Wrestling with a Humanitarian Dilemma in Afghanistan

January 31, 2023

William Byrd, Ph.D.

United States Institute of Peace

Wednesday, January 25, 2023

Recent decrees by the Taliban barring Afghan women from attending university or working in NGOs are severely damaging the country both socially and economically, especially coming atop a ban on girls’ secondary education last year. The marginalization of half the population also highlights the “humanitarian dilemma” that aid donors and international agencies face: Afghanistan is highly dependent on humanitarian assistance, not only for saving lives and easing deprivation but also to stabilize its economy. The quandary for international donors is what to do when alleviating suffering benefits the Afghan economy and thereby the Taliban regime, even when that regime is harming its own people?

Humanitarian aid — around $3 billion a year now compared to total civilian and security assistance of $8 billion-plus annually before 2021 — has taken over pre-2021 aid’s role in shoring up Afghanistan’s weak economy in addition, of course, to saving many lives. While a considerable portion of humanitarian assistance is provided in-kind (mainly basic foodstuffs), much of the aid reaches Afghanistan in monetary form for local cash transfers, contractual payments for goods and services, salaries and other expenses.

United Nations humanitarian cash shipments of U.S. dollars into Afghanistan average about $40 million a week — a total of $1.8 billion since they began in December 2021. These inflows, similar to or slightly more than the Afghan central bank’s pre-2021 imports of cash dollars, have replaced the latter in stabilizing the country’s economy.

Unlike before the Taliban takeover, this money no longer goes directly to the central bank (Da Afghanistan Bank, or DAB), now under Taliban control. Instead, deposits are made in a private commercial bank. U.N. agencies and implementing partners then withdraw the money in U.S. currency or after the bank has converted funds into afghanis to pay local costs.

The U.N. cash shipments provide critically needed liquidity in the economy. They are used to pay for imports directly or to purchase domestic goods and services (including salary payments). Either way, they support Afghanistan’s balance of payments, which is characterized by a gap between imports and exports of roughly $4 billion per year, by providing much-needed foreign-sourced funding.

The U.N. cash imports are a major reason why the exchange rate for the afghani has been reasonably stable and the falling inflation rate mainly reflects international price inflation rather than the domestically driven hyperinflation of the 1990s.

No One Should Want a Repeat of Afghanistan’s Economic Free-Fall in 2021

So, Afghanistan’s extraordinarily high aid dependency has continued, now on the shoulders of humanitarian support. Moreover, given the much more precarious situation faced by most Afghans — living near, at, or below the subsistence level — people’s dependence on external aid arguably is just as great as or even greater than pre-2021.

But by supporting a low-level economic equilibrium — albeit precarious and subject to downside risks —  current humanitarian assistance creates similar issues regarding dependence and sustainability that arose with past aid. Recent Afghan history provides a striking demonstration of the problems that can occur. The August 2021 Taliban takeover and the resulting immediate cut-off of international aid plunged the country into a period of economic free-fall and precipitated the largest humanitarian crisis and U.N. humanitarian appeal in the world until the Ukraine war. No one should want a repeat of this disaster.

Humanitarian aid is not supposed to be conditioned on a government’s policies. That would be contrary to internationally accepted humanitarian principles, namely:

  • Humanity — human suffering must be addressed wherever found, with particular attention to the most vulnerable
  • Neutrality — humanitarian aid must not favor any side in an armed conflict or other dispute
  • Impartiality — assistance must be provided solely on the basis of need, without discrimination
  • Independence — provision of aid must remain autonomous from political, economic, military or any other objectives

However, the sheer size and economic importance of humanitarian aid for Afghanistan means it has important macroeconomic impacts. Moreover, by helping stabilize the macro-economy and shoring up incomes, it inevitably benefits the Taliban regime at least indirectly. The government generally benefits from a more stable economy where people are not starving, but this aid also means the Taliban can freely use their sizable resources from taxation — perhaps around $2 billion a year — for other purposes. As is true of all aid, resources are fungible in the bigger picture.

This issue is common to large humanitarian interventions in any conflict-affected country. But when the Taliban administration takes deliberate actions that harm large segments of the country’s population, we have arrived at the crux of a humanitarian dilemma.

Taliban Actions Against Women and Girls Complicate the Delivery of Humanitarian Aid

Recent Taliban actions have jeopardized the delivery of aid to Afghanistan — both in general and specifically aid for Afghan women and girls.

Comprising 30-40 percent of NGO employees, women include nutrition experts, team leaders, community health workers, vaccinators, nurses, doctors and heads of organizations. Moreover, aid that goes directly to women and girls — such as health and nutrition services, food and other aid to female-headed households or those whose males are away from home — must be delivered by Afghan women. It would be socially unacceptable in most of the country for men to bring humanitarian relief and services to Afghan women and girls. And asking female NGO employees to work at aid delivery points but never report to the office on work-related matters, which the Taliban might see as an acceptable compromise, would be unrealistic and unviable.

Over the medium term, the education bans will reduce the numbers of trained and professional women able to provide health and other humanitarian-related services, further constraining humanitarian aid.

Finally, Taliban actions against females in education and NGOs most likely mean that little if any development aid will be forthcoming in the near-term future. Hence humanitarian assistance will continue to comprise the lion’s share of international public financial flows into Afghanistan. The macroeconomic and financial implications of this aid need to be kept front-and-center and guide decision-making, in addition to responding to humanitarian needs.

Conditionality for Humanitarian Assistance?

Making humanitarian aid contingent on the Taliban reversing the recent restrictions they placed on women and girls may go against the humanitarian principle of nonconditionality. Moreover, if experience is any guide, imposing explicit conditions on aid is unlikely to work. It would provide the Taliban with a further excuse to misleadingly blame economic problems and human suffering on the international community’s actions.

Nevertheless, according to the British government, nearly half of NGOs in Afghanistan have paused their assistance following the Taliban ban on Afghan women working for NGOs. Inability to effectively deliver essential humanitarian aid without women is the prominent reason for these suspensions. Humanitarian principles require aid to be delivered in a non-discriminatory manner, and if that becomes impossible due to Taliban restrictions, questions arise over whether and to what extent the aid should continue. On the other hand, U.N. imports of cash dollars have resumed at high levels following a month’s gap during the winter holiday period, with no sign that they will decline in the immediate future. International aid donors are still developing their responses to the Taliban bans.

Even in the absence of explicit conditionality, the Taliban’s recent actions will dampen donors’ enthusiasm for continuing to fund humanitarian aid at current levels. Moreover, the distinction between humanitarian and basic development activities is somewhat fuzzy, so there could be a narrowing of the scope of humanitarian assistance to focus on the most life-saving activities (such as food aid and emergency health services). This would leave other important programs that are currently being carried out under the humanitarian umbrella vulnerable to cuts.

Donors’ aid fatigue over Taliban actions will further worsen the already deteriorating outlook for aid to Afghanistan in the face of competition from the massive humanitarian needs generated by the Ukraine war as well as other humanitarian crises. These trends also mean that the amount of cash dollars imported by the U.N. will at some point start to decline.

There needs to be clear and explicit international messaging about the effects of the Taliban’s bans on humanitarian aid, so the implications are abundantly clear both to them and to the Afghan people.

Proactive Strategizing and Planning Are Needed — Not Reactive, Disorganized Responses

Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis is not like, say, a discrete natural disaster, affecting hundreds of thousands or perhaps 1-2 million people for a limited time. Most of Afghanistan’s more than 40 million people are facing severe hunger and deep poverty. This is an economic crisis for the entire country, one likely to extend for at least several years. The situation cries out for incorporating a macroeconomic, stabilization and sustainability perspective on humanitarian aid — not just reacting short-term to Taliban actions.

When humanitarian aid is as large and prolonged as in Afghanistan, effectiveness issues and cost-efficiency come to the fore. This will be particularly true when resource constraints tighten and funding declines, as almost surely will happen for Afghanistan in coming years.

For example, there is widespread recognition that cash assistance is more cost-effective than in-kind aid in meeting most humanitarian needs, and no more risky. Aid organizations globally are beginning to shift the composition of their assistance from in-kind to cash. So, one way to improve the cost-effectiveness of humanitarian aid in Afghanistan is to provide more of it in cash rather than in-kind.

Reducing Dependence on U.N. Cash Shipments

In the likely scenario that humanitarian aid declines over time, a smooth transition away from U.N. cash shipments must be planned to avoid a repeat of the August 2021 shock when aid abruptly stopped.

U.N. cash shipments need to be put on a planned trajectory and not allowed to haphazardly reflect aid agencies’ fluctuating needs for funds in-country and the availability of money from donors. It would make sense to pre-program a gradual, predictable decline in the U.N. cash shipments over time, to give the Afghan economy and people time to adjust, rather than injecting volatility through ups and downs, let alone precipitating another major economic shock if there is an abrupt drop.

Use of new technologies involving mobile phones and digital money transfers is increasing around the world, driven in part by the pandemic. A highly effective aid delivery mechanism which is already being piloted in Afghanistan, mobile phone-based digital cash transfers could progressively replace part of U.N. cash shipments, supporting Afghan women’s and their households’ humanitarian needs directly, as demonstrated by a successful recent pilot program.

The proposed Humanitarian Exchange Facility (HEF), preferably with streamlining and simplification of design to ensure that it is cost-effective and curbs excessive overhead, could be revived and partly substitute for U.N. cash shipments. Aid donors can incentivize the shift away from U.N. cash shipments in favor of mechanisms such as the HEF by requiring increased use of such channels.

Such options would require more cohesive, coordinated planning and deployment of humanitarian aid among U.N. agencies and on the part of donors. This is not how humanitarian business is normally conducted, but the nationwide crisis, the sheer amount of aid and the risks of future disaster in Afghanistan require such a holistic approach.

Wrestling with a Humanitarian Dilemma in Afghanistan
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To Help Afghanistan, Engage Its Political Opposition

January 31, 2023

By , the chief executive officer of the Center for a New American Security, and , the director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.

Foreign Policy magazine
January 31, 2023, 9:33 AM
The Taliban’s rule isn’t inevitable or forever.

Eighteen months after the fall of Kabul, the situation in Afghanistan is moving from bad to worse. In addition to banning girls from secondary schools, the Taliban recently closed universities to women. Taliban officials also stopped women from working with nongovernmental organizations that distribute humanitarian aid in December, prompting international charities to suspend their work. The United Nations now reports that 6 million Afghans stand on the brink of starvation.

The United States has rightly continued to provide help to Afghanistan despite the Taliban conquest and stands today as the single largest donor of humanitarian assistance in the world. While such aid remains critical, Washington should not simply accept the Taliban’s coercive rule as an indefinite if unfortunate reality. By engaging with the political opposition, the United States can take steps toward a better Afghan future.

Traveling recently in Tajikistan and Turkey, we met with former Afghan officials, members of the diaspora, refugees, and others who look in anguish at Afghanistan’s plight. Kabul’s ambassador in Dushanbe, appointed by the previous government, holds meetings in the cold: The embassy’s budget for central heating has run out. Opposition figures in Turkey attempt to harmonize their political approaches but face constraints on their speech and activities imposed by the Turkish government. Each one laments the fall of Kabul and all urge the international community to not simply give up on Afghanistan.

The challenges go beyond the Taliban crushing the rights of women and girls. The new regime is overhauling the educational curriculum, ensuring that millions of boys will be subject to its hardline Islamist views. U.N. officials report that the Taliban has “precipitated the collapse of the rule of law.” Two-thirds of the entire population is expected to remain dependent on foreign aid this year. ISIS is active and deadly in Afghanistan, and the Taliban remains linked to al Qaeda.

The international community’s ability to alter these realities is now highly circumscribed. But it is not zero, and the United States should lead the effort to wrest from today’s perils a better tomorrow.

For all its inflexibility, elements of the Taliban seek internal legitimacy, including basic governance and services, not least to forestall an eventual uprising against their rule. They crave a measure of international legitimacy as well, including the ability to travel, acquire diplomatic status, and tap frozen assets and foreign assistance. They frequently visit the Gulf states and have sent representatives to diplomatic missions in Turkey, Russia, China, and Pakistan. Last summer, Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid blamed Washington for blocking the regime from receiving wider international recognition. This provides a modicum of leverage.

Washington should seek to build on that leverage by engaging not only the Taliban itself but also the burgeoning political opposition now largely resident outside Afghanistan. It should reopen the embassy in Washington and allow the previous ambassador (or her representative) to return to it. Many, perhaps more than 60, Afghan diplomatic missions across the world remain open and staffed by members of the previous government. No country has recognized the Taliban as Afghanistan’s government, and in November the U.N. General Assembly criticized the its record on human rights, sending a message that member states will not recognize the Taliban under current circumstances. Such moves provide implicit support for engaging with non-Taliban political actors.

The enduring disunity among the opposition groups presents challenges to this approach. Divided over ethnic identity, power politics, corruption allegations, and prior service in the government of Ashraf Ghani, there are today three main opposition groups: the National Resistance Front, based in Tajikistan, led by Ahmad Masood, the “Ankara Group,” based in Turkey, comprised mostly of former warlords, and a group calling itself the National Movement for Peace and Justice, led by former members of the Ghani government. They are united by opposition to the Taliban and concern for Afghanistan but not a great deal else.

The United States should support a political office for the Afghan opposition in a third country, as the Taliban had in Doha for years, one that could serve as the focal point for the groups to unify, organize their political activities, and harmonize their engagement with the Taliban and the international community. While several members of the political opposition already engage individually with Taliban leaders, a formal office would give more weight to those discussions and encourage a more broad-based, Afghan-led negotiation process.

U.S. diplomats should also increase engagement with the diaspora who seek to build a different future for Afghanistan. They should press countries, particularly the Gulf states and Turkey, to enforce the ban on international travel by Taliban officials blacklisted by the United Nations. And the Biden administration must ensure that the millions of dollars in cash shipped into Afghanistan each week for use by the U.N. Assistance Mission—lifesaving support for many Afghans—does not line Taliban pockets, as is widely suspected by many former government officials.

If the United States wishes to send a clear diplomatic message about the unacceptability of the Taliban’s policies, it should formally discard the Doha deal signed in February 2020. Many Afghans interpret it not as a peace agreement but as a withdrawal measure that guaranteed Taliban rule. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has acknowledged that the Taliban “grossly” violated the Doha deal by harboring al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in downtown Kabul. Voiding the agreement would signal that America’s approach to Afghanistan is no longer premised on trust in Taliban promises.

All these measures, even taken together, will neither dislodge the Taliban nor dramatically empower the political opposition. The opportunity to exert more direct leverage was lost in the chaos of America’s withdrawal. But Washington should seek even modest steps to deny the Taliban international legitimacy, strengthen Afghanistan’s political opposition, and make clear that a better future is possible.

With its Kandahar-based, hardest-line elements in the ascendancy, the Taliban today hurriedly wrings from Afghanistan the basic rights of its people and the essential functions of its society. Yet if history is any guide, this faction will not rule forever. The effort to help Afghans shape a better alternative should begin now.

Richard Fontaine is the chief executive officer of the Center for a New American Security. He worked on the National Security Council staff and at the State Department during the George W. Bush administration. Twitter: @RHFontaine

Lisa Curtis is the director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security and served as senior director for South and Central Asia on the National Security Council staff.

To Help Afghanistan, Engage Its Political Opposition
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Wrestling with a Humanitarian Dilemma in Afghanistan

January 27, 2023

William Byrd, Ph.D.

United States Institute of Peace

Wednesday, January 25, 2023

Recent decrees by the Taliban barring Afghan women from attending university or working in NGOs are severely damaging the country both socially and economically, especially coming atop a ban on girls’ secondary education last year. The marginalization of half the population also highlights the “humanitarian dilemma” that aid donors and international agencies face: Afghanistan is highly dependent on humanitarian assistance, not only for saving lives and easing deprivation but also to stabilize its economy. The quandary for international donors is what to do when alleviating suffering benefits the Afghan economy and thereby the Taliban regime, even when that regime is harming its own people?
Humanitarian aid — around $3 billion a year now compared to total civilian and security assistance of $8 billion-plus annually before 2021 — has taken over pre-2021 aid’s role in shoring up Afghanistan’s weak economy in addition, of course, to saving many lives. While a considerable portion of humanitarian assistance is provided in-kind (mainly basic foodstuffs), much of the aid reaches Afghanistan in monetary form for local cash transfers, contractual payments for goods and services, salaries and other expenses.United Nations humanitarian cash shipments of U.S. dollars into Afghanistan average about $40 million a week — a total of $1.8 billion since they began in December 2021. These inflows, similar to or slightly more than the Afghan central bank’s pre-2021 imports of cash dollars, have replaced the latter in stabilizing the country’s economy.

Unlike before the Taliban takeover, this money no longer goes directly to the central bank (Da Afghanistan Bank, or DAB), now under Taliban control. Instead, deposits are made in a private commercial bank. U.N. agencies and implementing partners then withdraw the money in U.S. currency or after the bank has converted funds into afghanis to pay local costs.

The U.N. cash shipments provide critically needed liquidity in the economy. They are used to pay for imports directly or to purchase domestic goods and services (including salary payments). Either way, they support Afghanistan’s balance of payments, which is characterized by a gap between imports and exports of roughly $4 billion per year, by providing much-needed foreign-sourced funding.

The U.N. cash imports are a major reason why the exchange rate for the afghani has been reasonably stable and the falling inflation rate mainly reflects international price inflation rather than the domestically driven hyperinflation of the 1990s.

No One Should Want a Repeat of Afghanistan’s Economic Free-Fall in 2021

So, Afghanistan’s extraordinarily high aid dependency has continued, now on the shoulders of humanitarian support. Moreover, given the much more precarious situation faced by most Afghans — living near, at, or below the subsistence level — people’s dependence on external aid arguably is just as great as or even greater than pre-2021.

But by supporting a low-level economic equilibrium — albeit precarious and subject to downside risks —  current humanitarian assistance creates similar issues regarding dependence and sustainability that arose with past aid. Recent Afghan history provides a striking demonstration of the problems that can occur. The August 2021 Taliban takeover and the resulting immediate cut-off of international aid plunged the country into a period of economic free-fall and precipitated the largest humanitarian crisis and U.N. humanitarian appeal in the world until the Ukraine war. No one should want a repeat of this disaster.

Humanitarian aid is not supposed to be conditioned on a government’s policies. That would be contrary to internationally accepted humanitarian principles, namely:

  • Humanity — human suffering must be addressed wherever found, with particular attention to the most vulnerable
  • Neutrality — humanitarian aid must not favor any side in an armed conflict or other dispute
  • Impartiality — assistance must be provided solely on the basis of need, without discrimination
  • Independence — provision of aid must remain autonomous from political, economic, military or any other objectives

However, the sheer size and economic importance of humanitarian aid for Afghanistan means it has important macroeconomic impacts. Moreover, by helping stabilize the macro-economy and shoring up incomes, it inevitably benefits the Taliban regime at least indirectly. The government generally benefits from a more stable economy where people are not starving, but this aid also means the Taliban can freely use their sizable resources from taxation — perhaps around $2 billion a year — for other purposes. As is true of all aid, resources are fungible in the bigger picture.

This issue is common to large humanitarian interventions in any conflict-affected country. But when the Taliban administration takes deliberate actions that harm large segments of the country’s population, we have arrived at the crux of a humanitarian dilemma.

Taliban Actions Against Women and Girls Complicate the Delivery of Humanitarian Aid

Recent Taliban actions have jeopardized the delivery of aid to Afghanistan — both in general and specifically aid for Afghan women and girls.

Comprising 30-40 percent of NGO employees, women include nutrition experts, team leaders, community health workers, vaccinators, nurses, doctors and heads of organizations. Moreover, aid that goes directly to women and girls — such as health and nutrition services, food and other aid to female-headed households or those whose males are away from home — must be delivered by Afghan women. It would be socially unacceptable in most of the country for men to bring humanitarian relief and services to Afghan women and girls. And asking female NGO employees to work at aid delivery points but never report to the office on work-related matters, which the Taliban might see as an acceptable compromise, would be unrealistic and unviable.

Over the medium term, the education bans will reduce the numbers of trained and professional women able to provide health and other humanitarian-related services, further constraining humanitarian aid.

Finally, Taliban actions against females in education and NGOs most likely mean that little if any development aid will be forthcoming in the near-term future. Hence humanitarian assistance will continue to comprise the lion’s share of international public financial flows into Afghanistan. The macroeconomic and financial implications of this aid need to be kept front-and-center and guide decision-making, in addition to responding to humanitarian needs.

Conditionality for Humanitarian Assistance?

Making humanitarian aid contingent on the Taliban reversing the recent restrictions they placed on women and girls may go against the humanitarian principle of nonconditionality. Moreover, if experience is any guide, imposing explicit conditions on aid is unlikely to work. It would provide the Taliban with a further excuse to misleadingly blame economic problems and human suffering on the international community’s actions.

Nevertheless, according to the British government, nearly half of NGOs in Afghanistan have paused their assistance following the Taliban ban on Afghan women working for NGOs. Inability to effectively deliver essential humanitarian aid without women is the prominent reason for these suspensions. Humanitarian principles require aid to be delivered in a non-discriminatory manner, and if that becomes impossible due to Taliban restrictions, questions arise over whether and to what extent the aid should continue. On the other hand, U.N. imports of cash dollars have resumed at high levels following a month’s gap during the winter holiday period, with no sign that they will decline in the immediate future. International aid donors are still developing their responses to the Taliban bans.

Even in the absence of explicit conditionality, the Taliban’s recent actions will dampen donors’ enthusiasm for continuing to fund humanitarian aid at current levels. Moreover, the distinction between humanitarian and basic development activities is somewhat fuzzy, so there could be a narrowing of the scope of humanitarian assistance to focus on the most life-saving activities (such as food aid and emergency health services). This would leave other important programs that are currently being carried out under the humanitarian umbrella vulnerable to cuts.

Donors’ aid fatigue over Taliban actions will further worsen the already deteriorating outlook for aid to Afghanistan in the face of competition from the massive humanitarian needs generated by the Ukraine war as well as other humanitarian crises. These trends also mean that the amount of cash dollars imported by the U.N. will at some point start to decline.

There needs to be clear and explicit international messaging about the effects of the Taliban’s bans on humanitarian aid, so the implications are abundantly clear both to them and to the Afghan people.

Proactive Strategizing and Planning Are Needed — Not Reactive, Disorganized Responses

Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis is not like, say, a discrete natural disaster, affecting hundreds of thousands or perhaps 1-2 million people for a limited time. Most of Afghanistan’s more than 40 million people are facing severe hunger and deep poverty. This is an economic crisis for the entire country, one likely to extend for at least several years. The situation cries out for incorporating a macroeconomic, stabilization and sustainability perspective on humanitarian aid — not just reacting short-term to Taliban actions.

When humanitarian aid is as large and prolonged as in Afghanistan, effectiveness issues and cost-efficiency come to the fore. This will be particularly true when resource constraints tighten and funding declines, as almost surely will happen for Afghanistan in coming years.

For example, there is widespread recognition that cash assistance is more cost-effective than in-kind aid in meeting most humanitarian needs, and no more risky. Aid organizations globally are beginning to shift the composition of their assistance from in-kind to cash. So, one way to improve the cost-effectiveness of humanitarian aid in Afghanistan is to provide more of it in cash rather than in-kind.

Reducing Dependence on U.N. Cash Shipments

In the likely scenario that humanitarian aid declines over time, a smooth transition away from U.N. cash shipments must be planned to avoid a repeat of the August 2021 shock when aid abruptly stopped.

U.N. cash shipments need to be put on a planned trajectory and not allowed to haphazardly reflect aid agencies’ fluctuating needs for funds in-country and the availability of money from donors. It would make sense to pre-program a gradual, predictable decline in the U.N. cash shipments over time, to give the Afghan economy and people time to adjust, rather than injecting volatility through ups and downs, let alone precipitating another major economic shock if there is an abrupt drop.

Use of new technologies involving mobile phones and digital money transfers is increasing around the world, driven in part by the pandemic. A highly effective aid delivery mechanism which is already being piloted in Afghanistan, mobile phone-based digital cash transfers could progressively replace part of U.N. cash shipments, supporting Afghan women’s and their households’ humanitarian needs directly, as demonstrated by a successful recent pilot program.

The proposed Humanitarian Exchange Facility (HEF), preferably with streamlining and simplification of design to ensure that it is cost-effective and curbs excessive overhead, could be revived and partly substitute for U.N. cash shipments. Aid donors can incentivize the shift away from U.N. cash shipments in favor of mechanisms such as the HEF by requiring increased use of such channels.

Such options would require more cohesive, coordinated planning and deployment of humanitarian aid among U.N. agencies and on the part of donors. This is not how humanitarian business is normally conducted, but the nationwide crisis, the sheer amount of aid and the risks of future disaster in Afghanistan require such a holistic approach.

Wrestling with a Humanitarian Dilemma in Afghanistan
read more

The Daily Hustle: How Afghan women working for NGOs are coping with the Taleban ban

January 27, 2023

Roxanna Shapour

Afghanistan Analysts Network

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Afghan women who were studying at university or working for NGOs have now had a few weeks to take in the implications of two decrees issued by Taleban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada which denied them a university education and banned them from working for NGOs. The announcements had come as successive blows to women who had already seen their rights and freedoms rolled back by the Emirate since it came to power in August 2021. For the latest instalment of The Daily Hustle, our series that features individual accounts about one aspect of daily life in Afghanistan, we hear from two women who used to go out to work, but since the latest decree, are no longer going..

Sonita supports her family of five – husband, two children and her elderly parents – with her salary working for an international NGO in Kabul as a project officer.

24 December 2022 was a very cold winter day. I’d been working in my room all day, wrapped up in several patus (traditional woollen blankets) with a hot water bottle on my lap. Around six in the evening, I heard my mother rustling as she quietly came into my room. I thought she’d come to fetch me for the evening prayer, but I could see something was wrong as soon as I saw her. Her face was ashen, taut with anxiety. “The Taleban have banned women from working for NGOs,” she said. I dismissed what she was saying with a wave of my hand and told her that it must be a rumour, but she shook her head and said it was being reported on all the television channels. I quickly started to check on social media, scrolling down timelines until I saw the decree – a few short lines in Pashto saying that women were no longer allowed to work for national or international NGOs. I sank deeper into my chair, wrapped the patus closer around me and started sobbing.

Khalida lives with her husband, two sons and four daughters in one of the most impoverished neighbourhoods in Kabul. She has worked for the same Afghan NGO as a cleaner for nearly two decades.

We didn’t have electricity in our neighbourhood that night, so we couldn’t watch TV. I found out about the ban from the chowkidar (guard) when I went to work the following day. I thought he was joking, but he didn’t look like he was. Then my manager told me to go home because the Emirate had made a rule that women couldn’t work for NGOs anymore. He said they’d keep paying my salary as long as they could afford it, even though I was no longer working. I wondered how long ‘as long as they could’ meant, but I didn’t ask.

I’ve been very lucky with work. I’ve been a cleaner at the same office for 18 years. My job is good and my organisation is stable and takes care of us. Last year, I used some of our savings to help my sons open a little shop in our neighbourhood, but the economic situation is bad and the shop makes only a little money. My husband is retired. He hasn’t received his pension since the Taleban came back. There are rumours that the government will start paying pensions and also give us all the money they owe, but we haven’t got any money so far. Now, I don’t know how my family would manage if I lost my job.

Facing an uncertain future

Sonita and her husband both lost their jobs when the Islamic Republic collapsed in August 2021, and she counts herself lucky because she was able to find work with an NGO:

I’m the only breadwinner in my family. Who is going to support my family now? For many Afghan women, working for an NGO is one of the only ways to earn a living. I count myself as one of the lucky ones because I was able to secure a job after the economy collapsed in the wake of the Taleban takeover. The job matters to me in so many ways. It’s the only source of income for my family. It keeps a roof over our heads and food on the table. It pays for books and pens for my children and my parents’ medical care. But the money also helps the economy. It’s a source of income for the shopkeepers in our neighbourhood where we buy things and the taxi drivers who drive me to work. I even use part of my salary to help those less fortunate than us.

My colleagues have been really supportive. They urge me to be strong and their reassuring tone is a comfort. My organisation has assured me that they will keep paying me until the situation is resolved and I can go back to the office. But this is not only about money. I love my job. It gives me satisfaction and a sense of purpose. Only two weeks earlier, my supervisor and I had done our annual appraisal and agreed on my work plan for 2023. What will happen now to those plans?

Khalida worries about making ends meet, even though her family owns their own home and they have some savings to cushion the blow:

I try to put a brave face on for my daughters. I joke around with them and talk about us visiting my parents in our village. After dinner and the evening prayer, after the girls have finished their evening chores and have gone to bed, my husband and I sit down with my sons to see how long we can survive on our savings and the meagre income from the shop. If we tighten our belts and keep our expenses down, we think we could stretch our savings out for another six months. I would also get severance pay, but I don’t know how much, and I don’t know if they could afford to pay that.

Thank God we own our own house. My husband gave me a small piece of land when we got married, and many years ago, with the help of some colleagues who loaned me money, I was able to build two rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom. So we don’t have to pay rent. We also keep some chickens, so we have some eggs every day and sometimes we cook one of the chickens. But I worry about our other expenses. Everything is so expensive now. My salary also supports my elderly parents in the village. My father is too old now to work the land. He rents it to one of my cousins, but that cousin hasn’t been able to make a go of it because of the drought and so he can’t pay my father any rent for the land. I don’t have any brothers and it’s up to my sister and me to support our parents.

Making plans to cope

Khalida is pragmatic about the possibility of being allowed to work again and talks about plans to keep at least one son employed:

I’ve been talking to the other two women who work in my office. They said our manager had told them that our jobs were not in danger and that they were talking to the Ministry of Economy to see if they could get exemptions or workarounds to the ban. They told me there was already an exemption for women health workers, but we’re not health workers, we’re cleaners.

My older son wants to go to Iran for work and leave my other son in Kabul to run the shop. But the economy is bad there too and their currency isn’t worth as much as it used to be. I don’t think he’ll be able to send any money back to us, even if he does go. I think the Taleban only want men to work. A few months ago, they said women [employees] should send the men in their families to work in their place. I’m thinking of asking my office if my older son could take my job. If it’s allowed, I could train him to do the cleaning, but I’m not sure they would agree.

Sonita moves between hope and dejection

My spirits rally when I see the news about international NGOs that have suspended their operations and issued statements condemning the ban and the UN delegation that came to Afghanistan to talk to the Emirate about reversing it. I know my own organisation, and others, will do their best to find a way to keep women working for NGOs, but I also have to be realistic about the future.

For the past sixteen months, I have stayed strong and remained optimistic. I focus on my work and my family’s well-being. But these days, there is little hope. I stay close to home and do a lot of housework. I grieve for myself and for all women in Afghanistan. I mourn all the freedoms that we’ve lost, one after another, in the past year and a half. I also spend a lot of time talking with my husband behind closed doors and in hushed voices, so my parents and children don’t hear us. We talk about all the doors that have closed, the possibilities that are no longer available, and the plans that might never be realised. We talk about leaving Afghanistan. A day might come when we will have to pack our bags and leave our homeland. But that day is not today.

Edited by Roxanna Shapour

The Daily Hustle: How Afghan women working for NGOs are coping with the Taleban ban
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The Afghans I Trained Are Fighting for Putin in Ukraine

January 25, 2023
By Thomas Kasza
The New York Times
25 Jan 2023

Mr. Kasza served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I am an American Special Forces soldier, a volunteer knowing well the hazards of this profession in which I’ve served quietly for 14 years.

And I helped build Vladimir Putin’s foreign legion.

Green Berets — the “Horse Soldiers” who toppled the Taliban in 2001 — are not Army Rangers or Navy SEALs. We specialize in training and fighting alongside indigenous forces, and our greatest strength is the trust and camaraderie we develop with our counterparts. For years, the Green Berets and the commandos of the Afghan National Army were a bulwark against the Taliban. It was a partnership forged at immense cost in American and Afghan lives.

Since the precipitous departure from Afghanistan, and in the absence of meaningful government support to the nonprofit organizations who have worked to aid our former allies, many of those highly trained commandos have accepted recruitment offers to fight with the Russian Army in Ukraine. For the 20,000 to 30,000 men that we trained, a steady salary and the promise of shelter from the Taliban is often too good of a deal to pass up — even if the cost is returning to combat.

As the next Congress prepares to investigate the withdrawal and how it went so disastrously wrong, they should examine not only the lead-up to those dramatic days in August 2021 when the Taliban swept into Kabul, but also what happened — and is currently happening — in the wake of their victory. How those who safeguarded American troops are actively hunted. How they’ve suffered under the Taliban. How our government turned a blind eye. How Afghans were forced to pay nearly $600 per person to apply for humanitarian parole, while Ukrainians had the fee waived.

Following the gross malfeasance of the withdrawal, I didn’t think that there were more red lines to cross, any further moral injury that could be inflicted on those of us who served or worked to save our allies. Yet, with this soul-sickening revelation that our closest partners will now bleed for Russia, here we are. Again.

We should have seen it coming. We abandoned our closest partners wholesale: what choice were the commandos left with? Those left behind are suffering destitution, famine, persecution from the Taliban.

Mr. Putin, suspect though his promises may be, provides hope. If they fight for Russia, their families might live under better conditions, they might earn the $1,500 recruitment incentive and they might earn Russian citizenship. The irony is that those who head to the front lines in the Donbas will be shredded by the very same American-built weapons that once supported them in battle.

I cannot blame those Afghan commandos who fight for Russia; to do so would deny them agency in their own survival.

And it was a deft and cunning move from Mr. Putin, who increases the lethality of his frontline soldiers without risking Russian lives. These soldiers are not amateurs, conscripts or convicts. This is a battle-tested special operations force, trained by America’s best. They might not tip the scales of Russia’s war, but they are competent. Ukrainians will die by their hands.

Meanwhile, our national shame is perpetuated and a generation of Special Forces is saddled with mitigating the damage from America’s previous conflict while their task of winning the trust of allies — present and future — is made more difficult and more dangerous.

Compounding the tragedy is the fact that there is an army of volunteers, grass-roots organizations, and boutique nonprofits (including one that I founded) champing at the bit to help. Yet we are stymied at every turn by cowardice, political dysfunction and a lack of resources.

In July, during a video conference with members of the various nongovernmental organizations, Secretary of State Antony Blinken voiced his gratitude toward these groups, acknowledging our assumption of the State Department’s responsibilities, and expressing that “We need you to continue to do so.” Why though? Why is it incumbent on American civilians, veterans and active service members to dedicate our own time and resources to rebuild our nation’s honor?

The private refugee sponsorship initiative known as the “Welcome Corps” touted by Secretary Blinken as the “the boldest innovation in refugee resettlement in four decades” is a missed opportunity. At the very earliest, by-name sponsorship will not take effect for Afghans until at least mid 2023, effectively dooming hundreds who could be saved with immediate, decisive action. Aid at an indeterminate point in 2023 is not good enough. They need it now. If our leaders intend to wash their hands of Afghanistan, they should support the nongovernmental organizations who have stepped up to do their job for them.

I don’t know if our efforts in Afghanistan were in vain, and the memory of a fallen brother in arms complicates that question. I see the improvements to infrastructure, the generation of women and girls who received an education. But the motto of the Green Berets is “De Oppresso Liber” — To free the oppressed. The country we bled for to keep free is gone, and the very weapon we created to keep oppression at bay has been co-opted by tyranny.

Deploying to Afghanistan was easy. Trying to hold a government-size moral failing at bay feels like running a relay with no one reaching to receive the baton. Our morality has been taken for granted and we are tired. Tired of swallowing our anger. Tired of an endless moral injury. Tired of the red lines and red tape.

I can only imagine the betrayal our Afghan counterparts must feel.

I have little more to give. I’ve sacrificed finances, career opportunities and medical school aspirations. Relationships and my well-being have borne the brunt of it. I don’t begrudge those who carry on with life as usual, though I sometimes feel disconnected from them. To keep myself in equilibrium, I often feel as though I must put on a mask to hide the shame, humiliation and rage.

Tremendous advances in military medicine have been made during 20 years of war, but there is no coverage offered for a battered conscience. If I want help from the Veteran’s Administration, I lie. I lie and say this impotent, lonesome anger bloomed from a tunnel outside Kandahar where some Taliban fighters thought they were safe from the explosives I carried.

I’ll look to the healing of my own moral wounds as best as I am able. I hope that Congress in turn can lead, and help our nation start healing in its own right by honoring the promises we made to those who went into combat on our behalf.

It is the very least we can do because if we don’t offer our allies hope and meaningful action, someone like Vladimir Putin will.

Mr. Kasza served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is now in the National Guard and founded the 1208 Foundation, which provides humanitarian aid and immigration advocacy to Afghans who served with American Special Forces.

The Afghans I Trained Are Fighting for Putin in Ukraine
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The World Has Fallen for the Taliban’s Lies Once Again

January 20, 2023
By Fawzia Koofi

Ms. Koofi is the former deputy speaker of the Afghan Parliament.

The New York Times

20 Jan 2023

I was a first-year medical student at Kabul University when, on Sept. 26, 1996, Taliban fighters swept in and seized the capital. It was a Thursday. I remember that clearly because I was rushing to finish schoolwork due by the weekend. Those assignments were suddenly no longer required. By the next day, the Taliban had announced that all women and girls were henceforth banned “until further notice” from schools, workplaces or even appearing in public without a male companion present.

For the next five years, until U.S.-led international forces ended the Taliban’s reign of terror in 2001, an Afghan woman’s view of the world was through the windows of her home. I was crushed. I had dreamed of becoming a gynecologist, hoping to help address Afghanistan’s chronically high maternal mortality rate. I never became a doctor.

That despair is being felt once again by a new generation of millions of Afghan women.

Before completing their reconquest of Afghanistan in August 2021, the Taliban had promised to safeguard women’s rights, along with other pledges of moderation designed to ease world fears and pave the way for the withdrawal of the last foreign forces standing in their way. But since then, they have issued dozens of edicts to deprive women of basic human rights, including last month barring them from attending universities.

It should now be crystal clear that the international community was swindled. Taliban leaders have re-established their brutal fundamentalist Islamic and gender-apartheid regime, reversing the social progress achieved over the past two decades.

Yet the international community, including the United States, still clings naïvely to yet another Taliban fallacy — that it will stamp out the Islamic State’s affiliate in Afghanistan — and has maintained political and security-based contacts with the Taliban.

This is a gross misreading of reality that in fact increases the longer-term security threat to the United States and the world.

Taliban leaders are now raising a new generation of violent extremists. They have commandeered the Afghan school system, installing new curriculums that indoctrinate children in their extremist ideology, which endorses violence to advance Taliban objectives. Growing friction within the Taliban will make further radicalization and instability inevitable as factions struggle over ideology and distribution of resources.

The group’s leaders claim that while ISIS seeks a transnational Islamic caliphate, Taliban aspirations are confined to Afghanistan. Yet the Pakistani Taliban has staged intensifying attacks across the border in Pakistan. ISIS has expanded its operations on Afghan soil since the Taliban took over and remains a lethal threat.

During the Taliban’s first spell in power, I was luckier than most Afghan women. I fled to my home in Badakhshan, the only province in Afghanistan never conquered by that earlier regime, and set up an English school for girls. After the Taliban were driven out, I entered politics in the fragile democracy that followed. As an outspoken woman, I was on the Taliban hit list, and was targeted in several assassination attempts, including one in 2020, when I was shot in the arm.

I would later come face-to-face with those who wanted me dead. As the first female deputy speaker of the Afghan Parliament, I was among my country’s representatives in peace talks with the Taliban in Doha in 2021. The Taliban delegation promised to cut all ties with Al Qaeda and other extremist groups, form an inclusive government and refrain from threatening other countries. During one meeting, Taliban members looked me in the eye and declared that women would be allowed to engage in business and all manner of social and political life, and to become government ministers, even prime minister.

Instead, they are once again erasing women — barring them from traveling alone in public, seeking employment or pursuing education beyond grade six. The threat faced by women was underlined this week when Mursal Nabizada, a former legislator and one of countless women who were lifted up in the years following the first Taliban regime, was gunned down at her home in Kabul. Despite Taliban promises, Al Qaeda’s leader Ayman al-Zawahri, a patron of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, was found to be living in Kabul, where he was killed last year in a U.S. drone attack. A humanitarian disaster is now playing out under the Taliban’s chaotic misrule.

International leverage is limited, but to allow the situation to continue on its current course is unconscionable.

Led by the United States, which invested so much blood and treasure in helping the Afghan people claw out of the Taliban abyss all those years ago, the world must cease any further contact with the Taliban and intensify engagement with Afghan opposition groups, especially women’s rights groups. All Taliban offices abroad must be closed, its officials barred from traveling overseas and all remaining foreign revenue streams cut off, including the income from drug trafficking that has long helped sustained them. Legal bodies such as the International Criminal Court should initiate investigations of human rights violations in the country.

Actions like these won’t change things overnight and could endanger the tenuous cooperation with the Taliban needed to ensure continued supplies of badly needed international humanitarian aid. Every effort should be made to ensure that aid supplies are unaffected.

But Taliban leaders have so far enjoyed a sense of impunity. They must be made to feel the same pain that the people of Afghanistan feel until they deliver on every one of their broken promises.

The alternative is to doom the Afghan people to the same nightmare that my generation lived through and to sit back while Afghanistan descends further into chaos and extremism that could soon emanate beyond the region to the shores of the United States.

The World Has Fallen for the Taliban’s Lies Once Again
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Can the Taliban’s Brazen Assault on Afghan Women Be Stopped?

January 18, 2023

BY: Belquis Ahmadi;  Kate Bateman;  Andrew Watkins;  Scott Worden

United States Institute of Peace

Thursday, January 12, 2023

The audacity of the Taliban’s latest bans on women in public life brings two new factors into play, which may over time lead to change.

The Taliban marked the New Year by doubling down on their severe, ever-growing restrictions on women’s rights. On December 20, they banned women from all universities — adding to their prior ban on girls attending middle and high school. Then the Taliban announced on December 24 that women cannot work for NGOs, including humanitarian organizations that are providing vital food and basic health services to the population that is now projected at 90 percent below the poverty rate. Western and regional governments have responded with uncommonly unified outrage and many humanitarian organizations have suspended their operations until women are allowed to return to their jobs.
USIP’s Andrew Watkins, Kate Bateman, Belquis Ahmadi and Scott Worden explain what may be motivating the Taliban’s misogyny and what are the prospects for moderating it.

The Taliban have been on notice since their March 2022 ban on girls in high school that they would not gain recognition or sanctions relief unless they reversed their restrictions. Why do they continue to make moves that make it even harder for them to gain international legitimacy?

Watkins: The Taliban’s most recent raft of gender-based restrictions is the sharpest shift yet back to the draconian rule the group made notorious in the 1990s.

The Taliban began restricting girls and women in public life from the first days after their takeover. But the current trend accelerated in March 2022, when the group’s supreme leader, or emir, Haibatullah Akhundzada overruled his cabinet’s decision to resume secondary education for girls. In spite of repeated warnings that the continued removal of girls and women from public life would cripple the already-anemic Afghan economy and risk vital foreign assistance, the emir and his hand-picked officials have issued a series of further restrictions ever since.

These bans are part of the ultraconservative vision of an Afghan state that the emir, a circle of influential Taliban clerics and some of their supporters claim that their insurgency was fought for. Early in 2022, the Taliban’s chief justice Abdul Hakim published a quasi-official manuscript outlining the scope of a “proper” Islamic system of government, which included extreme restrictions on women’s role in the public sphere — many of which have since been enacted. These measures also include the re-institution of hudud and qisas punishments (e.g., decapitation for theft, death for capital crimes), and the empowerment of the intelligence service and morality police to further restrict personal freedoms.

The emir and his closest lieutenants are charting this path in the face of near-universal foreign discouragement; the rejection of foreign “interference” has become a policy motivation unto itself. Over the past 18 months, the Taliban’s decision-makers have adopted a narrative that they survived 20 years of war and persecution and triumphed; by comparison, no amount of foreign pressure could ever oblige them to change course.

Doubling down on gender-based restrictions is also a reflection of power politics within the movement, an assertion of authority by the emir over those in the Taliban who might rule differently. Throughout 2022, some regions of the country saw local Taliban flexibility on the girls’ high school ban, rules for strict hijab and other decrees. Media outlets and observers have reported that many within the Taliban’s own ranks disagree with the recent bans and are disturbed by the emir’s isolationist trajectory. Even if true (and accurately surveying Taliban opinions is near impossible), the policy trend has continued unabated, with those in disagreement proving unwilling or unable to change course in any meaningful way. Indeed, the most recent bans should be understood as a consolidation of earlier edicts and obliging compliance with the emir’s vision.

The international community, including regional countries, appears unusually united in denouncing the Taliban’s bans on women in universities and NGO positions. Who has weighed in and will it have any effect?

Bateman: If there is any silver lining to the recent bans, it is that they have revived international attention to the severe humanitarian and economic crises in Afghanistan, and to the Taliban’s ongoing assaults on the rights of Afghan women and girls. Hours and days after each ban was announced, donor countries, regional states, the U.N., the EU, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and aid organizations condemned the restrictions and called on the Taliban to reverse them. The outcry has been stronger and more widespread than perhaps at any time since the Taliban took power in 2021. The U.N. and OIC are also vigorously pursuing engagements with the Taliban to apply pressure.

The university ban elicited firm rebukes from Western and regional states alike: major donor countries issued a joint statement denouncing the Taliban’s systemic oppression of women and girls, stating that such policies “will have consequences for how our countries engage with the Taliban.” The responses from regional countries — including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Pakistan and Uzbekistan — were less harshly worded and did not threaten reprisals. They did, however, emphasize that denying women access to education is un-Islamic and, like Western states, called on the Taliban to revisit or revoke the decision.

Responding to the restriction against women working in NGOs, major donors, international aid organizations, the U.N., and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation are pressuring the Taliban to reverse that policy, as well as the university ban. U.N. envoys and heads of humanitarian aid organizations have met with senior Taliban officials across key ministries to lobby for the removal of the bans, and impress upon the Taliban the dire consequences: already-implemented suspensions of aid, potential aid cut-offs and the dire downstream effects these will have on the Afghan people. U.N. officials are reportedly soon traveling to Kabul to press the Taliban to reverse the bans.

On January 11, the OIC convened an emergency meeting and, on behalf of its 57 member states, issued a communiqué harshly criticizing both the university and NGO bans. The OIC also announced its intention to send a second team of Islamic scholars to Afghanistan “to continue the dialogue with the de facto authority on its measures depriving Afghan girls and women of their basic rights to education, employment and social justice, as these rights constitute a top priority for the Islamic world.”

Will the Taliban bend in response to this pressure campaign? Tragically for the Afghan people, the Taliban’s behavior of the past 17 months suggests this is unlikely, at least in the short term. The Taliban leadership has so far resisted international demands to protect women’s and broader human rights and to govern more inclusively. They appear to place implementation of their hardline vision of Islam — one that majority-Muslim countries insist contradicts fundamental Islamic tenets — over the lives, livelihoods and basic rights of the Afghan people. And yet the stakes are so high, the international community must continue to explore all avenues to influence and persuade Taliban leaders to change course.

What impact will these bans have within Afghanistan?

Ahmadi: Almost every month the Taliban have issued decrees or edicts imposing restrictions on women and girls that violate their very fundamental rights.

The Taliban’s ban on girls’ education is a moral outrage that, if enforced over time, will reinforce what Afghan activists have labeled “gender apartheid” and remove Afghan women from professional and leadership roles — likely the Taliban’s intent. Afghan women have reached out to world leaders, the U.N. and OIC countries calling on them to move beyond condemnations and take viable actions to hold the Taliban responsible for their actions. One such platform is Together Stronger, an online platform that has launched campaigns with the slogan, “All or None.”

In an encouraging show of solidarity, as soon as the university ban was announced, both male professors and university students protested at universities across the country and near 100 faculty resigned from their positions in protest.

University degrees are not widely required for employment in Afghanistan but are necessary for technical jobs that come with higher salaries and greater social status. Economists, engineers, professors and doctors all require university degrees. There is a spiraling logic to a ban on women in universities given the Taliban’s insistence on gender separation in public and workplaces. If there are no women professors, there can be no women students. And if there are no female doctors and other health specialists, one wonders how the health care system will work for half of the country’s population?

The Taliban’s ban on women in NGOs presents a more immediate practical problem. Currently all of Afghanistan’s humanitarian assistance, which is essential to provide lifesaving emergency and humanitarian aid to 28 million people, is delivered through international and national NGOs. The U.N. estimates that half of Afghanistan’ population face acute hunger. Since the December 24 decree banning women’s employment in NGOs, 150 organizations and aid agencies have suspended all or part of their work, the vast majority of whom were delivering humanitarian aid. A U.N. Women survey of 124 such NGOs revealed that over 4,500 female employees were affected, of whom nearly 70 percent are their families’ main breadwinners.

Not only are women essential to these organizations’ operations, by the Taliban’s own decrees women need to receive assistance from other women. So, the ban effectively discriminates against women receiving many types of assistance, violating basic humanitarian principles.

Cutting off humanitarian aid will have real costs for the large segments of the Afghan population — men and women — who rely on it. But the alternative of yielding to Taliban aid delivery rules that are both impractical and discriminatory is unpalatable as well.

Is there a way out?

Worden: The Taliban have demonstrated over the past year and a half that they are unmoved by the standard tools of diplomatic leverage — namely strident diplomatic demarches and economic and individual sanctions. In fact, the religiously motivated hardliners in Kandahar that are issuing restrictive social decrees seem to be perversely incentivized: if the West is against a policy, that means it is right.  Even when regional and Muslim majority countries have criticized women’s rights restrictions for being un-Islamic, the Taliban have said they are striving for the purest form of Islamic statehood yet and are not constrained by others’ interpretations of Islam.

The audacity of the latest Taliban bans brings two new forces into play, which may over time lead to change. The most immediate is a decision by most international and Afghan humanitarian international NGOs to suspend their humanitarian assistance work as long as the ban on their female employees remains. The U.N. is also considering whether to suspend some of their operations as well. Since the Taliban took over in August 2021, Afghanistan has received $3 billion in humanitarian aid, providing an essential source of food for more than half the population. All of that is delivered through the U.N. and NGOs rather than the Taliban. Moreover, the value of the Afghan currency and a significant portion of the economy is kept stable by shipments of $40 million per week in cash — a total of $1.8 billion in the last year — that are flown in by the U.N. to pay for the salaries and logistics needed to deliver humanitarian assistance.

While humanitarian principles hold that assistance cannot be conditioned on politics, the fact that a large percentage of these organizations’ staff are women means that work cannot continue without massive disruptions. It remains to be seen whether a reduction in essential services and cash will sway Taliban leadership. Unfortunately, Afghanistan’s poor — a vast majority of the population — will bear the pain of such a test of will because starvation and illness will increase if the pause in aid remains in effect over time. Who will blink first is the metric of this terrible dynamic.

The second vector of possible reform comes from within the Taliban. It is clear that a majority of Taliban ministers and diplomats personally disagree with their emir’s reactionary decrees. Many themselves have daughters who are in school outside of Afghanistan. And several surely recognize that neither the Afghan economy nor international credibility will revive unless they govern society with the same basic norms that other Muslim majority nations adhere to. This raises the possibility that at some point  powerful Taliban factions outside of the conservative bubble in Kandahar say “enough is enough” and increase pressure from within to moderate restrictions. There is also some hope that the pressure from reducing cash and humanitarian aid will advance that point in the timeline.

One slight bit of good news in a pressure campaign scenario is that the Taliban have based both the university ban and women’s employment with NGOs on an declaration that their strict rules on facial coverings were not being followed and that studies and work must be paused until the risks of violations are reduced. While this is likely a pretext that masks underlying ultra-orthodox religious beliefs, it offers a potential face-saving way out whereby a reversal can be explained by declaring there is now a proper understanding of the headscarf rules rather than being seen to cave into political pressure.

Can the Taliban’s Brazen Assault on Afghan Women Be Stopped?
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As Humanitarian Crises Escalate, So Do Demands to End Them

January 14, 2023

The New York Times

This article is part of our special report on the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

David Miliband, head of the International Rescue Committee, says the global refugee crisis “is manageable, not insoluble.”

Humanitarian crises — especially the plight of refugees — around the world are once again among the issues on the agenda at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

A report by the International Rescue Committee predicts that in 2023 nearly 340 million people will require some kind of humanitarian aid as a result of civil wars, invasions like the one in Ukraine, poverty, income inequality, climate change and more.

David Miliband, 57, is president and chief executive of the International Rescue Committee, one of the world’s largest humanitarian aid and refugee advocacy organizations.

The group, whose founding was precipitated in the 1930s by Albert Einstein, a refugee himself, deploys more than 40,000 staff members and volunteers in 40 countries.

Mr. Miliband is a former member of the British Parliament and was foreign secretary from 2007 to 2010. He had served on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the New Agenda for Fragility and Resilience until Dec. 31, when his term ended. He said he planned to attend the forum again this year.

Borge Brende, president of the World Economic Forum, said in a statement that refugees had always been part of the forum’s agenda but that “since the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016, we have increased our focus on the world’s most vulnerable populations — including refugees and other displaced persons — through a dedicated set of discussions, communities and initiatives.”

For example, the statement said, the forum’s Humanitarian and Resilience Investing Initiative is trying to channel private capital toward “vulnerable communities and fragile economies,” and its Refugee Employment and Employability Initiative is building on its support for Ukrainian refugees to bolster employment of refugees across conflict zones.

Mr. Miliband recently spoke by telephone and email about the global crisis and challenges. The interview has been edited and condensed.

If there is one point about the plight of the world’s refugees you would like to emphasize at Davos, what would it be?

That the refugee crisis is manageable, not insoluble.

It is, right now, concentrated in relatively few countries. It’s about a hundred million people. The number has more or less tripled in the last decade. If you listened to some media, you’d think that Western Europe or Britain or America host most refugees. They don’t. Most are in countries like Lebanon or Jordan or Turkey or Bangladesh or Uganda.

But it can be managed. The refugee crisis is one of the global risks, alongside climate and health pandemics, that have been monstrously undermanaged and mismanaged in this phase of globalization these past 20 years.

My message to the people going to Davos is that if they are to continue to reap the benefits of globalization, they have to be willing to bear the burdens of globalization. The “burdens” refer to those who make the rules for how the world deals with the transnational needs that arise in a connected world.

What are some concrete steps that can be taken?

We think that humanitarian catastrophe is a choice. Reducing the scale of global humanitarian need means incentivizing actors with power to make the choice against it. The 100 million displaced worldwide and the 340 million in humanitarian need [according to United Nations data] will need more than aid to break the cycle of protracted crisis. They need fresh thinking on preventing famine; protection from the worst impacts of conflict and impunity; and a new deal for the displaced, via support to low- and middle-income states least equipped to support large refugee populations but providing a global public good. We need ambitious refugee resettlement targets.

What has caused the number of refugees to triple in the last 20 years?

Well, we know the answer to that. Civil wars. They represent 80 percent of the driver of humanitarian need. Second, the climate crisis, which for many people is a contributor to conflict and the flight of people. But the fundamental reason we have more refugees is that we’ve had more, longer and more virulent civil wars around the world — with the exception of Ukraine, which is obviously the product of an invasion.

Has the worldwide resurgence of authoritarianism exacerbated the increased refugee numbers?

There’s no question that we’re living in an age of democratic recession. There is good evidence that the more autocratic a regime, the more it rides with impunity in the wars it engages with. Since we’re primarily looking at the drivers of refugees from conflict, I would say that the rise of autocracy is an associated factor rather than the driving factor. It’s the impunity that threatens them.

The Taliban in Afghanistan recently barred women who were not accompanied by a male relative from workplaces. In response, the rescue committee, whose 8,000 employees in the country includes 3,000 females, has suspended operations there. That must have been a difficult decision to make.

I.R.C. operations depend on our Afghan female staff as well as male. They work at all levels of the organization, from senior leadership to health care staff working with female patients.

We simply cannot work without them. We know that Afghans are suffering from extreme poverty. They cannot do without humanitarian aid, but that is the consequence of the latest edict.

In the I.R.C.’s annual report, you write that the “guardrails” protecting the world’s refugees are being eroded. Can you define what you mean by “guardrails?”

Guardrails are the buffers that prevent disaster turning into catastrophe. And they are weakening. Social safety nets are weakening. Overseas aid is weakening. The laws of war are being weakened. So we are saying we need to strengthen the guardrails because that’s the way to at least mitigate some of the worst symptoms of conflict and disaster.

Obviously, the best case is to get to the roots of the problems and reinvent diplomacy to try and tackle these civil wars of source. But that’s easier said than done.

How do you avoid feeling numbed by the huge number of people in need of your advocacy — tens of millions?

If you’re running an NGO [nongovernmental organization], you’re trying to make the world better one person, one family at a time. So we are working from the ground level.

And I think second, if you look at the statistics, you can get depressed. If you look at the people, you have hope. And that’s the way we try and run the I.R.C.: from the lessons of the fortitude and the determination and the creativity of the people who are our clients.

In 2013, you left British politics to head the I.R.C. Do you feel you are able to effect more change leading an NGO than you could in politics?

No. It’s different. If you’re in politics, you look at the big picture and the danger is that you lose sight of the people. If you are at an NGO, you see the people, but the danger is that you lose sight of the big picture.

Not all the news about refugee policy is negative. As chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel offered to absorb nearly a million people fleeing the Syrian conflict. Colombia has provided a haven for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans. The member states of the European Union have been welcoming to the Ukrainians. What can we learn from these examples of generosity?

That when people and governments decide to manage a refugee crisis, they can — even when the flow is very fast and very large. Generosity — and I don’t like using that word — has been an enormous benefit to the societies that have done it. Just think about America and what refugees have done. But you have to manage the system properly. The U.S. southern border is not managed properly. It takes six to 10 weeks to process an asylum claim in Germany. It takes three to four years in America. That’s the recipe for backlash.

Finally, treat individuals with dignity because they can become patriotic and productive citizens when they are given some humanity.

Any final thoughts for the Davos conferees?

I think we are facing the globalization of risk. At the moment, it is being matched by the nationalization of resilience. And so, what I want global leaders to do is fill that gap. Stepping up and into global responsibility to match global power is the essential demand that we make in Davos.

Claudia Dreifus teaches science journalism at Columbia University’s School of Professional Studies. She had previously taught at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and is a frequent contributor to The New York Times.

A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 17, 2023
As Humanitarian Crises Escalate, So Do Demands to End Them
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Afghanistan & Haiti: failed as autocracies and democracies

January 10, 2023

Anatol Lieven

Responsible Statecraft

DECEMBER 27, 2022

Both have intractable governing problems, but that doesn’t mean the West should keep intervening to save them.

Recent months have seen escalating clashes along Pakistan’s disputed border with Afghanistan. In the latest, on December 11 and 15, civilians on both sides were killed when Taliban forces fired into Pakistan and Pakistani troops retaliated.

These clashes have their origins in three factors: the presence in Afghanistan of Pakistani Islamist rebels who launch attacks across the border into Pakistan, Pakistani attempts to fence off the border to limit militant attacks, smuggling, and illegal mass migration (more than 250,000 Afghans have fled near-famine conditions in Afghanistan since the Taliban took control last year), and the radical reduction in Western aid.

The Taliban, like every previous Afghan government, has also refused to accept the legality of the frontier that was established by the British Empire. The border fence has caused violent resentment among Afghans living along the border, as well as some of their neighboring Pakistani Pashtun fellow-tribesmen.

Clashes between the Taliban and Pakistan are on the face of it surprising. Pakistani support was instrumental in helping the Taliban take over Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, and during the U.S. and Western intervention in Afghanistan, Pakistani shelter of the Taliban played an important part in allowing them to continue their struggle. Some Western and Afghan government propagandists even accused the Taliban (quite falsely) of being mere Pakistani puppets. The problems that Pakistan has faced since the Taliban victory last year have therefore led to a measure of Schadenfreude in the West.

This is misplaced. For what Afghanistan exemplifies is a wider problem that may reach terrifying dimensions in the years to come: that of societies that while ferociously determined to resist intervention and even influence from outside, are themselves incapable of generating or accepting effective modern state institutions. At the time of writing, another extreme case of this is developing on America’s own doorstep, in Haiti.

The modern history of Afghanistan is not only the history of the defeat of successive attempts at outside intervention — whether British, Soviet, or American. More importantly, it has been the history of the failure of successive Afghan regimes to create an effective modern state.

Thus in the 1920s, the attempt of King Amanullah to bring accelerated modernization led to a revolt of the tribes under the banner of conservative religious reaction. Following his overthrow, a more limited and cautious royal regime was established. In the decades after the Second World War, with the help of U.S. and Soviet aid and modern weaponry, this state expanded its power; but it proved incapable of meeting the increased expectations that it had generated in sections of society.

The collapse of dynastic rule in the 1970s led to the catastrophic Communist attempt at accelerated modernization, resulting in another conservative revolt and the eventual victory of the Taliban. Their overthrow by the United States after 9/11 led to yet another attempt at modernization (this time coupled with an attempt at “democracy”), with the results that we now see before us.

The Taliban have certain advantages denied to previous state-builders: their deep rootedness in the conservative Pashtun rural society of eastern and southern Afghanistan; and the tremendous prestige that accrues from their defeat of an infidel superpower. Their ambitions when it comes to state-building are also limited, which given Afghan realities may also be an advantage. Essentially they want to create a state with basic internal peace, which in cultural terms adheres strictly to their version of conservative Islam.

They are however completely incapable of developing Afghanistan economically. As the population surges and public misery grows, this is bound to undermine their rule. Moreover, their limited form of rule allows other armed militant groups to exist, like the Pakistani Taliban and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which are tolerated by the Taliban because they do not threaten their rule, they do threaten all Afghanistan’s neighbors. For very obvious reasons, however, none of these neighbors is likely to think of intervening directly in Afghanistan to deal with these threats.

The American establishment clearly wishes to forget that Afghanistan ever existed, and since Kabul is 7,000 miles from the United States this could be possible. Americans will however find it more difficult to ignore state collapse in their own backyard. Haiti is in many ways very different from Afghanistan, but the underlying problem is the same: the perennial failure of attempts at modern state-building, both domestic and through outside intervention. And while Haiti, unlike Afghanistan, has not incubated a terrorist threat to its neighbors, like Afghanistan it has generated huge numbers of migrants and great problems of criminality. Haiti over the past 40 years has seen repeated coups and rebellions.

A brief U.S. military intervention in 1994-95 (until 2000 continued as part of a UN mission) failed to solve or even seriously mitigate any of Haiti’s underlying problems . Given its extremely limited numbers, funding, mandate, and timeframe, there was never any serious prospect that it would. Haiti today lacks an effective government and is dominated by criminal gangs whose warfare and crimes are a nightmare for most of the population.

Haiti might on the surface seem a much more suitable area for U.S. military intervention than Afghanistan. There is no terrorist threat from Haiti, so American forces would not face anything like the fanatically determined resistance of the Taliban. Nor would Haitian gangs receive support and protection from outside powers.

But to do any good, a U.S. intervention would have to be in effect permanent, and involve a government that would for the foreseeable future be staffed by Americans. Every short-term effort followed by a “restoration of democracy” has failed and will go on failing.

In principle, the fact that Haiti is a neighbor of the United States should make this possible. The United States cannot simply walk away from Haiti, any more than Pakistan can walk away from Afghanistan. In practice, however, such a long-term U.S. intervention however looks highly improbable, barring a radical transformation in American attitudes and priorities. Especially after the miserable experiences of Afghanistan and Iraq, the American public and Congress are extremely unlikely to accept such an open-ended commitment.

Moreover, the creation of what would in effect be a permanent colonial government would not only challenge contemporary ideas of national sovereignty, it would radically contradict the present largely bipartisan U.S. doctrine of a world divided between democracies and hostile autocracies.

And that is indeed a key point about the examples of Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and elsewhere: the complete irrelevance of U.S. (as previously Soviet) ideological nostrums to these societies. Both democratic and authoritarian regimes have failed to create effective states in these countries, and on the record so far will continue to fail.

As climate change, coupled with population growth poverty and water shortages, undermines more and more vulnerable states around the world, this problem of failed states in recalcitrant societies is likely to grow, until it becomes a dire threat to all organized and developed societies — once again, irrespective of whether these states are democracies or autocracies.

Above all, such failed or failing states are likely to generate immense waves of migration — as we see already in western Africa and Central America. As the example of Afghan migration to Pakistan indicates, this is not simply a problem for the West, but for every state around the world. The most ferocious anti-immigrant (as opposed to security) border in the world is probably that created by India to stop migrants from Bangladesh, more than 1,200 of whom have been killed by Indian security forces over the past 20 years. Once again, this is a problem that transcends ideological systems, to which neither democracies nor autocracies have found answers that manage to be both effective and reasonably humane, and which demands the combined attention of the international community.

Judging by U.S. behavior during the Cold War, American administrations will be tempted to meddle in these failed states for geopolitical reasons, picking one tribe or gang as anti-Chinese or anti-Russian and then blessing them as “democratic,” as President Reagan notoriously blessed the Afghan Mujahedin. This will make local conflicts even worse. Instead, we should recognize that effective statehood is a fragile thing, and that all countries that have achieved it have a common interest in defending it. In the future, this will also mean finding ways to cooperate in managing the problems emanating from places like Haiti and Afghanistan.

Afghanistan & Haiti: failed as autocracies and democracies
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There’s Nothing for Me Here,’ My Mother Hears Again

January 9, 2023
Jamil Jan Kochai

The New York Times

8 Jan 2023

Last September, 13 months after the Taliban takeover, my family and I flew into Kabul one morning as many of our relatives were on the cusp of fleeing the city. We hoped to see them before they parted.

My uncle Fawad and cousin Hashmat picked me up from the airport parking lot. The dire state of the economy became evident almost as soon as we entered the city. Groups of children rushed our car, begging for money or food. Poverty in Kabul has been severe for decades. The billions of dollars that flooded into the country during the American occupation rarely reached impoverished Afghans, as income inequality grew throughout the years. And yet, at least in Kabul, I had never witnessed such wanton desperation on the streets.

Children waited at bakeries for a single loaf of bread. There were makeshift markets filled with desperate, newly impoverished families, selling mattresses and furniture and their own clothing. Fawad and Hashmat — both young and unmarried — bemoaned the collapse of the economy, wondering why America had cut a deal with the Taliban only to punish everyday Afghans with their brutal economic sanctions. “We used to say, ‘Deny us bread but give us peace,’ but now that we have peace, we realize that we need the bread, too,” Hashmat remarked and laughed.

Four years had passed since my last visit to Afghanistan, and so much had changed. I had 100 questions about the American sanctions, the fighting in Panjshir, the restrictions on women and the future of the country. My family members in Kabul felt hopeless. Suicide bombings continued to maim and kill in the cities. Children were dying of malnutrition in underfunded hospitals. The Taliban had shut down high schools for girls — even though Islamic scholars across Afghanistan have criticized the decision — and many of my young female relatives felt despondent about their futures. The occupation had ended, but the aftereffects of the long, American war were still ravaging the country.

For many Afghans, life has become untenable. There is little work. The costs of food, gas and everyday goods have skyrocketed. The countryside suffers from flood or drought — side effects of global warming caused by large industrial nations. And groups affiliated with the so-called Islamic State continue to carry out attacks on vulnerable communities. Although many Afghans choose to struggle through these incredible adversities, others have been forced to flee.

In 1982, during the Soviet-Afghan war, my parents escaped Soviet bombings in Logar Province, south of Kabul, and fled across the border into Pakistan. A decade later, I was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, as civil war raged in Afghanistan. Shortly thereafter, my family and I immigrated to the United States, integrating ourselves into one of the largest refugee communities in the world.

More than 40 years have passed since the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, leading to the deaths of as many as two million Afghans. And yet, to this day, the Afghan people have been seemingly condemned to perpetual displacement. War after war, invasion after invasion, Afghans are still seeking asylum.

Fawad dreams of escaping Afghanistan. He has been unemployed for years, living off odd jobs and funds sent to him by relatives in America. He was planning a trip to Brazil, where he would begin an arduous journey through South and Central America to eventually reach the United States.

According to a report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more than six million Afghans have been driven out of their homes or their country by conflict, violence and poverty. Legal routes into safer countries like the United States have dried up as the international community continues to isolate and disengage with the Taliban government. Many Afghans, including my own family members, feel compelled to take dangerous pathways through South American jungles, Eastern European woods or deadly waterways.

Journeying through the Darién Gap between North and South America has become an increasingly popular pathway for Afghan migrants unable to attain a visa for America. My mother warned Fawad about the dangers of the Darién Gap, but he wasn’t dissuaded. “There’s nothing for me here,” he said. “I have to leave.”

In our rented apartment in Kart-e-Char, a neighborhood in western Kabul, we were met by my mother’s sisters: Nafeesa, who lived nearby, and Marijan, who had traveled from our home village in Logar. My aunt Nafeesa is tall and stout and quick-witted. From a young age, I learned not to tease her because her jokes packed a wallop. Nafeesa and her husband, Qayoum, a slim bureaucrat from Logar, lived in the Kart-e-Naw neighborhood of Kabul with four brilliant daughters, all of whom were in danger of losing out on an education.

Her eldest daughter, a 14-year-old, could no longer attend her classes because the Taliban had barred girls from high school. As of Dec. 20, the Taliban banned Afghan women from all higher educational institutions as well.

Nafeesa and Qayoum refused to give up on their daughter’s education. They paid for online English courses and signed her up at the local madrasa. Qayoum supported his daughter’s dreams of one day enrolling at a university. Now he contemplated fleeing the country.

“Let me tell you,” he said. “You never know what God has planned.”

The night before the fall of the Afghan government in August 2021, Qayoum spent hours at his office, filling out biometric forms for last-minute passports — though he hadn’t been paid in months. By 2 in the morning, he had completed about 150 passports.

With the Taliban conquering provinces throughout Afghanistan, Qayoum was dubious about the late-night assignment, but he couldn’t imagine that the entire Afghan government was about to abandon Kabul. In the morning, unemployed for the first time in a decade, he saw the streets filled with Afghans. “The Taliban are coming,” some of them screamed. President Ashraf Ghani had fled, and the Taliban were entering Kabul.

Afghans were so panicked, Qayoum recalled, that their vehicles veered left and right and drove directly into oncoming traffic. Several accidents jammed the roads and families were abandoning their cars to run on foot. Everyone was headed to the airport. Qayoum, too, was struck by panic. He thought he might be shot in the streets.

Fortunately, the Taliban didn’t come for Qayoum. There were no public executions in Kabul — as had occurred in Kabul during the Afghan civil wars in the 1990s — and Qayoum’s fear of total urban warfare didn’t come to fruition. The Taliban carried out raids to search for weapons all throughout the city. When they arrived at Qayoum’s home, they scoured his rooms, found nothing suspicious, and left his family alone. “In the beginning, the Taliban seemed different,” Qayoum said. “They didn’t bother people. They promised to forgive their enemies. They promised not to close schools. I thought things might work out.”

The promises, however, didn’t last.

During my last days in Kabul, my 30-year-old uncle Fawad, the former bodyguard, was on the cusp of fleeing Afghanistan. He sat before me one evening, quieter than ever, rising up every few minutes to go outside and smoke a cigarette. He seemed anxious. Fawad wasn’t in the best shape. He had knee problems and hip pain and weak lungs and a terrible temper that often got him into trouble. But the worst part might have been that he was traveling alone. You could see it in his face. He didn’t want to leave home.

My 24-year-old cousin Hashmat felt compelled to stay and help his parents on their farm in Logar, a largely rural province in eastern Afghanistan. He currently worked as a taxi driver, a farmer, a carpenter, a mechanic and a merchant selling homegrown produce. His two older brothers, Jawed and Nadeem, studied at universities in Kabul but never found employment in their respective fields. Jawed sold produce in Logar and Nadeem worked illegally in Istanbul. When Hashmat finished high school, he decided not to attend college and started working to support his family. For him, a college education just wasn’t practical. He needed income, and he needed it fast.

Throughout my time in Logar, Hashmat drove me around and told stories about the war. He pointed out crumbling bases and locations of recent battles. It felt surreal to return to my family’s village after so many years. The last time I had visited Logar in 2017, firefights and bombings were so constant, I only had a few minutes to visit the graves of my relatives. The local village market and all of the roads had been eerily empty. But Hashmat assured me that Logar had become peaceful again. The roads and the market were packed, and everywhere I walked, I met old relatives and friends.

Hashmat was happy about the tenuous peace in Logar. Over the last several years, he had lived through the brunt of the American occupation, dodging bullets in fields, avoiding corpses on roads, all while attempting to appease the Afghan government forces that haunted his village. His house had been scarred with bullets and severely damaged by Afghan commandos. He faced harassment at checkpoints and was once severely beaten by militiamen. He used to watch the sky, wondering if an American bomb might fall on his head. But now he could walk in his own fields again. The constant firefights had all but ceased. He was no longer afraid of driving produce from Logar to Kabul, a trip that had once been a death wish.

While Hashmat seemed cautiously optimistic about the condition of his country, his older brother, Nadeem, was determined not to return. He had fled Afghanistan in 2020, at what my family recalls as the height of the violence in Logar, and had been living illegally in Istanbul since. It was an arduous and suffocating existence. He worked all day in a factory and then spent his evenings cooped up in a small apartment with several other Afghan refugees. The Turkish police were targeting Afghans for deportation. Nadeem was planning to smuggle himself into Europe again.

The last time Nadeem had made the attempt, he was captured at the Bulgarian border by Turkish police officers. They brutally beat him, tortured him and stole his possessions. In a few days he intended to take a new route with a new smuggler, and he assured his family he was going to make it. His mother, Marijan, wasn’t so certain. She had lived almost her entire life in Logar and had survived two occupations, three wars and the collapse of six different governments. And yet, she could never imagine leaving Logar. “I just want him home,” she said. “It’s where he belongs.”

My aunt Nafeesa and her husband Qayoum had their hearts set on England. They had recently received good news from the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy program in Britain. There seemed to be a real possibility of relocation.

By the time I touched back down in Sacramento, Fawad was on his way to Iran, Nadeem was crossing the Turkish border, Qayoum was waiting for a call in Pakistan and Marijan had returned to Logar.

Scattered across the world, my mother’s family waits for visas and court dates and smugglers. They trek through woods and rush past borders in a desperate attempt to escape the violence and poverty generated by the same countries they hope will accept them. For now, my mother sits by her phone and prays for word of their arrival.

Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of the novel, “99 Nights in Logar,” and the short story collection, “The Haunting of Hajji Hotak,” a finalist for the National Book Award.

There’s Nothing for Me Here,’ My Mother Hears Again
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