This week’s summit showed remarkable solidarity with beleaguered Afghans, but it remains to be seen if that can translate to meaningful change.
Over a year and a half since the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, not a single country has recognized its government. Yet, it has resulted in no change in Taliban behavior. The worst predictions of what Taliban rule could be like have come true, as the regime has implemented unprecedented restrictions on women amid a brutal humanitarian crisis. The situation is so bad that U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres convened a special conference in Doha, Qatar this week — with no Taliban representation — to discuss Afghanistan’s international isolation. While there were no tangible outcomes — evidence of how limited the international community’s leverage really is — it did demonstrate remarkable consensus on the imperative to help the Afghan people.USIP’s Scott Worden, Kate Bateman, Belquis Ahmadi and Andrew Watkins assess whether the U.N. can really do anything about the situation in Afghanistan, what this means for U.S. policy, if Afghan women can glean any hope from the Doha conference and how the Taliban have responded.
What is the significance of the U.N. secretary-general calling a meeting of international envoys to discuss Afghanistan now? Can the U.N. really do anything about the situation?
Worden: The Doha meeting this week was extraordinary in several dimensions. The secretary-general rarely calls a meeting outside of the U.N.’s headquarters in New York to deal with a particular national crisis, and even more rarely convenes such a diverse group of international and regional diplomats without inviting representatives of the country concerned. The fact that two dozen special envoys from across the world met in Doha to talk about the problems of Taliban rule without the Taliban is a sign of just how bad the regime has become.
The Taliban’s unprecedented ban on Afghan women working for the U.N. in Afghanistan was the proximate cause of the discussion. But really this was the final straw on top of waves of human rights abuses and security breaches that violate core principles of the U.N. charter. When U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed rushed to Afghanistan in January after the Taliban banned women from working for NGOs and universities, she could not even get a meeting with the Taliban supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada. Provoked by the Taliban’s enforcement of the ban on women working for the U.N. and vexed by the Taliban’s refusal to abide by the most basic diplomatic norms, the U.N. called for this week’s meeting.
Another rare feature of the U.N. gathering is the universality of member states’ condemnation of the Taliban’s policies and actions. Just before the meeting, the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to condemn the Taliban’s women’s rights restrictions, calling for “full, equal, meaningful and safe participation of women and girls in Afghanistan” and for “the Taliban to swiftly reverse the policies and practices that restrict the enjoyment by women and girls of their human rights and fundamental freedoms.”
It is amazing to think that the United States, Russia and China can agree on anything these days, but the Taliban have managed to unite them with their offensive conduct. At the Doha meeting, an even larger group of national envoys to Afghanistan — which included Iran, Pakistan, India, Turkey, as well as Central Asian and Gulf states — maintained their non-recognition of the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan and Guterres called on the Taliban to improve their performance on the “inter-connected” issues of human rights, inclusive governance, counterterrorism and anti-drug trafficking efforts. Amid so many conflicts that the U.N. is divided on, the Doha meeting shows the body can demonstrate unity and international resolve.
Despite the solidarity, not much new leverage was found to move the Taliban off their extreme positions. No one is contemplating the use of force in a country that has seen far too much death and destruction over the past many decades. The Taliban are already the subject of multiple U.N. sanctions regimes and are not a recognized government. Humanitarian aid is declining but that tends to hurt most the Afghan people U.N. members are trying to help.
What else is to be done?
Guterres called for another meeting in several months and in that time it will be important to translate international resolve into a set of clear minimum steps the Taliban must take to even begin a conversation about international legitimacy and communicate those through detailed engagements with the Taliban. At the same time, the international community needs to develop more ways to directly support Afghan civil society that opposes Taliban excesses so they can push for reforms from within the Taliban. Guterres pointed to another recent U.N. Security Council Resolution 2679, which calls for an independent assessment to “provide recommendations for an integrated and coherent approach by the international community to the current challenges facing Afghanistan.” This presents a new opportunity to translate international resolve into more concrete actions to induce the Taliban to uphold their international obligations.
What are the implications for U.S. policy?
Bateman: The United States’ policy goals vis-à-vis Afghanistan center on mitigating the country’s severe humanitarian and economic crises; opposing and mitigating the effects of the Taliban’s oppression of women, girls and minorities; and addressing the threat of terrorist attacks emanating from the country. On all these priorities, the United States is well served by acting in concert with other countries, which to a remarkable extent share these goals.
To stabilize the Afghan economy and prevent another tailspin like that seen in the fall of 2021, sustained cashflows for humanitarian services are needed. Particularly amid donor fatigue and many other global crises, donors need to coordinate to better monitor assistance and ensure humanitarian aid does not suddenly fall off. The United States and international community also need to speak with one voice and exert as much pressure as possible on the Taliban government to restore basic freedoms and to end its gross violations of human rights and women’s rights. It is particularly important that Muslim countries and organizations and regional actors deliver similar messages. Finally, given the United States’ and others’ dramatically reduced visibility on the ground in Afghanistan, it is critical that Washington discusses with other countries developments in the security situation and activities of terrorist groups.
The meeting in Doha, despite lacking any substantive statement on outcomes, was an important opportunity for closed-door, frank conversations among key players and aid organizations on all the above issues. It was announced that a similar meeting will be held in three to six months. If between now and then, the international consensus on non-recognition of the Taliban government holds, we can assess that this week’s meetings might have reinforced that consensus — which preserves some of the very limited leverage that exists for outsiders seeking to improve the situation in Afghanistan.
Can Afghan women derive any hope from statements in Doha?
Ahmadi: Afghan women’s rights advocates have been consistent and vocal about the need for the international community to maintain pressure on the Taliban to reverse their draconian restrictions on women’s rights and to keep discussion about recognizing the Taliban government off the table as long as a system of gender apartheid remains. Afghan women were therefore given new hope by the U.N. Security Council Resolution 2681 calling for a reversal of the Taliban’s ban on women working for the U.N. and for the Taliban to “swiftly reverse the policies and practices that restrict the enjoyment by women and girls of their human rights and fundamental freedoms including related to their access to education, employment, freedom of movement, and women’s full, equal and meaningful participation in public life.” The resolution further “urges all States and organizations to use their influence … to promote an urgent reversal of these policies and practices.” The U.N.’s refusal to invite the Taliban to join the discussion in Doha was a good step in this direction.
Guterres’ statement that now is not the right time to meet with the Taliban sends a strong signal to the Taliban that the international community cannot separate the regime’s request for political legitimacy from international demands for rights reforms. Indeed, Guterres said after the meeting that it is essential for the international community to maintain unity behind their collective concerns about human rights, terrorism, political inclusion and narcotics trafficking, and recognize that the issues are intertwined. Guterres underscored that “we will never be silent in the face of unprecedented, systemic attacks on women and girls’ rights” and that “when millions of women and girls are being silenced and erased from sight … [it] is a grave violation of fundamental human rights.”
A coalition of Afghan women, including many currently living in Afghanistan, submitted written recommendations to the international envoys on ways they can deliver on their commitments to pressure the Taliban on women’s rights. These include expanding travel bans on Taliban officials to include political representatives in Doha and better monitoring humanitarian assistance within Afghanistan to ensure the Taliban are not siphoning aid for their own benefit. Another request is that future meetings of international envoys include side meetings with Afghan women — particularly important considering that Afghan women are not otherwise represented by any Afghan officials and are being intentionally erased from the political conversation by the Taliban. It will be important for the special assessment of international engagement with the Taliban, led by Turkish diplomat Feridun Sinirlioglu, to meet directly with Afghan women to understand their priorities and fully account for the Taliban’s violations of women’s and human rights.
How do the Taliban read the signals from the Doha meeting?
Watkins: In the days leading up to the gathering, there were conflicting reports that the Taliban’s acting foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, might attend. U.N. officials insisted the Taliban was not invited, but there may have been some planning for the Taliban to arrange meetings on the sidelines. In the end, influential member states, including the United States, appear to have enforced the U.N.’s travel ban on senior Taliban officials (including Muttaqi) and there was no trip. Beyond any of the speeches or statements issued from the gathering, this may have been the strongest signal sent to the Taliban.
The Taliban have not put out an official statement on the summit in Doha, but at least one of their diplomatic officials offered comments to the press. Suhail Shaheen, head of their political office based in Doha, “expressed regret” that the group was not invited to participate, and said such exclusion was “one-sided and ineffective.” That their chief spokesman, ministry of foreign affairs and other senior officials declined to comment on the summit is a statement of itself.
The Taliban have, however, commented on other recent U.N. actions and statements. The latest was a U.N. Security Council resolution, adopted just days before the summit, that strongly condemned the Taliban for having applied a ban on female Afghan staff working in U.N. offices across the country. The Taliban’s official response was Orwellian: They praised the resolution for reaffirming the Security Council’s “strong commitment to the sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity and national unity of Afghanistan,” as well as “support for the Afghan people” and the principle of self-determination. Only further into the statement did the Taliban reject the resolution’s condemnation, insisting that restrictions on women are an “internal social matter … that does not impact outside states.”
The U.N.’s position on the women’s ban, its prominent place in this Doha gathering and the remarkable global consensus it demonstrated are unlikely to pressure a reversal in the Taliban’s gender policies in the foreseeable future. If anything, in the near term the gathering may heighten Taliban suspicions toward the United Nations as a vehicle for Western interests and agendas, which many in their leadership seem to believe are meant to harm or weaken them. It may also further confirm, among their leadership, that the only diplomatic approach offering any open doors is one that anchors itself in the region, especially in engagement with adversaries of the United States, such as Russia, Iran and China. In spite of those countries’ attendance and agreement with the U.N. summit’s position, they and other neighboring states have increasingly offered de facto normalization of relations, a consolation prize that does not require the Taliban to bend to outside pressure.
U.N. Conference Highlights Global Unity but Limited Leverage Over the Taliban
The 1-2 May 2023 gathering in Doha, hosted by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, brought together the representatives of 21 countries – the five permanent members of the Security Council, major donors and regional players, plus the European Union and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. They spent two days talking about how to engage with the Taleban, who have now been in power for 20 months, but are still unrecognised as Afghanistan’s government. The gathering took place in the shadow of the extension of an Islamic Emirate ban on women working from NGOs to the UN and a chaotic few weeks for the UN. AAN’s Roxanna Shapour and Kate Clark have been sifting through Guterres’ press statement and the various reactions to the gathering. They ask some questions about the gathering in Doha – and try to answer them.What were the aims of the gathering, and did it fulfil them?
The key objective of this meeting was for the diverse countries and organisations invited [1] to find common ground on how to engage with the Taleban and develop what Guterres called in his press conference afterwards, “a common international approach” [2] (see video and text here). Guterres stressed the spirit of unity among the delegates, which he said followed on from “the unanimous Security Council resolution 2681 of 27 April calling for full, equal, meaningful and safe participation of women and girls in Afghanistan.”
Guterres said the participants had agreed on the “need for a strategy of engagement that allows for the stabilization of Afghanistan but also allows for addressing important concerns.” They had also agreed, he said, on what those concerns were:
The persistent presence of terrorist organizations — a risk for the country, the region, and further afield.
The lack of inclusivity, which importantly includes human rights, in particular those of women and girls, severely undermined by recent Taliban decisions.
And the spread of drug trafficking with all its dramatic consequences.
He said that different countries prioritised different concerns, but all recognised that the issues are intertwined, and none can be prioritised.
Guterres said to “achieve our objectives, we cannot disengage,” but that engagement had to be “more effective and based on [unspecified] lessons which we have learned from the past.” In that light, Guterres said he would be using the UN’s convening power to “advance a forward leaning approach, which puts the Afghan people first, and in a manner that is complementary to existing regional platforms and initiatives.” He said several initiatives were ‘going on’ and there were plans for another meeting as a platform for them to ‘come together’.
Guterres was strong on the unity of the delegates and vague about what engagement with the Taleban might look like. Possibly helping to flesh out the nature of that engagement is a newly-appointed Special Coordinator for the Assessment. Under Security Council Resolution 2679, passed on 16 March, the appointee, Permanent Representative of Turkey to the UN and previously Turkey’s Foreign Minister, Feridun Sinirlioglu, is charged with coordinating an “integrated, independent assessment” – of what exactly the resolution does not say. However, he should consult “all relevant Afghan political actors and stakeholders, including relevant authorities, Afghan women, and civil society, as well as the region and the wider international community” and make “forward looking recommendations for an integrated and coherent approach by the international community to the current challenges facing Afghanistan.” [3] Guterres introduced Sinirlioglu to the Doha gathering, saying he had already “begun his work in earnest.”
Guterres’ messaging was something of a relief after a couple of weeks in which senior UN officials appeared at loggerheads with each other and caused chaos and confusion both over the aims of the Doha gathering and UN policy over the working women ban (see our curtain raiser published on 30 April for details). In that light, Guterres’ statement to the press appeared designed to convey a sense of unity, purpose and coherence. Whether that holds and is useful in practice will become clearer as future meetings are held, as any engagement progresses, what senior officials say, and what the UN does on the ground.
What did Guterres say about the ban on women working for the UN and NGOs?
The extension of the ban from NGOs to UN agencies had threatened to eclipse the original aim of the Doha meeting, which was to discuss how to engage the Taleban. However, the idea for the gathering, as AAN has reported, emerged in relation to the NGO ban, when Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed visited Kabul in January to try and get the ban lifted. She came away with the sense that a more political approach was needed in dealing with the Emirate. What to do in the face of the ban was then complicated further by remarks by the global head of UNDP, Achim Steiner, that the UN might have to pull out of Afghanistan and then by Deputy Special Representative and Humanitarian Coordinator Ramiz Alakbarov that it must “stay the course” and now was “not the time to turn our backs on the people of Afghanistan.”
In his press conference on 2 May, Guterres addressed the ban directly. He called it “unacceptable” and said it put lives “in jeopardy.” He said the UN would “never be silent in the face of unprecedented, systemic attacks on women and girls’ rights.” While the ban violated international law, including the UN Charter and undermined the aid effort and Afghanistan’s development, “throughout the past decades, we stayed, and we delivered. And we are determined to seek the necessary conditions to keep delivering,” he said, stressing that UN’s “commitment to support the people of Afghanistan” would not waver.
What do Guterres’ remarks add up to? It sounds like negotiations with the Emirate about the ban will continue, with no sense given of plans to pull back, let alone pull out. The UN is not happy about the ban and will keep speaking up about women’s rights, but other than that, it looks as if Guterres hopes the matter can be resolved. He gives no idea of a Plan B if it continues.
Meanwhile, word of discontent among some UN staff in Afghanistan has emerged in the form of a letter addressed to heads of agencies and sent in late April. The letter was endorsed, wrote The New Humanitarian, which broke the story on 3 May, by about 125 staff working for 15 agencies in Afghanistan (out of about 4,000 staff in the country). The letter largely relates to how different agencies obeyed or ignored, to varying degrees, an order issued for all national staff, men and women, to stay at home while an operational review was carried out (it is due to end on 5 May). It also accuses agencies of directing “NGO partners and third-party contractors… to restart operations with significantly fewer female field workers and no female staff in offices. [4] The letter writers describe the UN approach as sending “the message to all its staff that female staff do not matter.”
The difficulties of dealing with the Taleban over female employees are not to be underestimated, nor the strains the ban has put on staff and heads of UN agencies and NGOs – see our recent report, Bans on Women Working, Then and Now: The dilemmas of delivering humanitarian aid during the first and second Islamic Emirates for a wider discussion of the ethical and practical dilemmas. The Emirate has insisted that the employment of Afghan women is an internal affair and no one else’s business. Government spokesman Zabiullah Mujahed told BBC Pashto on 31 December 2022 that the Emirate wanted to “preserve the dignity and chastity” of Afghan women and that “because these institutions are not under the control of the Emirate, the risk for women is high and we have received dangerous reports” (reported by BBC Persian). It may be that the leadership is unhappy about Afghan women mixing with foreigners and working for foreign organisations or in a sector it sees as ‘foreign’. Yet, there is also the suspicion, whether justified or not, that the Emirate is deploying women’s issues to put pressure on international actors to engage on sanctions, frozen assets and recognition. The Emirate’s spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahed, in a brief statement issued on 12 April, as well as saying it was an internal matter, also linked the issue to those wider concerns:
[I]t is necessary that the member countries of the United Nations resolve the problem of freezing Afghan assets, banking, travel bans and other restrictions so that Afghanistan can progress in the economic, political and security areas. Afghans have the capacity to stand on their own feet.
In that sense, the ban and what to do about it feeds back into the wider discussion of engagement with the Taleban. However, Guterres refers to another issue that may actually be a greater threat to the UN’s programme of humanitarian assistance, and that is funding. In the absence of any on-budget support, humanitarian funding represents the vast majority of aid given to the country. Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis, he said, is the largest in the world, and it is “difficult to overestimate the gravity of the situation.” Yet the 2023 Humanitarian Response Plan, the detailing of Afghanistan’s needs for the year, which had asked donors for USD 4.6 billion, has, as yet, he said, received “a mere USD 294 million – 6.4 per cent of the total funding required.”
It is still early days. The launch of the Plan was delayed from January to 9 March, and in 2022, it took time and an international pledging conference before most pledges came in (see AAN reporting here). Still, for donors, the unconscionable restrictions put on female aid workers by the Taleban have made giving aid to Afghanistan less attractive at the very same time as other countries present equally pressing needs for support. (For more on this, see OCHA’s Global Humanitarian Overview 2023, published on 1 December 2022.) Most people have been expecting funding to diminish this year; see for example, USIP’s William Byrd’s recent report for Lawfare.
What was the Taleban’s response to the gathering?
The first response of the Taleban came ahead of the Doha meeting, in reaction to UNSC Resolution 2681 of 27 April, which unequivocally condemned the Emirate’s ban on women working for the UN. An official statement, which was echoed by several Taleban officials in media interviews, called the ban “an internal social matter,” which did not affect outside states and should be respected as one of Afghanistan’s “sovereign choices” (see the foreign ministry’s statement and media reporting by ToloNews and BBC Persian). The Emirate, the statement said, remained committed to ensuring all the rights of Afghan women, but stressed that “diversity” must be respected and not politicised. The statement did welcome certain parts of the resolution, including the acknowledgement that “Afghanistan faces multifaceted challenges” and that “engagement is the only realistic path,” but stressed:
The path to a post-conflict recovery requires the unconditional removal of UN, multilateral, and unilateral sanctions and restrictions on the country, in addition to the provision of humanitarian and development assistance to the country…. While humanitarian assistance is appreciated, the reality is that this ongoing crisis can only be resolved by the removal of restrictions on the country and helping Afghanistan to address core climate change, economic, infrastructural, and development needs of its people.
After the meeting ended, the most comprehensive response came in an exclusive interview with BBC Persian by the Emirate’s ambassador to Qatar and spokesperson for its political office, Muhammad Naim Wardak. He said the Taleban were not “pessimistic and that the media often portrays issues in a way that doesn’t reflect the reality.” He was unimpressed that the Taleban were not invited to the gathering:
Logic and international norms demand that a meeting about a particular country should include representatives from the country.… There is also a practical consideration, how can you solve a problem you have with a person if you don’t sit down with that person.… Consensus can only happen when all sides sit together.
He was clear that the Taleban viewed the issues raised at the gathering as internal matters. “Let me put it clearly: others cannot determine Afghanistan’s national interests,” he said. Nevertheless, he said the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan welcomed any and all steps taken to solve Afghanistan’s problems, provided they were in line with the country’s values and national interests.
Asked about the protests in Afghanistan and abroad ahead of the meeting, which called on the UN not to recognise the Emirate, Naim said he thought the protesters were in the minority. The majority of Afghans, he said, believed there should be engagement with a view to solving any problems. “The system that exists in Afghanistan,” he said, “is unprecedented in the past 50 years. We can see that what the [current] system has achieved is what 50 countries [in the US-led intervention] were unable to accomplish.”
As to the issue of women studying or working, Naim said that the Emirate was not opposed to this in principle, but the issue required “interpretation in line with the mindset and sensibilities of Afghanistan’s traditional Islamic society,” which was in its substance different to that of other countries, particularly those in the West. He restated the Emirate’s commitment to addressing the access of Afghan women and girls to education and to reversing the ban on them working for NGOs and UN agencies, but his refusal to commit to a timeline would have discouraged anyone hoping for the speed readmission of Afghan girls to secondary and university education and the return of women employees to NGOs and the UN.
As to how we will resolve [these issues], we need time. If you look at the advancements of other countries … they did not come about in one day, two days, two years or five years. It took them 20-30 years to get anywhere.
Were there any responses from Afghan women?
Afghan women activists, both inside the country and abroad, and their supporters were prominent among those questioning the intentions behind the Doha meeting. Their suspicions had been sparked by remarks made by Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed on 18 April which appeared to suggest that recognition of the Emirate might be on the table at the Doha meeting (detailed in this AAN report). While the UN immediately and categorically denied that recognition was on the agenda, her words sparked a media and social media storm, prompting tens of thousands of tweets with the hashtags #NoToTaliban and # Don’tRecogniseTaliban, video messages and op-ed pieces. One small group of demonstrators, risking violent reprisal by the Taleban, took to the Kabul streets to tell the UN, “The Taleban is a terrorist and fascist group and do not represent the people of Afghanistan” (see this video tweeted by Zan TV and reporting in Hasht-e Subh). They said any engagement with the Taleban that denies women a seat at the table is unacceptable and stressed that the Afghan people, including women, had to be involved in decision-making.
An open letter sent from women activists inside and outside the country to Secretary-General Guterres called on him to ensure:
The UN is consistent in messaging on human rights, including women’s rights and gender equality…. [and] to immediately suspend all of Amina Mohammad’s engagement with the Taliban;
The UN does not comply with the Taliban’s ban on women working for the UN;
Diverse Afghan women are meaningfully consulted…. including at the upcoming meeting of Special Envoys in May 2023;
We also urge all parties not to grant the Taliban a seat at the UN.
Former Afghan diplomat Asila Wardak in an op-ed published by PassBlue, an independent, women-led news site that closely covers the work of the UN, also said that while she appreciated that the actions of the Taleban were “beyond the control of the international community,” she questioned why Afghan women were excluded from the Doha meeting:
The global envoys — almost all men — will be talking about us without us. Why? We always ask for a seat at the table, and we have asked for just one hour of this two-day meeting. But we have been told it is not possible. What message does this exclusion send to the Taliban, to Afghan women and to the rest of the world about where the UN actually stands?
Women activists noted that even though the Taleban were not invited to the gathering, officials were in Doha and would take the opportunity to have meetings with officials. Several were tweeted about by the Taleban or reported by the media, although whether or not they were actually on the ‘sidelines’ of Doha, as portrayed by the Emirate or just normal routine meetings is questionable. Those were: a meeting with Norway’s Special Envoy for Afghanistan Kjell-Gunnar Eriksen and Paul Koloman Bkar, its Chargé d’Affaires (tweet here); the Director for Afghanistan and Pakistan in the UK’s foreign ministry, Andrew McCoubrey (tweet here, report here); China’s Special Envoy for Afghanistan, Yue Xiaoyong (tweet from TOLOnews here); Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, Pakistan and Russia (reported by Ariana).
In the end, there was a virtual meeting, organised at the request of US Special Envoy for Afghan Women, Girls and Human Rights Rina Amiri on 1 May between some of the envoys and officials, including from the US and EU, and dozens of women’s rights activists, more than sixty, according to Mary Karimi, from the Together Stronger and other groups (see tweet). The women updated the special envoys about the dire economic situation of Afghan families, especially women, and restated their demand that the Taleban should not be recognised, Asila Wardak told the London-based Independent Farsi. While they gave assurances that the issue of recognition was not on the table at Doha, the envoys had nothing “new to say to the women, except for ‘compassion and empty promises,’” said Wardak (see Independent Farsi reporting here).
Did any Afghans from the media, aid or civil society support greater engagement?
Not all Afghans have been arguing against engagement. Other groups, particularly made up of those working on the ground inside the country, suggested practical approaches to engagement, which they believe would provide useful paths to resolving the impasse between the Emirate and international actors. They also sent two open letters to the UN Secretary-General, one from individuals working in the media and civil society inside Afghanistan and another signed by dozens of Afghan NGOs, calling itself the Nexus Group.
The letter from the individuals living in Afghanistan and working across peace, civil society, humanitarian aid, human rights, media and business sectors called for a “principled, pragmatic, and phased approach to engagement,” which would help remove what they said were the “roadblocks” to social and economic development against the backdrop of “the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet worsened by a weakened economy and a lack of a framework for political dialogue.” The letter offered a number of recommendations on political, aid, economic and diplomatic tracks, including a call for the international community to engage directly with the Afghan people to “develop Afghan solutions to Afghan problems,” expand support to local organisations, which it said had a proven track record of successfully negotiating access, and invest in women-led and owned organisations and areas where women and girls could still be active such as “local media, certain types of vocational institutes, cultural heritage preservation and arts programming.”
The second letter, from the Nexus Group, was signed by dozens of Afghan civil society organisations, argued against isolating Afghanistan and said: “A heavily sanctioned Afghanistan will not be conducive to regional security or human security inside the country.” Afghanistan’s civil society, the letter said, has shown “immense resilience” and has proven that meaningful working was possible in the current challenging environment: “Our potential to hold the de-facto authorities accountable is vast and can be leveraged by the international community to strengthen international pressure on the de-facto authorities.” Finally, the letter urged donors to target their support to critical areas such as the health sector, which “are collapsing in the absence of development aid, creating current and future needs which fuel more costly humanitarian interventions later on.”
Both letters stressed that they were from Afghans on the ground and working to improve people’s lives. They did not feature any open criticism of the Taleban, but couched them as the de facto authorities who needed to be engaged with. As the signatories to the first letter said: “The current approach to Afghanistan has only increased the suffering in this country. Our people are innovative, determined, pioneering and resilient – let’s work towards lifting the barriers to our progress.”
What did the opposition say about the gathering?
There were few reactions from opposition groups or leaders outside Afghanistan. The only group that seems to have issued a statement is the National Resistance Council for the Salvation of Afghanistan. This group was established in the Turkish capital Ankara in March 2022 on the initiative of former vice-president and Jombesh-e Melli leader Abdul Rashid Dostum at a launch attended by several northern mujahedin heavyweights, including: two leaders from Jamiat-e Islami, Atta Muhammad Nur, former governor of Balkh, and Ahmad Wali Massud, Ahmad Shah Massud’s son and National Resistance Front (NRF); Ittihad-e Islami leader and former MP Abdul Rabb Rasul Sayyaf, and; Hizb-e Wahdat Mardom leader and former Deputy Chief Executive Muhammad Mohaqeq. [5]
A 1 May declaration issued by the National Resistance Council welcomed efforts to end the current crisis in Afghanistan, but expressed strong opposition to any move to recognise the Taleban; rather, it called for the Doha Agreement to be abandoned and urged the international community to find a “new and acceptable road map” and “the formation of a comprehensive transition mechanism and the return of sovereignty to the Afghan people through national elections.”
Former first vice president Amrullah Saleh tweeted his thanks to the UN for excluding “the Talibs from the UN led Doha conference,” calling it “a meaningful & constructive decision,” on 2 May. Hecalled for the people of Afghanistan to be “given a chance to express their will & have a say in who should lead them and how.”
Why does this all feel vaguely familiar?
The authors did feel a sense of déjà vu over Guterres’ statement. The participants’ three ‘concerns’ that he cited appeared to come straight from the 1990s playbook of relations between the ‘international community’ and the Taleban’s first Emirate. Then also, the Taleban’s harbouring of terrorist groups, primarily al-Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden, their treatment of women and girls and their failure to control narcotics were all regularly cited by foreign powers and in Security Council resolutions (see resolutions 1267 (text here) and 1333 (text here) adopted on 15 October 1999 and 19 December 2000 respectively).
In those days, the terrorist issue was most pressing, as it probably is also today, but the issue of women’s rights and narcotics were also regularly cited. The issue of women’s rights is far more of a stumbling block to the aid programme than it was in the 1990s, given the Taleban are now trying to restrict freedoms which women and girls had (not universally, but in many places) been enjoying, rather than clamping down on a population cowed by a brutal civil war. (For more on this, see this recent AAN report comparing the two eras.)
Since 1999 Afghanistan’s production of narcotics – as the world’s leading supplier of illegal opiates– could be said to be the one single issue which harms the rest of the world the most. For the Taleban, both during their first rule and now, it was also the easiest international concern to deal with. In July 2000, they successfully banned opium poppy resulting in negligible cultivation in the 2000/2001 growing season – less than 10,000 hectares were planted with poppy, and that was in opposition-held areas, mainly in Badakhshan (see this report from the UN International Drug Control Programme (whether the eradication of poppy would have continued is moot as the Emirate was overthrown the following year).
Last year, on 3 April 2022, the Emirate again banned opium poppy cultivation and opiate production and trade (see AAN reporting here) and on 9 March 2023, it also banned cannabis cultivation. [6] The Taleban issued the opium ban in the midst of the harvest season and granted a two-month grace period, which left the 2022 harvest largely unaffected by the ban, according to the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime in a report issued in November 2022. [7] However, available media reports suggest that the ban has been strictly enforced on the new crop that was planted in the autumn of 2022 (see for example here).
In the 1990s, the poppy ban garnered the Taleban virtually no benefits in terms of relief from sanctions or steps towards recognition. There is no sense today, either, that these bans will help the Emirate’s case. This is even though their action appears to be in stark contrast to the failure of the US-supported Republic to make inroads in poppy production.
What is different this time is that the Taleban, with a cadre of diplomats honed by years spent talking to foreigners in Doha, are much more eloquent and on the front foot than in the 1990s, even though their message is virtually the same: the outside world has no right to meddle in domestic issues and should recognise the Emirate as the rightful rulers of Afghanistan. There is also a greater diversity of Afghan voices speaking in opposition to or critical or at least independently of the Taleban. Despite the Taleban’s clampdown on free speech, [8] some of those voices are from inside the country, named and identifiable people. This feels like a new phenomenon.
Edited by Jelena Bjelica
References
References
↑1
The delegates were from: China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Norway, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Uzbekistan, plus the European Union and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.
↑2
The aim of the two-day gathering, according to the Secretary-General’s spokesperson, speaking at his daily briefing in New York on the 1 May, was to:
[T]o reach points of commonality on key issues, such as human rights, especially for women and girls, inclusive governance, countering terrorism and drug trafficking… [and] achieve a common understanding within the international community on how to engage with the Taliban on these issues.
↑3
The resolution lists those challenges as “including, but not limited to, humanitarian, human rights and especially the rights of women and girls, religious and ethnic minorities, security and terrorism, narcotics, development, economic and social challenges, dialogue, governance and the rule of law; and to advance the objective of a secure, stable, prosperous and inclusive Afghanistan in line with the elements set out by the Security Council in previous resolutions.”
↑4
On 5 April, the UN said it had instructed “all national staff – men and women – not to report to the office until further notice” and again on 11 April, announced that “national personnel – women and men – have been instructed not to report to UN offices, with only limited and calibrated exceptions made for critical tasks.” The letter describes a wide variety of interpretations of this order, ranging from one agency deeming “all male staff ‘critical’ and offering female staff to return to work without any assurances for their safety, against the recommendation of the UN Country Team,” while multiple others “have not ensured the equal administration of this decision to all of its employees, with UN contract holders and 3rd party implementers held to different standards.” Only a few heads of agencies had framed the work-from-home mandate as a response to an “attack on women’s rights and the neutrality of the UN,” instead casting it as “purely a security measure.”
Perhaps more significantly, it says that following the December ban on NGOs employing women, instead of following UN operational guidelines issued by the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (the highest-level humanitarian coordination body within the UN) to ensure the “non-discriminatory delivery of aid,” in practice, “NGO partners and third-party contractors were directed to restart operations with significantly fewer female field workers and no female staff in offices.” This point was also raised in January by former AREU director, Orzala Nemat.
↑5
Whether those who attended the launch are members of the National Resistance Council for the Salvation of Afghanistan is not clear.
↑6
The ban on cannabis was announced at the beginning of the planting season. Typically, the planting season for cannabis in Afghanistan is between March and May, depending on the region. It is possible that the farmers in the western, northeastern and southern regions, who would typically sow cannabis seed in March, may have already done so. It remains to be seen how this ban will be implemented.
↑7
In 2022, Afghan farmers planted 56,000 hectares more land with opium poppy than in 2021, an increase of 32 per cent. That area, 233,000 hectares, was the third largest area under opium cultivation since UNODC monitoring began, UNODC reported in its 2022 Opium Cultivation in Afghanistan report. It also said that:
Opium prices have soared following the announcement of the cultivation ban in April 2022. The income made by farmers from opium sales tripled from USD 425 million in 2021 to USD1.4 billion 2022 – the equivalent of 29 percent of the 2021 agricultural sector value. The sum still represents only a fraction of the income made from production and trafficking within the country.… Following drought conditions in early 2022, opium yields declined from an average of 38.5kg/ha in 2021, to an estimated 26.7 kg/ha in 2022, yielding an opium harvest of 6,200 tons (10 percent less than the 6,800 tons in 2021). The 2022 opium harvest can be converted into 350 – 580 tons of heroin of export quality (50 – 70 percent purity).
↑8
For more on the Emirate’s repression of media, protests and other ‘fundamental freedoms’, see the UN Special Rapporteur’s first two reports, published in September 2022 and 9 February 2023 (AAN analysis here and here).
A Ban, a Resolution and a Meeting: A look at the May 2023 meeting in Doha and the reactions to it
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres is due to host a two-day meeting on Afghanistan with foreign envoys, beginning tomorrow, 1 May 2023, in the capital of Qatar, Doha. The Taleban have not been invited. AAN understands from sources from invited countries that the idea for the meeting emerged from visits to Kabul in January by senior UN officials trying to negotiate with the Islamic Emirate on its ban on NGOs employing Afghan women. UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed, in particular, came away with the sense that there needed to be a political plan for dealing with the Emirate. In recent days, however, the Doha meeting has become mired in controversy over her reported suggestion that the representatives would be looking into the question of recognising the Taleban’s government. This suggestion was swiftly and categorically denied by the UN Secretary-General’s spokesperson. The Taleban’s extension of their ban on employing Afghan women to the UN, made almost a month ago, has only complicated everything further, as AAN’s Kate Clark reports (with input from Roxanna Shapour), including appearing to throw the UN into disarray.
The Doha meeting will be held behind closed doors, with Secretary-General Guterres hosting Special Envoys for Afghanistan. The list of participants has not been released, but is expected to include countries from the region and the major donors, with the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Afghanistan and her deputy for political affairs coming from Kabul. Finally, after much speculation in the media about whether the Taleban would take part, the Secretary-General’s spokesperson confirmed that, unlike the last such gathering, in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in July 2022 (media reporting here), “The Secretary-General has not extended an invitation to the de facto authorities.” (See transcript of the 28 April press briefing here.)
The meeting is an opportunity for international actors, both interested nations and the UN, to discuss how to deal with the Taleban.
This report first lays out why dealings between the Islamic Emirate and the rest of the world has been so difficult and perplexing, both for the Taleban and other countries. It looks at how relations deteriorated after the takeover and at the strange and uneasy modus vivendi that has developed, involving sanctions, aid, non-recognition and minimal engagement, and at how that has been thrown into confusion by the Taleban’s decision to ban Afghan women from working, first with NGOs (on 24 December 2022) and then the UN (on 4 April).
The report then looks at how the UN responded to the extension of the ban on Afghan women working, which had been widely anticipated, but which it had apparently not prepared for. It looks at how the extension has complicated the agenda for the already-planned Doha meeting. It also details recent remarks made by various senior UN personalities in the light of the ban and ahead of the Doha gathering, which have stirred up controversy, including comments by Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed which appeared to suggest that recognition of the Emirate might be on the table – something which has been denied, but which sparked a media and social media storm.
The report explores, a little, the reasoning of those advocating greater or less engagement with the Taleban, before concluding with the little that is known about the agenda at the Doha meeting and what can be expected from it.
Why are relations between the Emirate and the rest of the world so difficult?
Relations between the Taleban and many of Afghanistan’s Republic-era allies have deteriorated since the Taleban took power in August 2021. In the early months after the fall of the Republic, even though the Taleban had taken power by military force and after – as many international actors saw it – they broke a promise to negotiate with other Afghans, there was still some appetite to deal with Taleban rule as a fait accompli. Discussions with the Taleban in Doha in 2020 and 2021 before the takeover had engendered some hope that, this time, the Taleban might behave differently, respect the rights and freedoms of the Afghan people – women and girls, the media and protestors, that a Taleban government would be a pluralistic one, not made up exclusively from its own ranks, and that an official amnesty given to former officials and military would be respected. Re-opening embassies, beginning ‘constructive dialogue’ and resuming development aid were all on the table at this time.
None of that happened. No country has recognised the Emirate as Afghanistan’s government, although a handful of embassies [1] are now in the hands of Taleban appointees, and some countries have opened missions in Kabul. [2] Afghanistan’s reserves, held in the United States and Europe, have remained frozen since the takeover. US and UN sanctions, which applied to the Taleban or individual members before the takeover, now apply to the country they govern. Those sanctions have been subject to multiple waivers that should enable most trade, remittance flows and aid, but they still have a chilling effect on business and other financial interactions because foreign correspondent banks, which act as intermediaries between domestic and international banks, are reluctant to deal with Afghan banks. Meanwhile, the money which had poured into Afghanistan as aid and military support (estimated by USIP economist William Byrd to have been about eight billion dollars a year) and the plentiful spending of foreign armies was cut off overnight in August 2021. It has been replaced by a much smaller, but still significant amount of humanitarian aid – Byrd calculates about three billion dollars a year, or a fifth of Afghanistan’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), itself far smaller since the takeover and the economic collapse it precipitated.
From a Western point of view, any improvement in relations has been successively set back by Emirate policy decisions that Western governments found untenable: the appointment of an administration made up exclusively of Taleban, with few non-Pashtuns and no women in September 2021 (AAN reporting here); the decision to re-close secondary schools for girls just after Nawruz 2022, 72 hours ahead of a major international conference on aid to Afghanistan (AAN reporting here); the discovery that the leader of al-Qaeda was living in Kabul (Ayman al-Zawahri was killed by a United States drone on 31 July 2022, see this AAN report) which, reportedly scuppered discussions on how to reactivate the Central Bank as an independent entity (which could have eased the liquidity and banking crisis); and finally, in December the banning of girls from university and Afghan women working for NGOs. The Taleban decided to extend that ban to the UN, despite the UN having announced its operations were on a “trial period” while it monitored the ban’s impact on women working for NGOs.
For the Taleban, who believe they are the rightful rulers of Afghanistan through God’s grace and the defeat of foreign armies and their Afghan ‘puppets’, this refusal to recognise their regime and to stymie economic activity through sanctions, is perplexing and enraging. How they deal with Afghan women and whom the Supreme Leader chooses to appoint are all internal, domestic issues and no one else’s business. As to Zawahri, they condemned his killing, saying it was “a clear violation of international principles and the Doha Agreement” and would harm “mutual interests” (for more detail, see this AAN report). They also believe that as the government of Afghanistan, they are best placed to deliver aid to their people.
The result of all this has been a strange modus vivendi. Western donors provide huge amounts of off-budget aid to Afghanistan, but it is overwhelmingly humanitarian, which is ‘apolitical’ and, therefore, more palatable domestically, but neither cost-effective nor aid effective. The aid is channelled not through the Taleban government, but largely through an unwieldy and expensive mechanism which sees UN agencies devolving funding to NGOs (with the World Bank’s Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund or ARTF adding another layer of bureaucracy to some of it). Since August 2021, that support has saved millions of Afghans from even worse hardship and helped the economy limp along. The dollars needed to pay for humanitarian efforts (flown in by the UN, but the effect would be the same if they arrived by bank transfer) also help keep the economy afloat, supporting the domestic currency, the afghani, keeping inflation down and boosting many national and personal incomes.
Humanitarian aid, by its very nature, is short-term assistance to help the most vulnerable members of a society facing an acute humanitarian crisis – to save lives, relieve suffering, and protect human dignity until the government or other actors can step in with long-term sustainable plans. It is not intended to act as a long-term solution to address, let alone resolve, a complex humanitarian crisis like Afghanistan’s. It is especially problematic, writes Byrd, when it is “a primary source of external financial support propping up the economy.” The aid, delivered so as to bypass the Taleban does also inevitably help sustain the Emirate: it keeps the economy afloat, indirectly fund domestic revenues from the collection of taxes and customs from individuals, businesses, traders and NGOs, and means that some of that revenue that might have had to be spent on services, such as healthcare, can be reserved for other aspects of government, especially security. Few think this situation is ideal or even healthy.
Meanwhile, engagement between foreigners and the country’s supreme leader has not happened at all: requests to meet by those based in or coming to Afghanistan have been turned down, which means outsiders do not get to talk to the real holder of power in the country. Western diplomats also generally meet Taleban officials outside the country, typically in Doha. That has left humanitarian actors on the ground as the Emirate’s main international interlocutors. Yet, they have no say over the policy of Western states, especially over what is important to the Taleban – sanctions, Afghanistan’s frozen assets and recognition.
This unsatisfactory modus vivendi suddenly and radically deteriorated yet further on 24 December 2022 when the Emirate announced that NGOs were banned from employing Afghan women. That ban left NGOs and their UN and donor partners with uncomfortable choices, summed up in a recent AAN report on the ban as: comply, fudge, or boycott. Scores of NGOs suspended some of their operations in the immediate aftermath of the ban while they tried to find compromises and workarounds.
The ban touched off a succession of visits by high-ranking UN officials in hopes of persuading the Emirate to overturn it and allow women to continue working for NGOs. The first of such visits was that of the UN’s top-ranking woman, Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed (see media reporting about her visit on 20 January here and here). Her two-week trip included “consultative visits” to Turkey, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and several other Gulf states, where she also met diplomats based in Doha before travelling onwards to Afghanistan and visits to Kazakhstan, the UK and the European Union afterwards.The consultations, she told a press conference on 25 January on her return to New York (transcript here), were important because “the international community needs to have that unified response.”
She wanted “to see if there was any opening, any momentum that we could have on the political track.” At that press conference, she also made a case for engagement:
[The Taleban] have these two mantras. One is called self-sufficiency and the other one’s called alternatives and I think that that’s really difficult to deal with, because within the region, which is why we must engage with the region, there is engagement. Even while we were there, there were announcements to some countries of some of the investments that they were dealing with. So I think they will go to where they can get an engagement and resources will come. This is a well-functioning mindset that zero tolerance for corruption. Absolute take the max tax so they can take out of anyone to make sure the coffers are full, and they do have trade. I mean, they trade. So I think that we’re up against, you know, looking for the leverage we have to bring them to the international community, where the respect for women and girls’ rights, human rights are right up front. And that’s why I think the pressure for us to continue engaging not to leave a vacuum that will be filled by something else that will take us back decades.
One such leverage, she said, was recognition “because [the Taleban] talked about it all the time,” she added: “I went into Afghanistan thinking perhaps the most conservative of them didn’t care about recognition; they do. Recognition is one leverage that we have, and we should hold on to it.”
Meanwhile, back in Kabul, the ban had derailed the launch of the critical 2023 Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP). It outlines Afghanistan’s needs for the year and was due to make a multi-billion dollar funding appeal on behalf of humanitarian organisations working there, in January. The HRP’s launch was delayed until March while intense discussions took place between humanitarian actors, and with the Emirate about the ban. Those discussions included another visit to Kabul later in January by members of the UN’s highest-level humanitarian coordination forum, the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC), led by its chair, the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Martin Griffiths (see his press conference on returning to New York on 30 January 2023 here).
In the end, the ban did not alter the Humanitarian Response Plan; it still requested USD 4.6 billion in assistance for Afghanistan in 2023 to support 23.7 million people in need, with a little over half, USD 2.66 billion, going on food security and agriculture. However, the IASC mandated an “operational trial period” for humanitarian activities during which, according to the HRP, “based on the outcomes of… monitoring and related advocacy efforts,” the UN would review operations comprehensively and, if required, revise the plan. [3]
The Doha meeting, the women working ban and confused UN officials
One important outcome of the senior UN visits to Kabul in January was that Amina Mohammed in particular came away feeling that a ‘political approach’ and the establishment of a political track with the Taleban was needed, something which she spoke about in her January press conference:
So it’s not black and white. It’s not cut and dry. There’s lots of grey areas and weaving that we have to do, but always keeping our women right at the centre of this. Right upfront and centre. If we keep that focus, I can tell you we will go much, much further ahead. If we start to get involved in the why we can’t do it, then we won’t do it. Now we must do it because these women matter. And they are a reflection of what is happening to women’s rights around the world. And if we drop it on Afghanistan, we will drop it on many more rights of women.
Mohammed’s sense that there needed to be a political approach to the Emirate was, AAN was told by sources from invited countries that the genesis for the 1-2 May meeting in Doha, where envoys and UN officials could discuss and perhaps flesh out what that might look like. AAN was told by an official from one of the invited countries that, in parallel and feeding into the drive to explore complementary approaches to the Taleban, were the complaints of humanitarians on the ‘frontline’ in Kabul that they were neither equipped nor authorised to deal with the Emirate politically.
It was hoped that the gathering would be held soon after UNAMA’s mandate renewal in March, but the Secretary-General’s other commitments delayed it. [4] When the Taleban extended its ban on women working to the UN on 4 April, the UN responded by announcing that all staff, male and female, would work from home wherever possible while it reviewed operations: the end of that review was timed to end just after the Doha meeting, on 5 May. The extension of the ban has, of course, complicated the agenda at Doha. Also complicating what people understand the meeting to be about, and what UN policy in the wake of the working women ban might be have been remarks by senior personalities within the UN speaking at cross-purposes.
First, on 18 April 2023, UNDP’s global chief Achim Steiner told AP that the UN (not just UNDP but the entire UN family) was ready to take the “heartbreaking” decision to pull out of Afghanistan in May if it could not persuade the Taliban to reverse the ban on women working:
[I]f I were to imagine the U.N. family not being in Afghanistan today, I have before me these images of millions of young girls, young boys, fathers, mothers, who essentially will not have enough to eat.
Steiner said they were approaching “a very fundamental moment.” Their “hope and expectation is that there will be some common sense prevailing,” but right now, the “entire United Nations system [is] having to take a step back and re-evaluate its ability to operate there. His remarks came the same day as UNDP published a bleak assessment for the coming year, “Afghanistan Socio-Economic Outlook 2023”, and possibly in an attempt to influence the UN’s internal review on operations due to end on 5 May.
Dujarric was left later that day trying to downplay Steiner’s remarks at the daily press briefing. He claimed there had been a “misinterpretation or misunderstanding” and insisted: “We are staying in Afghanistan. We are committed to do whatever we can to deliver for the people of Afghanistan.” Pressed repeatedly by journalists, he said the UN was “committed to doing whatever we can in Afghanistan,” that he was “not aware that the full pull out of the UN is an option” and that they were busy trying to “thread the needle” of how to deliver humanitarian aid in an impartial way according to our principles, respect International Human Rights Law and the UN charter.
The Secretary-General’s spokesperson was back clarifying UN policy on Afghanistan the following day after another senior official sparked fresh controversy. This time, he was responding to remarks made by Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed in a talk at Princeton University in the US and reported by the media (see for example, Voice of America). She spoke about the first meeting of envoys from “the region and internationally” with the Secretary-General:
“And out of that, we hope that we’ll find those baby steps to put us back on the pathway to recognition [of the Taliban], a principled recognition,” Mohammed said. “Is it possible? I don’t know. [But] that discussion has to happen. The Taliban clearly want recognition, and that’s the leverage we have.”
VOA reported that Mohammed had said the Taleban had told her during her visit in January that they had implemented laws protecting women from gender-based violence and ensuring women’s inheritance rights according to sharia, and had eliminated corruption, but that the ‘international community’ had not allowed her to engage to know if these claims were true or not. Mohammed said engagement would help hold the Taleban accountable for their actions: “We cannot allow that they continue to get worse, which is what happens when you don’t engage.” Regional economic engagement was already happening, she also said, with the aim of ensuring Afghanistan did not implode and plunge into chaos: “We either engage and pull them to the right side, or we don’t and see where it drifts. We must dine with the devil with [a] long spoon.” Mohammed also reportedly compared the Taleban to COVID, calling their actions unpredictable: “We don’t know what they’re going to do or how they’re going to react.”
While the transcript of her speech at Princeton has not been released, the words quoted do recall what she said during her press conference back in January. Back then, she was not proposing that the Emirate should be recognised, but that recognition was one thing that the Taleban had been clear about desiring and as such, it might be used as valuable leverage to obtain concessions. In that sense, there was nothing new about what she was reported to have said at Princeton. However, the very mention of ‘recognition’ stirred up horror and hope – depending on a person’s hostility towards, or support for, the Emirate. Any number of tweets, articles, blogs and opinion pieces were triggered by the Princeton talk, mainly to attack, but some to support putting recognition on the table, despite the UN Secretary-General’s spokesperson’s clarification the very next day, 19 April, when he told reporters:
So let me be clear. First of all, on the topic of recognition, that is clearly in the hands of the Member States. And it’s a fact, it’s according to the Charter, and there’s no question on that.
The spokesperson then tried to put Mohammed’s remarks in context.
I think in her remarks in Princeton, she was reaffirming the need for the international community to have a coordinated approach regarding Afghanistan, which includes finding common ground on the longer-term vision of the country and sending a unified message to the de facto authorities on the imperative to ensure that women have their rightful place in Afghan society. She was not, I think, in any way implying that anyone else but Member States have the authority for recognition.
Dujarric’s attempts to tell reporters what the Doha meeting was about were mystifying – at least to this author who is not fluent in UN-speak. He said the aim of the gathering was to:
[R]einvigorate the international engagement around the common objectives for a durable way forward on the situation in Afghanistan. The Secretary-General has said and continues to believe that it’s an urgent priority to advance an approach based on pragmatism and principles, combined with strategic patience, and to identify parameters for creative, flexible, principled, and constructive engagement. It is his aim that the discussions, which will be held behind closed doors, can contribute to a more unified consensus regarding the challenges ahead.
The following day, 20 April, UN deputy spokesperson, Farhan Haq, was still trying to clarify the nature of the Doha meeting after “several countries have sort of expressed some concern, and maybe slight confusion” that it was about recognising the Emirate. He insisted this was not the case.
Meanwhile, back in Kabul, on 19 April, UNAMA Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General and Humanitarian Coordinator Ramiz Alakbarov urged the international community to “stay the course [and] maintain the humanitarian response in the current operating environment to the best extent possible, avert famine, prevent disease outbreaks & avoid excess mortality.” In a series of tweets, [5] which appeared to be in response to, and contradicting, UNDP boss Achim Steiner’s remarks that the UN might be leaving Afghanistan, he said:
3/4 While the Taliban de-facto authorities have taken a series of decisions that have negatively impacted the ability of humanitarian actors to mount a full-scale response, this is not the time to turn our backs on the people of Afghanistan. They need everyone’s solidarity.
Western officials who spoke to AAN were all privately perplexed by the mixed messaging from these senior officials. The outcry against Mohammed’s reported remarks meant some had had to privately clarify what the aims of the UN’s Doha meeting ‘really were’ to their ministers, while some have also felt the need to re-state their governments’ position publically. For example, US Special Envoy for Afghan Women, Girls and Human Rights Rina Amiri tweeted on 25 April:
I have received a number of messages expressing concern regarding recognition of the Taliban. We remain clear. There will be no normalization of relations with the Taliban without respect for the rights of all Afghans, especially women.
The conflicting remarks have been a comms disaster for the UN, stirring up controversy and concern. Perhaps more worryingly is how they pointed to the UN having collectively had its head in the sand over the possibility that the Taleban might extend the ban. On 4 April, after the extension to the ban became evident, the Secretary-General made clear, via his spokesperson, that he found it “frankly, inconceivable.” Yet anyone involved in Afghanistan had assessed the extension of the ban as probable, indeed, likely. It was a possibility that was also mentioned by his deputy, Amina Mohammed, back in January:
There was the notion that a third edict may come out that would take out international women from the international organizations, the embassies.[6] The author was told that some embassies have indeed been affected by the ban on employing Afghan women. I mean this was talked about. I have to tell you we went with, in our back pocket, three responses to that. It hasn’t happened so far, touch wood and the tree of knowledge. I don’t say that it won’t, but clearly the pressure that we’re putting on has stopped that roll back as quickly.
The utter confusion displayed by senior officials has given every impression that the UN had carried out no scenario planning during the more than three months following the announcement of the ban on women working for NGOs as to what it would do and say if the Taleban extended the ban. It took a week for the ‘UN in Afghanistan’ to come up with a policy and a statement, published on 11 April. Different UN agencies have different interests, mandates and priorities, as well as perennial squabbles over finances and resources. Yet, this should have been one time when planning, coordination, and unity of messaging, won out.
The controversy and confusion caused by the varying remarks of senior UN officials have exacerbated what was an already difficult situation facing the UN and NGOs on the ground. It has further muddied already muddy waters over international policy towards the Emirate. If Taleban are now discussing splits in the UN and the ‘international community’ and wondering what their ‘real aims’ are, it would be no surprise.
Is greater engagement a good idea?
For both the UN and other international actors, deciding what to do in the face of both the bans on working women in particular and dealing with the Taleban in general, is far from easy – for all the reasons explored here and in another recent report by the author, “Bans on Women Working, Then and Now: The dilemmas of delivering humanitarian aid during the first and second Islamic Emirates”. One interviewee in that report with experience working in Afghanistan in the 1990s and today described the dilemmas as “fundamental, complex and largely irresolvable,” which means that whatever choices are made “will feel at least partially wrong. In a situation this complicated, a good choice doesn’t really exist.” The very difficulty of the situation makes the need for clarity and profound thinking obvious.
There are thoughtful proponents of both greater and lesser engagement. Former US ambassador to Kabul and senior career diplomat Ronald Neumann, for example, has pointed out that the “current approach of sanctions, demands and restricted contact with the Taliban is not working” to progress US goals. He made practical and thoughtful suggestions in a piece, “Why, when and how America should engage the Taliban”, published on 6 April in The Hill, which included being mindful of the mistrust, misconceptions and ignorance about the other party’s intentions and interests, and taking “a more limited approach based on certain principles.”
One [principle] is to limit goals for much smaller steps designed to slowly make some progress and, perhaps, build Taliban confidence that negotiations can be useful. A second principle is that every step must have a clear something given by them for something concrete from us. We should not advance based on promises; that approach led to the failure of the Doha withdrawal agreement. We withdrew U.S. troops. The Taliban gave virtually nothing.
Others are adamant that the Taleban need to amend their policies first, before they are ‘rewarded’ with any positive change in relations, or believe the Emirate is actually incapable of change and engagement is pointless and counter-productive. This position has been cogently argued by former Deputy Head of the Independent Directorate of Local Governance and former senior analyst with Crisis Group, Timor Sharan, in a piece published in Just Security on 20 April.
[I]nternational engagement with the Taliban keeps hitting a brick wall and has mainly proved ineffective, including on women’s rights. The United States and its allies are dealing with a regime on a radical mission, making any meaningful engagement very difficult beyond technical discussion over the delivery of humanitarian aid.
The carrots the international community has proposed so far subject to Taleban’s improved policies towards women – broader engagement and potential development assistance in specific areas – such as salaries for teachers or in the healthcare sector – is of secondary importance for the Taliban core leadership. They are driven and motivated by a puritanic mission and elements of a shared ideology. Indeed, they would rather see the Afghan population starve to death than undermine this mission.
The Doha meeting, and a new UN resolution
The extension of the ban to women working for the UN raised the bar for foreign governments to present a united front. Just a few days ahead of the Doha meeting, on 27 April, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) passed a resolution condemning the ban. It took six drafts and 17 days of heated negotiations to finalise the content and language of resolution 2681 (2023). (For a readout of the negotiations in the lead-up to the vote, see UN Security Council Report here).
According to a UN press release, the resolution condemned the Taleban ban on Afghan women for UN, saying it “undermines human rights and humanitarian principles” and called for “the full, equal, meaningful and safe participation of women and girls in Afghanistan.” It also called on the Taleban to “swiftly reverse its policies and practices restricting women and girls’ enjoyment of their human rights and fundamental freedoms — including those related to their access to education, employment, freedom of movement and participation in public life.” (The resolution will be publicly available as document S/RES/2681(2023) in due course.)
Speaking before the vote, Lana Zaki Nusseibeh, ambassador to the UN for the United Arab Emirates (UAE), one of the penholders on Afghanistan (these are the council members who lead the negotiation and drafting of resolutions on a particular issue – the other current penholder on Afghanistan is Japan), said her country was:
[P]leased to be joined by over 90 co-sponsors, not just from the Council, but also from Afghanistan’s immediate neighbourhood, the Muslim world and all corners of the Earth…. The cross-regional support for this resolution makes our fundamental message today even more significant: the world will not sit by silently as women in Afghanistan are erased from society. (See video here and UN press release here).
The Taleban were quick to react, with foreign ministry spokesperson Abdul Qahar Balkhi telling Turkey’s Anadolu news agency the ban was “an internal social matter of Afghanistan that does not impact outside states,” adding that the Emirate “remain[s] committed to ensuring all rights of Afghan women while emphasizing that diversity must be respected & not politicized.” Emirate spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid also weighed in: “The only solution to address all the problems of Afghanistan,” he said, “is to have engagement, dialogue and understanding. They should not block the route for engagement and dialogue, it is very harmful.” Finally, senior Taleban member, Anas Haqqani, called on the UN Security Council to stop chasing “its failed policies” and instead of passing resolutions, concentrate on removing political, economic and banking sanctions, which he said amounted to the “collective punishments of the Afghan people.” Balkhi did, however, say parts of the resolution were positive: “[Its] acknowledgement that Afghanistan faces multifaceted challenges is welcomed…. Afghanistan has suffered from decades long conflict often imposed by foreign powers. The path to post-conflict recovery requires the unconditional removal of UN, multilateral, & unilateral sanctions & restrictions, in addition to the provision of humanitarian & development. Assistance to the country.” (For more media reporting, see ToloNews and BBC Persian.)
It is following the world’s unequivocal condemnation of the Emirate’s working women ban that special envoys and UN officials will start arriving in Doha. The original purpose of the meeting, to come up with a practical approach to engagement, was already difficult enough, given the diverse nature of the participants. The Taleban’s ban on women working for the UN has further complicated matters, as that issue will inevitably loom large, skewing the conversation and taking up airtime – although fleshing out of a common position would be useful, as would backing for whatever the UN does: pull out, suspend, restrict or carry on with its operations.
Many would prefer to shelve any discussion on possible engagement with the Taleban until after the Emirate changes its policies on women, political participation and other freedoms, but for those who advocate political engagement, however limited, the Doha meeting could be an opportunity to start discussing preliminaries: How might the outside world influence Taleban policy? Are there common interests despite bigger differences? Should UNAMA have a role, and if so, what could it look like? How does one engage when even the most senior UN officials, globally, do not get to meet the Kandahar-based leadership?
People from three nations or organisations that have been invited to Doha have told AAN the agenda is limited – “skeletal” was the word used by one. All said that ambitions and expectations were low. It appears the meeting will focus on deliberating international concerns over the Taleban and exploring to see if there are any tools to influence them, or any common ground for better relations between the Emirate and the world – in other words, the very ‘baby steps’ that Amina Mohammed was talking about when she spoke at Princeton. We should not expect an outcome statement, they said, nor a final communiqué, nor a press conference.
Edited by Roxanna Shapour and Jelena Bjelica
References
References
↑1
On 25 March 2023, Taleban Spokesperson, Zabiullah Mujahid, told AP: “The Islamic Emirate has sent diplomats to at least 14 countries,” including China, Iran, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Russia, Turkey, “and other Arab and African countries.”
↑2
The following countries have diplomatic missions in Afghanistan: China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates. In addition, there is a European Union Delegation, which focuses on the delivery of humanitarian aid and monitoring the humanitarian situation and the United States also maintains an interest section at the Qatar embassy.
↑3
According to the HRP:
The Humanitarian Coordination Team (HCT) in collaboration with other humanitarian partners and basic human needs actors have developed a related monitoring and reporting framework to report back to the IASC [Inter- Agency Standing Committee] on the permissiveness of the access environment and sectoral and local authorisations, and humanitarian partners’ ability to operate within the IASC Mission recommendations / minimum criteria for operations under the impact of the ban. In the meantime, the humanitarian community continues to assess the impact of the ban across all sectors and engage with [de facto authorities] at the national, regional and provincial levels to overturn the ban.
↑4
UNAMA’s mandate is another element in the background to questions of engagement with the Taleban and the UN’s role in dealing with them. Divisions among Security Council members around whether UNAMA’s primary focus should be assisting humanitarian and economic crises in Afghanistan or taking on a broader governance and human rights mandate came to the fore when UNAMA’s mandate was up for renewal earlier this year. While UNAMA’s mandate was renewed unchanged for another year, a second UNSC resolution requested “an independent assessment that provides an integrated and coherent approach among different actors in the international community in order to address the current challenges facing Afghanistan”, with a report to be presented to the council before 17 November 2023 (see UN reporting here and AAN analysis in “Two Security Council Resolutions and a Humanitarian Appeal: UN grapples with its role in Afghanistan”. The person charged with making that assessment has now been appointed, Feridun Sinirlioğlu of Türkiye as the Special Coordinator, Independent Assessment Mandated by Security Council Resolution 2679 (2023) (announcement on 25 April here).
A year and a half after the Taleban takeover, music has completely disappeared from Afghan streets, TV channels, radios, cars and wedding halls. It barely survives in more personal and subdued forms and volumes – inside a house with tightly closed windows or shutters, inside headphones on one’s smartphone. The world, and Afghanistan more so, has graver problems to cope with, so it is not surprising that the silence on the Afghan streets has been matched by a comparative lack of reporting on music censorship. But what of the musicians, those Afghan men and women, made of flesh and blood like all others, who in August 2021 suddenly discovered that there was no more a place for them in Afghan society, nor a living to be earned in their home country? AAN’s Fabrizio Foschini has been hearing from five musicians from different walks of life, and different paths of exile. Here he makes their tales, if not their music, heard.
Students of the Afghan National Institute of Music in exile perform at a mixed musical evening of Portuguese Fado and Afghan songs in Lisbon. Photo by Fabrizio Foschini, 5 April 2023
2023 is turning out as yet another year without music in Afghanistan. Despite the lack of further clarification from the Taleban authorities about their official legal stance on music or the status of musical performances in the country, the unofficial ban on music is now taken for granted by all those involved – music performers, music lovers and music censors. Instances of Taleban crackdowns on performers and listeners of music across the country have continued to be reported sporadically in the international and Afghan press. The low volume of reporting of such cases does not bear proof of a more relaxed attitude by the Taleban or of a passive acceptance of the ban by the public; rather, such cases rarely make it to the front page because they get pushed back by more dramatic events.Since AAN’s last report on music censorship at the end of 2021, Afghanistan’s economic and political woes have increased in number and gravity, absorbing most of the residual media focus on Afghanistan. The uncompromising attitude adopted by the Taleban on major issues such as female education has eclipsed other human rights, such as those protecting people’s right to participate in the community’s cultural life in the media and among Afghan activists and international rights watchdogs.[1]
At the political level, any debate on the lawfulness of music may be considered to have stalled. In the absence of strong pressure, either internal or external, for a change, the Taleban hardly need to clarify their stance or make it official. As in the repression of other activities or behaviour considered reproachable from a religiously ultra-conservative point-of-view, Taleban authorities do not have to engage in systematic ad hoc persecution. To make sure that music is repressed, and the de facto ban implemented, they can also count on religiously conservative networks in society and mechanisms of self-censorship activated by the population as a survival strategy. This can amount even to participating in the denouncing of musicians. As for the forms of this repression, despite hints by the Taleban that they would seek to enjoin people engaging in sinful acts to cease doing so with reasoning, it seems clear that the punishment for playing music can take extremely violent and disturbing shapes.
A look at one of the videos documenting the Taleban’s active targeting of musicians reveals several ‘culprits’ being publically punished, disgraced and humiliated, as they are forced to undergo haircutting, clothes-rending and self-shaming, and see their beloved instruments destroyed. The scene looks closer to a mob lynching than organised state violence. This, and the remote border location, Zazai Aryub district of Paktia province, where the footage originates, should not suggest that such a punishment is to be considered an outlier with respect to Taleban official procedures. Rather, it represents a form of state repression made more effective by the memory of old-time punishments, such as those meted out to individuals who ‘had gone astray’ by tribal or religious institutions invested by local elites with normative authority. Such types of community violence have usually been more effective and to-be-feared than forms of government repression in Afghanistan. The fact that these punishments are not inflicted regularly but seem to depend on the whim of local Taleban commanders and Amr bil Ma’ruf officials[2] does not leave the musicians in a better situation.
As detailed in the previous AAN report, one of the major yet most underrated problems of the Taleban ban on music is how it has undermined the social status of musicians and others connected to music making. Afghan musicians were traditionally classed as members of a clearly defined – and typically, looked down upon – social group. Until the 1970s, the great majority of musicians were associated with low-class, largely endogamous communities (ie they formed their own clan or ‘tribe’). Being a musician was hereditary and bore an economic and cultural stigma. Exceptions were made for some of the greatest names of Afghan music, who featured on radio programmes and were endowed the status of stars by the public, and for a few connoisseurs of music who belonged to the educated elites and were not dependent on performance for their income. The decades of war and religious radicalisation after 1978 saw a further erosion of musicians’ status inside Afghanistan; meanwhile, prominent musicians fled the country and settled abroad. This elite diaspora, also thanks to its connections with the modern ‘world music’ scene, was able to retain its stardom status in the eyes of the Afghan people, especially after 2001. For the traditional musicians who had remained in the country or emigrated to nearby Pakistan or Iran and then returned, the process of emancipation from the old stereotypes proved much slower and harder.
However, in the years following the 2001 change of regime, change came, slowly but surely. Pursuing a career in music was no longer only an option for the scions of musician families, who had put up with social stigma forever. Earning one’s bread through music, even traditional music played on ‘old’ instruments, began to be considered not a low-class and low-income occupation but potentially a respectable, professional career choice. It also became connected with national heritage and pride in being Afghan. Musicians were becoming a more composite group, with young talent from different walks of life adding to the wealth of knowledge and experience stashed in traditional musical preserves like Kabul’s Kharabat neighbourhood.[3] The Emirate’s de facto ban on music has eroded musicians’ hard-earned respect, throwing them back, once again, to the moral margins of society and destroying their ability to earn money and support a family. As a group, musicians have effectively been criminalised.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that so many musicians left the country shortly after the Taleban takeover, and that almost all those remaining are trying to follow suit. However, despite the widespread interest that the return of musicians to Afghanistan after the first Emirate triggered, the disaster befalling this social group now has not been fully appreciated internationally.
Some media reports have thrown light on the economic plight of musicians forced into joblessness in Afghanistan and the problems faced by those still trying to leave the country. The Emirate’s attack on Afghans’ cultural rights and the abuse of musicians also featured in the first report of the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Afghanistan to the UN Human Rights Council, published on 9 September 2022. There have also been some brief mentioning of the music ban by human rights groups.[4] However, as with so many other issues facing Afghans, the persecution of the nation’s musicians has so far failed to trigger a coherent or comprehensive response by international players. In fact, after the early sound and fury of the evacuation in the second half of 2021, the organisations[5] dedicated to facilitating the relocation of musicians or supporting economically those remaining in Afghanistan have actually started facing problems in gathering the needed attention and funding from donors.
Whatever attention the dire situation of Afghan musicians receives often originates from the musical events periodically organised in the countries hosting refugee musicians in relevant numbers and within the framework of organised relocation programmes. These events, which serve the purpose of raising both awareness about the ban on music in Afghanistan and funding for the support of musician exiles and those who stayed back in Afghanistan, certainly provide a rare occasion for advocacy and a vital form of support (see here a brief list of events organised by the International Campaign For Afghan Musicians – ICFAM).
Some more consistent media coverage has been received by the once Kabul-based, but now exiled Afghan National Institute of Music (ANIM) by virtue of its unique relevance to the Afghan musical scene and its extraordinary tale of survival, which entailed the relocation of a great number of students and teachers first to Qatar and finally to Portugal, where they strive to resume the institute’s previous activities fully (see here; here and here. ANIM musicians are also trying to make the best of their misfortune by eagerly joining every chance to perform music and exploring collaborations with other musical traditions and instruments, as the author was delighted to discover when attending an evening of mixed Fado-Afghan musical entertainment in Lisbon in April 2023 (pictures of the event feature in this report).[6]
The Afghan dhol drum may be posed to become an appreciated addition to Fado ensembles. Photo by Fabrizio Foschini (5 April 2023)
However, the fates of the many individual musicians, both inside the country and abroad, constitute precious threads of Afghanistan’s music world, which is under threat and at risk of being lost for good. In order to highlight the very diverse situations in which members of this special class of Afghans find themselves, AAN sought to give voice to some of them who are, more or less, now on their own.
AAN interviewed five Afghan musicians of different ages and backgrounds. Four are Kabulis (though one of them hails originally from Ghazni), and the fifth is Herati. Three were evacuated through international programmes and are currently in Europe – in Germany, Albania and Portugal. Another has fled Afghanistan on his own and is currently living as an undocumented refugee in Pakistan, while just one, the most senior, has remained in Kabul. Among those who relocated to Europe, two were students of ANIM, while the third had cooperated with the institute on various occasions. The other two musicians were active in the traditional musicians’ community centred in Kharabat in the Afghan capital.
The interviews took place in February 2023, and each began with the musician recalling what happened to them immediately after the Taleban takeover in August 2021. They are presented below, with interviewees grouped by age and clustered around specific events and aspects of their lives after that fateful turning point.
The new generation of musicians: fresh enthusiasm, and an iron determination
The first two interviewees belong to the newest generation of musicians: born after the fall of the Taleban’s first Emirate, they grew up in an environment which, however harsh and uncertain, offered at least the dream of a bright future in music, and some key opportunities to cultivate it. 18-old viola player, Rohullah, currently living in Germany, recalled studying at ANIM in Kabul:
I was 10 when I first went to study at ANIM. It was amazing: ANIM was trying to teach us music in the way a real academy would do: Western, Indian, Afghan music, theory and practice.
The other, Shokria, is only slightly older at 19. Originally from Ghazni, she lived in an orphanage in Kabul, where she also attended classes at ANIM. There, she studied classical guitar and the qashqarcha, a stringed instrument from northern Afghanistan, and played with the Zohra Orchestra (Afghanistan’s first all-female musical ensemble). She currently lives in a refugee camp in Albania, waiting to be relocated to the United States.
Both recalled vividly the moment they had to stop going to the institute and start making emergency plans for their future, as in Rohullah’s words:
Before the Taleban arrived, none of us had entertained the slightest idea they could take the city. The day they got into Kabul, I was at school. We were rehearsing for the music we’d perform for a national festivity; also because of the Covid-19 pandemic, we hadn’t been able to go to school for a long time in the previous months, and we needed to rehearse together hard.
Then suddenly, the police came to the school and told us the Taleban were in Kot-e Sangi [an area of PD6 not far from the ANIM premises, also located in west Kabul], and they were raising their flags there. It was sudden. It came as a shock: I rushed out, took a taxi, went home and started to pack my things, realising I had to leave the country immediately. Then Dr Sarmast [the director of ANIM] called and told me there was a plan to bring us students abroad with the support of foreign countries.
Or in Shokria’s recollections:
After the 15thof August [when the capital fell to the Taleban], the situation in Kabul was very bad. The stories we were hearing and the videos we were receiving from all sides were very scary. Also, we knew who the Taleban were. Because of their previous record when they’d been in power, because of the war they’d been waging in the provinces for years, they were known to us. We could never have believed they’d come to power and conquer Kabul. When this happened, a majority of the people living in Kabul tried to leave the city out of shock and fear.
The wait that followed was fraught with fear and anxiety for both of these young musicians: evacuation seemed a mirage scarcely to be grasped and, if available to ANIM students themselves, then not to most members of their families – as Rohullah recalled:
While I was waiting, I stayed mostly at home. I was so afraid of the Taleban, I didn’t go out to see how they were at close quarters. My family was pushing me to leave, saying, “You have toiled so much for the past few years, you even managed to travel abroad and give concerts, all this can’t end in nothing, you have to leave here and finish what you started.” After some weeks, I received the call and was taken to the airport: we students stayed [outside the airport] for one whole night, but, that time, it didn’t work. The flight was postponed, and we came home. And then the airport was bombed, so we had to remain in Kabul much longer.
For Shokria, the frustration was made more acute by the additional obstacles she had already had to overcome as a girl.
I [finally] left two months after the arrival of the Taleban. Two months I spent shut in my room. I was always in fear they’d come searching for me. A few days after their takeover, the BBC announced that music had been forbidden in Afghanistan. [The Taleban] had barely had the time to come to power and already they’d banned music!
Music is my profession, and in Afghanistan, it’s very hard to carry on with your life, to make a living for yourself and your family with music, especially as a girl. As if this was not enough, the Taleban arrived and ruined everything.
Finally, ANIM students were airlifted to Qatar in October 2021 and from there to Europe. Most went to Portugal, where the school was eventually re-established. Some, including Rohullah, did not stay:
Once in Europe, I asked to be reunited with my father. I was still a minor and this helped speed up the procedure. My father had been living in Germany for several years and I hadn’t seen him for a while. So, it’s eight months now since I moved to a small town in Bayern. I study in the local high school and I’m also learning German: English is useful here, but only up to a certain point. Once I get a diploma, I’ll continue my music studies. Luckily, I didn’t have to stop learning and practising my instrument. For three years, I’ve been a student of an American professor of viola who came to Afghanistan to teach, and luckily even now, I’m able to receive his online classes.
Others, like Shokria, are still in limbo:
I arrived in Albania at the end of October 2021. My family has remained in Afghanistan. There are many Afghans living here, waiting for visas to get to Canada or the US. Our life here is comfortable compared to other refugee camps: the place has good facilities, we don’t face food shortages and the refugees are free to move around; it’s not a closed camp. We’re taught various classes, but mostly English. Kids go to school and adults are active too, so they don’t get too depressed. I’m waiting for a US visa, but nobody knows how long it’ll take. I want to go to the US, go to college and continue my education. I want to pursue a career in music because I wish to remain a musician, but I also want to study another subject besides music.
According to their rather different current circumstances, Rohullah and Shokria both keep looking for ways to connect with other musicians and put their musical skills to play:
I was a member of the South Asian Orchestra between 2018 and 2020 when its activities were suspended because of the Covid-19 pandemic. They gave a concert in September last year [2022], but I’d just arrived in Germany and was still waiting for my documents, and I couldn’t travel abroad to perform with them. I hope this year to be able to do so. More recently, I managed to get in touch with the Passau University Orchestra and they offered me to join them, so I hope that in a few months I’ll start playing with them. (Rohullah)
When I arrived here in the camp, in less than a month, I managed to find a guitar. But I couldn’t find any other Afghan who played music. So I’m alone, but I have started teaching Afghan kids. UNICEF manages a school here and I arranged to teach those who are interested in music. (Shokria)
This determination to pursue their musical careers arguably stems from an inner certainty that their travel into the world of music is just beginning. Even highly traumatic events such as the Taleban takeover and their subsequent exile have come to represent the start, potentially, of a new phase in their personal path of learning and performing. These words, respectively by Rohullah and Shokria, show that the Taleban takeover and de facto ban on music has not robbed them of their identity as musicians:
The life of a musician is different from all other professions, but I hope that despite all the difficulties, I will manage to remain essentially a musician and bring back the meaning of music, its message of peace, of culture, of hope, to the people of my country. At any rate, until now, there were no professional viola players in Afghanistan. If nothing else, I hope at least to be able, when Afghanistan gets well again, to bring back this specific skill and learning to my people. (Rohullah)
Now musicians like me are scattered abroad. It’s a very hard situation for them. They’re always concerned about their families, left wondering what’s happening inside their country and whether they’ll ever be able to return. But we are in touch, we former students of ANIM, and other Afghan musicians as well, keeping in touch even if we’re spread far and wide, in order to get together whenever possible and keep bearing testimony to the world of the continuing existence of Afghan music. (Shokria)
A generation caught in the middle: a grim awakening for musicians in their prime
When I was a child, the Taleban took power for the first time. Back then, my father was in the army and he had to flee to Iran, while I had to stay back in Herat. I gave up my childhood because of the Taleban: I had no father, I couldn’t study, I couldn’t play. I grew up with my uncle’s family until I was eleven. Only when the US toppled the Taleban and the Karzai government came into being could my parents return from Iran.
Fazel, now exiled in Portugal, comes from Herat. He is 32 years old and has spent all his life “studying, researching and teaching music.” He plays different stringed instruments such as the rubab, dotar, tambur and sitar;[7] and has also studied singing. His approach to music is grounded in the rich traditional world of Herati musicians, but he sought avidly to expand his horizons and deepen his understanding of music, and managed to do so, thanks to the opportunities offered by post-2001 Afghanistan:
My uncle was a veteran rubab player who used to work for RTA [Radio Television Afghanistan, the state broadcaster], after having been a shagerd [disciple] of the Khushnawaz family of Herati rubab maestros. I started learning music as his student. After 2001, I also strived to study music more formally, but unfortunately, there was no adequate musical institution in Herat, so I got a diploma in Persian Literature instead.
From 2010, I started taking part in the winter academy organised by ANIM in Kabul, where they invited music students from other provinces. There, Afghan and foreign teachers would also give lectures on the theory of music. In Herat, there were many famous musicians and great performers, but they had no theoretical depth. In Kabul, I could finally learn the theory of Western and Indian musical systems.
Another musician, Faruq, had believed music to be his lifelong profession and destiny. 43 years old and a virtuoso of the rubab, he was also a member of the music ensembles of various TV channels. He is now living in Quetta, Pakistan, though he originally hails from Kharabat, the musical heart of Kabul:
Music plays a huge role in my life. It’s my daily bread. In my family, there has always been music and I have continued this tradition from my childhood until now. And it’s because of music that now I had to flee Afghanistan and come live in Pakistan. The Taleban threatened us, saying we musicians put Islam in danger. During the past two decades, we have toiled to rebuild and enrich Afghan music. That is what we did. Every day, I would exert myself for 10 to 12 hours on the rubab, the sarod, the guitar. And, if I can’t be a musician, there is no other job I can do in Afghanistan.
Faruq and Fazel’s generation of musicians witnessed the destruction brought to Afghan culture and society in the 1990s by the, by then, already decades-long conflict before participating in the reconstruction and rejuvenation of Afghanistan’s musical traditions, facing many obstacles and oppositions in the process. Now, the Taleban takeover has caught them, and scores of other musicians and music teachers who are in the prime of their professional and creative lives, as an unforeseen doom, forcing their projects and careers to an abrupt end, as Fazel recounted.
Back in Herat, I contributed to the founding of the Honarestan-e Tarana Academy and became the director of musical programmes there. With the help of ANIM, I also tried to expand the teaching of music curricula to other schools. Unfortunately, I faced many problems: on the one hand, there was a lack of professional music teachers and, in state schools, also of available budgets. Only in the last few years, some private schools had started to develop their own music groups to perform at festivals such as Nawruz. Moreover, Herat is a religiously conservative place and the influence of some religious leaders against our activities was very strong. They even managed to get some concerts by famous Afghan music stars cancelled.
When Herat fell, my problems were not with the incoming Taleban, but with certain circles – those around Mujib al-Rahman and his people.[8]They were the ones who came after me when the Taleban conquered the city: they came to the academy and destroyed our musical instruments. I didn’t have sufficient contacts with foreigners to gather support, as I’d never travelled abroad. I managed to reach Kabul and get in touch with the French embassy who said they could help me, but not my students or the school. Then the Taleban took Kabul as well. I managed to flee to Qatar where I stayed for three or four months, and in December 2021, I was able to reach Portugal together with the ANIM students who were being relocated there.
Faruq also recalled difficult experiences.
Before coming here, to Quetta, we lived in Kabul under the Taleban for a while, but my face was too well known because I’d often performed on TV during the Republic. After the Taleban came to power, I stayed at home in PD8 for four months, barely going out at all. Then somebody – well, actually it was the wakil-e gozar [the representative] of my neighbourhood – who informed the Taleban about me, telling them that “this guy used to play music on TV and so on.” The Taleban came to my house, I owned a lot of instruments, also sarods and guitars, besides the rubabs. They scolded me and they destroyed some of [my collection]. After that, I decided to quit my home and I went to live in hiding in a rented house in Khushal Khan (in PD5 of West Kabul, the other side of the city) for another four to five months, until we managed to leave the country.
In those days, to bring you to Pakistan, smugglers would normally ask for 50,000 Pakistani rupees [around USD 270 at the time, in May 2022]. I had to pay triple the amount, 150,000 PKRs [around USD 810], because the smugglers could tell I was some sort of fugitive. They thought I must have been someone in the military or a government official, or anyway somebody with something to hide from the Taleban, so they raised the price as they pleased.
For men of Faruq and Fazel’s age, to suddenly lose the social status and economic stability achieved after great efforts in difficult environments – respectively a social background considered a ghetto, albeit a musical ghetto, like Kharabat, and a conservative, though learned, provincial city such as Herat, was a particularly heavy blow. Added to that, covering even the basic economic needs of a family was suddenly a nightmare, especially for Faruq, a refugee in Pakistan, shorn of rights and, unlike Fazel, with no international support.
It’s now ten months since my family and I arrived here in Quetta. Life is very hard – from an economic point of view, to understanding the language, to having access to public services. I’m very concerned because my kids can’t go to school – my daughter should be in class 11, and my sons in classes 7 and 4. Government schools won’t accept them as we’re undocumented here, and private schools are too expensive.
I opened a vegetable stall to earn money for my family. However, all I earn goes on expenses: 20,000 rupees (around USD 78 at today’s exchange) for the monthly rent, other house expenses and bills – here they bring water in tanks and you have to buy even that. Out of ten months, I managed to make ends meet maybe two or three times. For the rest of the time, we’ve been using the last of our savings. I registered with UNHCR, but we haven’t received any help so far.
Whereas younger students see in the learning of music both an existential goal and a set of skills that qualify them and allow them to progress in life, older musicians in exile now struggle to be allowed to employ their musical skills to make a living:
Here in Portugal, I’ve had only a few occasions to play at concerts; once with Orquestra Todos, a very big ensemble from Lisbon, when their sitar player was absent. Thanks to friends and acquaintances, I obtained a pair of old tablas and repaired them; I also acquired a harmonium in order to give some concerts. I went to many restaurants to propose an evening performance, but very few accepted and then they paid little money, around 50 euros per night. With this sum I need to pay somebody who plays percussions with me and cover transportation as well. Even if I played every night, I couldn’t earn a living this way! And, I have no place to perform or teach. I live in a room in a refugee centre and there’s no spare room to practice, so I have to do it outside. I tried to give music classes. I once found some students, some master students of a music faculty from Slovenia that were researching the music of Afghanistan and had come all the way to Portugal to meet the Afghan musicians exiled here. I ended up teaching them in a park outside the refugee centre. (Fazel)
In Quetta, there is music. Local people like music, but their music is different; it has different characteristics, I cannot play it. Of course, I play Pashtun folk music, but Afghan Pashtun music. Pakistani Pashtuns and Baluchis have different musical tastes and patterns. Afghan refugees, especially the newly arrived like me, but even those who have lived here for long have a lot of problems and cannot afford the luxury of organising musical events. Since I arrived, I’ve played only once for a gathering. With time, I could learn the characteristics of the local music and start to play it, but for the moment, I have not even tried.
Our biggest problem here is that we’re living illegally, without documents. As long as we stick to our neighbourhood, Gawalmandi, where many Afghan refugees live, the police won’t disturb us, but as soon as we leave it, we risk being arrested, held in jail for some months, or brought to Spin Boldak and pushed back to the Afghan side of the border. The Pakistani government doesn’t want Afghan refugees to become too many or travel to other parts of Pakistan. I’ve received several proposals to go and play in Peshawar or Islamabad, but I had to turn them down for fear of being arrested or deported because that would leave my family unprotected. (Faruq)
Their situations may be very different, but the words of both interviewees featured something they share with many Afghan refugees – uncertainty about the future. At this stage, with both the future of music in Afghanistan and their own fate on hold, they are stuck in a slowly deteriorating situation. Uncertainty over the future has grown so strong that they question even their lifelong pursuit of music, or it provokes dreams of, for now, an impossible return to their homeland:
Initially, I didn’t plan to remain in Portugal, I wanted to go to France, but eventually, they convinced me to stay in Lisbon and be hosted by a local NGO together with some other single men.[9]Unfortunately, the support they’ve provided us isn’t adequate and, anyway, it is due to be terminated next July. Now I like Portugal very much, I have spent more than one year in this country and its people have been nice to me, but it doesn’t seem to be the right place to get a job, and finding a house to rent is also difficult. When I came here, I entertained hopes that I could continue my studies, complete a PhD, and one day return to Afghanistan as somebody able to carry forward the music traditions in my country. I’ve now realised that in this world, music is an extra, something for people who are in love with it, like me. There’s no chance for me to live on music here.
Many Afghan musicians in exile have been forced to change their lives: they work as cooks, waiters, mechanics. I’m afraid I will also be forced to leave the musical profession and search for other livelihoods. I was recently in touch with a French music scholar in Nice. I’ll go there in the next weeks for a concert. It’s a benefit concert for refugees and I’ll sing there. But he already warned me that, even in France, there’d be hardly any chances for long-term cooperation or funding on musical projects. I’ve also developed some health problems, as of late, so I really need to find a place and an income anywhere as soon as possible. (Fazel)
I don’t have long-term plans, my long-term plan is to go back to Afghanistan. Afghanistan is the best place for us, Afghan artists should belong there, and Afghanistan is a country that all people in the world are friends with.
If there is a chance, I will go back to Afghanistan. I played with different Afghan TV stations and I know all the people of the trade there. For Afghan artists, there’s no place as good as Afghanistan. (Faruq)
The future of music in Afghanistan: full circle with the 1990s?
The return to an Afghanistan where music is again allowed may seem an idle dream born out of desperation and disbelief about what has happened, but some of the younger interviewees, such as Rohullah, hold it as a likely outcome:
All in all, I don’t think the Taleban can manage to silence music in Afghanistan this time. It’s an impossible task. They can try and take music away from the people with all their means, but people will nonetheless listen to it. Music is in the blood of the people, and, the same as blood, they need it to live. And our people have progressed; the new generations won’t let this happen again. A few people in power cannot stop major trends in society: the Afghan people won’t give up their music.
His optimism was balanced by a more cautious appraisal by his age-peer, Shokria:
I don’t think the Taleban will ever relent on their ban on music. They have a lot of problems with music, especially with the teaching of music and the idea that people can be professional musicians. They’ll never allow people to study music. You see, they don’t allow girls to study at all.
In my opinion, the situation in Afghanistan is so bad now, especially economy-wise – we see people forced to sell their daughters to feed their other kids – that there’s no chance at all, there’s nothing that the international community can do for Afghan music. That has to come a long way, the defence of Afghan music, of all parts of Afghan culture, that is still very far away.
Older musicians such as Fazel from Herat compare the present situation with previous times of crisis, and the defence of music with that of other human rights:
This is not the first time of the Taleban. The previous one was even worse: every musician was in danger. The very existence of Afghan music was in danger. The quality of the musical tradition got affected very badly. Much was lost. [After the fall of the first Emirate and, previously, in the diaspora], all sorts of people started to call themselves musicians and make a business out of music. But what we see today is also worrying: Afghan music is at risk of going down the same path as it did twenty [sic] years ago.
Music is the human right of everybody. We see in Afghanistan nowadays that not only music but also many other human rights are forsaken: the Taleban don’t even let the girls study. As for all other human rights, pressure must be brought onto the Taleban to change their policies on music so that the rights of the Afghan people aren’t trodden upon. Even the Taleban make use of music for their own purposes: when I was in Kabul after their takeover, I saw them riding around in big government cars, playing loud music. And in the Islamic world, there’s not a single Muslim country where music is forbidden. Haven’t the Afghans the same right as all other Muslims to live their lives with music?
His words were echoed by Faruq from his Pakistani exile:
Every country has its culture, and music is a part of it. Even the Arab countries, which represent Islam to the world, have it. The world must not forget that the youth, that all people need music, when they are tired from work, when they are sad because of some problem they face.
However, another musician, our last interviewee and the only one who has so far remained in Afghanistan believes the problems of the Afghan people have grown way beyond the need for music. He asked not to be named. Here we refer to him as ‘Bismillah’.
An older musician’s perspective: poverty is stronger than even the decree of the Taleban
A rubab ustad (maestro) in his seventies, Bismillah has lived through all the different phases of conflict and misery that Afghanistan has endured since 1978. He now sees the social plight of his compatriots as beyond recovery and their ability to stand up for music as mortally compromised:
You know me, I’ve grown old with my music, spent all my life living inside it. Only now, in these days, do I find myself not surrounded by music. This is for a number of reasons. Yes, the Taleban banned music; bravo to them. But poverty is stronger than even the decree of the Taleban. People don’t have money, don’t have a place in their lives for music now. In the past two years, almost all classes of people have been reduced to begging; everybody is trying to sell what he has and leave this place. The people already have more than enough problems, so they think, “Why should I get in trouble with these Taleban over music?” So there are no concerts, not even people inviting a few friends to their homes to enjoy an evening of music.
So, nowadays, I only play during the day, at rush hour, when there is traffic, when people move to and fro there is noise in the streets and my music cannot be heard from without. I don’t play in the evening or at night, nor on Fridays. Life is the opposite of what it used to be.
Kharabat is empty. The Kharabatis who could afford it have left the country. All the others are busy pulling carts across the city to scratch some money to eat and stay alive, or they have turned their music workshops into food stalls. What else could they do? Music is food for the soul for those who listen, but what’s the use of it if the performer himself starves?
I keep imparting lessons to my students, secretly. Sometimes they can visit me with some excuse or another. Other times, if needed, I send them recordings of lessons on video via the phone. But many of the younger ones are giving up their passion for the rubab. They don’t see a future for it. The hearts of the people have turned black to music. They have no place for it in their anguished hearts.
One and half years ago, I applied for family reunion – part of my family has lived in Germany for many years. Now they’ve asked me to send documents proving my achievements as a musician. We will see if they accept what I have done in seventy years. The last time the Taleban took power, I had to go to Pakistan and spend a few years there in order to survive as a musician. I did not believe I would have to go through this again in my life. Anyway, this world goes, this life also goes, everything passes very quickly. Soon, we will see.
What the musicians’ stories tell us
The first thing apparent from these very diverse interviews is that all but one of the interviewees are still, after more than one and a half years of Taleban rule, in transit, or limbo, and currently unable to tell where they will be and what life will bring them. Another constant is that the trauma of the fall of a social and political order which guaranteed them incomes and rights and of the total takeover by the Taleban endures. It could not be otherwise for a social group that was specifically targeted by the new victors and was hurt so conclusively by the changed situation. Indeed, one of the first details to come out from many of the interviews was the recollection of their sense of bewilderment, of disbelief at the Taleban conquest of Kabul, followed by the fear and uncertainty of having become, all of a sudden, possible targets.
Despite this, a sense of hope, enthusiasm and strong individual motivations are quite apparent in the words of the youngest interviewees. They are young, in their late teens, people for whom music has already often meant finding their way, getting social recognition and self-affirmation in an otherwise harsh and uncertain life: even the present dire situation cannot prove bleak enough to cause them to despair about their future as musicians and their ability to contribute to the preservation and furthering of Afghanistan’s musical scene.
Their undaunted determination is balanced by their seniors’ more pessimistic attitudes. For musicians in their mid-thirties and forties, their formative and active professional lives coincided with the difficult, gradual re-establishment of music in Afghanistan and its transformation from a marginal and disreputable activity to a socially acceptable profession and even a cherished form of art and an expression of national pride. They naturally thought the worst was over for Afghanistan’s musicians, and the achievements to which they had contributed were long-lasting: things could only get better. Consequently, they now feel the reversal of the nation’s fortunes, full force.
Their passion for music and consciousness of their own artistic and professional worth are still very much alive in their words, but there is also a bitter realisation of the fragility of their status, when torn away from the society where it had been gained, with so much effort. That has taken its toll. Pressing economic woes and uncertainty are forcing many like Fazel and Faruq, not only those in Pakistan or Iran, but many also who made it to Europe or America, to seek alternative livelihoods, despite the fact that they still cling to the idea of a return to their previous profession and to their country.
The oldest generation of musicians is now experiencing a second, double exile, from their country and from music, in less than three decades. Pessimism among them is even more pronounced: the elderly ustad interviewed sees Afghan society as having lost all care for or interest in music amid the maelstrom of its economic and political woes.
Some (bitter) conclusions
The lack of options and the economic constraints encountered by many musicians who ‘made it’ out of the country represent more than a mere call for humanitarian action and renewed economic support. They trigger some necessary reflections.
Afghan music is thriving in the diaspora was the headline of one report in The Economist. As we mentioned in our previous report, the fact that in the past, musicians joined the mass of other Afghan refugees in diaspora communities abroad was not solely detrimental. Musicians who ended up being physically absent from their country for one or even two decades did not lose their connection to Afghanistan and, when it was again possible, returned, or at least visited to help restore the presence of music in society or enhance its quality. Meanwhile, they had been able to establish a place for ‘traditional’ Afghan music on the international stage and to secure useful liaisons with foreign institutions and scholars. However, a full appreciation of the usefulness of this diaspora experience could be made only after their return, and because, in their case, a return was eventually possible.
In 2023, two elements advise pessimism when making comparisons with the earlier period of exile. Firstly, the hostile attitude towards music by the Taleban and other religiously conservative elements, and the political and economic crisis that has forced society into a mode of survival strategy risk being long-term features of Afghanistan. In 2001, the reversal came about only because of a completely unlooked for international intervention, which it is difficult to imagine being repeated. Secondly, in the absence of Afghanistan again becoming a home to Afghan musicians, the avenues of dialogue and interaction between the Afghan musicians now in the West, those who managed to relocate only to the neighbouring countries and those remaining inside Afghanistan would need to increase and solidify in the future – and that is not a given. Moreover, even if that interaction did strengthen, would it ever be enough?
A ‘national music’, however it is conceived, can hardly fail to include the role of the human environment in shaping musical forms, whether urban pop trends or regional folk revivals. In the past, Afghan music production had already shown trends towards fragmentation, depending on the target audience, with very different records being made for foreign listeners and for the home public (as noted by Professor John Baily in this essay). In the future, the risk is of an even more confused and fragmented musical landscape emerging.
Ultimately, the continued existence of an Afghan music scene will depend to a large extent on the variety of sources contributing to it and on fair levels of accessibility by the Afghan public, at home and abroad. The inability of Afghan musicians to visit, perform and reside in Afghanistan for any prolonged period puts this very possibility at stake.
The emptying of the musicians’ neighbourhood, Kharabat, can be taken as a symbol of the risk of losing, if not Afghan music altogether, some specific interactions, networks and practices which together formed the backbone of the knowledge and performance of music in Afghanistan.
The remarkable achievements of a number of musicians who continue to keep up, and even refine, the country’s musical traditions from abroad will not be sufficient by themselves. Without a foothold inside the country, they cannot prevent a smaller-scale repetition of what happened in the 1990s. Then, many original folk repertoires, patterns, techniques, if not whole instruments, were lost forever, and the void filled, in the music of the diaspora and of the first years after 2001, with imported replacements that were often of questionable musical value. To avoid this, the contribution of every Afghan musician, with his or her approach to an instrument or a type of music, formal or informal education, and performance-driven experience, will be vital. Thus, every musician’s voice that goes unheard in the critical days we are living in will inevitably impoverish the Afghan music of the future.
Edited by Jelena Bjelica and Kate Clark
References
References
↑1
Defence of music and musicians is not explicitly mentioned in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Nevertheless, Article 27 (Right to participate in the cultural life of community) says everyone has the right to freely participate in the cultural life of the community, to share scientific advances and its benefits, and to get credit for their own work. This article firmly incorporates cultural rights as human rights for all.
Article 27
Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
↑2
Also referred to as the ‘religious police’, the Dawat wa Ershad Amr bil-Maruf wa Nahi al-Munkar (Invitation and Guidance on Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice) was re-established as a ministry in the Taleban government on 12 September 2021. For further information on its activities, read this 2022 AAN report.
↑3
Kuche-ye Kharabat, the area around the namesake alley in the Old City of Kabul, has been the abode of the city’s traditional musicians since at least the 1860s, when a number of Indian musicians were settled there by the Afghan amir, Sher Ali. Despite witnessing much destruction during the civil war of the 1990s and remaining relatively poor and dilapidated, the neighbourhood had returned to its full musical prominence during the last two decades. For a glimpse of its past cultural life, read this previous AAN report.
Fado is the most celebrated form of Portuguese music, typically sung by a male or female singer accompanied by a small ensemble composed of Portuguese guitar, classical guitar and additional stringed instruments. Beyond any similarities in terms of musical features (or lack thereof), a major point of contact exists between fadistas and Afghan musicians in their Portuguese exile: Fado’s defining character, captured by the word, saudade, is the feeling of nostalgia for an irreparable loss.
↑7
The list includes stringed instruments of both Afghan and foreign origin: the rubab, a short-necked lute, is the most famous Afghan autochthonous instrument; dotar can refer both to the Herati dotar, a long-necked lute derived in modern times from the original dotar, a simpler, traditional instrument found also in Iran and Central Asia; the tambur is a long-necked lute, typical of central and northern parts of Afghanistan and resembling similar instruments found from Eastern Europe to Central Asia and; the sitar, a large, long-necked lute with movable frets, played with a wire pick, that is, of course, one of the best-known Indian instruments.
↑8
Mujib al-Rahman Ansari was an influential radical Sunni preacher active in Herat from the times of the Republic. After the Taleban takeover, he officially joined the movement and became a prominent member of it until he was killed in a suicide bombing in September 2022.
↑9
This would be a different reception programme from that offered to ANIM students, who are now mainly hosted in the northern city of Braga and neighbouring Guimaraes.
Hearts Turned Away from Music: Afghan musicians’ paths to exile
The Taliban contains many contending factions, but that’s also a source of its stability.
Rumors about the internal division of the Taliban began soon after their return to power in 2021. Power struggles among the regime’s top-tier military and political leadership—confounded by personal ambitions as well as tribal and ideological fault lines—reportedly drives internal splits, with the regime’s ban on female education and employment further increasing the rifts. Monopolizing decision-making power in the hands of the regime’s supreme leader in Kandahar, Hibatullah Akhundzada, who entertains a dystopian and ultraorthodox outlook, is assumed to have antagonized the more pragmatic political leadership of the group in Kabul. The reported splits led to concomitant predictions regarding potential power-change scenarios within the regime, including an internal putsch against the supreme leader or a shift toward more consensus-based decision-making processes.
Despite such speculations and predictions, the Taliban regime has maintained its cohesion and demonstrated unshaken resolve in imposing its draconian rule. Since its establishment, the regime has effectively enforced its’ decisions, which is a rarity throughout the history of Afghanistan given its unruly terrain and complicated ethno-tribal social fabric.
This cohesion also runs counter to the Taliban’s history of heterogeneity. Since its establishment in the 1990s, the movement has never been a monolith, but rather a collective of militant groups with distinct regional and tribal affiliations, contrasting political attitudes (radical, ultraorthodox, reactionaries, and some moderate), and different ideological and sectarian orientations.
This heterogeneity allows the Taliban to unite groups with different social and political ideologies toward a shared fundamental mission that is beyond mundane politics—the obligation of establishing the rule of the divine. The existence of various militant groups pragmatically creates a balance of power and deters the consolidating of military force in the hands of a few. Various military groups within the regime provide a counterweight to each other in a power equilibrium, which ensures the survival of the regime in the face of various threats, including internal factions and fault lines.
A Political Mission Beyond Politics
The raison d’être of the Taliban is to establish a “true” Islamic order driven by the supremacy of the divine. Unlike the rights-based obligation of the Westphalian state to protect individual rights and the common good of the people, the Taliban regime seeks the salvation of people on the path ordained by God. As such, instead of rationalizing the rights-based relationship between the state and the people, the Taliban has mandated its regime to enforce divine (Sharia) rule and ensure that the people follow the “righteous” and “true” path. Hence, the fundamental mission of the state is celestial, not mundane politics.
Internalizing such a mission shapes the ideological contours and behavior of the regime. Externally, it aligns the regime with other like-minded actors, including al-Qaeda and the Tahrek Taliban of Pakistan (TTP). Internally, the divine mission serves as a unifying moral and religious rationale for an array of diverse constituent groups to converge on a single “divine” mission, whose arbiter is the supreme leader.
Before their designations, none of the three Taliban’s supreme leaders was known for mundane qualities such as political leadership, military/strategic vision, or social influence. Although these traits are crucial for political and administrative functions, the group identifies its leaders primarily through spiritual/religious attributes such as piety, devotion (to Sharia), righteousness, and poise. The Taliban considers their supreme leaders as revivers, who have realigned politics in the service of the divine mission. Such an extraordinary portfolio places their supreme leaders above politics. Any political disagreements or ideological and identity-based variations become secondary to the divine obligation of the supreme leader. And any norm or practices repugnant to his obligations is deemed corrupt and void.
Heterogeneity as a Stabilizing Factor
The Taliban regime’s military is composed of various militant groups with distinct regional, tribal, and ideological affiliations. These groups, commanded by individual Taliban military leaders, balance one another’s power. Such power dynamics minimize strategic instability within the regime. The lack of a centralized and unitary military formation prevents the accumulation of power in the hands of a few, thereby reducing the probability of individuals revolting against the regime.
The constituent military groups within the regime vary in mandated geographic scope and tactical capabilities. Smaller groups, mostly affiliated with the larger ones, have command in districts and less strategic provinces. Larger groups with broader geographic control, well-trained personnel, and access to sophisticated capabilities reside in regional centers and larger cities, including Kabul. Independently, however, none of these groups has the power to explicitly challenge the integrity and cohesion of the regime.
A handful of powerful military groups comprise the core of the regime’s military strength. The Haqqani Network, headed by Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani, is an elite force of the Taliban. Maintaining a semi-autonomous status within the Taliban since its establishment in 1994, the network cultivates close ties with Pakistan and global Jihadi networks, including al-Qaeda. It has considerable influence on the regime’s suicide bombers’ brigade and its elite special forces/Badri Unit. With an Islamic fundamentalist orientation, the group has reportedly adopted a more pragmatic attitude since the Taliban’s return to power in 2021.
At the Ministry of Interior, Haqqani’s authority and power is balanced by the forces of his deputy, Ibrahim Sadr, a senior Taliban military figure since the 1990s. Sadr is one of the key figures of the Helmand Council, once led by the second Taliban supreme leader, Mullah Mansur Akhtar, who was killed by a U.S. drone attack in 2016. Unlike Haqqani, Sadr has an ultraorthodox ideological attitude. He established closer ties with the regime in Iran and Al-Qaeda and reportedly has influence over foreign fighters and a deep-running involvement in the Afghan opium trade.
Defense Minister Mullah Yaqoob Mujahid controls another sizable portion of power within the regime. Mujahid commands Taliban fighters from and in the southern provinces of Kandahar and Urozgan. He replaced Sadr as the Taliban’s miliary chief in 2020. His charismatic personality and his status as the son of the movement’s late founder Mullah Omar have made Mujahid the face of the Taliban’s new generation. Because of his increasingly nationalistic inclinations, Mujahid’s relationship with the supreme leader has become strained due to the latter’s draconian rulings. He has also kept his distance from Pakistan. According to rumors among the Taliban, he has established initial links with India.
Mujahid’s power is similarly balanced by his deputy, Abdul Qayum Zakir, another hardliner with cordial ties to the Taliban supreme leader. With a radical and extremist ideological attitude, Zakir is one of the key military strategists of the Taliban and reportedly the most brutal one. He is currently heading military operations in the north against the National Resistance Forces (NRF). Ahmadullah Muttaki, the former commander of the elite Badri Unit and currently the deputy of the prime minister, also has close relationships with the Haqqani Network and Tahrek Taliban of Pakistan (TTP).
Among the non-Pashtun, Qari Fasihudin Fitrat has noticeable military power in the regime with fighters from the northern provinces, mainly Badakhshan and Takhar. An ethnic Tajik, Fitrat is the regime’s chief of staff and has close links with Lashkar-e-Tayeba, a regional terrorist group in Pakistan focused on Jihadi terrorism in India. Sources in Kabul have revealed that Fitrat has established closer ties with China. He recently warned the United States against violating Afghanistan’s airspace, a concern China has previously expressed after U.S. troops withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021.
Despite reports that it built a centralized national army after retaking power, the regime has yet to reconstitute its military structure from a group (militia)-based configuration to a unitary formation. Among other reasons, including the lack of financial and technical capabilities, the Taliban have deliberately avoided the centralization of military forces to prevent potentially destabilizing challenges from military figures pursuing personal, political, and/or strategic agendas. Conversely, the absence of centralization serves the regime in maintaining a balance of power among its various military leaders.
A Possible Avenue of Change
Despite maintaining internal cohesion and successfully enforcing its dystopian rule across Afghanistan, the Taliban regime does experience internal rifts along spiritual, military, and political lines. External pressures, namely economic, financial, and diplomatic sanctions, seem to have divided the Taliban’s top-tier leadership into two competing blocs: the pragmatists and the ultraorthodox.
The former is reportedly composed of the regime’s political and diplomatic elites in Kabul, including those with considerable military power, including but not limited to the Haqqani Network and Mullah Yaqoob Mujahid. This group demands a more mainstream and rights-based domestic policy as well as normalized relations with the world. On the opposite end of the spectrum are radical military and political leaders, including the supreme leader and his ultraorthodox ideologues and clergy, who view governance exclusively through the prism of implementing a “true” religious order. The fundamental question is whether the rifts will lead to an internal revolt or a change of power within the regime.
Although such scenarios are possible, they seem unlikely, at least in the short term. The balance of power among various military groups renders political or military takeovers highly risky. No military group can effectively challenge the integrity of the regime. However, such strategic stability could change over time, if not immediately then through alliance-building among the powerful military groups. In addition, ambitious Taliban military and political leaders can change internal power dynamics through clandestine efforts to sabotage and liquidate their internal rivals.
Politically, consensus-based changes to depose or replace the current supreme leader or challenge his authority are unlikely. The Taliban have not developed guidelines for deposing a ruling supreme leader, who is essentially above political accountability. However, this does not mean that the protected status of the supreme leader is definite or eternal.
Lacking military power and leading a reclusive existence with little to no interaction with the public and media, the supreme leader is vulnerable to unidentified potential threats. He could be the target of internal sabotage or foul play, as was the Taliban’s founder and first supreme leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar. Recent news from Kabul and Kandahar suggests that the supreme leader has accelerated steps towards consolidating military and political power in Kandahar, including shifting the regime’s spokespersons from Kabul, misappropriating funds from the ministry of finance, and forming his own military group. These efforts, which could reduce Akhundzada’s political and military vulnerabilities , are also indicative of a deepening rift within the regime. In addition, the continued draconian decrees from Kandahar, the latest of which is the ban on women working with UN agencies in Afghanistan, demonstrates the supreme leader’s despotism.
The pragmatists, though, will not give up their military and political power without a fight. Although armed resistance and revolt are unlikely, clandestine efforts from within seem more feasible. Currently, there is no viable military or political opposition to the Taliban. Any changes in the regime’s behavior and governance depend on internal developments. Being cornered by the hardline leadership can make the pragmatists more open to external influence, which can in turn motivate them to stir the internal process of change. Furthermore, supporting popular and civil resistance in the country, mainly of women, can be an effective tool to embolden the pragmatists to pursue change.
Atal Ahmadzai is a visiting assistant professor of international relations at the Department of Government, St. Lawrence University in NY. As a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Arizona, he studied the governance systems of violent non-state actors in South Asia. Born and raised in Kabul, he has over ten years of research experience in studying terrorism. His work appeared in academic journals, including Perspectives on Terrorism. He also published short analyses in Foreign Policy magazine, the Conversation, and Political Violence at a Glance.
Anyone who lived in Afghanistan during the first Islamic Emirate will find the current stand-off between the Taleban and NGOs – and now the United Nations – over the issue of women working familiar. There is the same clashing of principles: the Emirate’s position that women must largely be kept inside the home to avoid the risk of social disorder and sin, and the humanitarians’ that the equitable and effective delivery of aid is impossible without female workers. The choices on the humanitarian side also feel familiar, and all unattractive: comply, boycott or fudge. AAN’s Kate Clark has spoken to people who were working in the humanitarian sector in Afghanistan in the 1990s, and who continue to follow Afghanistan, to get their insights into the similarities and differences – and what, possibly, might help.Three months after the Islamic Emirate ordered NGOs to stop employing Afghan women until further notice, it has extended the ban, to cover women working for the United Nations. The Taleban’s extension of the ban to include women working for the UN is a major escalation. While the Secretary-General had claimed, via his spokesperson on 4 April, that banning women from working for the UN was “frankly, inconceivable,” it had been widely feared ever since the Emirate announced, on 24 December 2022, that women could no longer work for NGOs, citing serious complaints regarding non-compliance with the Islamic hijab and other applicable laws and regulations.”
Written before the recent extension of the ban, this report focuses on how the Taleban and NGOs could or should deal with each other, but what is at stake applies just as much to UN agencies. It first outlines the NGO sector, including who makes decisions and NGOs’ initial response to the ban. It then hears from eight people who were working in Afghanistan in the 1990s and now, in the hope that their experiences will help further our understanding of what the ban might mean not only for women in Afghanistan but also for the delivery of humanitarian aid to Afghans in need.
Edited by Martine van Bijlert
You can preview the report online and download it by clicking the link below.
Over a year and a half after the Taliban barred girls from secondary education, ‘the sadness is overpowering,’ one female student told USIP.
In March, 20 months after the Taliban banned Afghan girls from receiving secondary education, another school year began in Afghanistan — the only country in the world where girls are prohibited from going to school beyond the primary level. Since the Taliban’s August 2021 takeover, the group has sought to marginalize women and girls and erase them from virtually every aspect of public life. After a September 2021 ban on high school education, the Taliban also barred women from attending university at the end of last year. In a series of interviews with USIP, Afghan mothers, female students, schoolteachers, and university lecturers spoke of the terrible toll the Taliban’s actions have taken on their mental health.
The Taliban have implemented over 20 written and verbal decrees on girls’ education — with each edict adding more and more restrictions. These decrees, among other things, ban: co-education; secondary education for girls; certain majors for female university students (including journalism, law, agriculture, veterinary science and economics); and annual university entry exams for female students. Meanwhile, university female lecturers face severe restrictions designed to keep them from interacting with men on campus.
Beside these draconian rules, the Taliban are also targeting girls’ and boys’ schools. In the past two weeks alone, two girls’ schools in Faryab and Paktia provinces and a boys’ school in Panjshir have been burned down. These attacks exhibit a common tactic used by the Taliban to clamp down on education.
These actions will have devastating, long-term implications not just for women and girls but the very social and economic fabric of Afghan society, with half of the population unable to contribute to their country’s future.
Hard-won Gains
This stands in sharp contrast to the educational gains Afghanistan had made since 2001. Indeed, prior to the Taliban takeover, the country’s education sector was thriving, with access for girls across all 34 provinces at all education levels — except in areas under the Taliban control.
From 2002 to 2021, 3,816,793 girls enrolled in first through 12th grades. According to the Afghan Ministry of Education’s 2020-2021 annual report, there was 18,765 public and private schools in operation. Afghanistan also had more than 200,000 teachers, including 80,554 women. Over 100,000 Afghan women were enrolled in public or private universities in 2020 and, according to 2019 figures, there were 2,439 female lecturers at higher education institutions. Public and private universities flourished in the last two decades, providing women and girls with countless opportunities to contribute to Afghanistan’s future.
These educational advances fostered broader societal achievements and gains for women. Before the Taliban takeover, 63 women were in the Afghan parliament, nine held minister- or deputy-minister level positions. Afghanistan’s judicial system had 280 women judges and over 500 prosecutors. There were over 2,000 women-owned small- and medium-sized businesses.
This is just a snapshot of how women were increasingly playing vital roles in Afghanistan’s traditionally patriarchal society. The Taliban have worked to quickly erase all this progress — and it is wearing on the hearts and minds of women and girls.
The Psychological Impact
The evaporation of these advancements has led to dire psychological impacts. During interviews with Afghan women and girls, USIP heard distressing reports about girls that have been out of school exhibiting signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts, saying they feel they are living a life with no purpose and an uncertain future. “My students are suffering from attention deficiency. Most have learning difficulty and display signs of depression and anxiety,” said a ninth-grade teacher from an underground private school in Kabul.
Some are even isolating themselves from family, while others have turned to narcotics, further fueling Afghanistan’s drug crisis. Those that are using narcotics see it as a way to escape and create alternate realities for themselves. “I like being in my imaginary world I have created for myself. There, I am safe, and I can do whatever I want,” said one female student from Takhar province who told USIP she was using synthetic drugs. “You are probably going to laugh at me, but in that world, I am going to graduate next year and become a pilot.”
These forlorn sentiments are shared by many in Afghanistan. One sixth-grade student from Kabul told USIP that when she thinks about her future, she is “restless and agitated” and that at times “the sadness is overpowering.” She has dreams of becoming a psychologist and her mother, who is a teacher, tells her that despite the current situation she should continue to hold out hope for a brighter future.
The mother of an eighth-grade student from Maidan Wardak, burst into tears while sharing concern about her daughter’s mental health. “My daughter puts on her uniform several times a day. She talks to herself all day about school, her teachers and her classmates. I feel helpless.”
Afghanistan already had a paucity of female mental health experts and Taliban travel restrictions have exacerbated this situation, making it difficult for these experts to even reach communities in need.
Without mental health counselors and practitioners, these girls have no resources to turn to in this critical juncture of their lives.
The Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice and the Ministry of Education have begun administering religious tests for teachers. These tests are intended as a mechanism for the Taliban to dismiss educated and experienced teachers and replace them with those that are not formally educated or experienced, with the majority only educated at madrassas. The Taliban have also created an incentive structure with the test, providing teachers that pass the religious test with a modest bonus or salary increase. A teacher from northern Kunduz province with over 25 years’ experience was dismissed last fall because she failed the religious knowledge test last year. “Our society is about to sink in a dark pit that the Taliban keep digging deeper and deeper,” she said.A teacher at an elementary school in Kabul noted that harassment and intimidation by the officers of the Ministry of Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice is now routine. The ministry has told teachers that white running shoes, high heels and bright colored clothing are banned. In many parts of the country, teachers are ordered to cover their face even inside classrooms while teaching. “We are faced with constant humiliation by Taliban-appointed school officials within the school and by Vice and Virtue and police outside schools, questioning our knowledge of Islam, harassing us because of our outfits,” she said.
Throughout the country, the Taliban’s decrees and bans have been met with vocal opposition from men and women, including education activists working tirelessly to advocate for girls’ access to education. Matiullah Wesa is one of these individuals. In 2009, he founded Pen Path Civil Society and Pen Path Helping Charity Organization to provide education to disadvantaged girls and boys in remote areas in all 34 of Afghanistan’s provinces. Since its inception, the organization has provided education access to 57,000 children, 35 percent of whom are girls.
On March 27, the Taliban detained Wesa — his whereabout remain unknown to his family. For those like Wesa that push for basic human rights, forced disappearances and abductions have become commonplace. This is a serious human rights violation that has become a routine Taliban practice to spread terror and silence dissenting voices.
Sustaining Focus on the Plight of Afghans
These edicts and bans will not go away overnight, nor can they be wished away. It is therefore incumbent on concerned parties to maintain consistent and firm pressure on the Taliban — at the domestic, regional and international levels — to allow girls to attend school and open access to female university students and lecturers.
Given the Taliban’s resilience to international pressure to date, there are very limited policy options to circumvent their draconian strictures or compel them to change behavior. Online educational platforms promise secure learning within the home, but millions of Afghan women and girls living in rural areas have limited internet access. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and Muslim-majority countries have called on Taliban to rescind their bans, but it has resulted in no change and it’s unlikely the OIC will be more engaged on this issue. And the international community’s sanctions have had no demonstrable impact.
The international community has largely turned its attention away from the dire situation in Afghanistan, as it focuses on atrocities in Ukraine and elsewhere. For now, it is vital for the international community to continue to spotlight the Taliban’s abuses against Afghanistan’s beleaguered women and girls. “Please be the voice of Afghan mothers and tell the world about our suffering,” pleaded the mother from Maidan Wardak. That is the least we can do.
The names of those interviewed for this article have been omitted for their safety.
Taking a Terrible Toll: The Taliban’s Education Ban
Since their takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021, the Taliban have moved to restrict social freedoms, with a persistent focus on the rights of women and girls. Two edicts issued in December 2022, indefinitely banning Afghan women from attending universities and prohibiting working in NGO offices, constitute the most extreme restrictions yet — orders that were expanded this week to apply to women working for the U.N. as well.
The bans, as shocking as they are, were not a surprise to close observers; diplomats covering Kabul had flagged well in advance that these policies were imminent. Western and regional governments had warned the Taliban that such moves would only isolate Afghanistan further, and remove any hope for the foreign assistance and economic investment the country desperately needs.
Perhaps more surprising has been evidence of Taliban opposition to the edicts issued by the emir, Sheikh Haibatullah Akhundzada. Ever since he overruled the Taliban cabinet’s decision to permit girls to resume secondary education in March 2022, a growing number of their leaders seem to disagree with the emir’s overall policy agenda. A fundamental divergence has grown between Taliban elites over their visions for the future.
Dissenters Emerge
From the group’s inception, the Taliban have famously tended to their movement’s cohesion. But since the 2021 takeover, internal disagreements have spilled into public view as international condemnations have rolled in, humanitarian aid has been disrupted and as the U.N. paused all operations. Since February, some of the most important Taliban leaders have openly criticized the country’s trajectory — if not the Taliban’s first instance of public criticism from within, certainly the most prominent.
Sirajuddin Haqqani, acting minister of interior and leader of the notorious Haqqani network, said the Taliban’s “monopolization” of power was “defaming” their entire system. He did not name the emir, but in context his criticism was clear. Mohammad Yaqoub, acting defense minister and son of the movement’s revered founder Omar, said days later the Taliban must always listen to “legitimate demands of the people.” A deputy prime minister and several other ministers offered similar remarks. In response, the emir’s defenders chided critics and called for obedience. One diplomat referred to these leaders — who were once seen as rivals jockeying for power — as an emerging camp of “dissenters.” Their frustrations exist, and are growing, on two different planes. One is rooted in policy differences, concerns over the future direction of the country and what their state looks like; the other is about contestation for power and how the state will apportion it.
Media and Afghan popular discourse obsessed over this rare public display of internal tensions. Commentators described an “intense” power struggle and explored the potential for political upheaval. Rumors spread of a coup plot against the emir, the emir’s counterplots, and Taliban factions breaking into open conflict. In early March, the emir called for a cabinet meeting in Kandahar, in which Hidayatullah Badri, acting minister of finance and a representative of key tribal and factional interests, allegedly tried to resign in protest of the emir’s management of the country’s affairs. Some gossip suggested the entire “dissent” camp had attempted the same.
Yet weeks passed, with no major disruptions to the Taliban’s governance modus operandi, which has plenty of everyday dysfunction. The Islamic State managed to assassinate a senior official, but this merely reinforced an existing difficulty containing the terror group (ever since, Taliban security forces have responded with an expansive series of raids). By the end of March, it was announced that Badri would be reassigned to helm the country’s central bank — hardly the outcome of an explosive revolt against the emir’s authority.
The Emir Asserts Himself
Does the reclusive emir possess unchallenged, “godlike” authority? Or are Taliban leaders plotting to overthrow him? Are Taliban policy debates really just raw struggles for power?
With the virtue of hindsight, the past year of Taliban politics offers some clarity. For most of their insurgency, the group’s leadership council determined policy via obscured consensus, hidden from even their own fighters. In propaganda and in theory, the emir always retained the final say, yet military imperatives dominated the movement’s decisions. But, after the military takeover, the emir began gradually to assert a more robust definition of his authority. The March 2022 decision on girls’ schools was his return to the Taliban’s center stage. From then on, his interference in ministries’ daily affairs increased steadily. By year’s end, the emir’s office had effectively taken over most official appointments, a historical source of patronage and authority in many Afghan governments, including the highly sensitive security ministries. This was a direct challenge to powerful figures like Haqqani and Yaqoub, who already disagreed with the emir’s agenda of domestic social policy and foreign isolationism.
The emir’s overreach, including his December decrees, should be understood as deeply political, and as preoccupied with internal politics as with a harsh vision of a gender apartheid society. One apparent motive for these bans grew out of an increasing concern that the emir’s policies weren’t being enforced strictly enough. Reports gradually made their way to Kandahar of mass disregard for the girls’ school ban and other gender-based restrictions. Obedience, the cornerstone of the movement’s strength, was faltering.
Understanding the Taliban
These internal divisions and Akhundzada’s effort to consolidate power provide several critical takeaways for U.S. policymakers attempting to understand the Taliban today:
The emir’s increasingly frantic micromanagement of governance appears prompted in part by perceptions of rampant disobedience; he can either accept being undermined, or double down. In this light, it seems the emir is issuing ever-harsher edicts from a place of weakness, not unquestioned supremacy. This assessment is bolstered, inter alia, by his establishment of ulema councils in every province — which seem to function as the emir’s eyes and ears, like a nationwide “neighborhood watch” for loyal clerics to report violations among the Taliban’s own officials.
Dissent against the emir’s agenda is real, but even as a growing number of Taliban seem to believe the emir is overreaching, dissenters aren’t necessarily all in agreement, or even working toward the same objectives, which will make it difficult for them to act in concert.
Dissenters, who seem to want to develop the economy and engage with the outside world without betraying their militant roots and ideals, assume a more complicated stance than the emir. More than anyone, Haqqani embodies this struggle between former identities and aspirational new ones: He is an ambitious state builder yet believed responsible for hosting al-Qaida’s former chief in Kabul.
The emir, in contrast, offers consistency. In one of his rare public speeches, he said the jihad or struggle did not end when foreign military forces withdrew and the Afghan republic collapsed. The struggle continues to this day, with purification of society as its aim (and with enemies still set against them).
Having built a movement based on obedience, with the emir notionally anchoring their organizational discipline, attempting to sideline or overthrow him would pull the rug out from under their own feet. The leadership’s Byzantine decision-making process lacks any solid mechanism for challenging the emir, who for the past 20 years — across different leaders — had almost always deferred to the group’s consensus. Too direct of a challenge to the emir’s authority, and local commanders could quickly lose faith in the movement.
Public criticisms are a creative attempt among dissenters to fight back against the emir’s overreach, and perhaps lay the groundwork for a move against him. But it is yet unclear if these critiques are the opening salvo in an impending contest, or acting more like a pressure release valve, allowing leaders to blow off steam while they bide their time.
Dissenters are caught in what some political scientists term the moderates’ dilemma, or what some analysts in Kabul call the Taliban’s “propaganda trap.” To prove resilient against a superpower’s military might, the Taliban radicalized their fighters (many practically from birth) and flooded them with extremist propaganda. To shift away from the insurgency’s narratives too suddenly, to ramp up diplomatic engagement and moderate social policies, would be a betrayal to many Taliban fighters. It would cast the leadership as just another “puppet” regime, beholden to foreign interests — exactly what they fought against. As the dust settled after the takeover, which was so sudden and shocking that most of the state was kept running by the republic’s bureaucracy, there was grumbling among rank and file that the Taliban’s government seemed just like the last one, only now wearing turbans and beards. Amid this atmosphere lingers the local branch of the Islamic State, tempting Taliban members with propaganda disparaging the Taliban for meeting with foreigners, compromising on public policy and betraying the purity of the jihadist cause.
The above reflection suggests an ominous conclusion. The emir, rather than being portrayed as a fanatical recluse, may be continuing to operate in the same style that won him the job in 2016: a careful listener, deferential to other views and interests. It must be considered a possibility that the emir is not implementing a harsh gender apartheid regime solely out of personal zealotry, but out of firm belief that core constituencies in the Taliban zealously demand it.
If true, policymakers shouldn’t hope for too much “moderation” from dissenters, even if they manage to gain the upper hand against the emir and his camp. Even the most pragmatic Taliban figure, elevated to supreme leadership, would be bombarded by the same internal expectations and pressures. The militancy boiling within the movement has not yet cooled.
Finally, the Taliban is made up of many different interests and factions, not easily labeled but very easily oversimplified, in a way that can catch policymakers off-guard. In the first days after their takeover, much was made over a spat between the “Haqqanis and the Kandaharis,” in which Haqqanis were painted as dangerous hardliners and Mullah Baradar, former chief of the political office in Doha, supposedly represented moderates and all of southern Afghanistan. Over time, it became clear that Haqqani and Baradar were both far more pragmatic than the emir — so “Kandahar” became shorthand for the supreme leader’s circles. But newer binaries like “Kabul versus Kandahar” obscure the fact that the emir has loyalists based in Kabul and discontents next door.
For the first six months of their rule, observers fixated on Kabul and barely noticed the center of gravity emerging in Kandahar. As the emir flexed his authority over the past year, observers fixated on him and his role. But Taliban politics are churning with dozens of entrenched interests. We are likely not paying enough attention to the next dynamic that could dominate the movement.
What’s Next for the Taliban’s Leadership Amid Rising Dissent?
Governments on both sides of the Atlantic are still failing to take responsibility for abandoning the Afghan people to the Taliban
The fall of Kabul in August 2021 and the accompanying chaotic evacuation of US and UK forces, foreign nationals and limited numbers of Afghan civilians marked the end of a 20-year, western war-fighting and nation-building intervention in Afghanistan begun after the 9/11 attacks.
It also marked the starkest, most humiliating reverse for US and British foreign policy in recent memory. It is extraordinary that, almost two years later, no one in either government has taken responsibility for this fiasco.
A report on the Afghan collapse, published last week by the Biden administration, perpetuates this brazen refusal to accept that ministers, senior officials and intelligence chiefs on both sides of the Atlantic fell down on the job. At least President Joe Biden and the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, were actually at their desks as the crisis unfolded. Boris Johnson, the then foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, the Afghanistan minister, Tariq Ahmad, and the Foreign Office permanent secretary, Philip Barton, all went on holiday.
The US report reads like a schoolboy’s excuses for failing to do his homework: defensive, self-justificatory, unapologetic and even self-congratulatory. It is crystal clear that what the report calls “the intelligence and military consensus” in early 2021 that the Afghan army and security forces “would be able to effectively fight to defend their country and their capital, Kabul” after an allied withdrawal was hopelessly, foreseeably wrong.
It is also clear that, despite a “deliberate, intensive, rigorous, and inclusive decision-making process”, Biden’s pressing ahead with the withdrawal ordered by Donald Trump was rash and mistaken and led to disaster. US troops paid with their lives in the Hamid Karzai airport suicide bombing at its Abbey gate. Innumerable Afghans died as Taliban insurgents closed in for the kill. They are still dying.
For some, the report looks like a partisan attempt to shift blame on to Trump, when Republicans are investigating Biden’s actions. While politically self-serving, its skewering of Trump is fully justified. The master deal-maker condemned Afghanistan to a Taliban-ruled future through his giveaway 2020 Doha agreement, which excluded the Afghan government and pledged a rapid US military withdrawal and prisoner releases in exchange for risibly vague Taliban promises to talk peace. To some extent, the agreement tied Biden’s hands.
The US report uncomfortably recalls the UK government’s self-exculpatory Afghan post-mortem, published last year, partly in response to excoriating criticism by the Commons foreign affairs committee. It conceded that there were “areas of its crisis response which need improvement”. Tom Tugendhat, former committee chair, was blunter. “It is clear that leadership within the Foreign Office fell desperately short before, during and after the UK’s withdrawal from Afghanistan,” he said. As we have suggested before, it is never too late for Raab to resign.
Retrospective inquiries are important but do little to help the Afghan people, day-to-day victims of a huge humanitarian crisis and a violently oppressive, misogynistic Taliban regime. Yet what is the government doing? It is slashing UK aid to Afghan women and girls while abjectly failing refugees and evacuees. The fall of Kabul represented a great betrayal. The betrayal continues.
The Observer view on Afghanistan: withdrawal should be a cause for lasting shame in Britain and the US
The peace process that ended the Tajik civil war in the late 1990s successfully combined both official and civic channels of communication and negotiation from its start. This report argues that although the agreement and its implementation were far from perfect, the Tajik experience contains valuable lessons on power-sharing arrangements, reconciliation, reintegration, and demobilization for the architects of future peace processes, and provides important insights into the shortcomings of the 2018–21 peace process in neighboring Afghanistan.
Summary
Tajikistan’s 1997 peace agreement was a remarkable achievement that ended the country’s bloody civil war after military stalemate. While Tajikistan has remained stable, the majority of conflict-generating factors that triggered violence and the civil war remain unresolved, and localized violence has broken out on numerous occasions.
The effectiveness and sustainability of the peace process were undermined by the failure to ensure effective and just power-sharing mechanisms. External actors focused on ending violence in the shorter term and fulfilling their own geopolitical agendas. Without effective implementation, the government treated the agreement as a short-term political concession.
While track 2 dialogue played an expanded role in reaching the agreement, the dialogue did not last long in postwar Tajikistan.
Tajikistan’s peace process highlights shortcomings in Afghanistan’s recent peace process and offers lessons for any future efforts to engage in negotiations, including the value of external actors using their resources to bring all sides to the table and the importance of establishing a clear basis for peace negotiations and national reconciliation.
About the Report
This report assesses the peace process that ended the Tajik civil war in the late 1990s and highlights aspects of the Tajik experience to aid in understanding the failures of Afghanistan’s 2018–21 peace process. It includes perspectives from interviews with stakeholders in Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Europe. The report was commissioned by the Afghanistan and Central Asia programs at the United States Institute of Peace.
About the Author
Parviz Mullojanov is a political scientist and historian in Central Asia. He was a member of the Inter-Tajik Dialogue, a track 2 diplomatic initiative that worked to resolve Tajikistan’s civil war. He is also a former chairman of the board of the Open Society Institute Assistance Foundation–Tajikistan and a former member of the EU and Central Asia Monitoring Research Group.
Afghanistan Peace Campaign
Students of the Afghan National Institute of Music in exile perform at a mixed musical evening of Portuguese Fado and Afghan songs in Lisbon. Photo by Fabrizio Foschini, 5 April 2023
