers sits at a table with three others, briefing President Obama in the White House Situation Room.
A signed photograph from President Barack Obama. Vickers, center, was a significant proponent of the American drone program.Credit…via Michael G. Vickers
Still, winning meant above all prevailing in Afghanistan, the site of his great victory in the 1980s. Vickers labors mightily to demonstrate that his strategy there, centered on President Obama’s 30,000 troop “surge,” was a viable one. Few readers will find the argument convincing. And, when U.S. forces finally departed in 2021, the Afghan state created at a cost of $2.3 trillion over a period of 20 years fell apart in a matter of days, rendering a definitive judgment on the entire enterprise.

Vickers holds Donald Trump and Joe Biden jointly responsible. By initiating and then committing to U.S. withdrawal, the two presidents had turned a useful “stalemate” into a “self-inflicted defeat.” This “major and completely unnecessary strategic blunder,” according to Vickers, has “greatly emboldened the global jihadist movement.”

In fact, by the time Vickers left government, in 2015, the U.S. effort to achieve escalation dominance in Afghanistan had devolved into an open-ended campaign of attrition. “Though beaten down by the surge,” he admits, the Taliban “never left.” The enemy’s persistence obliged Washington “to accept the fact that Afghanistan would be a much longer war.” How much longer he does not say. America’s wars in Afghanistan consumed Vickers for most of his adult life. In his memoir, he almost seems sad to see them go.

Today, Vickers concedes, “the underlying conditions that gave rise to global jihadist terrorism remain largely intact.” If true, then the methods devised to deal with Brzezinski’s stirred-up Islamists have been inherently defective, with further efforts to achieve escalation dominance — even with whole fleets of missile-laden Predators — unlikely to yield anything like definitive success.

The final minutes of “Charlie Wilson’s War” suggest that terrorism took root in Afghanistan and blossomed on 9/11 because the United States did not invest in nation building after the Soviets left. In his memoir, Vickers instead focuses his regrets on military strategy: if only they had gotten the mujahedeen bigger guns earlier; if only they had kept a closer eye on foreign insurgents, like Osama bin Laden, who were spurred by the fighting.

He does, however, gesture at something more than perpetual war. “Operationally dismantling” terrorist networks “is necessary but not sufficient,” he writes. “You also have to defeat their ideology and prevent their reconstitution.”

Defeat their ideology? On that issue, no one in the U.S. national security apparatus has a clue about where even to begin.

BY ALL MEANS AVAILABLE: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy | By Michael G. Vickers | Illustrated | 599 pp. | Alfred A. Knopf | $35

Andrew J. Bacevich is chairman and co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is at work on a novel.

Where Did We Go Wrong in Afghanistan?
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Taleban Bans on Drugs: What is the Emirate’s counter-narcotics agenda?

June 15, 2023

Jelena Bjelica • Fabrizio Foschini

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Since they captured power in summer 2021, the Taleban have issued two strict bans on drugs. In April 2022, they banned the cultivation and production of opium and the use, trade and transport of all illegal narcotics. A year later, in March 2023, they issued another ban, specifically on the cultivation of cannabis and the production of hashish. Recent satellite imagery from the UK-based organisation Alcis has indicated that there has, indeed, been a dramatic decrease in opium cultivation in 2023. Data on whether the more recent cannabis ban is being observed and enforced is yet to come. In this report, AAN’s Jelena Bjelica and Fabrizio Foschini offer some background on the bans, including the less-covered prohibitions on cannabis and methamphetamine, and wonder if the Taleban will be able to continue to enforce their restrictions on a sector of the economy which is critical to national and many households’ income – without a backlash.
Afghanistan is one of the world’s major producers of illicit drugs: it has been the world’s largest producer of illegal opiates (opium, heroin and morphine) for more than 20 years, a large producer of cannabis resin (chars, or hashish) for decades and, in the last ten years, a significant producer of methamphetamine, which it exports as meth or other drugs that use meth, like ecstasy, to the region and beyond. However, the Taleban government appears determined to strip the country of all these unflattering ‘accomplishments’. Since the group returned to power in August 2021, it has issued two anti-drug decrees and has been steadily enforcing them. However, they have also kept a blind eye to the trade and trafficking of narcotics, according to a recent report by Alcis and the independent researcher and author on illicit drugs in Afghanistan, David Mansfield.
In this report, we first sum up developments on the opium ban, then provide some historical background for the less-debated ban on cannabis, and finally review and summarise what available sources say about methamphetamine production since the Taleban takeover. We conclude with a brief analysis of the impact of these measures on both farmers and the national economy and ask how sustainable the Emirate’s approach to counter-narcotics is in the long run.

The opium ban

The Taleban issued their first anti-drug decree, since they returned to power, banning the cultivation of poppy and production of opium in April 2022. It was right at the beginning of the opium harvest and when Afghans across the country were already suffering under the strain of economic collapse triggered by the Taleban’s military capture of power (for our initial analysis of the ban, see this report). However, the authorities granted farmers a grace period of two months, which meant the 2022 harvest was largely unaffected by the ban. Some eradication was reported to have taken place, as confirmed by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in its crop monitoring report released in November 2022. UNODC estimated that during this two-month grace period, approximately 6,200 tons of opium were harvested from the roughly 233,000 hectares of land planted with opium poppy in autumn 2021. The area of land sown with poppy in 2021/2022, the UNODC said, was “the third largest” since it began monitoring in 1995, with the opium crop witnessing further expansion mainly in the southwestern provinces. [1]

However, the Taleban Ministry of Interior conducted numerous anti-narcotics operations after the grace period, according to news reports (for example, here). These operations have been confirmed by Mansfield, who reported that the campaign to ban opium built up steadily and over a period of time:

In fact, what followed Haibatullah’s proclamation in April 2022 was a steady ramping up of pressure on drugs production, initially targeting the smaller lower yielding spring and summer poppy crops in the south and southwest, before tackling the methamphetamine industry over the summer and fall, and culminating in concerted action against the 2022/23 poppy crop.

This steady effort seems to have paid off. According to high-resolution satellite imagery of land use by Alcis and Mansfield’s analysis, in Helmand province, poppy cultivation “has fallen from more than 120,000 hectares in 2022 to less than 1,000 hectares in 2023.” [2]

That is significant because far more than half of Afghanistan’s annual opium cultivation has traditionally taken place in Helmand (see graphs 1 and 2). A favourable climate in the province allows for the harvest of up to three crops of opium poppy annually: the winter crop is usually planted in October/November and harvested in April/May, while the spring and summer crop seasons are far shorter and give poorer yields – April to July and July to September, respectively. The timing of the spring and summer harvests in Helmand is precisely the reason, according to Mansfield, why the Taleban focused their anti-drugs effort in Helmand and surrounding areas:

The authorities didn’t touch the standing crop – the one planted in the fall of 2021 – that was only a week or two from harvest as that would have provoked widespread unrest so close to the harvest season and after farmers had invested considerable time and resources in their poppy fields.

Rather it was the second and even third crops of the season that was the focus of the Taliban’s eradication efforts over the spring and summer of 2022. Typically, small and poor yielding, these crops were not well established and were a much easier target for the authorities. Much was made of these efforts with videos of crop destruction posted on social media by the Ministry of Interior as well as by individual commanders and farmers.

Graph 1: Data extracted from the UNODC Annual Opium Surveys. Graph by AAN, 2023.
Graph 2: Data for years 2001 to 2022 extracted from the UNODC Annual Opium Surveys; data for 2023 from the Alcis report. Graph by AAN, 2023.

According to Mansfield’s recent analysis, wheat cultivation now dominates the landscape of what had been Afghanistan’s main opium-producing region, the southern and southwestern provinces, which had produced around 80 per cent of Afghanistan’s opium annually for at least the last ten years. He said that in Nangrahar province, another significant opium producer, “by the end of the [2023] season there were only small pockets of poppy cultivation” and that “while cultivation persists – and may have even increased – in parts of the northeast, such as Badakhshan, it is clear the stage is set for the lowest levels of poppy cultivation since the Taliban ban of 2000/01.”

Counterintuitively, in the short run, the ban was not a disaster for all those involved in opium production and trade. Richer farmers and traders have benefited because of a hike in prices. Opium prices had been relatively low until August 2021, when the Taleban came to power, at which point they rose (see our reporting here). That increase in opium prices was an undisputed incentive for farmers to plant opium poppy in the 2021/22 growing season. Then, prices rose further in the wake of the April 2022 announcement of the ban. By November of that year, Mansfield says, “opium prices had risen to almost US$360 per kilogram in the south and southwest, and US$ 475 per kilogram in the east – triple what it had been in November 2021.” Farmers who could afford to wait to sell their opium until after harvest benefitted from the price rises. It gave them a measure of temporary financial security, even as they wondered what damage to their future incomes the looming ban would cause. For poorer farmers, who are given seeds and other support by traders in exchange for the forthcoming harvest, in practice going into debt each year, the higher prices came too late to have brought benefit. Landless labourers, who are typically paid in raw opium, also could not afford to wait for prices to rise. The short-term impact of the ban, therefore, has been very mixed.

The cannabis ban

The Taleban had indicated their intention to take action against all drugs, including cannabis, in April 2022 [3] when the decree banning opium also included a prohibition against the “use, transport, selling, trading, importing and exporting of all types of drugs.” [4] They have also taken demonstrative action against cannabis cultivation, for example by destroying cannabis fields in Farah province in June 2022, as can be seen in this Radio Free Europe video.

The timing of the second decree, numbered 510, which specifically forbids cannabis cultivation and charges the Ministry of Interior and the ‘investigative agencies’ with destroying cannabis and sending violators to court for prosecution, was precise. It was issued on 9 March 2023 (16 Sha’ban 1444 in the Islamic lunar calendar), just before cannabis would typically be sowed.

In Afghanistan, cannabis is a summer crop, with planting done in most of the country between late March and late May, harvesting in October and November, and resin extraction in December and January. The ban came before the crop was or would have been planted. However, according to AAN sources, it seems that in the north, specifically in Balkh, Badakhshan and Takhar provinces, the cultivation of cannabis persists. The hashish from Balkh and Badakhshan, in particular, is very much valued on the local and regional markets, and it seems highly unlikely that farmers in these two provinces would easily let go of such a valuable cash crop. It also appears that the Taleban may be acting more cautiously in these provinces and are aware of people’s dissatisfaction with the policy. In most provinces, cannabis is grown and is sown as part of a patchwork pattern among other crops, such as maize, and rarely constitutes the sole production of a rural household. Even so, the sudden loss of a year’s harvest would still represent a serious blow to the prospects of economic survival for many an Afghan family. [5]

The ban on cannabis also has wider implications than the ban on poppy. It challenges the circulation of a substance engrained in the life of many Afghans, the occasional consumption of which constitutes a favourite pastime for many otherwise ‘respectable’ people. Despite cannabis not being condoned by either religious or social norms, its use within certain limits has been tolerated more easily than other ‘vices’. Its use is fairly widespread, cross-cutting Afghan society in terms of its use by various age groups and in both rural and urban areas, although typically only by men (for more details on hashish consumption in Afghan society, read this AAN report). The relatively relaxed attitude towards hashish smoking as an occasional pleasure does not hold true for any other intoxicating substance, although opium may also be valued for its medicinal role in pain relief (a role that has always risked addiction, especially when used to treat chronic pain).

Like poppy, the Taleban had formally banned hashish production and consumption during the first Emirate (find their subsequent decrees on this here and here), although, unlike poppy, they had not made much effort to prevent its cultivation. However, in March 2020, while the Taleban were still waging their anti-government insurgency, they did issue a decree banning the cultivation of cannabis and the production and trafficking of hashish in areas under their control. They put a great deal of effort into formulating that ban, consulting Islamic scholars and their own various commissions before issuing it, and justifying the prohibition on religious and social grounds, while also being conscious of the financial cost it imposed on farmers (see this AAN report).

The strategy pursued by the Taleban in the growing season that followed the insurgency-era ban was to let farmers harvest the 2020/21 crop and then prevent them from sowing cannabis seeds the following year, but only in selected areas of the country: they enforced the ban in provinces where cannabis was a relatively new crop, such as Ghazni, Logar and Paktika. However, in that first year of the implementation of the ban, they did not stop farmers growing it in its traditional heartlands, such as Kandahar, Balkh and Nangrahar (for details on the 2020 Taleban ban, read this AAN report).

What about meth?

The methamphetamine industry has been expanding rapidly in Afghanistan since 2015 when local meth production moved to using plant-based ephedrine because the process of making it from over-the-counter medicines, such as cough syrups and decongestants, was complicated and more expensive. The raw material is the plant, ephedra, which grows naturally in arid areas above 2,500 metres above sea level, in Afghanistan’s central highlands and surrounding areas. The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction was the first to note this move in a 2020 report:

Ephedrine, known locally as ‘F’, can be extracted using a relatively simple and low-cost method.… According to an ephedrine ‘cook’ in Bakwa, ‘this is easy, everyone can learn it’; another villager in Bakwa described how the number of local ephedrine cooks had risen from one to 30 in a period of three years.

Mansfield reported that the Taleban issued a ban on ephedra in December 2021; AAN has not been able to confirm the ban, but the actions of the Taleban in destroying stocks of the plant and laboratories in multiple provinces have been widely reported. [6] The prime focus of the Taleban was the Abdul Wadud bazaar in Bakwa in the southwestern province of Farah, which was the most important trading market for the ephedra plant. [7] “Once in Abdul Wadood,” Mansfield wrote, “[the plants] would be stored on open ground in the centre of the bazaar, where [they] would be milled and sold to the growing number of makeshift ephedrine labs that had been established in the surrounding area.” He described how those involved in the trade in Bakwa were first told they could not store the crop and later saw labs targeted. The number of labs in the 400 km2 area around Abdul Wadud, he said, went from 174 in February 2000 to 126 in March 2021, 114 in January 2022 and zero by September 2022. Yet, when it comes to methamphetamine, Mansfield said, “disruption rather than elimination is the more likely outcome of these efforts.”

The market disruption was significant and by November 2022 the price of ephedra and ephedrine had risen fourfold compared to twelve months prior, while meth prices had tripled. Prices have largely remained at these levels ever since.

AAN found the same upward pressure on prices when, in June 2022, a few months after the April decree banning all drugs and drug-producing plants, we asked about the price of ephedra and meth. We were told that one man (4.5 kilogrammes) of ephedra had been selling for about 150 afghanis (around USD 1.7), but since the ban, the price had risen almost seven-fold, to around 1,000 afghanis (USD 11.4) per man. As for the refined product, meth, called shisha (glass) in Afghanistan, one kilo was going for 150,000 afghanis (around USD 1,700) in June 2022. A local contact also suggested that, at least as late as June 2022, for each truckload, which is almost 4,500 kg of ephedra, transported to Bakwa market, the Taleban were still taking 300,000 afghanis (around USD 3,400) in taxes and transit fees.

What might be the rationale for the Emirate’s anti-narcotics drive?

The prohibition on the consumption of intoxicating substances is an obvious element of the Emirate’s view of the role of an Islamic state in upholding and enforcing proper Muslim conduct. In his April 2022 decree, Taleban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada says that those disobeying will face sharia ‘procedures’. As we explored in our detailed look at the thinking behind the Taleban’s March 2020 ban on cannabis in areas under their control, it was clear that the movement has been willing and able to justify their decisions on the grounds of religious sanction. When looking at the reasons behind that insurgency-era ban, we found they were multiple and went beyond the religious injunctions. They included the leadership’s desire to control its members: in a number of areas under Taleban control, some Taleban commanders had themselves been cultivating cannabis and trading its produce. Widespread hashish consumption among the population and the involvement of their own members in its very production appear to have raised the alarm among the Taleban leadership about cannabis at that time.

That mix of motivations may also hold true for the current bans. As well as religious injunctions against taxing intoxicating substances, there are domestic worries about consumption: in the past decade, addiction to drugs, especially heroin, has become a major problem in Afghanistan and a serious concern for broader public opinion. The Taleban have already displayed an iron fist against drug users in some hotspots of drug consumption on the streets of Kabul. The desire to demonstrate their ability to crack down on the widespread presence of drugs and their consumption may also have been behind the bans. They could boost support for the Taleban among some sectors of the population who are concerned about drug addiction, although would that balance the potential opposition from farmers, traders and labourers taking such an economic blow from the counter-narcotics prohibitions?

It seems possible, as well, that the Taleban’s decision to announce the ban on opium just months after taking power, as well as their determination to implement it, may be oriented towards international audiences as well. The fight against the production and trafficking of opiates is one of the strategic levels of interaction between Afghanistan and the world and possibly the only one where the Taleban can hope to establish non-controversial relationships and positive cooperation with most international actors. Any major success on this side could bring the Taleban some much-needed plaudits, at least as a reliable partner in the fight against drugs. Shortly after the publication of the ALCIS report, on 7 June, for example,  US special representative Thomas West acknowledged the Taleban’s achievement.

International reactions to the cannabis decree have been fewer, but the move has been commented on positively in the press of Pakistan, itself a producer, as well as a major consumer of Afghan hashish. Pakistani commentators also pointed to the blow this will cause to the funding of militant outfits (likely referring to the Tehrik-e Taleban Pakistan or TTP) and to the need, as they see it, for the United Nations and ‘international community’ to offer economic assistance to the Taleban to help support its counter-narcotics policy.

The Taleban may hope to attract ad hoc forms of economic support and cooperation to support their counter-narcotics policy. They may even hope it will ease their path to recognition. Or, they may just believe the bans are the right thing to do. Cynical observers might also point to those benefiting financially from the opium ban; in particular, anyone who had stocks or could buy up stocks of opium paste would already have made major short-term gains.

Can the bans be sustained?

The Taleban’s achievements in counter-narcotics so far certainly look impressive. Although comprehensive data on cannabis cultivation and production of meth is yet to come in, it is clear that the Emirate has, at least, effectively and severely cut back opium cultivation in the 2022/23 growing season. The reduction is especially dramatic given that, for two decades, the internationally-backed Republic failed to do anything even close to this. Indeed, it is a feat matched only by the Taleban’s first emirate. Then, the collapse of the Taleban regime in November 2001 meant it was never known how long they might have maintained their ban on poppy. This important question could be answered this time round: How sustainable – economically, socially and politically – will the Taleban’s sudden cutting off of opium production be?

The major consequence of the bans will be economic. This time, even richer opium farmers, who have seen the ban temporarily boost their household economies, will join poorer farmers and the landless who usually gain much-needed cash from labouring in the poppy fields, in being hit hard by the loss of this important cash crop if the ban lasts into future years. As prices for opium rise off the back of the ban, the loss of earnings will become even starker. An indication of losses can be seen by what happened after the last ban in 2000 collapsed when the United States intervened the following year. The one-year ban had triggered a massive price hike, and, according to UNODC, farmers, when they could grow poppy again, gained on average 16,000 USD per hectare compared to earlier years (the average annual gross income of farmers in the period 1994-1999 had been close to 1,500 USD per hectare: for more information on how much farmers earn on average see this AAN report ).

As for cannabis, its cultivation in Afghanistan has always been a fast-changing phenomenon, which is difficult for researchers and the authorities alike to monitor. Thanks to the availability of solar-powered generators for irrigation, the plant can be grown on many types of soil, even on terrain unsuitable for other crops. It also does not require sophisticated skills or prohibitive investment. In recent years, cannabis has been spreading to different parts of the country beyond its ‘traditional’ growing areas of Balkh, Takhar and Kandahar. In Logar, Ghazni and Paktika provinces displaced people or sharecroppers from outside the area have put empty stretches of land to use to grow cannabis, hoping for quick economic returns from small investments in irrigation. Like opium, a one-year decrease in production will not affect those who stocked reserves and may even have a ‘beneficial’ effect on market prices. The ban on cannabis is far more difficult to enforce because hemp plants can prosper nearly anywhere, including on very rugged mountain terrain. It is, therefore, unlikely to be as effective as the ban on poppy. Even so, in due time, an economic backlash will be felt by cannabis farmers.

The Taleban have also shown their determination to stop the production of meth, which will also hurt many households’ economies, even though, as Mansfield has tweeted, their targeting of labs in populated areas may just accelerate the existing trend to site labs in more remote mountainous areas, nearer, and therefore more cost-effective, to where ephedra grows. [8]

A complete halt to the drug economy, especially to opium production, trade and export, would be a major blow not only to many individual households but also to the national economy. UNODC has estimated that the potential gross value of the opiate economy in the 2010s, including exports, was equivalent to almost half of Afghanistan’s total licit GDP and helped employ about a quarter of a million people. Such a sudden drop in national income would surely exacerbate the humanitarian crisis affecting Afghanistan since the Taleban capture of power. “An effective ban on drug production in the midst of a failing economy,” warned Mansfield, “is a recipe for disaster.” In a lucid analysis for the United States Institute of Peace, economist William Byrd has also unpicked the harm the bans will have on Afghanistan’s economy, deep enough, he believes, as does Mansfield, to potentially cause a major outflow of refugees.

For government income as well, the bans will have consequences. In the past, the Taleban have taxed opium farmers with ushr (a tithe on the harvest) and traders with ‘customs duties’. [9] Here, however, it is a messy picture, at least on trade. According to Mansfield, drugs exports are ongoing:

Opium grown prior to the imposition of Haibatullah’s ban continues to be sold and seizures by Afghanistan’s neighbours and further afield, suggest a continued supply of both opiates and methamphetamine. In March 2023, the Taliban even removed the formal tax they imposed on the export of opiates since coming to power, easing the transactions costs for the cross border trade.

The Taleban must be aware that the financial losses for Afghanistan would be immeasurable if its international and national drug trade networks were dismantled for good. It appears that, for now, then, the ban has hit farmers, especially poorer ones, but the traders have escaped any consequences. [10]

State policy that hits people’s pockets, especially when it is seen to discriminate, is always risky. If few Afghans are likely to object in principle to the Taleban bans on drugs, the economic consequences of the prohibitions have the potential to alienate those sections of rural society that find a much-needed source of income in the cultivation of poppy or hemp or the collection of ephedra. For opium, that would be the south and southwest, Nangrahar and Badakhshan. Cultivation of cannabis is widespread across almost all provinces of the country, but there are areas where it is particularly developed and relevant in economic terms. Some of these areas, such as the provinces of Panjshir, Takhar and Balkh, are already hotspots of opposition to the Taleban.

At the very least, the bans are likely to mean some loss of goodwill from those directly affected and, therefore, the need for the authorities to either expend political capital for cajoling farmers to obey the ban or deal with the political consequences if they have to enforce it coercively.

Much will depend on whether the ban is maintained into a second and subsequent years, as lost harvests hit the incomes of richer farmers, traders deal with dwindling stockpiles of opium, the government deals with a loss of income and Afghanistan’s national economy suffers. 2024 and future years will be the real test for the Taleban’s anti-drug policy.

Edited by Kate Clark

References

References
↑1 UNODC said: “[I]n the 2022 cropping season… opium cultivation continued to be concentrated in the south-western parts of the country (accounting for 73%), where the largest increases [compared to 2021] took place, followed by the western provinces (accounting for 14%). In some regions opium poppy cultivation occupied a significant proportion of overall agricultural land. For example, in Hilmand province one-fifth of arable land was dedicated to opium poppy, and in some districts the proportion was even higher – taking away fields from vitally important food crops, including wheat.”
↑2 Interestingly, in 2001 during the first Taleban ban, Helmand recorded no poppy cultivation; of an estimated 7,606 hectares (ha) of opium poppy that was cultivated in Afghanistan during the 2001 season, none was in Helmand (indeed, almost all cultivation that year was in Northern Alliance controlled Badakhshan province). Helmand’s poppy fields shrank from 42,853 hectares in 2000 to zero in 2001.
↑3 This was despite having reportedly shown some interest in a proposal by one German entrepreneur who, in December 2021, said he wanted to legally commercialise Afghan hashish for therapeutic purposes (in German here and English here).
↑4 Full text of the opium decree (AAN translation):

In the name of Allah, the most merciful

Decree of His Excellency Amir al-mu’minin, may Allah protect him, concerning the forbidding of poppy cultivation in the country 

Number: (30)

Date: 04/09/1443 lunar hijri [5 April 2022]

All compatriots are hereby informed that from the date of the issuance of this decree, cultivating poppies in Afghanistan is completely forbidden. After this time, no one should cultivate poppies on their land. Anyone who sows it, their crops will be destroyed and they themselves will face Sharia procedures.

Likewise, the use, transport, selling, trading, importing and exporting of all types of drugs such as alcohol, heroin, shisha [methamphetamine], tablet K [a ‘dirty cocktail of methamphetamine, opium and MDMA], hashish and all other types of drugs, as well as drug-producing plants is forbidden. Anyone disobeying this decree will be referred to the legal and justice departments of the Islamic Emirate and will face severe punishment.

Wa al-salam [Regards]

Amir al-mu’minin Sheikh ul-Quran wa al-Hadith [Authority in teaching Quran and Hadith]

Mawlawi Hibatullah Akhundzada
↑5 The rise of the more worrying opium poppy over the last 50 years has overshadowed Afghanistan’s role as a producer and exporter of hashish, which began in the 19th century. In the 1970s, when Afghanistan was a prime supplier of hashish to Europe and even North America, King Zahir Shah was prompted to ban cultivation and launch eradication campaigns in exchange for funding from the United States government. Production of hashish continued even during the decades of the Afghan conflict, with hemp becoming, much like opium, a cash crop of choice for Afghan farmers in times of uncertainty and thus a staple of Afghanistan’s illicit war economy. The post-2001 governments banned the cultivation, trafficking and consumption of hashish with successive counter-narcotics laws (read AAN analysis here). These efforts met little success, however, UNODC said in 2009 that Afghanistan is the “world’s top producers of hashish”.
↑6 Read recent reports about Taleban anti-ephedra operations in Uruzgan here, here and here; Sar-e Pul here; Baghlan here; Daikundi here; and Bamiyan here.
↑7 Laboratories for methamphetamine production in the same area had been the target of deadly US airstrikes in 2019 (read AAN report here).
↑8 Mansfield tweeted about the Taleban destroying meth labs on 12 June 2023:

This is not to say that the meth industry has been eliminated. It has not. Production persists but at markedly higher costs & in more remote mountainous areas, many of them closer to the source of the ephedra crop (which grows at 2500+m)…. This was a process that in part began prior to the Taliban ban- a logical response to the challenges of transporting bulky ephedra to ephedrine labs hundreds of miles away- but escalated after with larger numbers of labs appearing in the central highlands & areas nearby.
↑9 Ushr and zakat collected from farmers go not to the Ministry of Finance but to the Ministry of Agriculture and then the Amir’s office. See AAN’s special report from September 2022 on Taleban revenue collection, “Taxing the Afghan Nation: What the Taleban’s pursuit of domestic revenues means for citizens, the economy and the state.”
↑10 This report has not looked at the consequences of the Taleban ban on opium to global supply. Given the extensive stocks of opium paste, shortages will not be immediate as long as they are still exported. After the 2000 ban, according to Mansfield, it took about 18 months to two years for the price of heroin to be pushed up.

 

Taleban Bans on Drugs: What is the Emirate’s counter-narcotics agenda?
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Former Afghan Pilots Remain Grounded, Hunted by Taliban

June 13, 2023
Lynne O’Donnell
By , a columnist at Foreign Policy and an Australian journalist and author.
Foreign Policy
12 June 2023
Afghanistan’s top guns have no easy path to a new life.

Pilots trained at great expense to the U.S. taxpayer to fly for the Afghan Air Force during the 20-year war against the Taliban, who could have become assets as military and commercial fliers, have been grounded by the very partners who promised to keep them in the air. Many are hiding from Taliban death squads, almost two years after the extremists’ victory, and many of those who escaped the country are living in poverty, nursing fading hopes for freedom in the West, according to American trainers who’ve been trying to help them find safety and work.

The United States spent more than $80 billion training and equipping Afghanistan’s security forces, including thousands of pilots who each cost between $1 million and $6 million to train. They flew attack helicopters, fighter jets, and supply planes, giving Afghan forces their only real edge over the Taliban—until maintenance contractors were withdrawn in a move that sealed the end of the war on Aug. 15, 2021. While the Afghan army and police were derided for being shy of battle, stuffed with “ghost” soldiers and corrupt leaders who sold equipment to the enemy, the air force and special forces earned respect and did the bulk of the fighting after U.S.-led forces pulled back from the front lines in 2014. U.S. President Joe Biden pledged to “our Afghan partners” in July 2021 that the United States would “ensure they have the capacity to maintain their air force.” Five weeks later, the war was over.

A handful of former Afghan Air Force pilots have thrown their lot in with the Taliban, flying the left-behind Black Hawks that have started falling out of the sky for lack of maintenance. The majority of pilots went into hiding or fled arbitrary Taliban justice as reports emerged of torture, killings, and dismemberment. Families often share the retribution. Those who escaped to Pakistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan fear deportation as their visas expire. A few who made it to Britain could be sent to Rwanda under a scheme to rid the country of migrants and asylum-seekers. Stuck in visa jams with no special status, like that for military interpreters granted “special immigrant visas” in the United States, the pilots’ fate seems sealed as obstacles to getting to Allied countries, let alone accepted into their militaries, appear insurmountable.

Many are relying on the efforts of people such as James Papp, a retired U.S. Army Apache helicopter pilot who helped train hundreds of Afghan pilots in the United Arab Emirates between 2018 and 2021. Through his organization, 2430 Group, he’s supporting 34 people (18 pilots, many with families) in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. He sees little hope for their onward movement despite their education, skills, and fluency in English.

When the Afghan Republic collapsed in August 2021, 75 pilots were training in the UAE, and another 80-odd were in Slovakia; all eventually resettled in the United States, Papp said. “But many were left behind. It’s been a long and difficult time. A lot of organizations and people with money who said they could help have disappeared,” he said.

U.S. and European defense sources said some of the pilots had approached the militaries in the United States, Australia, and other NATO member and partner states about joining but initial interest fizzed. The biggest obstacle is citizenship, a fundamental requirement that takes years. George Lefevbre, a former U.S. Army pilot, said the pilots’ training was specific to Afghanistan’s war, fighting insurgents over mountains and deserts. Few countries recognize the military training of others, he said, and the United States has no program to retrain the pilots for civilian flying. Lefebvre trained 200 Afghan Air Force Black Hawk pilots. The Afghan Air Force also flew Russian Mi-17 helicopters, fixed-wing Lockheed C-130 Hercules and Cessna 208 Caravans, Super Tucano ground-attack aircraft made by Brazil’s Embraer, and the smaller MD530 attack helicopters.

“They are scattered now as there is no program to help them go one way or another—they are on their own,” Lefevbre said. “There are NGOs or people like me trying to help, but there is no way to get them into the United States unless they get a sponsor.” They also lack the experience and certification for commercial employment. Even if they had a way to get certified as civilian pilots, they’ve been out of the cockpit so long, “they’d have to start from scratch,” he said.

Former Afghan pilots who spoke to Foreign Policy said they feared for their safety if their identities were revealed. They’re no strangers to Taliban terror tactics. The extremists began targeting pilots long before they won the war, to eliminate the biggest threat to their foot soldiers. Without air cover—including close air support, casualty evacuation, resupply, and redeployments—it’s likely that Afghan forces would have been overrun by the Taliban much earlier than they were.

The former pilots told of their fear as the Taliban began hunting down former military personnel, searching door to door in cities, towns, and villages across the country. One who flew Black Hawks said that in the months after the Taliban victory, he and his wife moved almost daily and hid in basements before making their way to Pakistan. Now living in Islamabad on expired visas, supported by Papp, the former pilot said he feared arrest and deportation by the Pakistani police, who regularly round up Afghans, jail those without valid papers, and send them back over the border to Afghanistan. “The constant fear of retaliation by the Taliban and the isolation of being in hiding for so long have taken an extreme toll on the both of us,” he said. “My wife is pregnant, and the stress of our situation has caused some complications in her pregnancy. We have been seeking a way out of our situation for over a year but have not been successful in our effort thus far.”

Another former Black Hawk pilot living in Islamabad with his wife and 1-year-old daughter described his career trajectory: four years at the military academy, two years at the air force academy, basic training in the UAE, specialist training in Slovakia, and then deployment to Kandahar Airfield in 2020. Until the end of the war, he flew into some of the hottest battlefields in Kandahar, Helmand, Uruzgan, and Zabul provinces, he said. Like many Afghans who have fled the Taliban, the 30-year-old has applied for resettlement in the United States; others are taking their chances seeking refugee status in a third country via the U.N. system.

In the meantime, these Pakistan-based pilots said, they are stuck in a country riven by political and economic turmoil, with no work or income, trying to pay for housing and unable to afford health care. All fear that the day the police knock on the door and they cannot pay bribes to stay out of jail is getting closer. “Of course we all hope that one day we can continue with our flying careers. But right now, because of the situation, it doesn’t matter where we go from Pakistan,” the 30-year-old former pilot said. “We just hope for evacuation from here.”

Former Afghan Pilots Remain Grounded, Hunted by Taliban
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The Taliban’s Successful Opium Ban is Bad for Afghans and the World

June 9, 2023

BY: William Byrd, Ph.D.

United States Institute of Peace

Thursday, June 8, 2023 /

The ban is not a counter-narcotics victory and will have negative economic and humanitarian consequences, potentially leading to a refugee crisis.
The Taliban have done it again: implementing a nearly complete ban against cultivation of opium poppy — Afghanistan’s most important agricultural product — repeating their similarly successful 2000-2001 prohibition on the crop. But the temptation to view the current ban in an overly positive light — as an important global counter-narcotics victory — must be avoided. This is particularly true given the state of Afghanistan’s economy and the country’s humanitarian situation. Indeed, the ban imposes huge economic and humanitarian costs on Afghans and it is likely to further stimulate an outflow of refugees. It may even result in internal challenges for the Taliban itself. And, in the long run, it will not have lasting counter-narcotics benefits within Afghanistan or globally.
Phasing out Afghanistan’s problematic drug economy will be essential over the longer term — not least to contain widespread addiction within the country. But this ban, lacking any development strategy and especially at a time when the economy is so weak that displaced opium poppy farmers and workers have no viable alternative sources of income, is not the right way to start on that path.

The Taliban’s Highly Successful Opium Ban

Satellite imagery analyzed by Alcis and associated research by David Mansfield, an independent researcher who has conducted extensive fieldwork and analysis on Afghanistan’s opium sector and rural economy for more than a quarter-century, show that the Taliban opium ban, announced in April 2022, has been remarkably successful in sharply reducing opium poppy cultivation. In Helmand, by far Afghanistan’s largest opium-producing province, the area of poppy cultivation was cut from over 129,000 hectares (ha) in 2022 to only 740 ha as of April 2023. The reduction in Nangarhar, another long-standing opium producing province, is also impressive — only 865 ha this year compared to over 7,000 ha in 2022.

This is the pattern more broadly in south and southwest Afghanistan. Reductions in other provinces such as Badakhshan will be more limited, but these areas produced much less opium in the first place. Though the full picture is not yet clear, Afghanistan may approach the 90 percent reduction in cultivation achieved during the Taliban’s previous opium ban in 2000-2001. This is an undeniable achievement, particularly given the much larger size of the opium economy this time around (an estimated 233,000 ha in 2022 versus some 82,000 ha in 2000).

How was the ban implemented so successfully? As Mansfield argues, the Taliban took a relatively sophisticated, staged approach that evolved and intensified over time. The announcement of the ban was not accompanied by eradication of 2022’s bumper crop of poppy fields that were about to be harvested, which would have met fierce resistance. This gave rise to uninformed speculation that the ban was not serious. The Taliban did engage in eradication of the much smaller spring and summer crops subsequently planted in 2022, intended to deter others.

There were also major efforts during 2022 to crack down on ephedra, the main ingredient for Afghanistan’s thriving methamphetamine industry. These actions sent strong signals to the rural population in advance of the fall 2022 planting season, which, along with outreach and threats, effectively deterred planting of opium poppy in the south and southwest of the country. As a result, the bulk of the reduction in poppy cultivation reflected people not planting in the first place, and this was complemented by eradication of some remaining poppy fields soon after planting.

Unlike the Taliban’s previous opium ban, the current ban encompasses trade and processing of opiates, not just poppy cultivation. But just as the standing 2022 winter crop was exempted from eradication, it appears that trade in opium produced in 2022 and earlier has been allowed to continue. With the sharp decline in opium poppy cultivation for this year’s harvest, the bulk of ongoing trade must be in the ample supplies of “older” opium (UNODC estimated that Afghan opium production was 6,800 metric tons in 2021 and 6,200 metric tons in 2022). It remains to be seen whether this is a temporary dispensation or will be more permanent. In 2000-2001, trade in opiates was never hindered.

Immediate Economic Damage

The economic shock from the opium ban is enormous: Not including adverse effects on downstream processing, trade, transport and exports, Afghanistan’s farm-level rural economy has lost more than $1 billion per year worth of economic activity as calculated by Mansfield, including as much as hundreds of millions of dollars that had accrued to poorer wage laborers and sharecroppers. These people and their families, already at the margin of subsistence and lacking other job opportunities in Afghanistan’s very weak economy, will be at even greater risk of hunger, malnutrition and associated health problems.

This economic shock comes on top of a significant reduction of humanitarian aid in store for this year — likely at least a $1 billion reduction compared to the $3 billion of humanitarian aid delivered in 2022. Thus Afghanistan’s mostly poor, deprived population will be doubly squeezed.

Moreover, replacing poppy with wheat (as has been happening during the current opium ban) is economically unviable for Afghanistan’s rural sector as a whole and especially for households owning limited or no land. Most Afghans don’t achieve food security by growing their own food. Rather, people make ends meet by growing cash crops or producing other agricultural products (e.g., livestock and dairy), which can be sold to provide resources to purchase food needs, or by working other jobs. Wheat is a low-value crop and a poor substitute for opium, though it does serve as a temporary recourse for people who may expect to return to opium poppy later, in particular for landowners whose fields are ample enough to serve their own family’s food needs. Fruits and other tree crops would be more viable substitutes for opium poppy over the long run but require significant time and investments.

Another, related outcome is that more people will try to leave Afghanistan, going to nearby countries and then onward to Turkey and Europe. As Mansfield documents, the cost of people smuggling is low compared to the potential rewards of being employed in and sending remittances from Europe. Moreover, other alternatives for the poor that were available before August 2021 (like finding work in cities, other rural on-farm and non-farm activities, or the Afghan National Army) are now limited to nonexistent.

Delayed and Longer-term Impacts

Additional damage from the opium ban will materialize with a delay, over the coming months and years.

An important buffer for better-off rural households is the inventories of opium they have built up from the 2022 bumper crop. Landowning households able to hold on to their opium inventories have benefited from capital gains as the price rose, and can sell off some of them to offset the loss of this year’s crop, while growing wheat and other crops to feed their families. (It should be noted that the Taliban as a movement and now as a governing regime do not hold sizable inventories of opium.)

This buffer will erode over time. Suffering will increase among middling farm households as they exhaust what inventories they have of opium and are forced into more harmful coping mechanisms, as poorer households have already done in response to broader economic privation: selling livestock and other remaining assets, eschewing medical care and medicines, eating less and lower-quality food, sending family members out of the country, or even marrying off daughters prematurely.

The impact of the opium ban on drug supplies and prices in other countries, and ultimately in Europe, will not be immediate. After the 2000 Taliban ban, it took about 18 months to two years for the impacts to play out in Europe, as Mansfield notes, in the form of effective price increases through adulteration of the purity of heroin on markets, which exacerbated risks to problem drug users from overdoses. Such impacts probably would become significant this time around if the opium ban is effectively implemented for a second year.

What Happens Next?

The big question now is whether or not the poppy ban will be maintained for a second year.

Historically, there have been examples of successful opium bans in Afghanistan, both nationally (2000-2001) and regionally (Nangarhar province for a number of years, significant reductions in Helmand on two occasions). But maintaining these bans has invariably proved difficult. It is unclear what the Taliban would have done during the late 2001 planting season, after the 2000 ban weakened them politically in key rural areas and arguably contributed at least in part to their surprisingly rapid defeat by international forces after 9/11. There were already signs of increasing resistance against the ban, which suggest that it could not have been fully maintained even if the Taliban had remained in power. And the provincial-level bans during the Islamic Republic period became increasingly hard to sustain over time as privation and resistance against them grew.

So, implementation of the ban for a second year can be expected to face increasing resistance. As more influential middle-sized and larger landowners in the south and southwest deplete their opium inventories they are unlikely to be as accepting as they were in the first year and could even lobby against continuation of the ban. As a core Taliban constituency, their voices will be heard, though to what effect remains to be seen. And in the east and northeast, where landholdings are small and resistance already significant, it may well snowball if the ban is enforced for a second year.

The political blowback within the Taliban from the ban, limited and manageable so far, thus may intensify if the ban continues to be seriously implemented into 2024. In addition to influential landowners, Taliban figures associated with the drug industry may increasingly weigh in or actively try to subvert the ban, at least locally.

However, the serious, sustained effort that went into implementing the opium ban in its first year, and the political and personal capital Emir Haibatullah Akhundzada has invested in this effort, suggest that it will continue and there won’t be an outright reversal. And the economic shock and human suffering will continue and worsen as long is the ban is implemented.

International Response?

There will probably be a counter narcotics-driven, knee-jerk response that the effectively implemented Taliban opium ban is a good thing. However, history amply demonstrates that banning opium in Afghanistan by itself is not sustainable, nor does it address the drug problem in Europe and elsewhere. And it won’t stop rampant drug use within Afghanistan. Supply-side measures will not work if not backed up with sensible development interventions to help make them sustainable. This is especially true given the weak Afghan economy and lack of ample non-drug income earning opportunities. And simply put, these measures will not reduce drug consumption unless accompanied by effective demand reduction measures.

The Taliban opium ban may provide a well-grounded justification for more humanitarian assistance. As with that aid as a whole, however, this would just be a band-aid to provide temporary relief unless and until the opium ban is rescinded or undercut. Moreover, any bump to humanitarian aid that may materialize will at best maintain it closer to the existing level, not result in an increase from last year.

Some forms of basic needs rural development aid could be helpful — agricultural support, small-scale rural infrastructure, income generation, small water projects, investments in agro-processing and marketing, and the like. It would make sense to orient any basic needs assistance that becomes available for Afghanistan in these directions, while recognizing that the modest amounts of money involved will at best have a marginal impact. Custom-made, standalone “alternative livelihoods” projects should be avoided, especially if designed, overseen or implemented by counter-narcotics agencies, which lack development expertise. It is broader rural development that will over time make a difference, as part of a healthy, growing economy that generates licit jobs and livelihoods opportunities.

And finally, the international response must acknowledge not only the overall damage that the opium ban is causing for the Afghan economy, but also the likely upsurge in outmigration that will result. Trying to block people flows at the Afghan border will work only imperfectly, and to the extent it is successful will worsen privation and hunger within the country.

Overall, while understanding the extraordinary success of the Taliban’s opium ban and what it tells us about the Taliban’s strength and effectiveness as a governing regime, the international response must be clear-eyed about the very real costs the ban imposes both on Afghanistan and the world, on top of the other very serious economic and social problems the country faces.

The Taliban’s Successful Opium Ban is Bad for Afghans and the World
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The Growing Threat of the Islamic State in Afghanistan and South Asia

June 9, 2023

BY: Abdul Sayed;  Tore Refslund Hamming

United States Institute of Peace

Wednesday, June 7, 2023

When the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in 2021, counterterrorism experts were alarmed at the possible resurgence of Islamist terrorist groups within the country. This Special Report lays out why those concerns, particularly about the regional Islamic State affiliate known as Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), were well-founded. The report discusses the likely trajectory of ISKP’s activities in South Asia and recommends measures to minimize potential threats to the West and build regional resilience to extremism.

Summary

  • Since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in August 2021, the threat posed by terrorism in the region has grown. The primary threat, however, is neither the Taliban nor their close ally al-Qaeda, but the Islamic State’s regional affiliate the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP).
  • ISKP’s “core” territory remains Afghanistan and Pakistan. Although ISKP first emerged as a Pakistani-dominated network, it soon focused on Afghanistan. It has switched its strategy there from controlling territory to conducting urban warfare. It posed a serious security threat to the former Afghan government and now seeks to disrupt the Taliban’s efforts to govern.
  • The Islamic State’s presence in South Asia is not limited to Afghanistan and Pakistan but extends to include “periphery” territory, including India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, the Maldives, and Sri Lanka. In these periphery states, however, the Islamic State faces a struggle for relevance in the face of competition with rival militant groups and strong counterterrorism pressure.
  • ISKP poses a growing threat to the West and its South Asian partners, and ISKP’s alarming potential calls for the West to take a variety of countermeasures, including even limited counterterrorism cooperation with the Taliban.

About the Report

This report analyzes the origin, status, and future of the Islamic State in South Asia and the threat it may pose to the West. Drawing on primary sources issued by ISKP and associated networks and individuals, the report explores the situation and prospects of the Islamic State not only in its regional “core” territory of Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also in its “periphery” territory, including India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. The work was supported by the Asia Center at the United States Institute of Peace.

About the Author

Abdul Sayed is an independent researcher on jihadism and the politics and security of the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. Tore Refslund Hamming is senior research fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicali-sation at King’s College London and director of the research consultancy Refslund Analytics.

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The Growing Threat of the Islamic State in Afghanistan and South Asia
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The Daily Hustle: Being a widow in Afghanistan

June 5, 2023

Roxanna Shapour

Afghanistan Analysts Network

The word most often used by Afghans to refer to widows is bisarparast (without someone to take care of you). In Afghanistan’s highly patriarchal society, where men are expected to be the breadwinners and opportunities for women to work are relatively few, being a widow is likely to be socially and economically precarious. They are often stigmatised, passed over for jobs and considered burdens on their families. One of the legacies of almost a half-century of war in Afghanistan it the high number of widows – there are no official statistics, but news reports put their number at two million or more. The position of widows without sons is even more insecure, especially since the Taleban takeover has intensified the requirement for women to have a close male relative to act as a chaperone (mahram) and legal guardian. The subject of our latest Daily Hustle is such a widow, an older woman who never had children and who has learned to live on her wits to survive widowhood, economic upheaval and her marginal status in society. 

A daughter’s legacy 

There is a pear tree outside the room in the house that I share with my three brothers and their families. It grew from a cutting taken by my father from a tree in his father’s garden in our ancestral village, brought with him to Kabul when he and my mother moved here in search of work and a better place to raise a family. This is the house I grew up in and this room is my birthright. The room and the pear tree outside its window – a daughter’s inheritance amounts to half of a son’s share – are the only things I own in this world .

I am the only daughter and the youngest in my family. I’m also a childless widow.

I spent my girlhood at home doing chores and caring for my parents, who, by that time, were ailing and needed me to look after them. So, I never expected to get married. But after my mother died, my father came home one day with a man he said had asked for my hand. I was 25 years old – an old maid by Afghan standards – and lucky to have found a husband. He was a distant relative several years older than me, with a grown son from his first marriage. His first wife had died in childbirth and my husband, unable to care for his son, had left him in the care of his grandmother. That son still lived in our remote village in Afghanistan’s central highlands.

Our wedding night was the first I had spent away from my father’s house. We lived in the piyada khana (outbuilding) at the bottom of the garden of the guesthouse of the small NGO where my husband worked as a driver and odd-job man. He was a gentle, caring man with a great sense of humour. He always treated me with respect. He never beat me and never mistreated me. Eventually, the NGO also hired me as a cleaner and we settled into a routine. Later, his son and wife came to Kabul in search of work and lived with us for a time before they moved into their own place and got going on starting their own family. These were happy years and I thought they would last forever.

The precarious life of a widow

My husband died unexpectedly from a heart attack ten years after I married him. I had to move back to my room in my father’s house. Society cannot abide a woman living alone in a house full of strangers without a mahram. By then, my brothers were married and had children of their own. At first, they weren’t happy giving me back my room, but they came around to the idea when they realised I could contribute to household expenses and ease their financial burdens. With the help of my stepson, I fixed my room, put carpeting down and bought new toshaks (floor cushion or narrow mattresses). Several months later, the manager of the NGO gave me an old TV that was no longer being used in the guesthouse. The arrival of the TV raised my status in the household and my room became the gathering place in the evenings. When we had electricity, we used to watch Turkish soap operas over dinner.

Then, the NGO closed its guesthouse and I was suddenly without a job. I had worked there for 15 years and never considered the possibility that I might lose my livelihood. It was the only job I had ever had and I didn’t know how to find another. My old colleagues used their contacts to find me jobs, but they never lasted. First, there was the woman who didn’t like how I cleaned and thought I was too old and, later, a foreign organisation with a big guesthouse in Wazir Akbar Khan [an affluent neighbourhood in Kabul]. That job paid well, but the NGO eventually downsized and moved its staff into one of the big compounds near the airport. I again lost my job.

After my husband died, I’d been forced to start thinking about my future. My late husband was a good man, but not so good at planning for the future or putting away a nest egg for a rainy day. I used to give him all my salary, so I had no savings. I had been left only with the room I’d inherited from my father. I also knew I couldn’t count on my brothers for financial support. Instead, it was my stepson and his wife who were my safety net.[1] He had a good job and he and his wife are warm and generous people, but their family was growing and I couldn’t contemplate having to impose on their goodwill into my old age. So, every month, I started saving some of my salary. I resisted all efforts to get me to open a bank account. Instead, I bought gold, mostly bangles as well as other gold trinkets – savings that I could see and touch and keep on my person at all times.

Facing an uncertain future 

Finally, after two years of working sporadically and living mostly on the generosity of my stepson, I was introduced to a young couple who’d moved back to Afghanistan from America. The wife was pregnant and they needed someone to clean the house and care for the baby when it was born. I worked for this family for five years. I was there when their daughter took her first steps and spoke her first words and later, also, when they came back from America with their second daughter. I had grown to love this joyful young family and knew they cared for me in return.

But this was not to last. Afghanistan was changing. There were peace talks in Doha and rumours that the Taleban were going to come back to power soon. Finally, [President] Ashraf Ghani ran away and the Taleban came into Kabul the same day. The young couple I worked for started making plans to leave the country. When the Taleban took power, their jobs disappeared and they decided to return to America, where their families lived and where they had a support system. So, on a cold December morning, several months after the Taleban came back to Kabul, they left. There were tears and hugs and promises that they’d soon return.

Their departure took an emotional and financial toll on me. Once again, I was facing an uncertain future. Most people were busy making plans to leave Afghanistan and there were no jobs to be had for a middle-aged widow. My former colleagues, who’d helped me find work in the past, were no longer in Afghanistan. They called to check I was OK and some occasionally sent money. Luckily, I’d grown my savings into a long row of gold bracelets and I had some cash – several months’ salary – that the family had given me before they left. When the banks closed after the Taleban takeover, my gold bracelets kept food on the table for my brothers and my stepson’s family. I sold them one by one and got a good price for them too. The price of gold had gone up and I was able to sell them for much more than I’d paid. But with each bracelet sold, I watched my little nest egg dwindle and still I had no job.

Counting my blessings

I am truly blessed to have people who care about me. Once again, friends and former colleagues clamoured to help. Finally, with the help of a former colleague, I got a job cleaning a small organisation’s office. The work is easy, but the pay is low. I don’t think I can ever make enough money to replenish my savings. Still, I’m not complaining. For now, I earn enough to make ends meet and keep my sisters-in-law from complaining that they might have another mouth to feed.

On my way to work every morning, I walk past a group of burqa-clad women, each indistinguishable from the next, huddled together in front of the neighbourhood bakery. They are widows like me. They sit there all day, waiting for a kind passer-by or the baker to give them some bread. They must be from the neighbourhood. I probably know some of them, but any gesture of recognition would be a terrible breach of their abero (dignity). If I have any extra money, I buy a few pieces of bread for them. As I walk away, I say a prayer for them and thank God for his blessings.

Edited by Roxanna Shapour

References

References
↑1 This is unusual and not something expected of a stepson in Afghan culture. Rather, it should be a widow’s birth family, especially her brothers, who look after her, if needed.

 

The Daily Hustle: Being a widow in Afghanistan
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Who Are the Taliban Now?

June 2, 2023

Steve Coll

Hassan Abbas’s book surveys the second Islamic Emirate’s ideology and leading personalities and probes its internal tensions.

The New York Review of Books

June 22, 2023 issue

The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan After the Americans Left

by Hassan Abbas

Yale University Press, 286 pp., $26.00

Nearly two years after the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul, the UN refers to the regime only as “the de facto authorities,” to avoid any hint of formal recognition of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as the Taliban call their government. By any name, the Taliban today control Afghanistan’s territory, as well as federal ministries and local administrations. They also preside over a nation in severe crisis. Food insecurity haunts at least half of the population; a country shattered by more than four decades of war again faces the shadow of famine.

A succession of edicts by Taliban clerics has disrupted the delivery of vital international aid. The Taliban have forbidden girls and women from attending school beyond sixth grade and from working for NGOs, prompting dozens of international aid groups to suspend or reduce operations. In April the Taliban extended their work ban to the four hundred Afghan women employed by the UN, a decision that threatens about $3 billion in annual food, medical, and other humanitarian assistance. (The US and other wealthy donor nations funnel their Afghan aid mainly through UN agencies, to prevent the Taliban from controlling the funds.)

The Biden administration and European governments have many quarrels with the Taliban, but the regime’s policies denying education and work to women lie at the heart of the current emergency over international aid. “This extreme situation of institutionalised gender-based discrimination in Afghanistan is unparalleled anywhere in the world,” Richard Bennett, the UN’s special rapporteur for human rights in Afghanistan, and Dorothy Estrada-Tanck, chair of a UN working group on gender discrimination, reported in May, after an eight-day visit to the country. The Taliban’s practices amounted to an “apparent…crime against humanity,” they concluded.

The Taliban’s position is that their gender policies are an internal matter and that shielding Afghan women from foreign-run workplaces is necessary to prevent sin.

During the Taliban’s earlier stint in power, from the mid-1990s until their overthrow after September 11, the movement banned women from working outside the home for NGOs, the UN, universities, and most government agencies, although it did allow women, under restrictions, to work for private businesses and occasionally in occupations such as midwifery, as it does now. Movement spokesmen say that the bans on female education are temporary while the regime works out acceptable forms of supervision and gender segregation in classrooms. Yet in view of the authorities’ tightening of restrictions, and the Taliban’s history of denying education to women and girls, it is doubtful they will ever adopt policies acceptable to the West.

These days, triumphant after their defeat of America and “half-believing” that they don’t need international aid groups at all, the Taliban see foreign-run organizations as “an even greater threat,” as Kate Clark of the Afghanistan Analysts Network wrote recently. The movement’s policies toward women and girls have left the UN and its aid delivery partners with only terrible choices, she noted: comply with discriminatory rules that may violate international law, ignore or finesse the rules and put local employees at risk of Taliban punishments, or withhold food and medical aid from a population in acute need.

Is there a way to prevent yet more suffering by the Afghan people under Taliban rule? The questions of who the new Taliban are, what makes them different from the regime of the 1990s, and how the world should manage them are subjects of Hassan Abbas’s The Return of the Taliban, which surveys the second Islamic Emirate’s ideology and leading personalities while probing its internal tensions. Abbas, a Tufts-educated scholar and former senior Pakistani police officer who wrote an illuminating earlier book about the Taliban,

invites us to take them seriously, and the questions he explores are difficult and important. They are also largely ignored in the US, where the Biden administration and the Republican Party have turned their backs on America’s painful failure in Afghanistan, or else mined the disaster’s controversies for partisan talking points that have little bearing on the present situation.

The Taliban have established their second emirate on the rubble of the Islamic Republic constructed and defended by the United States and NATO allies after September 11, a project that exacted an enormous cost in lives and resources. After the US-led invasion of 2001, war against the Taliban and terrorist groups sheltered by the movement killed more than six thousand American military service members and contractors, and roughly 165,000 Afghans, including about 50,000 civilians. Military operations and reconstruction cost more than $1 trillion.

Initially vanquished, the Taliban used sanctuary and support in Pakistan to mount a gradual comeback as a guerrilla force, drawing NATO into a grinding stalemate that proved politically unsustainable. The Trump administration negotiated an exit of US forces in exchange for minimal concessions by the Taliban, and when Joe Biden announced a final departure in April 2021, the Islamic Republic collapsed even faster than the most pessimistic analysts had forecasted. In August 2021 President Ashraf Ghani fled by helicopter, and the US evacuated personnel and at-risk Afghans amid infamous scenes at the Kabul airport.

The Taliban of 2023 are not the same as the Taliban of the 1990s. Many of the movement’s cadres under arms today were toddlers or not yet born at the time of the September 11 attacks. They grew up as part of South Asia’s smartphone and social media generation, even as they fought to overthrow the US-forged Kabul republic, whose donors made digital technology available across Afghanistan. During the 1990s the Taliban banned cameras, tape recorders, and other modern gadgets. After September 11 they modified those doctrines and embraced online media as a propaganda vehicle. Taliban leaders today retain large Twitter followings and benefit from a sophisticated social media presence.

The rise of the digital Taliban may be ironic, but it should not be misunderstood as evidence of some new accommodation of global norms. “I will not let the disbelievers implement their rules on us,” Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban’s emir and supreme leader, who is in his mid-seventies, told a gathering of clerics and tribal leaders in July 2022. “Now is the time for us to take complete control. We do not want to live according to others’ expectations nor will we deal with them even if they use an atomic bomb on us.”

That month the chief justice of Afghanistan’s Supreme Court, Abdul Hakim Haqqani, published a book entitled The Islamic Emirate and Its System, a manifesto for Taliban governance with an introduction by Hibatullah. The work “brims with fear and insecurity,” Abbas writes, as well as misogyny and intolerance of minorities. Crucially, the volume affirms the emir’s absolute power and a religious obligation to obey him.

Hibatullah is the third Taliban supreme leader and the one most obviously concerned with Islamic jurisprudence. Mullah Mohammad Omar, the deceased founding emir, was a conservative rural cleric, but he also gained renown among his followers as a guerrilla fighter who lost an eye battling Soviet forces during the 1980s. His successor, Mullah Akhtar Mansour—who was killed in Pakistan in May 2016 by a US drone strike—was a more worldly figure, a hefty former aviation minister who reportedly ran sanctions-busting endeavors, frequented Dubai, and maintained ties with Iran. By comparison, Hibatullah is self-isolating and scholarly. He served as deputy chief justice on the Supreme Court during the 1990s. After the US-led invasion of 2001 he followed other Taliban leaders to safety in Pakistan, where he supervised a madrassa and joined the Taliban’s ruling council. According to Abbas, following Hibatullah’s appointment as emir, he got rid of Mansour’s team. He governs today mainly from Kandahar, the Taliban’s birthplace.

In 2018 Donald Trump appointed Zalmay Khalilzad, a former US ambassador to Afghanistan, to negotiate with the Taliban for a withdrawal of American forces. Khalilzad was one of a number of international diplomats who saw promise in the attitudes of Taliban negotiators who represented the movement at a political office in Qatar. These men (all men, of course) included Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, now a deputy prime minister. According to Khalilzad, Baradar expressed openness to a deal in which the Taliban might share power with non-Taliban Afghan leaders, and it was certainly Baradar who helped to seal the Doha Agreement of February 2020, whereby the US pledged to pull out its military forces from Afghanistan by May 2021 in exchange for Taliban counterterrorism pledges.

Since the Taliban took power, their policymaking has been dominated by Hibatullah’s harsh, idiosyncratic ideas about Islamic law and society, even as Baradar and other figures from the Qatar office have taken positions in the new cabinet. Looking back, we can see—as Afghan and other skeptics of the Taliban’s diplomacy warned at the time—that Hibatullah used his Doha negotiators as American presidents often use State Department diplomats in treaty talks: they were not making decisions but rather cultivating international credibility while talking and maneuvering their way to the best deal possible. As Abbas notes, “At the end of the day, Hibatullah and Baradar made a great team for the Taliban.”

Hibatullah’s leadership has reaffirmed that the Taliban’s cohesion depends on the authority and supremacy of the emir and the advice of his favored religious scholars. The supreme leader’s views on female education are rejected by many international scholars of Islamic law in Muslim-majority countries. Yet in Afghanistan today, only Hibatullah can change the rules, and he does not show any sign of doing so.

Supreme though he may be, Hibatullah is not the Taliban’s only powerful figure. The costs Afghanistan is enduring because of his edicts have given rise to persistent rumors of splits within the government—and even, this year, some notable if fleeting public evidence of internal dissent. In addition to threatening humanitarian aid, Hibatullah’s policies all but guarantee that neither the US nor European governments will formally recognize the emirate, help to fund the Afghan economy, or ease travel sanctions on Taliban leaders.

It is a measure of the worldwide unacceptability of the Islamic Emirate’s gender policies and other forms of extremism that, despite Afghanistan’s mineral wealth and crossroads location, not a single nation has yet formally recognized the government, although about a dozen countries—including Russia, China, and Pakistan—have accepted Taliban diplomats. It is fair to ask, as Abbas does, how long pragmatic Taliban leaders who have economic interests or who seek influence beyond Afghanistan’s borders will put up with Hibatullah’s decisions.

The second most powerful person in Afghanistan today is probably Sirajuddin Haqqani, the minister of interior affairs and the leader of an eponymous network founded by his late father, Jalaluddin. The Haqqanis pledge loyalty to the Taliban’s emir but are seen as more of a coalition partner than a subordinate faction. The family has long had ties to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the major Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI. (Jalaluddin was also a paid ally of the CIA during the 1980s, when he fought against the Soviets.) From their base in eastern Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan, the Haqqanis have commanded thousands of guerrillas, run businesses, and founded Islamic seminaries. During the US war, their network carried out ferocious attacks, suicide bombings, and assassinations that killed thousands of Afghan civilians. The US and the UN have designated Sirajuddin and other family members as terrorists.

Nonetheless, Sirajuddin has lately positioned himself as a practical figure seeking to normalize Afghanistan’s place in the world. Last year he told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, “We would like to have good relations with the United States and the international community based on rules and principles that exist in the rest of the world.” In February, without naming the emir, Sirajuddin hinted publicly at his network’s dissatisfaction with Hibatullah’s leadership. “Monopolizing power and hurting the reputation of the entire system are not to our benefit,” he said in a speech. “The situation cannot be tolerated.”

Not all Taliban leaders want to keep women and girls locked up at home. After the Taliban’s overthrow in 2001, some movement leaders living in exile in Qatar and Pakistan, or underground inside Afghanistan, sent their daughters to secondary school and even university.

Today some Taliban ministers may recognize how Afghanistan changed during the US-led war, which poured tens of billions of dollars into the country and promoted urbanization. A phantasmagoria of images and ideas—including Western ones—enter Afghan homes on social media. Literacy rates for women and men have risen, and a generation of girls grew up with a new set of expectations. The Taliban, without yielding their extremely conservative principles, have already adapted some of their rules to accommodate realities of the digital era. Some cabinet-level leaders seem clearly willing to also update their policies to allow Afghan girls and women—not just those related to powerful Taliban figures—greater scope to study and work.

Another perceived Young Turk in the Taliban cabinet is the defense minister, Mullah Yaqoob Mujahid, who is in his early thirties and is a son of Mullah Omar. He told NPR’s Steve Inskeep last year that it was “obvious” that he wanted better relations with the US. As the rising scion of a well-known family, he belongs to a class of dynastic politicians familiar across South Asia. Photographed on an official visit to Qatar last year, he looked at ease aboard his government jet and during conversations with Qatari leaders. Earlier this year, following Sirajuddin’s speech, Yaqoob too made remarks that were seen as obliquely critical of Hibatullah.

Abbas’s take is that “the battle lines…are drawn” between “the relatively pragmatic Taliban in Kabul and their highly conservative counterparts” in Kandahar. Yet, he observes, the divisions have resulted only in “policy paralysis.” In fact, the movement is not likely to crack up violently over issues like female education, even if such policies cause international isolation. The Taliban have a long record of maintaining military and political unity under severe pressure. And it is not obvious why Sirajuddin or Yaqoob (who do not get on with each other, according to Abbas) would risk their power in a confrontation with the supreme leader over women’s rights, a favored cause of the very infidel powers that the Taliban fought for two decades to expel from Afghanistan.

Some sort of political transition in Kabul that tests the contours of Taliban factionalism seems more likely during the next year or two than an ideological split does. Mullah Hassan Akhund, the prime minister, who is reportedly in his seventies, “is believed to be quite ill,” Abbas reports, and in May Maulvi Abdul Kabir was named as a temporary replacement. Kabir participated in the Doha talks with the United States, but it is unclear whether his appointment portends a change in direction on access to education or work.

We should be very cautious about forecasting changes to the Taliban’s policies toward women or in any other field. Again and again in assessing the Taliban, American and European diplomats have assumed that its leaders will act as conventional politicians might, adjusting their doctrine to obtain funding and diplomatic legitimacy. But the Taliban’s empowered clerical leaders believe they have been called by God to wage an eternal war of ideas against devilish enemies of Islam and must remain vigilant. They do not describe this conflict as a material one or as a struggle to be managed through the give-and-take of international politics. As Hibatullah explained in his speech last year:

Infidels and foreigners were not fighting us for territory or money. They were fighting against our faith and beliefs to stop the practice of Islam and jihad. This fighting is still not over and will continue until the end of times…. We have not done any kind of consultations with them and will never do so in future.

On July 31, 2022, a missile fired by a US drone killed Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaeda, as he stood on the balcony of a home in a comfortable quarter of Kabul. Al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s successor, was a guest of the Haqqani network, according to the White House. The strike showed that the CIA could still assassinate an al-Qaeda leader even without American troops and intelligence officers in Afghanistan, a fact that offered credence to the Biden administration’s argument that the US withdrawal from the country wouldn’t sacrifice its counterterrorism goals. Yet it also offered vivid evidence of the persistent presence of globally ambitious terrorist groups in Afghanistan, and of Taliban collaboration with some of them.

The Taliban’s revived rule over Afghanistan has dramatically reduced violence in the country, yet an array of independent armed groups still operates there. Some, like al-Qaeda, whose presence in Afghanistan was the reason the US invaded in the first place, remain allied with the Taliban, but one formidable group, the Islamic State–Khorasan Province, or ISIS-K, has battled the Taliban repeatedly. ISIS-K is a branch of the group that originated in Iraq; it emerged in Afghanistan around 2015. Since the Taliban’s takeover, ISIS-K has assassinated Taliban leaders, mounted attacks in a dozen provinces, and carried out devastating bombings inside Kabul.

During the US-led evacuation through Kabul’s airport, an ISIS-K suicide bomber killed eleven US Marines, a Fleet Marine Force corpsman, a US Army soldier, and more than 170 Afghans. Defeating the group is the most obvious interest shared by the US and the second Islamic Emirate. David Cohen, the CIA’s deputy director, met with Taliban leaders in Qatar last fall to discuss counterterrorism, and American advocates for greater engagement with the Taliban often place counterterrorism at the top of their agenda. In late April, the White House announced that the Taliban had killed the latest leader of ISIS-K. It is unclear whether the CIA and the Taliban today maintain contact or cooperate in any way against ISIS-K, but they might.

In addition to ISIS-K, former commanders of Ashraf Ghani’s security forces have mounted scattered armed resistance against the Taliban. The most visible group is the National Resistance Front (NRF), led by Ahmad Massoud, the British-educated son of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the legendary anti-Soviet resistance fighter assassinated by al-Qaeda shortly before September 11. The NRF has fought the Taliban in and around Massoud’s former stronghold in Panjshir Valley, but it does not currently threaten the Kabul regime militarily. It is one of several groups operating mainly from exile that have embarked on political programs to establish a broad-based anti-Taliban opposition.

Shamed by defeat and focused on Ukraine and other priorities, US and European governments have taken little interest in the political potential of the evacuated Afghan diaspora—a fractured, struggling, and traumatized population whose leaders include figures from the Islamic Republic now discredited among their own people. In addition to the exiles, a sizable but largely unmapped population of Afghans inside the country either oppose the Taliban (judging by occasional daring public protests) or merely wish to have a say in their country’s governance and direction. The more the second Islamic Emirate acts as a dictatorship and excludes huge numbers of its people from opportunity and influence, the more important these non-Taliban Afghans are likely to become—whether or not international governments help them.

In The Return of the Taliban, Abbas provides a well-informed survey of the second Islamic Emirate through 2022. The book’s tone is oddly conversational, however, and the text is laced with exclamation points—more a professor’s riffing lecture than a narrative or well-organized argument. Abbas’s main conclusion is that the Taliban of today are adapting to governance and have “proven to be relatively pragmatic.” This is a hard judgment to accept, unless the standard of comparison is merely the pre-digital dystopia of the first Islamic Emirate. Since 2021, despite being urged by such Islamic allies as Pakistan and Qatar to form a government that includes non-Taliban figures and a fair representation of Afghanistan’s ethnic diversity, Taliban leaders—who are almost all Pashtun, members of the country’s largest ethnic group—have failed to do either.

Abbas argues forcefully for engagement with the Taliban regime, nonetheless, noting that this “does not in any sense equate with endorsement.” He writes, “Engaging with the Taliban will, at the very worst, result in the inflation of their egos—and at best will restore life to a nation and people who have long deserved peace and prosperity.”

In some respects, this argument is uncontroversial and is already accepted in Washington and European capitals. The US, Europe, and neighboring countries such as Pakistan and Iran have an interest in preventing a humanitarian catastrophe in Afghanistan that might produce a total collapse of the state and yet more destabilizing emigration by desperate Afghans. Biden administration special representative Thomas West and EU and UN envoys have regularly engaged with the Taliban on humanitarian aid and technical efforts to improve the country’s banking system and private market.

Since Hibatullah has reaffirmed the Taliban’s ban on university and secondary education for women and girls, and tightened work rules, the Biden administration has pulled back some, but it remains committed to providing humanitarian relief through UN agencies—assuming that the UN can find a way to work under the Taliban’s gender restrictions.

The questions get thornier if diplomatic engagement ranges beyond emergency aid into areas such as counterterrorism, economic reconstruction, and counternarcotics. (Afghanistan has been the source of about four fifths of the world’s opium, but the Taliban announced a ban on poppy cultivation last year, though it isn’t clear how effective the ban will be.) Opponents of further engagement argue that to talk and bargain with the Taliban on matters beyond humanitarian aid is to implicitly legitimize their gender and human rights policies, and their tolerance of terrorists.

In any event, the language of professional diplomacy typical in this sort of sustained negotiation—the search for “leverage” to fashion a “quid pro quo”—seems misplaced. All of the Taliban’s leaders, whether perceived as extreme hard-liners or not, are under the impression that they won a great and historic military victory over the world’s superpower, a victory ordained by God, and they are not likely to be moved by US leverage or enticed by promises of financial investment, if this would require them to compromise the values that underpinned their triumph.

One problem with Abbas’s argument about engagement is that it is too narrow. Afghanistan is not only the Taliban. The Afghan diaspora includes politically active women flown out of the country by the US and European governments for their protection. They and many thousands of younger people seek a voice in their country’s future, judging by their social media postings. For the US and Europe, engagement with this other Afghanistan—supporting the diaspora’s new and unexpected lives as refugees and empowering them to argue about Afghanistan’s direction—is surely as important as engagement with Hibatullah’s regime. The Biden administration—led by Thomas West and Rina Amiri, the US special envoy for Afghan women, girls, and human rights—has done this by continuing to fund Afghan civil society groups since the withdrawal, even if they must work from exile. Yet the US and its major allies have developed no meaningful political strategy to challenge the Taliban’s monopoly on power in Kabul or nurture credible alternatives to them.

The Biden administration allowed the Afghan embassy in Washington to close in March 2022, depriving both the Taliban and their opponents of access to the building—a telling sign of the administration’s caution. Infuriatingly, it has botched the one part of Afghan policy it has the greatest power to control—clearing the enormous backlog of visa applications by the tens of thousands of eligible Afghans who served the US after 2001 but were left behind in the 2021 evacuation. These people remain at risk of Taliban persecution. The administration insists that it is speeding up visa paperwork, but its record to date is indefensible.

How, exactly, to support Afghan exiles who seek to end or change Taliban rule is a fraught subject. The Soviet invasion of 1979 ignited more than four decades of civil war exacerbated by outsiders—not least the US—who have fostered violence in the name of Afghanistan’s “liberation.” Neither the Biden administration nor any other government currently advocates arming the Taliban’s opposition. But there are unsettled debates over how severely to sanction Taliban leaders and whether to more actively support a political opposition—for instance, by setting up a political office in Qatar similar to the one the Taliban enjoyed. If Hibatullah’s policies on women’s education and work do not change, international human rights advocates and exiled Afghan women, buoyed by global public opinion, will surely challenge the status quo in American and European political strategy—as they already have since 2021, by pushing the Biden administration to empower Amiri’s role at the State Department and by helping to place gender rights consistently at the top of the UN and EU agendas. The Taliban are a fact of life in global politics, but so are international law and the worldwide movement to improve the status of women and girls.

There is something repetitive, performative, and self-deluding in America’s search for leverage over the second Islamic Emirate. Yet abandoning Afghanistan to its fate is not a moral or self-interested choice for either the US or Europe. A further collapse of the government might cause another wave of mass migration toward Europe, which would strengthen the continent’s nativist and far-right political parties. Ignoring groups like ISIS-K and al-Qaeda would risk repeating the policy errors of the 1990s, which helped set the stage for September 11. For the foreseeable future, Taliban-ruled Afghanistan will present a nightmarish diplomatic challenge: to deliver emergency aid under acceptable conditions while pressing for an end to the Taliban’s practices of gender discrimination. In early May UN Secretary-General António Guterres met with international envoys to Qatar to “reinvigorate the international engagement” and find a “durable way forward,” as a UN spokesman put it. Guterres did not invite the Taliban, saying that it was not the right time to include them. If the experience of the 1990s is any guide, UN aid agencies will manage the Taliban’s restrictions on women’s work by muddling through. Meantime, the Afghan population finds itself in the familiar position of being victimized by a conflict in which every party claims to be fighting on the people’s behalf.

Steve Coll is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Directorate S: The CIA and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. (June 2023)

Who Are the Taliban Now?
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The West has a golden opportunity to engage the Taliban

May 31, 2023

Sultan Barakat
Al Jazeera
Published On 30 May 2023
The appointment of a new prime minister in Kabul signals the Taliban’s openness to dialogue. Western leaders should not miss this chance.

On May 18, the interim Taliban administration in Afghanistan announced that it has replaced caretaker Prime Minister Mullah Mohammad Hasan Akhund with his deputy, Maulvi Abdul Kabir. Akhund had been ill for a while and was unable to carry out his duties.

The appointment of Kabir, who hails from the Pashtun Zadran tribe and who played a key role in negotiating the 2020 Doha agreement with the US, is said to be a routine process, but the timing of it is significant and must be read very carefully, particularly by the West.

The announcement came following growing international dismay at the Taliban’s edicts limiting girls’ education and preventing women from working. This change in leadership can be seen as a positive development and an indication of willingness on the part of the Taliban to open up.

Pride may stay in the way of a drastic reversal of policy, but a desire to alter course can be read in the Taliban making small but important steps towards incremental change.

For example, the recent decision by the authorities in Herat to allow several middle and high schools for girls to reopen is one such step. Kabir may well make another soon by lifting the ban on women working in the humanitarian field, considering that there already are exemptions in the health sector and for certain key NGOs.

In the past, when the Taliban showed a willingness to engage with the international community, foreign leaders failed to seize the opportunity. They should not make the same mistake again.

In considering a response to this strategic move by the Taliban, the international community would be well advised to consider a few points.

First, from a Taliban perspective, the appointment of Akhund as an acting prime minister in 2021 was inevitable. It was meant to symbolise continuity with the previous Taliban regime of 1996-2001, in which he occupied different ministerial positions.

Also, as one of the most conservative among the Taliban leaders, Akhund no doubt played a role in reassuring its rank and file, particularly those coming from rural areas, that the movement would not abandon its values now that the war was over.

Feeling more confident on the domestic front and in their ability to govern without serious opposition, the Taliban appears ready for a greater degree of openness and dialogue with the outside world. Kabir’s appointment is a reflection of this openness.

Second, the Taliban must have learned a thing or two as a result of its isolation over the past two years. Most importantly, its leaders have certainly observed that in our interconnected world, the concept of absolute sovereignty is hard to apply, particularly in a country on the verge of a major humanitarian crisis.

Adopting rigid attitudes in the name of protecting sovereignty antagonises the international community, including those countries that are willing to help Afghanistan. A case in point is the Taliban’s position on the management of Kabul Airport.

The Taliban government, led by Akhund, was determined to have complete control over the airport’s commercial affairs and security, and hence, ended up accepting an offer from the UAE, which agreed to its demands. A year later, regional and international airlines, including those owned by the UAE, have not resumed flights to Kabul, and the airport continues to be in bad shape, as the Taliban authorities have failed to manage it properly.

Third, the appointment of Kabir reflects a significant shift from the traditional rigid Taliban decision-making to a more contemporary “Taliban 2.0” that is more open to dialogue.

It also shows the importance that the Doha Agreement holds for the Taliban as a point of reference for future talks with the international community on issues of security and inclusivity. Although on the face of it, the Taliban has refused any form of dialogue with other Afghans, the group has not ceased to engage.

One initiative that has sought to promote dialogue with the Taliban is the Afghanistan Future Thought Forum (AFTF), chaired by Ms Fatima Gailani, an Afghan politician and former negotiator. It has convened six times, bringing together leading Afghan figures from various ethnoreligious communities, professions and political persuasions. Away from the media spotlight, the forum has been quietly changing attitudes among Taliban and opposition participants.

Thus, the international community should not waste this opportunity, debating whether a change in the premiership is a sufficient indicator that the Taliban is willing to shift its domestic and foreign policy. It is, indeed, a clear signal that there is space for engagement.

The West should reach out to the Taliban and demonstrate readiness to negotiate the lifting of sanctions and the gradual reintroduction of development aid. Such engagement is crucial to prevent one of the worst humanitarian crises of the past decades and a new conflict destabilising the region.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

  • Sultan Barakat is a Professor in Conflict and Humanitarian Studies at Qatar Foundation’s Hamad Bin Khalifa University and an Honorary Professor of the University of York. He is a world-renowned scholar known for pioneering the study of war-torn societies and their recovery. Professor Barakat founded the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies and directed it between 2016 and 2022. Previously he served as Director of Research at the Brookings Institution’s center in Doha (between 2014 and 2016). At the University of York, he founded and led the Post-war Reconstruction and Development Unit between 1993 and 2019
The West has a golden opportunity to engage the Taliban
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What caused deadly Afghan-Iran border clashes? What happens next?

May 30, 2023

Al Jazeera

Published On 30 May 2023

The two countries call to de-escalate the situation after deadly clashes erupt apparently over river water-sharing dispute.

Last week, deadly clashes broke out between Afghan and Iranian guards at their border raising fears of a new conflict.

Both sides have accused each other of initiating the shooting in which at least two Iranian and one Afghan guard were killed. However, they have issued measured statements aimed at de-escalating the situation.

Following the border violence, Iranian authorities closed the Milak-Zaranj border post, an important commercial crossing – and not the site of the clash – until further notice, Iran’s IRNA news agency reported.

Despite a treaty in place since 1973 on the sharing of Helmand River waters, the two sides have wrangled for decades. The river flows from Afghanistan towards eastern Iran.

What caused the fighting?

The reasons for the clashes are still unknown but the shooting at the border post between the Afghan province of Nimroz and Iran’s Sistan-Baluchistan province comes as Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi earlier this month accused Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers of restricting the flow of water to Iran’s eastern regions in violation of the 1973 treaty.

“We will not allow the rights of our people to be violated,” Raisi said on May 18.

The Taliban, which has denied the accusation, called on to “solve the problem” in accordance with the treaty. The Taliban, which remains diplomatically isolated since it came to power in August 2021, said it wanted “good relations” with Tehran.

According to Sina Toossi, a senior non-resident fellow at the US-based think tank Center for International Policy (CIP), there is a “lack of clear demarcation and understanding of border boundaries and rules” on both sides.

Interactive_Afghanistan-Iran borderclashes
(Al Jazeera)

Iranian officials have repeatedly blamed the Taliban for its disregard for international laws and border protocols since its takeover of Afghanistan two years ago. Clashes have erupted on multiple occasions, but have rarely led to casualties and have been routinely blamed on “misunderstanding”.

A day before the border clashes, Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian called on the Taliban to “follow legal framework” to resolve the water dispute.

“In recent years, this treaty has not been adhered to by Afghanistan’s rulers, including the Taliban,” CIP’s Toossi told Al Jazeera, adding that Kabul has delivered only “a fraction of the agreed amount”.

“It has been exacerbated by Iran’s worsening drought conditions, making the water issue increasingly critical,” he said.

The Taliban issued a statement saying it did not want to “fight with its neighbours”.

What is the Afghan-Iran water dispute?

The Helmand River, which is more than 1,000km (621-mile) long and flows across the border, is being dammed on the Afghan side to generate electricity and irrigate agricultural land.

Drought has been a problem in Iran for some 30 years, which has worsened over the past decade, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The Iran Meteorological Organization says that an estimated 97 percent of the country now faces some level of drought.

According to the Helmand Water Treaty signed by Afghanistan and Iran half a century ago, Afghanistan should annually share 850 million cubic metres of water from Helmand with Iran.

It also calls on both sides to address their differences via diplomatic channels and, if that fails, through an advisory board headed by a mutually chosen arbitrator.

Iran has accused Afghanistan of failing to adhere to the treaty on several occasions and has opposed its decision to construct dams on the river.

How have both countries reacted to the clashes?

The Taliban leadership has called for the resolution of such issues “through diplomatic channels”.

“We don’t want relations with our neighbouring countries to deteriorate. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is never in favour of escalation,” Hafiz Zia Ahmad, deputy spokesman of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told Saudi Arabian newspaper Arab News on Monday.

Analyst Toossi believes the border clashes have prompted both sides to de-escalate the situation and “reaffirm their commitment to dialogue and cooperation”.

He said there is an indication that Iran is open to dialogue, given that the Taliban’s acting foreign minister met an Iranian envoy to discuss the Helmand River water rights on the day of the clash.

Iran Afghanistan Map
Hirmand county along the Iran-Afghanistan border [Al Jazeera]

Where does the Afghan-Iran relationship stand?

As Kabul and Tehran are “trying to balance their interests and concerns”, according to Toossi, their relationship remains in a state of “uncertainty”.

“It is not clear whether the Taliban have pulled back their fighters from the border or whether they will abide by the agreement in the future,” he said after videos showed large numbers of Taliban fighters approaching the border with Iran last week.

Additionally, while Iran has held a dialogue with the Taliban, it has not officially recognised them as the legitimate rulers of Afghanistan.

The Shia-majority country has called for the formation of an inclusive government that represents all ethnic and religious groups in Afghanistan.

“Iran has expressed concerns about the security and welfare of the Afghan people, especially the Shia Hazara minority, who have faced persecution and violence from the Taliban in the past,” said Toossi.

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA
What caused deadly Afghan-Iran border clashes? What happens next?
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