From Land-grabbing to Haircuts: The decrees and edicts of the Taleban supreme leader 

July 16, 2023

Kate Clark

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The decrees, edicts and instructions of Taleban supreme leader Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, from 2016, when he became leader, to May 2023, have been published. They make fascinating reading, tracing some of what the leadership felt was important to ban, make obligatory, organise or administer during the insurgency and since recapturing power. Some themes are repeated – land and land-grabbing, administrative corruption and treatment of prisoners, including using torture without a court order. Several orders enjoin Taleban fighters to good behaviour, such as not letting hair grow below the shoulders, not using profanities and avoiding cronyism and ethnocentrism. Alongside AAN’s English translation of the decrees, which can be found in the Resources section of our website, Kate Clark has been delving into their substance to see what they tell us about the Taleban’s leader and the Islamic Emirate.

65 decrees, edicts and instructions from Mullah Hibatullah have been published in the Official Gazette (announcement here). The original orders in Dari and Pashto, as well as an unofficial English translation by AAN are available in the Resources section of the AAN website. A list of the orders (brief title and number) can also be found here.

A forthcoming report on Taleban publications will examine, a book by their Chief Justice, Abdul Hakim Haqqani, “Al-Emarat al-Islamiya wa Nidhamuha” (The Islamic Emirate and its System of Governance), which may be the fullest and most authoritative account yet of the Taleban’s vision of governance.

Ruling by decree is nothing new. The Islamic Republic’s presidents, Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani, and before them, the first Taleban amir, Mullah Omar, also issued decrees and edicts which had the force of law. According to the 2004 Constitution of the Islamic Republic, the National Assembly, with its two houses, was the highest legislative organ in the country (the cabinet could also suggest laws to MPs). The president could issue decrees of two types: administrative (regulatory) and legislative only in emergencies and which were supposed to be temporary and needed parliamentary approval (if MPs voted a decree down, it would be rescinded). The cabinet could also issue regulations, and ministries could issue policy documents, such as action plans and other administrative documents, without the need for approval by the cabinet or parliament.”

The Islamic Emirate’s legislative process is far less clear and there is far less literature on its nature and organisation. Existing literature suggests that among the Emirate’s key attributes are that “all branches of government are subject to the authority of the emir” and that “basic rights are defined/limited by Sharia as interpreted by the emir/leadership” (see this USIP report).

Hibatullah is the highest authority in the Emirate, and his orders are the law. Under the Emirate, there is no parliament and legislative, executive and judicial powers are the exclusive purview of the amir. The 2004 constitution has apparently been suspended (according to UNAMA, quoting the acting Deputy Minister of Justice on 22 September 2022 in which he said it was unnecessary (see TOLO News, “Officials: Afghanistan Does Not Need a Constitution”, quoted in UNAMA’s May 2023 report “Corporal Punishment and the Death Penalty in Afghanistan” p10). Islamic judges and muftis, including the Emirate’s fatwa-issuing institution, the Dar al-Ifta, are also powerful and their rulings are enforceable. Relevant departments have the authority to draw up legislation. It is reviewed by the Ministry of Justice and a special commission before being sent to Hibatullah for sign-off (see decree (9) on page 67 of AAN’s unofficial translation dated 24 October 2022, which sets out the process and principles for enacting legislative documents).

Like his predecessors, the numbering of Hibatullah’s orders is inconsistent, for example, in his first year as leader, he issued four orders, numbered 82, 85, 86 and 87, with 83 and 84 missing. One of the orders from 2022 also refers to an earlier unpublished set of instructions by name, date and volume number: it had forbidden officials from holding “needless and lavish” wedding ceremonies when they married for a second, third or fourth time. The 2022 order instructed the Taleban’s ‘morality police’, Amr bil Maruf, to identify those disobeying instructions and report them to the leadership.[1]

Karzai and Ghani both issued decrees that were never published. It was unclear whether this was because they were too sensitive or too trivial or just because the system was not standardised. Maybe this is also the case for Hibatullah.[1] Whether or not this is a complete list, there is much in the 65 published orders[2] that is of interest: they point to what was important at the time to the leadership.

The orders span the last seven years, with the first issued in 2016, when Hibatullah took over as Taleban supreme leader following the killing of his predecessor, Mullah Akhtar Mansur, in an American drone attack (Hibatullah’s second order accepts and endorses all of Mansur’s orders). 19 orders were issued during the insurgency (four in 2016, six in 2017, none in 2018, seven in 2019 and two in 2020), and the bulk since the Taleban and Hibatullah captured power in August 2021.

The insurgency-era decrees are mostly to do with keeping control of fighters and commanders and ironing out arbitrary or potentially problematic behaviour. Some cover conduct in war – how to treat prisoners, not growing long hair and not using profanities in communications – this is “inappropriate” and gives the enemy “an excuse for insulting the mujahedin [as the Taleban call themselves].” Also important is curbing behaviour in the field which would harm higher-order priorities, for example, accepting government soldiers who have switched sides, even if they bring no weapons with them, and not persecuting defectors; the leadership wanted to encourage defections and government soldiers and officials needed to have confidence that amnesties would be honoured to come over.

Other insurgency-era orders are to do with quasi-state functions, sometimes with an apparent eye to trying to prevent administrative corruption in the ranks, for example the ban on seizing land, the order to hand over Emirate property to one’s successor upon redeployment, not publishing books without the leadership’s permission and the proper use of seals. One of the decrees, about how to certify a person is missing so that a widow can re-marry (the decree only refers to dead male spouses), looks to be a response to a need for legal clarity in an organisation which saw so many of its members killed.

After the Taleban’s capture of power and its transformation, once again, into Afghanistan’s rulers, many more of Hibatullah’s orders have been to do with administration and ensuring order within the state: which ministries should report to which of the acting Prime Minister’s deputies, relocating departments and courts, defining the duties of various government bodies, defining the stages legislative documents go through and ordering the Supreme Court to send its decisions to the leadership. A good number look to be trying to head off administrative corruption, while many deal with the security services, including purging the ranks of “undesirable and corrupt people.”

However, it is noticeable that the 46 orders issued since the Taleban’s return to power are not aimed at redesigning the administration of the Afghan state. The ideology and aims of the Emirate certainly represent a very clear break from the past. The Emirate’s leaders, from the amir down to many in civil service middle management, are also new to their posts, along with almost all the security forces and judiciary personnel. Yet, the Emirate has largely kept the administrative and financial systems and institutions of the Republic intact, and Hibatullah’s orders are not those of a leader seeking to overturn them. Rather, the changes they institute are largely marginal to the state’s bureaucracy, financial system and administrative systems, aimed not at nullifying them, but, as the Taleban presumably see it, improving what they have inherited.

Some themes running through the orders

Hibatullah appears particularly concerned with two areas of governance, both as leader of an insurgent movement and later ruler of a state – firstly, the courts and secondly, the fighters who would become the Emirate’s security services – with some overlap, for example, the treatment of prisoners of war and the role of military courts.

This attention is hardly surprising. The Taleban’s founding legend, from 1994 Kandahar, is that its formation was prompted by the need to deliver justice and free the people from tyranny. During the insurgency, Taleban courts, whether fixed or mobile, have been the key service the movement has delivered, including during the insurgency in areas under its control or influence (education, health and other services continued to be delivered by the Islamic Republic, as AAN’s 2018-2021 series on service delivery in insurgency-influenced districts detailed). As to the orders’ focus on fighters/the security services, from 1994 until 2021, the movement’s primary activity was fighting. Much of the leadership’s attention has naturally been devoted to organising and controlling its large body of armed men. Some themes emerging in the orders are looked at in more detail below.

Land grabbing and other corrupt administrative practices/abuses of power

Land is the subject of six out of the 65 orders – roughly ten per cent of the total – and features both before and after the takeover: state land can be leased to the public (2017) and; private land must not be seized by the ‘mujahedin’ or anyone else (2019). After the takeover, the first two published orders concerned land. In the first five weeks after the Taleban captured the Afghan capital, Hibatullah ordered the end to what he said had been “the norm” under the “puppet administration” – the usurpation of state land. He also ordered provincial governors “to rigorously prevent the grabbing of Emarati [state] land and hand over usurpers to face Sharia law.”

A month later, in October 2021, he again banned land-grabbing, this time for land whose ownership was not clear. Only the supreme amir, the order decreed, “Based on necessity and expediency, can give [such land] to a member (of the Muslim community) as property.” The decree drew a parallel with what it said was the amir’s right to “withdraw from the public coffer [bait ul-maal]” and presumably give money to someone, again because of expediency. This is something also banned for others, elsewhere in this body of orders. In March 2023, the ban on officials selling land, or transferring land to individuals or corporations, was repeated unless there was a specific decree from the amir.[3]

Land has always been and will remain a source of controversy and conflict in Afghanistan. Throughout the war, since 1978, it has been seized by successive administrations and victorious commanders, creating layers of claims and counterclaims. Even before the Saur Coup, rulers in Kabul ceded land, typically to particular ethnic groups and tribes for political reasons, making ownership an even more historic source of lingering conflict.[4]That land has emerged again as an issue requiring the amir’s attention is entirely unsurprising.

Another issue that has appeared both in insurgency-era orders and since the re-establishment of the Emirate concerns state property: officials who are redeployed should not take “office accessories and state equipment,” including vehicles, with them but hand the property over to their successor (2019). In 2022, that ban was repeated twice, and in the second became even stronger and more explicit – a part of a long decree outlining the formation, duties and powers of the Security and Screening Commission, whose main task was to purge the ranks of the security forces, the text said:

Any individual involved in looting or removing without authorisation from the leadership, equipment, military or non-military vehicles, ammunition or gear belonging to the Islamic Emirate will be hunted down and the property of bait ul-maal (public coffer) will be recovered. If felt necessary, they should be expelled from the defence and security organisations and introduced to the military court.

The amir is explicitly excluded both from the ban on taking from the public coffer and the ban on transferring ownership of land. In these areas, Hibatullah has taken on monopoly powers.[5] It is easy to see how new cycles of conflict could be set up by his giving away land, if the transfers are seen as biased or unfair. As to taking from the public coffer, if at scale, this would undermine the public finance system, given that budgeting and ensuring spending does not exceed revenues is so crucial to the steady running of government and stewardship of the economy.

There are also a slew of orders attempting to prevent different types of administrative corruption that have been issued since the Taleban recaptured power and its officials came to control so many resources. They include: a ban on double salaries (2022), that revenues must be collected transparently and then, “to avoid irregularities and chaos,” must be handed over to the Ministry of Finance, with no independent spending of them (2022), the establishment of a National Procurement Commission (October 2022), and various spending limits for ministries and departments set, above which the Commission has to approve procurements (also October 2022) and – because corrupt procurement was still a problem? – a ban on state officials and employees and private companies in which officials and employees have shares or management responsibilities tendering bids for goods, services or gaining contracts for building materials or mines (2023).

A particularly strong decree, quoting a Hadith threatening hell for perpetrators, was issued in 2022, forbidding ‘cronyism’ in public recruitments; officials should not award jobs to their relatives or friends, it said. The message was repeated in a later order that year in a long decree concerning the behaviour and attitudes of the ‘mujahedin’. They are ordered to act only for God, to be pious, fair, kind and just, to eschew arrogance, to “strictly avoid ethnocentrism, regionalism, language-centrism and cronyism and refrain from cheating the public coffer (repeated twice in the same order), to pray in the mosque and support the families of the martyrs. The order appeared aimed at closing the gap between how the movement views its ideal self and the reality on the ground.

Other orders look less concerned with preventing corruption and more to do with ensuring financial matters are regular and systematised: for example, aligning the financial affairs of state bodies when it comes to salaries, e’asha(lunch and other free food provided to staff) and other expenses within the financial system of the Central Bank and Ministry of Finance (2022) and aligning salaries in the three branches of the security services (Ministries of Interior, Defence and the General Directorate of Intelligence) (2022). In the same year, the amir also ordered the Commission of Economy to activate all idle state-owned sources of revenue generation and inform the leadership about them.

Justice: courts, prisoners, punishment and torture

15 orders, or just under a quarter of the total, deal with justice, including the courts, lawyers, prisoners and legislation. Before the takeover, the main focus was on the treatment of prisoners of war, with some orders repeated after the takeover, but concerning prisoners in general.

Hibatullah’s first published order, in June 2016, referred to what he said were recent instances of “captured prisoners of war being arbitrarily subjected to tazir [discretionary][6] or inappropriate punishment and, in some cases, even killing without the knowledge of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’s General Directorate of Courts.” No one has the right to punish a prisoner, the order insisted, nor exempt them from punishment, with the exception of the amir or his deputy. Furthermore, filming the scene of a killing was banned, and if an execution was ordered, it must be by firing.

In 2017, the ban on filming executions was repeated, along with a ban on filming the beating of enemy soldiers and implementing hudud and qisas punishments,[7] and all executions had to be approved by all three tiers of the justice system (primary, appeal and supreme) and the leadership.

Similar orders were given in November 2019 – quoting the Quran and Hadith, to treat captives well – and in November 2020, that “only a Sharia court has the prerogative to decide on the guilt of a suspect and punish criminals.” That order goes on to instruct all officials and mujahedin to pay the utmost attention to two points:

1. No one has the right to beat with sticks, [use] whips [dura] or cables or torture [a person] in any other way without a court order. When mujahedin take someone into custody, be they a political or criminal prisoner, they have no right to punish [that person] without a court order;

2. No one has the right to take photographs of the scene of a punishment or to film it. 

Violators will be “considered criminals,” the decree goes on to say and will be punished for “disobeying Sharia norms and decrees, disturbing public order and defaming the Islamic Emirate.” In 2019, Hibatullah again ordered officials to refrain from torturing, because torture, like tazir punishments, could only be carried out with a court order. Also, suspects must not be kept under investigation for more than a month, unless, again, officials obtain a court order. Without court orders, it says, torture or punishment is “not justice, but oppression [zulm]. Preventing zulm is an obligation [wajeb], while allowing it to happen is forbidden [haram].”

For human rights advocates, this and some of the later orders are significant because, under International Humanitarian Law, torture is always illegal – regardless of whether a court or anyone else has authorised it. Others have deployed torture in Afghanistan in recent years, the United States military and CIA and the Republic’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS) in particular, but they either denied it was happening, insisted what they did was not really torture or implied it was necessary, even though it was illegal. Only the Emirate has been so frank about torturing detainees.[8]

After the takeover, in March 2022, all these commands were repeated: avoid torture and punishment of detainees – both are the “sole prerogative of the courts,” while keeping detainees under investigation was now not permitted beyond ten days, again, unless with a court order.

The frequent repetition of the same commands strongly suggests there has been a continuing problem with torture and arbitrary punishment. The latter has been tracked by UNAMA in its human rights reporting, most recently in a report published on 7 May 2023, which collated evidence both of non-court authorities, eg provincial and district governors, implementing punishments after a formal decision, and non-judicial officials, such as Amr bil Maruf, police and intelligence officials, carrying out punishments ad hoc. (See UNAMA, “UNAMA Brief on Corporal Punishment and the Death Penalty in Afghanistan” and AAN’s analysis.)

Since the takeover, the amir has placed an emphasis on the organisation of the justice system, especially the place of the military courts, setting limits on their jurisdiction (2021), ordering the establishment of an implementation force, merging military courts within the structure of the Supreme Court (2022) and finally, dissolving the Ministry of Defence’s military courts (2022).

Other orders have moved all specialisations in Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) and issuing fatwas from the Ministry of Justice to the Ministry of Higher Education (2022), with Justice also losing the Law Department, this time to the Supreme Court (2022). The time taken for laws to be drafted has been set (2022), as has the time given to law courts to consider cases (2023), while new procedures were established for licensing law firms (2022).

The Emirate’s fighters/security services 

Many of the 65 orders focus on controlling the ‘mujahedin’ and, after the takeover, organising them into security services and purging their ranks. The last published order before the Taleban’s capture of power was a decree liquidating ‘general fronts’, issued in January 2021. Like the mujahedin factions before them, the Taleban recruited and organised themselves organically in a multi-level military hierarchy of district and provincial commanders, ultimately all falling under the movement’s Military Commission. A ‘mahaz’, usually translated – somewhat confusingly as ‘front’ – is a grouping of groups of fighters, totalling anywhere between 200 and 1000 men, led ultimately by a single commander. This was highly useful and effective for organising an insurgency, but was always risky for the leadership as it created the potential for rival centres of power to emerge if a commander’s influence extended too widely. This decree sought to limit fronts to their commander’s own province. It banned recruitment from other provinces and said that any group loyal to a commander, but active in another province should come under the orders of that province’s governor. “General fronts,” it said, were “forbidden in the structure of the Islamic Emirate.[9]

After the takeover, several orders were issued to do with ‘cleansing’ the ranks and ensuring those who fail vetting cannot join other services. The US military did not destroy biometric data gathered from members of the Republic’s Afghan security forces and NDS, which meant the Emirate had a database to work from (see reporting, for example, by Human Rights Watch, on 30 March 2022). In 2021, a new body, the Military Commission, was set up with the task of purging the Emirate’s security forces of “undesirable and corrupt people.” This was followed in 2022 by an order to the security services to register ‘mujahedin’ with biometrics taken and positions and salaries specified. Later that year, a very long and detailed decree set out the duties of another new body, the Security and Screening Commission, also with a mandate to purge.

Conclusion

The orders published in the Official Gazette give us insights into what was important to the leadership at particular moments. Where problems have not been resolved, orders have been repeated, for example, the multiple bans on various types of land-grabbing, officials taking state property when they are redeployed, arbitrary punishment and unauthorised torture.

The body of orders also gives insight into the thinking and principles behind the orders. References to consultations with the ulema and reference to Hanafi jurisprudence feature prominently in the texts. Citations backing up the orders include some verses from the Quran and Hadiths and named collections of fatwas and exegeses of the Quran (tafsir).

There are also insights into what appears to interest or annoy Hibatullah personally. Only ask for a fatwa – a religious decision on a particular matter – officials were told in 2022, if the issue you are concerned about has not already been decided in your ministry’s rules and regulations. Was the leader being pestered for decisions?

Another order, issued just before the start of the new university year in 2022, delved into the minutiae of the religious education curricula of university students, even referring to spelling mistakes in the draft. The length and detail suggest this subject is particularly close to the Taleban’s supreme leader’s heart.

All orders can be read in the Resources section of the AAN website, both the PDF original, issued by the Ministry of Justice and an unofficial English translation by AAN.

Edited by Roxanna Shapour and Jelena Bjelica

References

References
↑1 The Department for Invitation and Guidance on Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice (Dawat wa Ershad Amr bil-Maruf wa Nahi al-Munkar) is typically shortened by Afghans to ‘Amr bil-Maruf’ or, in English, ‘Vice and Virtue’. The same names are also used for its enforcers, also known in English as the Taleban’s ‘morality’ or ‘religious police’.

After the Taleban gained power in August 2023, the department became a ministry and was renamed the Ministry for Invitation and Guidance on Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice and Hearing of Complaints. For more, on this body, see AAN’s report: Sabawoon Samim, “Policing Public Morality: Debates on promoting virtue and preventing vice in the Taleban’s second Emirate”, 15 June 2022.
↑2 There are a few important orders that we know about that have not been published, for example, the insurgency-era set of instructions banning the cultivation of cannabis (4/8/1441 (29 March 2020) No: 86/5), AAN wrote about the ban and published a translated text of the instructions as an annex to our report, “What now for the Taleban and Narcotics? A case study on cannabis”.
↑3  The other decree concerning land ordered the transfer of the Land Department from the Ministry of Urban Development to the Ministry Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock in 2022.
↑4  For more on this, see Liz Alden Wiley’s 2013 paper for AREU, “Land, People, and the State in Afghanistan: 2002 – 2012”, which reviewed the formal treatment of land rights in Afghanistan over the post-Bonn decade (2002–2012). For a recent case study of the historical dispute between Kuchi nomad landlords and settled, largely Hazara farmers and how this was renewed by shifts in power after the Taleban takeover, see Fabrizio Foschini’s 2022 paper for AAN, “Conflict Management or Retribution? How the Taleban deal with land disputes between Kuchis and local communities”.
↑5 In its November 2020 report “The Nature of the Afghan State: Republic vs. Emirate” USIP describes the key attributes of the Emirate as: sovereignty is manifested through implementation of Sharia; leader is chosen by a select Islamic shura, or council;  all branches of government are subject to the authority of the emir; and basic rights are defined/limited by Sharia as interpreted by the emir/leadership. Put another way: “The emir has near absolute executive, legislative and judicial authority, and while hypothetically having the same rights and responsibilities as other Afghan citizens [cites The Taliban’s draft Constitution of 1998, article 59] there are no provisions for accountability. Individual rights and freedoms are also subject to the limits of Sharia as determined by the emir and selected ulema.”
↑6  Islamic law has a standard three-way categorisation of offences and punishments (used by the Republic as well as the Emirate).

Hudud offences have punishments viewed as fixed by the Qur’an or Hadith and are perceived as offences against God; they include zina (sex outside marriage), accusing someone falsely of zina, drinking alcohol and some types of theft.

Qisas is a form of retributive justice between the victim, or their family, and the perpetrator. It allows for equal retaliation in cases of intentional bodily harm, up to and including murder. These crimes may also be forgiven by the victim or their family, or resolved between families with blood money or by giving a bride to the victim or a member of their family in what is called a bad marriage (this type of marriage was banned by Mullah Omar during the Taleban’s first emirate and in December 2021 (decree number 83, vol 1) by Hibatullah.

All other offences are given tazir punishments, which are at the discretion of a judge or ruler.

Different offences within all three categories may receive corporal, capital or other types of punishment.
↑7  For an explanation of hudud and qisas, see the previous footnote.
↑8 See AAN dossier “Detentions in Afghanistan – Bagram, Transfer and Torture.”
↑9 For more on the role and nature of fronts in the insurgency, see AAN guest author Rahmatullah Amiri’s second report in a two-part series from 2016 on how Helmand province was then falling to the Taleban, “Helmand (2): The chain of chiefdoms unravels”.

 

From Land-grabbing to Haircuts: The decrees and edicts of the Taleban supreme leader 
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What the Taliban’s Defensive Public Messaging Reveals

July 13, 2023

 BY: Andrew Watkins

United States Institute of Peace

Thursday, July 13, 2023

In the nearly two years since the Taliban’s takeover, much of the Afghan population continues to struggle to meet basic daily needs amid a severe humanitarian crisis. The Taliban have imposed a raft of draconian restrictions on Afghan women and girls, effectively erasing them from public life. Yet, in a recent public address, the Taliban’s supreme leader, the emir Sheikh Haibatullah Akhundzada, claimed his government has provided Afghan women with a “comfortable and prosperous life.”

Setting aside the controversy of the emir’s brazen claim, his address illuminates some trends that have emerged in the Taliban’s recent public messaging. These trends might shed light on the Taliban’s still-quite-secretive policymaking process, increasingly steered by their reclusive leader.

The Emir’s Eid al-Adha address

For much of the two-decade insurgency against the U.S.-led intervention and partner Afghan state, the emir’s annual Eid addresses (issued for both Islamic holidays, Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha) were the most significant formal public statements issued by the Taliban. The group’s public messaging capacity has grown steadily over the past decade, with a significant jump after the takeover of the country in August 2021, when they appropriated the former government’s state media apparatus. Yet while the Eid addresses are no longer so exclusive, they continue to stand as a some of the only public statements issued by the supreme leader.

As a regularly scheduled formal statement, the emir’s Eid messages have grown relatively repetitious in style and in content over the years. Therefore, new topics or shifts in tone suggest what the Taliban’s leader deems important enough to address.

Overall, the language of this latest Eid message is much more confident in how it describes the accomplishments of the Islamic Emirate, as the Taliban refer to their government — even compared to this year’s earlier Eid message in April. It is more definitive, even celebratory, on how much progress the Emirate has made establishing an “Islamic system.” In previous statements, this had been described more as a work in progress, a still-aspirational goal.

As reported by global media outlets, the most notable new content is a lengthy bullet point arguing that the Emirate’s rule has improved Afghan women’s lives. It counters specific criticisms from Afghans and the outside world, citing new protections for women according to Islamic family law. The paragraph only vaguely refers to the drastic restrictions imposed over the last year, framing them as corrective measures: “the negative aspects of the past 20-year occupation related to women’s Hijab and misguidance will end soon.” A similar note is struck later in the message, on Taliban courts re-imposing Shariah across the country: “society is improving day by day and the evildoers are about to disappear.”

The statement also describes a process for reviewing and formalizing law and regulation. It said that ministries have been tasked to comprehensively review their portfolios for compliance with Shariah — which shall be reviewed by two separate commissions, one headed by the Taliban’s chief justice and the other by the emir himself. Though still quite vague, this may be the most substantive public explanation yet of the Taliban’s attempt to establish a regulatory framework for the state.

The Eid message contains nationalist language that is new for the emir’s office (though it has appeared in other Taliban leaders’ rhetoric, especially the acting minister of defense and son of the Taliban’s founder, Mohammad Yaqoub): “The independence of Afghanistan has been restored once again, brotherhood and national unity have been strengthened.”

Finally, in a bullet point that has been repeated since their takeover, on the Taliban’s desire to have good relations with the outside world, a small rephrase suggests a significant shift. Last year’s Eid al-Adha address specifically named the United States as a recipient of goodwill. This address only said that good relations were desired “with the world, especially with Islamic countries.”

Insights into Kandahar

What does the emir’s address tell us about attitudes and potential future actions among the Taliban’s leadership, especially those based close to the emir in Kandahar?

The confidence of the language extolling the Taliban’s achievements suggests the emir and his trusted circle(s) are much more comfortable with their control over the state, compared to a year ago. As USIP has assessed, many of the emir’s most controversial decrees have been motivated in part by the desire to clamp down on policy variation and potential disobedience. Bold statements on the implementation of Shariah may reveal Kandahar’s increased sense of “ownership” over the policy agenda, along with the emir’s adoption of starkly nationalist language.

More concretely, the proud claims of achievements and the rebuttal of criticism put to rest any hope that the Taliban’s gender-based restrictions will be reversed in the foreseeable future. If anything, the message’s tone carries a sense of triumphalism among the emir’s camp, which will likely drive the further advancement of restrictive social policy. This is reflected in recent edicts such as the impending closure of women’s beauty salons.

But the emir’s sharp rejection of foreign condemnation also reveals that Kandahar has been paying close attention to what the international community thinks. The level of detail on policies toward women suggests he feels compelled to explain and defend his government’s actions to the Afghan people and to the world. Across the emir’s public remarks, including a rare speech in Kabul last year, he characterizes the United States and the West as inherently hostile powers, still actively seeking to prevent the Taliban from achieving their objectives. In other words, defiance is not the same posture as dismissiveness.

Conceptions of the emir as a recluse, cut off from the outside world, may be overly and unhelpfully simplistic. The emir’s attention to foreign relations was underscored by news in late May that he met with the foreign minister of Qatar — a meeting significant enough to be reflected in the Eid address. While it is unclear if the emir will engage in much more high-profile diplomatic exchanges, his trend of comprehensively seeking to consolidate control over the state suggests his influence over foreign relations will grow.

If this hardens the Taliban’s diplomatic posture in some ways, it could also render their government more predictable to the outside world. The past year’s most surprising political developments emerged in moments when the emir overrode his ministers, who were in much closer contact with foreigners and sending signals that were ultimately rendered null and void. With the emir more securely in control, there should be fewer policies he deems necessary to suddenly overturn.

Inconsistent Messaging, and its Impact

The emir’s Eid message is just one notable instance of increasingly defensive Taliban public messaging. Their reactions to recent headlines and official reports have been intense. As noted above on the Eid message, the Taliban’s defensiveness reinforces how closely they follow global media coverage, and how concerned they are by narratives that could undermine their own. While the Taliban’s media arm has long been hyper-attentive to critical press, foreign and Afghan alike, the past few months have marked a particular sharpness in tone.

This has perhaps been exacerbated by the see-saw nature of official reports and remarks from Western institutions: depictions of the Taliban and Afghanistan under their rule have varied wildly from one week to the next. Take statements and reports from the United States and various U.N. bodies, alone:

  • On June 5, the U.N.’s sanctions monitoring team released its annual report focused on the Taliban. Taliban spokesmen reacted most vociferously to the section of the report that alleged infighting and competition, underscoring their historical sensitivity to external perceptions of the group’s cohesion. The report painted the Taliban in such a harshly critical light that U.S. officials joined the Taliban in rejecting its findings — which some in the Taliban held up as evidence of their own legitimacy.
  • On June 19, the U.N.’s special rapporteur for human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, presented his latest report, which characterized Taliban policies as gender apartheid and suggested they may constitute crimes against humanity. On the same day, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) published its latest report, which the Taliban immediately labeled as “propaganda.”
  • Days later on June 21, the head of the U.N. mission in Afghanistan, Rosa Otunbayeva, briefed the U.N. Security Council. She echoed the negative assessment of the Taliban’s gender policies, but also bemoaned inattention to “more positive achievements” taking place under their rule.
  • By July 3, in response to an after-action report about the 2021 U.S. evacuation from Kabul, President Joe Biden asserted the Taliban was helping remove al-Qaida as a threat. The Taliban held up Biden’s remarks as an “acknowledgment of reality.”

The United States, allied donor states, and the U.N.’s global leadership are all seeking a more effective way to tackle challenges in Afghanistan, some of them directly posed by the Taliban’s posture. Since their takeover (and long before), the Taliban have been characterized often as obstinate and unwilling to bend to demands from the international community. The key to breaking through may lie within the Taliban’s kneejerk defense of their own legitimacy. This impulse is so intense that the group is willing to cite Western officials whenever they offer positive remarks, even at the expense of providing conspiratorial propaganda fodder to the Islamic State and many other Afghans with anti-Taliban sentiments.

Doing so, however, will require strategic thinking about communications from the United States and other key international institutions and stakeholders. Each of the above actors are a critical part of monitoring and holding the Taliban accountable. Clearly, their findings prompt a reaction from the Taliban — most obviously in their public messaging, but likely in less visible ways as well. While the independence of monitoring bodies should be preserved, that impact should be carefully considered and coordinated as much as possible.

What the Taliban’s Defensive Public Messaging Reveals
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Books are losing value in Afghanistan – this scares me

July 9, 2023

Hujjatullah Zia

A Kabul-based journalist

Al Jazeera
Published On 9 Jul 2023
My country, where the pursuit of knowledge was always venerated, is descending into darkness.

It has been almost two years since the Taliban took over Kabul. I, like many Afghans who worked hard to attain a good education, am struggling. Knowledge seems to be losing its value and books are no longer considered a precious possession.

When Taliban fighters arrived in the Afghan capital in August 2021, many of my friends rushed to the airport to try to leave, seeing no prospect for themselves in their home country anymore. The brain drain was immense.

People with masters’ degrees, PhDs, with multiple published books, professors, educators, medical doctors, engineers, scientists, writers, poets, painters – many learned people fled. A colleague of mine – Alireza Ahmadi, who worked as a reporter – also joined the crowd at the airport.

Before he left, he wrote on his Facebook page that he had sold 60 of his books on a variety of subjects for 50 Afghanis (less than $1). He never made it out of the country; he was killed in the bombing of the airport by the Islamic State in Khorasan Province.

I, too, decided to give away all my books – all 300 hundred of them, covering topics like international law, human rights, women’s rights and the English language. I donated them to public libraries, thinking that in a country ruled by the Taliban, they would be of no value to me.

I started searching for ways to leave the country. Evacuation was not an option for me so I decided to go to Iran, hoping I could find safe haven there like millions of other Afghans. But like my fellow countrymen and women, I faced contempt and hostility there. I soon lost all hope that I would be able to make a living in Iran. But I did find something that kept me going – my old love for books.

Upon returning, I started working on a book about the political rights of women within the international legal system and within Islam, which I managed to complete in about a year. I sent my manuscript to different publishers, but was repeatedly turned down because they found the subject too sensitive and thought that getting permission to publish it would be impossible.

Finally, Ali Kohistani of Mother Press agreed to take the book. He prepared the needed documentation and submitted the manuscript to the Taliban Ministry of Information and Culture to request formal permission to publish. Soon after, the committee tasked with book review sent me a long list of questions and critiques that I had to address.

I revised the book along the feedback they sent, but that was not enough to get permission. It has been five months now that we have waited for a final response and my despair is growing by the day.

Kohistani has gone to the ministry many times to inquire about the manuscript, with no results. He has told me that he has five other books he wants to publish this year but none of them have been cleared by the ministry.

Other publishers are also suffering from the arbitrariness of the commission’s decisions and long delays. They say books that the Taliban want to publish and that fall within their ideology do not face the same challenges. They see in this fraught process an attempt to suppress any thought that disagrees with the Taliban’s thinking.

Publishing permission delays and censorship are by far not the only problems Afghanistan’s book industry is suffering from.

Scores of bookstores and publishing houses have shut down in the past two years. In the book compound in the Pul-e-Surkh area of Kabul, which I use to frequent before the Taliban takeover, the majority of bookstores have now shut down.

The Taliban’s decision to ban girls and women from attending high school and university means they are no longer buying books as much. Boys and young men have also dropped out of school and universities, being demotivated to pursue an education that cannot guarantee them a job. This has severely shrunken the customer base of booksellers.

On top of that, the Taliban government has imposed high taxes on book sales, which have dwindled even further the declining income of bookstore owners and publishers.

Overnight, Afghan book publishing has gone from being a flourishing sector – perhaps the most successful homegrown industry – to a struggling and risky business venture. Afghans have gone from being avid readers to not being able to afford books. I have gone from being a proud author and book owner to a despaired man who has tried and failed to hold on to an intellectual life in Afghanistan.

It is extremely painful to see this state of affairs in Afghanistan – a country with a long literary history and tradition. This land gave the world the likes of Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi (also known as Rumi), Ibn Sina Balkhi (also known as Avicenna), and Hakim Sanai Ghaznavi (also known as Sanai).

Reading, writing and disseminating knowledge were always highly regarded in my country. Afghan rulers of different dynasties have respected the freedom of thought and supported learning and knowledge production. Censorship, restricting education and devaluing books were never part of the Afghan tradition or culture.

No country in world history has ever prospered when its rulers had suppressed knowledge, education and free thought. Afghanistan is moving towards darkness and ignorance and that scares me. Killing books and killing knowledge will have horrible consequences for the future of this country.

Hujjatullah Zia is a journalist and senior writer in Daily Outlook Afghanistan Newspaper
Books are losing value in Afghanistan – this scares me
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No Food For Hope: Afghanistan’s Child Malnutrition Dilemma in 2023

July 7, 2023

Fabrizio Foschini • Rohullah Sorush

United States Institute of Peace

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The time of the summer harvest has come, bringing with it some temporary relief to millions of Afghan households struggling to feed themselves. Standards of living, which had already worsened well before the Taleban takeover of August 2021, plunged further with their capture of power and the resulting economic collapse. The impact was most keenly felt by the under-fives and pregnant or lactating mothers. Rates of child malnutrition have soared. Diminishing aid budgets and the recent announcement by the World Food Programme that its already reduced rations will shrink again by the end of October unless it gets more funding are fuelling fears that the worse is yet to come. In an attempt to better understand child malnutrition in Afghanistan Fabrizio Foschini and Rohullah Sorush (with input from Gulhan Durzai) have been scrutinising the statistics and hearing from healthcare professionals and parents and finding out how it varies over both time and geography.

When it comes to child malnutrition, specialised terminology is unavoidable. We have put together a glossary explaining the terms in the infographics in this report. Briefly, some of the acronyms used in the literature and in this report are: Global Acute Malnutrition (GAM), which is made up of Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM) and Moderate Acute Malnutrition (MAM).

Afghanistan has long struggled with poverty and food insecurity, problems compounded by poor transport infrastructure and conflict which has hampered and fractured trade and aid logistics. These characteristics have historically made the remoter provinces of the country more prone to malnutrition. Yet all areas have suffered from the collapse of the Afghan economy following the Taleban takeover in August 2021. As documented in the three-instalment AAN series “Living in a Collapsed Economy” between 2021 and 2022 (see here, here and here), the livelihoods of nearly all classes of people have worsened. Three consecutive years of drought have only exacerbated food insecurity for many (see AAN reporting here and here).

According to the World Food Programme (WFP), Afghanistan is currently at its highest risk of famine in a quarter of a century, with nearly 20 million people – more than half of its population acutely food-insecure, including more than 6.1 million people who are on the brink of famine-like conditions. The situation has reached unprecedented emergency levels, and as always, it is taking a high toll, especially on children, with some 3.2 million under 5s and 840,000 pregnant and lactating women are suffering from severe or moderate acute malnutrition, according to the revised 2023 humanitarian response plan.

According to UNICEF, Afghanistan has one of the world’s highest mortality rates among under-fives. The World Health Organisation estimates that every day in Afghanistan, some 167 infants die of preventable diseases, while Save the Children has reported a 47 per cent increase in the number of malnourished children treated at its mobile health clinics from January to September 2022 (from 2,500 to 4,270). While food insecurity is the major driver in child and maternal mortality, lack of access to proper healthcare and medicine also makes illnesses such as pneumonia and measles so deadly in Afghanistan.

Child Malnutrition Glossary
Child Malnutrition Glossary

The most recent forecast from the Integrated Food Security Phases Classification (IPC) [1], the global standard for assessing food insecurity, “Afghanistan: Acute Malnutrition Situation for September October 2022 and Projection for April 2023”, was published in October 2022. It forecasted that in April 2023, 875,224 Afghan children would be suffering from Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM) and 2,347,802 from Moderately Acute Malnutrition (MAM), while 804,365 pregnant and lactating women would also have acute malnutrition. The maps below show the situation in autumn 2022 and the progress of malnutrition across the country throughout winter-spring 2023.

The nearing harvest will temporarily reduce food insecurity (as shown by the projected food insecurity estimates by the IPC) and somewhat ease malnutrition across the country. However, to make it through spring 2023, many families were forced to take dramatic steps, jeopardising their household economy and undermining their ability to get through the coming ‘hungry seasons’ of winter and spring. These steps were described in the Afghanistan Socio-Economic Outlook 2023 published by UNDP in April:

[M]ore than 4.3 million households have borrowed simply for securing food. Many households have mortgaged their future, having sold productive assets such as their last female animals (1.1 million) or other income-generating equipment or means of transport (over 0.6 million), and even their houses or land (over 0.3 million). In many cases, households were forced to mortgage their children’s future by seeking recourse to child labor (more than 850,000) or marrying their daughters earlier than intended (nearly 80,000), to combat extreme food insecurity. (pp 63 – 64)

Map 1: Acute Malnutrition in September – October 2022

Source: IPC Afghanistan Acute Malnutrition Analysis September 2022 – April 2023

Map 2: Projected Acute Malnutrition for November 2022 – April 2023

Source: IPC Afghanistan Acute Malnutrition Analysis September 2022 – April 2023

This report aims to navigate the data about child malnutrition and provide an overview of the situation in Afghanistan, how malnutrition is influenced by economic, geographic and even cultural factors, how it has worsened through the past decade and how it is experienced today by those affected by it. To this end, AAN has interviewed three healthcare workers, who work directly with malnutrition children, each from the provinces of Daikundi, Helmand and Takhar, as well as eight parents from Daikundi (one), Helmand (two), Kabul (two) and Takhar (three) whose children are suffering from malnutrition.[2]

The geography of hunger

Conflict, poverty, drought, food insecurity, limited or no access to health services, poor water quality and sanitation, insufficient maternal nutrition and low immunisation rates for children resulting in a high disease burden have all contributed to the high child malnutrition rates in Afghanistan. Malnutrition is widespread across the country, but its prevalence is greater in some areas and some sections of the population. In this section, we map the geography of hunger in Afghanistan based on both spatial and human characteristics. The next section will look at how and why it has varied over time.

Rural areas tend to be more vulnerable to malnutrition because of their greater poverty rates, difficult logistics and lower awareness of the symptoms of malnutrition, but even more significantly, the lack of nearby medical facilities and availability of suitable treatments. As a subset of rural areas, remote and/or mountainous places tend to be even more greatly affected – and at the same time, the increased distance and costs associated with accessing healthcare mean fewer malnutrition cases are reported compared to the actual number.

Thus, isolated provinces such as Ghor, as well as rural areas in Takhar and Badakhshan provinces in the northeast, all comparatively poor and highly dependent on local crops, have suffered heavily from the recent years of drought and crop failure. According to a nurse from Rustaq district of Takhar, whose work has focused on malnutrition for some years, large single-income households are typically worst hit by the problem:

Children who are malnourished are more likely to come from low-income families, with only one person serving as the primary earner and supporting a large extended family. Families in Takhar are extremely impoverished, earning just 180-200 Afghans [a day]. But the households are very large: as many as 15 people need to be provided for by only one person, which leads to insufficient and uneven access to food for all the family members. 

In Helmand, malnutrition is present in all districts, but affects particular areas more severely. As one NGO healthcare worker from Lashkargah remarked, the hilly northern districts, such as Musa Qala and Nawzad, or the southernmost, the desert districts of Khaneshin and Dishu, register more malnutrition cases. When interviewed by AAN, the health worker explained that:

The reason for the high cases of malnutrition [in those districts] is the economic status of families who are farmers and livestock breeders and have been affected highly by the drought. 

However, the impact of malnutrition is also felt inside the towns and cities because of the loss of income faced by many urban residents after the withdrawal of the international military and an influx of internally displaced persons from rural areas; they have been forced to settle in precarious living conditions without access to safe water and sanitation.

When families become food insecure, it is specific age and gender groups that are affected the most. Children under the age of five are considered most at risk of malnutrition and related illnesses, which is why this age group is usually featured in relevant statistics. Pregnant and lactating mothers are a second vulnerable group.

International organisations working in healthcare in Afghanistan have reported an increasing trend of more newborns and infants being admitted as inpatients to their nutrition centres than in the past. According to a recent report by the international NGO, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF),[3] the percentage of infants under six months of age admitted to their paediatric intensive nutrition centre in Herat has been reported “most concerningly” on the increase and reached 61.5 per cent of all patients in February 2023, while in MSF’s Kabul centre, the percentage of infants under one year old reached 67 per cent. According to the same MSF briefing note:

Breastfeeding in Afghanistan is challenged by the practice of child marriage, negative cultural beliefs related to breastfeeding, lack of family planning, poor access to clean drinking water, and limited access to information on optimal breastfeeding practices. (p 8)

These factors affect the above-mentioned age groups and are made worse by the absence or the prohibitive costs of safe replacement feeding, such as formula.

The healthcare worker from Lashkargah highlighted another pattern, that malnutrition takes a heavier toll on girls than boys, because in times of crisis, boys are more likely to be better-fed and taken care of – to the detriment of their sisters.

Girls are at risk in the family because of the culture and literacy levels. Boys are paid attention to and taken care of. I see it all the time that when boys are sick, their mothers bring them [to the hospital], but when girls are sick, [only] their grandmothers bring them to the clinic or hospital. When I ask why, they say boys are important and their mothers should take care of them. When there is little food, parents mostly try to feed their sons, rather than their daughters.

This trend is confirmed in reports from international organisations: for example, MSF reported that in 2022, girls faced a 90 per cent higher mortality rate compared to boys in their inpatient therapeutic nutrition centre in Kandahar, pointing to families’ deprioritising their daughters both in terms of providing food for them and seeking out medical care.

Such discrimination affects mothers as well. They are also deprioritised (or put others first) when it comes to food in the family, are then malnourished during pregnancy, often suffer anaemia after giving birth and have problems breastfeeding their babies, who in turn become victims of malnutrition. Other cultural traits, such as the frequent lack of family planning, only add to the problem, as one healthcare worker from Daikundi province described:

[I]lliterate families who don’t have any primary health education and only follow old traditions are also at risk of having malnourished children. They don’t have family planning, so they don’t consider intervals between births. Therefore, they give birth to children who are weak and then become malnourished. In addition, children who are born premature and children who are born on time but with low birthweights – because their mothers were malnourished during their pregnancy – are at risk of malnutrition.

Finally, some diseases with varying local or regional severity patterns, such as Acute Watery Diarrhoea (AWD) and Acute Respiratory Infections (ARI), often appear together with malnutrition, each contributing to the other’s morbidity. This is especially true in winter when food security deteriorates in many households. Malnutrition has, for example, been considered by some studies as a contributing factor – together with COVID-19 – to the deadly measles outbreak that hit many provinces of Afghanistan in 2022.

A chronology of hunger

While malnutrition has always affected some places more than others in Afghanistan, and girls more than boys, overall, it has been worsening over the last decade, and dramatically so after the Taleban takeover, which precipitated the collapse of Afghanistan’s economy.

In 2004, the National Nutrition Survey (NNS), which is conducted in Afghanistan every decade, found that 60.5 per cent of children under-five were suffering from stunting [4], while 8.7 per cent were suffering from wasting [5]. A decade later, the 2013 National Nutrition Survey showed a marked reduction in the number of stunted children under 5, down to 40.5 per cent, but the number of wasted under 5s had risen to 9.5 per cent. There was also an improvement in the number of underweight children from 33.7 per cent in 2004 to 24.6 per cent in 2013. The 2013 survey did, however, raise the alarm on the severity of child malnutrition, revealing eight provinces where general acute malnutrition levels were higher than the WHO threshold of 15%, marking a ‘Critical’ situation – Urozgan (21.6%), Nangarhar (21.2%), Nuristan (19.4%), Khost (18.2%), Paktia (16.7%), Wardak (16.6%), Kunar (16.2%) and Laghman (16%). In the decade that followed, the situation for children continued to deteriorate. After 2014, child malnutrition rates started to worsen (as the graph below shows).

The data for 2015 to 2020 were extracted from “2020 Afghanistan Nutrition Cluster Annual Report”; for 2021 and 2022 from the humanitarian response plan for each year respectively; and the 2023 revised humanitarian response plan.
Graph by AAN. 

A key event affecting the incomes of many Afghans was the withdrawal of NATO troops from most areas of the country, as they handed over responsibility for security to the Afghan National Security Forces (further reading in this AAN Thematic Dossier). The transfer was completed by the end of 2014. It brought with it not only a deterioration of security but also a decline in the national income because the foreign armies had spent money and given aid. That income had been spread quite widely and often went to remote areas where the insurgency was strong. As bases and outposts closed locally, the loss of jobs and other sources of income was often substantial. Up to 2014, the standard of living had generally been rising in Afghanistan, but the NATO withdrawal marked the first of several economic shocks from 2015 to 2023 that had detrimental knock-on effects on the ability of many Afghan families to provide adequate nutrition to their children. The figures below tell this story.

In 2015, an estimated 1.2 million children under 5 (39% of this age group, based on WHO population estimates) suffered from general acute malnutrition (500,000 severely and 700,000 moderately) and some 250,000 pregnant and lactating women. That year, the Strategic Response Plan, published by OCHA and focused on addressing the most acute life-saving needs, aimed at assisting far fewer than that number – just under half a million under-fives (155,279 suffering severely and 210,265 moderately from acute malnutrition and 134,071 pregnant or lactating women) because, it said, the aid effort that year was “[c]onstricted by partner capacities, accessibility, and resource availability.”

By 2016, the number of malnourished under-fives had increased to some 2.9 million (some 58 per cent of the total), according to the 2016 Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP), which is the annual appeal for humanitarian aid. Nearly 1 million children were slated for assistance because they were acutely malnourished (365,000 severely and 632,000 moderately), twice as many as the previous year.

Malnutrition remained a heavy burden for the Afghan people in 2017, with 1.3 million under-fives in need of treatment for acute malnutrition, and with levels of SAM breaching emergency thresholds in 20 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, according to the 2017 Humanitarian Needs Overview (see also the 2017 Humanitarian Response Plan).

The prevalence of malnutrition continued to increase as the intensifying conflict endangered people’s livelihoods and made access to many areas more difficult for health organisations and other humanitarian actors. In 2018, acute malnutrition affected 2 million children under 5, with “a staggering 600,000 children (29 per cent) suffering from severe acute malnutrition (SAM)”, along with almost half a million pregnant or lactating women. 75 per cent of the affected children lived in 22 provinces, designated as ‘priority’ (see the 2018 Afghanistan Nutrition Cluster Annual Report).

2018 Malnutrition Severity Map, showing the prevalence of General Acute Malnutrition (GAM) 

Source: 2018 Afghanistan Nutrition Cluster Annual Report

In 2019, the Afghanistan Nutrition Cluster Annual Report revealed two million acute malnutrition cases, including 600,000 suffering severely.

In 2020, the numbers again swelled, with acute malnutrition affecting 2.9 million children, 784,000 of them suffering severely (see the 2020 Afghanistan Nutrition Cluster Annual Report). There were also 650,438 malnourished pregnant and lactating women in need of supplementary nutrition. The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic that year had devastating consequences, pushing an additional 106,214 children into severe and 284,688 into moderate acute malnutrition and leaving 87,298 pregnant and lactating women in need of life-saving interventions. The number of provinces classified at emergency levels rose from 22 to 26 (for the economic effects of Covid-19, read this AAN report)

As the Taleban sued for control of the country in 2021, fighting intensified, making trade, travel, sowing and harvesting difficult for many. Malnutrition worsened, with an estimated 3.13 million children under 5 at risk of acute malnutrition, (895,000 severely and 2.2 million moderately) as well as 700,000 pregnant and lactating women (see this November 2021 Health Cluster Bulletin and the 2021 HRP).

The fall of the Republic in August 2021 and the ensuing economic collapse had pushed an unprecedented number of Afghan households into poverty by 2022. In that year, an estimated 3.88 million under-fives, with more than half facing acute malnutrition (1.08 million severely and 2.8 million moderately)[6], as well as 836,657 pregnant and lactating women. One million under-fives were believed to be at risk of death. (Figures from the 2022 HNO and HRP).

Child malnutrition in 2023: the view from the field 

The Afghanistan Humanitarian Response Plan for 2023 estimated that acute malnutrition will affect over four million vulnerable individuals this year, including more than 840,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women and 2,300,000 children suffering moderately and 875,000 severely.

Interviews carried out by AAN with both health workers and the parents of children who have suffered or still suffer from acute malnutrition give an idea of how the situation is deteriorating due to the economic crisis and the shortages of medical care. Primary healthcare centres are often working under strained conditions, with reduced staff, equipment and stocks of medicines.

The country’s health system received a double shock in August 2021, both a brain drain of qualified staff, as reported by the media, and a reduction in international funding (see reporting by the Development News website, Devex), with primary and community healthcare suffering the most. The Taleban ban on women working, first to NGO workers in December 2022 and later to UN staff in April 2023, has further reduced humanitarian capacities to deliver programmes to fight malnutrition and poverty. Even though female healthcare workers are largely exempt from the ban, according to the Revised Humanitarian Response Planreleased by OCHA in June 2023, conditions on employing female healthcare workers, such as the necessity for them to be accompanied by a mahram (a close male relative), have resulted in, “additional costs and budgeting, shrinking donor funding, and potential challenges in meeting the minimum operational standards due to the limited capacity of implementing partners.” (pp. 38-39)

A glimpse at the increased difficulties encountered in helping malnourished children and their mothers can be gathered from these figures given by the Revised Humanitarian Response Plan:

[D]uring the first four months of 2023, approximately 14.7 million people received at least one round of food and livelihood support, compared to 19.1 million in 2022. Health care was provided to 5.4 million people, an increase from 4.7 million in 2022. Support to prevent and address acute malnutrition reached 2.4 million children and nursing mothers, down from 3 million in 2022. (p 11)

A veteran nurse from Takhar, interviewed in March, summarised standard procedures to treat malnutrition in place at her clinic, before detailing how they were now being forced to let patients down.

If the MUAC [measurement of the mid-upper arm circumference – a key indicator] is less than 11.4 cm, we usually treat [the child] in the clinic and they are hospitalised. If it’s between 11.5 and 12.5, we treat them by providing enough supplements and resources.… RUTF [ready-to-use therapeutic food] and RUSF [ready-to-use-supplemental food] are resources provided for malnourished children…. Children that weigh less than 3 kg, are shorter in height and have a poor appetite are usually hospitalised and given medication and milk. When they show improvements, or their weight increases to 4kg, we discharge them and give them the necessary resources.

Such standards, she said, have become difficult to adhere to since December 2022 because of faltering stocks of therapeutic food and the pressure on health centres brought about by the sheer number and desperation of ailing families:

For the past almost four months, we’ve have had very few resources left. The cases of severe and moderate malnutrition have increased significantly in this time. Because of fewer resources, we had to start providing patients with the foods available in our clinic…. Resources were not being cut before. I do not know if we are not getting any supplies because of the current government. We have been without resources for four months now. I believe the Agha Khan Foundation or the World Food Programme were providing for us, but this support has stopped…. Our clinic is very small. The rooms are cramped, we’re short on staff and we have a heavy workload.

Speaking to the interviewee again in June, she did say international support had now resumed, with resources being provided by UNICEF and the World Food Programme. However, her experience was not singular. Other clinics and healthcare centres are being put under pressure by a growing caseload and, often, fewer resources. According to a healthcare worker in Daikundi, in the past, the provincial hospital would not host more than 15 malnourished children at any given time, but in March 2023, the malnourishment ward was hospitalising 25 to 30 children every day.

Understaffed and overcrowded clinics mean severely malnourished patients get discharged as soon as they become even moderate acute malnourished levels. Ideally, they are provided with food supplements and all the necessary information and guidance to continue their treatment at home. However, this can result in improper handling of the therapy by families and cause recurring malnutrition in a child. The nurse from Takhar said:

Some children receive food from us, but we don’t see any improvement when they return. Most mothers have many children and distribute the food and resources we provide for the malnourished child to their other children. Some have even said their husbands or mothers-in-law eat the bars or biscuits we gave them for their malnourished children.

She added how, in winter, especially, it was not easy even to discharge patients:

When the children start to improve, we contact their families to come and get them, but they don’t show up. They choose not to pick up their wives and children because they are getting some food – beans and bread – and the clinic’s warm. [When they finally show up] their husbands tell us that they don’t have any food at home and it’s very cold there. Therefore, they should stay with us for some more days.

Family evaluation of the costs/benefit of referring their malnourished children for medical treatment can also get in the way of successful treatment, as is apparent from the nurse’s observations:

Some children receive only the first treatment, and their families don’t show up for the next appointment because of the cost of travelling long distances. They claim the cost of their journey is much higher than the food that we provide, so they don’t come back to finish the treatment.

In some instances, the opposite can also be true, she added:

Families keep coming back to us for support for their children, even when they aren’t classified as malnourished anymore, and when we can’t assist them, they become irate and shout that we’re lying and taking the aid for ourselves.

We heard several such accusations from health workers that families do not respect them – realistic reporting, especially for female staff. We also heard accusations about health workers from some of our interviews with parents, particularly that they keep the, by now, rare medicines from those most in need and put them instead on sale on the black market.

A mother from Takhar, her two-and-a-half son malnourished, claimed to have witnessed healthcare professionals taking some of the medical resources for themselves and their families. “They also sell products like ready-to-use therapeutic food in the form of biscuits and milk to the market,” she told AAN, adding that the abusive practice persisted notwithstanding inspection by a foreigner (whether a member of staff or monitor was not clear) and subsequent personnel changes or transfers in the hospital. She blamed the problem on the fact that most healthcare professionals had left after the collapse of the Republic and were replaced by new ones who were not satisfactory. She went up to say that the new doctors and nurses would provide good care only upon receiving gifts from patients and remarked – a Tajik herself – that they would be biased against Uzbek mothers, even uttering racist slurs against them.

Several parents also complained that their first visit to a clinic was the only time they received free nutrition treatment. Afterwards, they were told there were no resources to continue the treatment, as a forty-five-year-old mullah from Helmand recounted.

The first time we went [to the clinic], they gave us RUTF [ready-to-use therapeutic food] and some medicine. After that, every time we went, they said there was no RUTF and no medicine. Each time, they told me to visit the clinic next time because there might be RUTF and medicine, but there never was. I could buy the medicine in the bazaar but couldn’t find RUTF…. The medicine that comes for children is not given to anyone. They always make excuses and say nothing remains in the clinic. Now [my son] can eat bread little by little. He’s very weak, and when seasonal diseases come, he gets sick easily. He’s two years old but looks like he’s only one. He still can’t walk. He still crawls.

In the absence of therapeutic food, many families resort to the less expensive types of milk powder or, often, to even cheaper replacements such as sugar water. Another father from Helmand told AAN how all his four children suffered from malnutrition, but he was unable to provide them with nutritious food except, when possible, milk powder:

All my four children are malnourished. My eldest son is six years old, and he was very weak when he was born.… The village doctor told me I should take him to the clinic so they could give him nutritious food. I told him I couldn’t [because] the clinic is far from our home, and I didn’t have money to rent a car and take my son there. Then he told me to at least buy milk powder to help my son survive. Since he’s my first child and I love him, I borrowed some money from a neighbour and bought him milk powder.… The doctor also prescribed some vitamin syrup, but I couldn’t afford it. Then, when he grew a little bit, I soaked bread in water and gave it to him. He is still weak and thin.… My other children are malnourished too. My wife doesn’t have milk, so she can’t breastfeed. All my children grew up with milk powder. The first two can eat bread and other food now. But the other two are small and can only have milk powder. Sometimes I really can’t afford milk powder either. We boil water and add some sugar and give that to them instead of milk.

For him, the economic constraints leading to insufficient nutrition are at the roots of all the health problems of the family:

[Their] mother didn’t eat well during her pregnancy. Our [household] economy has not been good and she couldn’t eat well. I’m a farmer and have no other income. I get wheat, potato and beans from the farms. I work on another person’s land and the landlord only gives me one-quarter of the harvest…. Because of the drought, I can only keep a few sheep and those with a lot of difficulties. Everything’s expensive and there’s drought, so the harvest isn’t good. We can only have bread, potato and beans as our food. We can have meat maybe once in a few months.

The decline in household economies, coupled with a decline in available healthcare, is proving a lethal mix across the country. No longer limited to remote rural areas, malnutrition has crept into the very heart of Afghan cities. Here, a father from Kabul describes how poorly and weak his daughter has continued to be:

There wasn’t enough [food] at home when Mina was born. Her mother didn’t eat well either. Women need to eat well when they’re pregnant and breastfeeding, but my wife didn’t eat well because of our economic situation. She was anaemic and needed blood because she’d had an operation.… When Mina was born, she weighed one kilo and eight grammes, while a healthy newborn weighs three to four kilogrammes.[7]

I took [Mina] to a government hospital and they said she had mild malnutrition, so they didn’t give her nutrients. I took her to another hospital, and they gave her nutrients for one month. She is still weak and her hair doesn’t grow. If it grows, it soon falls out. When I take her to the doctor, they say she’ll be fine. But she doesn’t grow and I don’t know what to do. They don’t give her medicine or food when I take her to the clinic. They say that now she is fine and doesn’t need nutrients, or they make excuses and say they don’t have any nutrients. She’s three years old, but when you look at her, you think she’s less than a year. She doesn’t grow and she can’t walk. She’s very weak. Her bones can be seen under her skin. She can’t talk either. Now she’s almost three years old and she weighs only seven kilogrammes.

Mina’s story highlights the strong connection between mothers’ and children’s health. Pregnant women in Afghanistan are very much at risk of the same economic and medical shortages causing child malnutrition. Mothers are often the first to suffer when household economies weaken, as the nurse in Takhar recalled:

Just three days ago, we had a woman here who was eight months pregnant and in critical need of care: she was malnourished, which contributed to her anaemia, and desperately required a blood transfusion. The family lacked the money to locate and purchase blood, and because the transfusion wasn’t arranged on time, both the woman and the child died before her husband could secure transport from Takhar to Rustaq to donate blood. The woman’s husband was sobbing at her feet and asking how he would carry her [home]. The midwives gave him some cash by putting together 20, 30 or more afghanis, which they’d been given by patients as gifts. When he left, he said he could carry his wife home now, but who knows where he’d get the money for her shroud and funeral.

Conclusions 

The economic and healthcare crisis, fuelled by the international withdrawal, the loss of capital and human resources and the discriminating policies by the Taleban that prevent women from studying, working and accessing healthcare, risk reversing one of the achievements of the past two decades in Afghanistan – the slow reduction in the country’s neonatal and child mortality rate (together with the maternal mortality rate, as pointed to in this recent article), previously among the highest globally and which risk returning so.

While the slow-burning, ever-intensifying humanitarian catastrophe befalling Afghanistan’s children is well-known to all international players, finding viable ways to prevent it seems elusive. The Taleban are unlikely ever to relent – or at least to take the first step in doing so – on their restrictive conditions for women working and other forms of gender-based segregation, while international donors are increasingly showing fatigue towards financing programmes in Afghanistan (see AAN report here).

Afghanistan has in the past been faring better, ie receiving more attention, than many other countries in crisis. However, that may be changing. The fact that donor commitments for the 2023 Humanitarian Response Plan have only been trickling in so far – only USD 632.2 million for an appeal of USD 4.6 billion as of this writing – leaves little room for optimism.

WFP announced in May 2023 that it would have to cut emergency assistance to four million people for the second month running due to severe funding constraints. Since the beginning of April 2023, eight million people have been left out of emergency food assistance due to persistent funding shortfalls. On 30 June, it had more bad news. “It’s five million people we are able to serve for another couple of months, WFP Country Director, Hsiao-Wei Lee, told Reuters: “But then beyond that we don’t have the resources. That I think conveys the urgency of where we stand.” She said the reductions would start in August, fall further in September and halt in October, according to the WFP’s estimates of current funds and financial assistance promised by donor countries in coming months.

Against the backdrop of this difficult scenario, the principal organisations focussed on delivering malnutrition support recommend against, among other things, financial cuts by donors and caution against the possibility of humanitarian actors disengaging from fieldwork due to the Emirate’s segregating policies. Instead, they advocate for prioritising feeding programmes for infants, young children and pregnant and lactating women to prevent dangerous forms of newborn malnutrition and trends of relapsing later. They also advocate for the timely treatment of moderate acute malnutrition to prevent these cases from becoming severe. They call for a redoubled focus on primary and secondary healthcare across the country to guarantee access to all portions of the population, improve the detection of pregnant and lactating women and child malnutrition and prevent cases from becoming too severe to be treated successfully.

The emergency assistance needed to fight malnutrition constitutes the most fundamental part of the humanitarian funding for Afghanistan, one that represents the future of Afghanistan embodied in the survival and the health of its next generation. To scrap it means to endanger the future for these children and for Afghanistan.

Edited by Roxanna Shapour and Kate Clark

References

References
↑1 IPC assesses acute malnutrition utilising anthropometric data, ie data related to measurements and proportions of the human body, from the National Nutrition SMART Survey (NNS), as well as other data related to the determinants of malnutrition, including feeding practices, morbidity, sanitation and hygiene, and food security.
↑2 All interviews were conducted by phone between February and March 2023. The provinces were selected because they have regularly displayed significant levels of child malnutrition and are representative of the situation in the central highlands, the south and the northeast, respectively. Interviews in Kabul offered insights on the situation in urban areas.
↑3 “MSF Briefing Note on Malnutrition and Health”, June 2023, pp 7, 8 (AAN has a copy).
↑4 WHO defines a stunted child as one who is too short for his or her age and is the result of chronic or recurrent malnutrition. Stunting is a contributing risk factor to child mortality and is also a marker of inequalities in human development. Stunted children fail to reach their physical and cognitive potential.
↑5 According to WHO, child wasting refers to a child who is too thin for his or her height and is the result of recent rapid weight loss or the failure to gain weight. A child who is moderately or severely wasted has an increased risk of death, but treatment is possible.
↑6 According to the 2022 National Statistics Yearbook the number of Afghan children under 5 years old stood at 6.17 million (see here).
↑7  The mentioned weight is very low indeed – typically babies require incubation if they are below 1.5 kilogrammes. The father made no mention of this having happened. It would seem a miracle if Mina survived without incubation at that weight.

AUTHORS:

Fabrizio Foschini

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Rohullah Sorush

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No Food For Hope: Afghanistan’s Child Malnutrition Dilemma in 2023
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Daily Hustle: Running a home school for girls

July 3, 2023

Roxanna Shapour

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The Taleban made their move against education for older girls about a month after they took over Afghanistan when they ordered secondary schools for boys to re-open, but made no mention of girls. Since then, there have been a few instances of false hope, notably in March 2022 when the government reneged on its promise to reopen girls’ secondary schools. Yet even before the fall of the Republic, many Afghan girls had no access to education – because of conflict in their area, or local conservative mores and a lack of female teachers, or because functioning schools did not exist. In this latest instalment of the Daily Hustle, we hear from one young Afghan woman about how elders in her community managed to open home schools for girls and appointed her as a teacher. That was five years ago. Now, there are rumours that the Taleban will close her school down. 
I live in one of the largest and most populated districts in our province in southeastern Afghanistan. During the Republic, there was a fight between the government and the Taleban over control of our province and danger was everywhere. We lived in fear of bombs, checkpoints and night raids, day and night. Because of the fighting we didn’t benefit as much as other provinces from the foreign aid that was coming into the country or from the development work the government was doing. There were few healthcare facilities in my area and the schools were closed most of the time, either because of the fighting or because there were no qualified people willing to come work here.

There are than 65 schools in my district – 20 of them are for girls – but the buildings are either neglected or were damaged in the fighting. Some only exist on paper. Over the years we learned that they call these ‘ghost schools’. In those years, the girls’ schools were not allowed to operate in the areas the Taleban controlled and where there were schools, there were few female teachers. But many people still wanted to educate their daughters. Finally, the tribal elders stepped in. They asked each village to find an educated woman in their own community who could teach girls ain their home. They asked the parents to pay the teachers whatever they could afford. This is how I came to run a school in our house five years ago.

A home school for girls in the village 

I used to have big dreams of going to medical school in Kabul, but my father wouldn’t agree. He thought I’d be a burden on my brother and his family in Kabul and that I should stay in the village until my fiancé could get enough money together for us to get married. But my family could see that I was chafing for something to do and one day my father came home and said I could use the big room in our house as a classroom for girls. And so, armed with my high school diploma, I joined the ranks of literate women and older men who’d opened their homes to educate the girls of our district.

My home school started with 20 girls but as our reputation grew and people started to learn about the classes my class grew until I eventually had 50 students between 7 and 18 years old.[1] It was difficult for me to ask for money from the parents. I knew many of my students didn’t have enough to eat at home and paying fees for their daughters’ education was a hardship, so I didn’t press anyone to pay me. The parents gave me what they could afford, which came up to about 7,000-9,000 afghanis (100-150 USD at the time) each month.

A new curriculum 

One day, after the Taleban came to power, UNICEF and an NGO came to our area. They said they wanted to establish community schools for girls and the elders told them there were already home schools in the district. So they met all the teachers and tested us to ensure we were qualified to teach primary school. They kept most of the existing schools and established some new ones. Now we have about 200 home schools in the district. UNICEF gives us educational materials including books, notebooks, school bags and pens for our pupils. They pay me 9,000 afghanis (now about 105 USD) each month so I don’t have to rely on the largesse of parents and it eases the financial burden on very poor families who’re struggling to survive.

The province’s Directorate of Education and UNICEF introduced new rules and a formal curriculum. They reduced the number of students from 50 to 35. Now the girls are between 7 and 12 years old. We cover two grades in one year, so it takes three years to complete the primary school curriculum. A team from the NGO and the district education office come twice a month to monitor my classes and make sure I’m sticking to the curriculum and the quality of teaching is up to par.

In the past, I taught my students Pashto, spelling, maths, religion, the biography of the Holy Prophet and the Quran. Now, with the new curriculum from the district’s education office, I teach Pashto, life skills, maths, calligraphy, art, religious education, which includes fiqh [Islamic jurisprudence] and hadiths [the sayings and actions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad], and the Holy Quran. The official school hours are 7 am to 12 pm. After lunch, I hold free Quran classes for the older girls.

My family is not in favour of the afternoon classes. They say I’m working too hard and that the girls tire me out. They’d like me to take a break in the afternoons and recharge my batteries for the next day, but I think it’s a good deed and will bring Allah’s blessings on our home and my life. It’s true, my pupils are lively and the classes can sometimes be raucous, but it makes me happy to educate young girls and make sure that they have literacy and numeracy skills and know the holy word.

Rumours fuel uncertainty 

Lately, there have been rumours that the Emirate wants to close the home schools. People are very worried. I don’t understand why the government would do such a thing. The home schools use the official curriculum and, anyway, what could possibly be wrong with teaching girls to read, write and do arithmetic? There used to be war before, but now it’s their government [ie those who had been the armed opposition]. They are in charge and all the people want education. Now that the war is over, the government should create more facilities, refurbish the old schools and build new ones. Girls should be able to go to school, same as boys. If the Emirate has really made this decision [to close home schools], it could affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of pupils across the country. It seems like an injustice.

It’s not only education for girls [that is at stake] but also the livelihoods of the teachers. The salaries the teachers get also help keep their families afloat. People are suffering financially and the money they earn helps put food on the table. We are 12 in my family – my parents, four brothers, four sisters, my sister-in-law and me. I am the only one who works and my income supports the household.

My father used to work in the Gulf and send money home for the family, but times have been hard since he lost his job and came back home to Afghanistan. [One] brother has a university education, but he’s unemployed. He farms our land, but we have [only] a small plot and we don’t have water. We can’t afford to hire a drill to dig a well, so we have to buy water from other people. Another brother was a teacher in one of the schools in the district, but he lost his job after he fell ill and had to go to Pakistan for medical treatment. He’s trying to get a passport so he can go aboard for work. If he manages to get a visa and find a job in one of the Gulf countries, he can send money home and that will help ease our financial burdens. For now we must make do with my small income, and if the government closes the school, we’ll face serious difficulties. I’m not the only one. Times are hard for most families and for the teachers who have classes at home, the money they earn is a lifeline. Their lives will be devastated if the schools are closed.

Keeping hope alive 

If there is one thing I’ve learned in my years, it’s that nothing is ever certain or forever. For now, we have the home schools and I must focus on the present and do my best to educate the girls that come to my classes. I’m hoping my fiancé will have enough money for us to get married this year. I don’t want the school to close after that, when I’m no longer living in the village. So I’m training my younger sister and my sister-in-law to take the school over when I move to Kabul with my husband. My fiancé is very supportive of my dream of becoming a doctor. Who knows, maybe by then the Emirate will allow women to go to university. Wouldn’t that be the best of dreams come true?

References

References
↑1 Despite the age range, all were getting a primary education: it was an opportunity even for older girls who had missed out on schooling when they were younger.

 

Daily Hustle: Running a home school for girls
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Civilian Casualties since the Taleban Takeover: New UNAMA report shows sharp drop – but some communities still under threat

June 30, 2023

Kate Clark

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

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

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

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

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

UNAMA’s focus on IEDs in the report

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

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

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

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

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

Who is being targeted/harmed by IEDs? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edited by Roxanna Shapour

References

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

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

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

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

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

REVISIONS:

This article was last updated on 27 Jun 2023C

 

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

June 27, 2023
By Andrew J. Bacevich

The New York Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 15, 2023

Jelena Bjelica • Fabrizio Foschini

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

The opium ban

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cannabis ban

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

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

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

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

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

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

What about meth?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can the bans be sustained?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edited by Kate Clark

References

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

In the name of Allah, the most merciful

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

Number: (30)

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

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

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

Wa al-salam [Regards]

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 9, 2023

BY: William Byrd, Ph.D.

United States Institute of Peace

Thursday, June 8, 2023 /

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

The Taliban’s Highly Successful Opium Ban

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

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

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

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

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

Immediate Economic Damage

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

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

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

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

Delayed and Longer-term Impacts

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

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

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

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

What Happens Next?

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

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

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

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

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

International Response?

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

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

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

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

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

The Taliban’s Successful Opium Ban is Bad for Afghans and the World
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