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Afghanistan Requires a Change from Humanitarian Business as Usual

April 1, 2023

By William Byrd

Lawfare

Thursday, March 30, 2023

ICRC and Red Crescent personnel deliver humanitarian assistance in Faryab province, Afghanistan. (ICRC, https://tinyurl.com/2jx64e5t; CC Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic, https://tinyurl.com/353zpzek)

International humanitarian aid is critical in responding to natural disasters and other short-term emergencies. But as the U.N. itself recognizes, such aid is not well positioned to respond to—let alone resolve—a prolonged economic crisis such as the one currently occurring in Afghanistan.

This is particularly true when humanitarian aid is a primary source of external financial support propping up the economy and when the national government—the Taliban regime—is at odds with donors and harms the welfare of its own population, especially women and girls, as evidenced by the Taliban’s bans on female education and women working in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Given these challenges and the myriad humanitarian needs elsewhere in the world, support for continuing massive aid to Afghanistan is slipping.

The current approach to humanitarian aid in Afghanistan helped prevent major loss of life in 2021 and 2022. But looking to the future, it is unsustainable given donors’ aid fatigue and the demands of the Ukraine war as well as other crises. The approach is also inefficient and not very cost-effective for the long haul. Furthermore, it does not exploit new technologies and aid delivery mechanisms as well as the potential of the Afghan private sector. From a macroeconomic perspective, current humanitarian aid—not least the roughly $40 million per week in U.N. shipments of U.S. dollars in cash—is so important to the country that it cannot be ignored. And finally, there has been too much focus on Taliban behavior and the international community’s unsuccessful efforts to influence the Taliban. Too little attention, meanwhile, has been devoted to aid agencies’ and donor countries’ own aid practices and performance and delivery modalities, which lie within their control.

A new approach is required in strategizing about, planning, organizing, and delivering international aid to Afghanistan, which is likely to be reliant on humanitarian support in the future. The new approach needs to encompass but also go beyond the core humanitarian objective of saving lives.

Incorporating a Macroeconomic and Sustainability Perspective

Humanitarian aid for Afghanistan, amounting to about $3 billion per year, is equivalent to approximately 20 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. This is less than half of the total annual civilian and security assistance in the several years that immediately preceded 2021 (which amounted to more than $8 billion annually) but fairly close to the level of civilian aid at that time. So current aid is macroeconomically quite important to the country: The U.N. humanitarian cash shipments ($1.8 billion over the past year), in particular, are propping up the Afghan economy and are essential for maintaining exchange rate stability and containing inflation. Thus, it is clear that the size and economic impacts of humanitarian aid need to be incorporated in macroeconomic modeling and forecasting.

Even more important, these macro implications must feed back into the planning and deployment of aid. Humanitarian donors, the U.N., and other aid agencies should program their assistance with a view to helping maintain macroeconomic stability. This implies that—just as the overall contours of the economic crisis in Afghanistan will not change suddenly—humanitarian aid needs to be reasonably steady moving forward, not hostage to the fluctuations of short-run funding availability and reactivity to Taliban actions.

Specifically, donors and aid organizations need to plan for a predictable, gradually declining glide path for aid to minimize further damage to the Afghan economy, not one subject to sudden ups and downs nor an extremely damaging abrupt cutoff or sharp drop. By all indications, international humanitarian aid to Afghanistan will decline in the coming years, and it is unlikely that such aid will be fully replaced by development assistance. A predictable, steady, and gradual reduction in total aid over the next three to five years will give the Afghan economy more time to adjust to lower levels of assistance. After the Taliban’s takeover in August 2021, the country was thrown into an economic tailspin by the abrupt aid cutoff and associated grievous harm to the Afghan people, a repeat of which must be avoided.

The U.N. cash shipments—originally seen as a temporary expedient—are both costly (with multiple fees and conversion charges by the U.N. and the Afghan private commercial bank concerned) and risky (one security incident could shut down this channel, at least for a while, wreaking havoc with aid delivery). Moreover, the Taliban reap economic benefits from the inflows of cash dollars: Even though the shipments do not go directly to the regime or to the Afghan central bank, some of the money does reach the latter’s coffers as a result of conversion into local currency either by the Afghan bank or on the local market. And the public optics of such large cash inflows—of a similar magnitude to the shipments of cash dollars into the country by the previous (pre-August 2021) government—are problematic and may further undermine international support for large-scale humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, as well as raising questions among many Afghans.

So, what should the international community do? First, consistent with planned reductions in overall humanitarian aid, it should preprogram a gradual decline in the amount of cash dollars brought in, either by reducing the size of each shipment or by stretching out the intervals between shipments. Second, aid organizations should develop other mechanisms for taking up some of the slack, discussed later, which would potentially enable U.N. shipments of cash dollars to decline faster than total aid.

Practicing Risk Management and “Do No Harm”

Donors and aid organizations should engage in risk management and risk minimization—not chimerical zero-tolerance risk avoidance—with regard to the Taliban benefiting from aid, and money laundering/terrorist financing risks. By propping up the Afghan economy, current humanitarian aid—including not least the U.N. cash shipments—indirectly benefits the Taliban regime. There is no escaping this effect. More generally, it is a fallacy to think that humanitarian aid provided through the U.N. system is somehow exempt from risks of money laundering and inadvertently funding terrorism, diversion from intended uses, corruption, and other financial risks. Within the humanitarian space, the idea that in-kind aid (for example, food) is somehow “safer” than cash assistance has been amply discredited in global experience.

The risks and benefits of different aid modalities and delivery mechanisms therefore need to be soberly assessed on a comparable basis, and decisions made accordingly. For example, the risks of diversion of in-kind aid, which are very real, need to be weighed against the risks of diversion of small-scale financial transfers, not just assuming that in-kind is acceptable but cash is not. A similar assessment is needed with regard to the risks of using cash versus digital currency transfers. Risks associated with relying more on Afghan private businesses to deliver aid need to be assessed against the risks of U.N. and other aid agencies doing so. And all of these risks need to be analyzed in relation to the different costs of aid modalities and delivery mechanisms. An approach that carries small increased anti-money laundering/countering the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) risks, for example, should not necessarily be ruled out if it is an order of magnitude cheaper than the slightly less risky alternative.

More broadly, aid organizations should emphasize a “do no harm” approach and minimize the adverse side effects of large-scale, prolonged humanitarian aid. Many of the recommendations proposed in this article are also important in containing and reducing the well-known distortions that can arise from very large aid programs—including humanitarian ones, particularly if they are in place for an extended period of time.

Prioritizing How to Use Increasingly Constrained Funding More Efficiently and Effectively

In responding to a short-term humanitarian emergency such as a natural disaster, the speed and the sheer quantity of aid, and its widespread distribution, are aid organizations’ primary concerns. In the case of Afghanistan, however, where the humanitarian emergency is driven by a protracted economic crisis, aid effectiveness issues cannot be ignored. This requires focusing on cost-effectiveness and, where applicable, using cost-benefit criteria to prioritize where humanitarian aid is allocated. The former are commonly used in evaluating different health programs, specifically disability-adjusted life years saved in relation to costs, and this kind of framework can be expanded to other humanitarian assistance as well. For example, the cost per life saved from mine clearance (including unexploded ordnance and improvised explosive devices, or IEDs) can be compared to costs of other humanitarian interventions—keeping in mind that viewed narrowly in terms of saving lives, mine clearance can be quite expensive (though there are also development-related economic benefits from restoring land and infrastructure for productive use).

The scope of this prioritization should include both humanitarian activities and basic development programs (so-called humanitarian-plus). The distinction between these two categories of aid inevitably is fuzzy, and some of the concrete activities currently being funded by aid to Afghanistan (for example, basic health services beyond emergency life-saving support and some primary education) could be labeled as either, with the actual categorization depending on the source of funding and donors’ constraints such as unwillingness to provide much development-labeled aid to Afghanistan under the Taliban. Therefore, the sensible approach is to assess total aid to Afghanistan and prioritize accordingly, rather than using the lens of isolated, stove-piped buckets of money, which would detract from overall aid effectiveness and efficiency.

Aid organizations should additionally factor in the fungibility of funds and deploy aid accordingly. The Taliban have been collecting large amounts of revenue—as much as $2 billion per year—even in the face of the weaker Afghan economy. If international aid pays costs that otherwise would have been covered by domestic revenues, it frees up funds in the Taliban’s national budget for other uses, such as prisons, the emir’s office, and the security sector, where spending has been buoyant.

A notable example is the salaries of teachers in government schools (comprising the majority of teachers in the country), who are civil servants under Afghanistan’s education system. There has been some debate over whether international donors should pay salaries or top-ups to teachers, perhaps as an attempt to provide an incentive for the Taliban to restore girls’ education. Indeed, UNICEF in 2022 had decided to pay two months’ worth of salaries (approximately $100 per month) to some 194,000 primary school teachers, in addition to their regular salaries from the government. However, the Taliban administration recently announced that they would in response hold back two months’ worth of teachers’ salaries—in effect, reserving the same amount of funds provided by UNICEF for other purposes. This example well illustrates the perils of making decisions on aid that do not factor in fungibility issues.

This may not be the only area in which international aid could replace government spending, thus benefiting the Taliban. A possible example is the clearance of mines, unexploded ordnance, and IEDs on land needed for government infrastructure projects, all of which would have to be completed using Afghanistan’s domestic resources if not paid by foreign humanitarian aid. While it may be impossible to entirely prevent humanitarian aid from displacing Afghan budget spending, aid organizations should carefully review the major assistance programs and spending categories, flagging sizable expenditures that carry a significant risk of this happening, and deploy resources accordingly.

Shifting Aid to Cash and Using New Delivery Technologies

Based on global experience, there is a consensus in the humanitarian aid community and among economists that cash is better than in-kind aid (or noncash contribution of goods) so long as goods are available on local markets, as is the case in Afghanistan. Providing aid in the form of cash is cheaper than goods, and no more risky. Thus the policy prescription is to provide more aid in the form of cash, not in-kind. Nevertheless, a large proportion of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan—including food aid—continues to be provided in-kind. Shifting the composition of food aid progressively away from goods in favor of cash therefore should be a priority, and the same applies to many other relief goods as well.

Beyond the superiority of cash over in-kind aid, advances in technology have created the potential for better and more cost-effective ways of delivering purchasing power to those in need through mobile money and digital transfers. These mechanisms take advantage of a post-2001 success story in Afghanistan: the broad national coverage of mobile telecommunications networks and the widespread use of cell phones throughout the population. Electronic payment options can also help get around the current hobbling of the banking sector and de facto restrictions on international banking transactions. The expansion of HesabPay, for example, as well as a recent successful pilot program that seeks to deliver assistance directly to Afghan women through mobile phone accounts, each demonstrate the potential for digital transfers to enhance the population’s access to aid.

These e-money innovations are promising. Scaling them up will require one or more major aid donors, and/or large U.N. agencies, to take the lead in beginning to allocate sizable amounts of funds for e-money transfers. Safeguards can be put in place to minimize the risk of diversion of aid to the Taliban and AML/CFT risks. In any case, the risks associated with small transfers, spread out over multitudinous mobile phone accounts, are modest compared to the risks carried by other forms of aid.

Mobilizing the Afghan Private Sector

The international community should make much greater use of the Afghan private sector in the delivery of aid, which will reduce associated costs while providing a modest economic boost. There is a widespread consensus that humanitarian aid alone is not the solution to Afghanistan’s economic crisis, but unfortunately there is little prospect for traditional development aid to ramp up. Humanitarian aid faces clear limitations in its ability to stimulate economic recovery and growth beyond sustaining the current precarious degree of macroeconomic stability. Nevertheless, the economic stimulus from humanitarian aid needs to be enhanced to the maximum extent possible. Aid agencies should seek to rely mostly on procurement and contracting with the private sector, rather than on their own procurement and provision of goods and services.

Aid agencies can also support and further develop private-sector workarounds to restrictions on international financial transactions. The U.S. Treasury issued increasingly clear and elaborate clarifications—culminating in its General License 20 of February 2022—that existing sanctions against the Taliban and individuals in the movement do not apply to a host of financial transactions involving Afghanistan—both public (for example, payment of legally mandated taxes and fees) and private (trade, except for a few luxury items such as furs and yachts). Nevertheless, foreign banks remain extremely cautious and routinely turn down many, if not most, requests for transfers of funds into and out of Afghanistan, especially when a U.S. dollar-denominated transaction is involved. This continues to be a major hindrance to Afghan businesses, trade, and the adjustment of the Afghan economy to the new realities.

The U.N.’s proposed Humanitarian Exchange Facility was intended to ease these constraints by allowing what would be in effect swaps between aid agencies and Afghan importers, substituting payments to the latter’s foreign accounts for inflows of aid money, and correspondingly using receipts from sales of imported goods within Afghanistan to provide liquidity for aid agencies to cover local costs (salaries and other local expenses). The Humanitarian Exchange Facility, which may have been overly complex in its design and would have carried substantial overhead costs, did not get off the ground in the end.

However, a broadly similar idea has been implemented on a smaller but potentially expandable scale by the Afghan private sector. The tankhaa (which can be translated as “salary”) mechanism emerged from the exigencies post-August 2021, when NGOs could not bring in funds to pay their employees’ salaries and other local costs due to the stoppage of international financial transactions. A major Afghan company, which engages in imported food trade and manages the most important wholesale market for foodstuffs in Afghanistan, was accumulating sales proceeds, as were the numerous shops in the market, but they could not use these funds to pay for their imports since outward bank transfers also were stopped. As a practical solution, in line with the needs of the NGOs, the company provided them with local funds to pay their salaries and other local costs, which were then settled by the NGOs transferring funds from their foreign accounts to the Afghan company’s foreign bank account. That money in turn could be used to pay for the cost of the concerned food imports.

By making use of what otherwise would be idle cash, tankhaa keeps the costs of these transactions low, and unlike many other ways of bringing in and spending aid in Afghanistan, it does not need to involve the informal hawala system at any point. Though relatively small at present, amounting to several hundred thousand dollars per day, this scheme could be expanded over time if joined by additional NGOs and aid agencies, and through its extension to include exporters and remittances. Other similar “swap” arrangements could further ease constraints emanating from international banking restrictions.

The international community should also directly attack the blockages of international financial transactions, by providing even greater comfort to reluctant foreign banks. Afghan businesses—many of which are well aware of the U.S. Treasury’s clarification that sanctions don’t apply to the vast bulk of commercial transactions—claim that when they point this out to foreign banks, the banks are not interested in reading the General Licenses and associated Treasury explanations. These documents could be transmitted officially from the Treasury to banks, perhaps via the central banks of the countries concerned (the Federal Reserve, in the case of the United States) to further encourage them to allow Afghanistan-related transactions.

Beyond the sanctions themselves, banks are likely concerned about the more general AML/CFT risks associated with financial transactions involving Afghanistan, and the high costs of installing AML/CFT protections compared to the limited volume and profitability of these transactions under current conditions. While there are no easy solutions, encouraging a risk management approach would also make sense in this area—for example, allowing sensible thresholds in terms of transaction sizes or other similar expedients.

Coordination and Financing of Aid

Aid organizations should encourage the World Bank to support this new approach to humanitarian aid in Afghanistan, bringing to bear its comparative advantages. The World Bank and the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF) that it administers have played important roles in Afghanistan over the previous 20 years, both financially and otherwise. The drastic changes in the situation brought about by the Taliban’s takeover call for strategic rethinking and changes, but the World Bank and the ARTF can continue to be highly effective in the country if reoriented and retooled. This would require a proactive World Bank stance—perhaps financial in the future, but crucially with the World Bank’s board of directors and leadership and ARTF donors authorizing it to play a more active role, now.

The World Bank, with its release of $280 million in ARTF funds in November 2021 for humanitarian purposes, immediately joined the ranks of the larger financiers of humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan, which provided an entry point for the bank’s engagement on humanitarian aid more broadly. And the subsequent ARTF-financed activities focused on basic needs and core services are along the fuzzy line of demarcation between humanitarian and basic development aid in the “humanitarian-plus” spectrum. So there is ample justification for the World Bank to become more engaged with humanitarian aid as a whole, in addition to its important nonfinancial roles.

Relatedly, aid agencies should rethink and strengthen the coordination of humanitarian aid, providing the clout to make coordination work better, which could be provided by pooled funding. Weak and ineffective coordination of off-budget development assistance prior to August 2021 unfortunately has been replaced by weak and ineffective coordination of humanitarian aid since the Taliban takeover. The sheer size of this aid, its major economic implications, and likely future constraints call for more robust and effective aid coordination, in which the World Bank should be engaged. The ARTF or a similar comprehensive trust fund encompassing humanitarian aid (not a number of separate, potentially competing trust funds) would give teeth to aid coordination, along with major donors working together—perhaps using the donor committee or board of the trust fund as a platform for better coordination extending beyond the funds directly managed by the trust fund itself.

Finally, the international community should explore ways to use the $3.5 billion of Afghan central bank reserves in the Afghan Fund in Switzerland to strengthen the country’s balance of payments and support the private sector, without directing these funds to the Taliban regime. Recent developments in New York—specifically the Feb. 21 decision in which a federal judge rejected an effort to use frozen funds from the central bank of Afghanistan to compensate 9/11 victims’ families and their lawyers—give grounds for hope that the more than half of Afghan central bank reserves remaining in the United States will eventually become available for Afghanistan.

In the meantime, the $3.5 billion that was already apportioned for the benefit of the Afghan people (and subsequently transferred to the Afghan Fund) is presently available to buttress macroeconomic stability in Afghanistan and indirectly backstop the private sector, including the commercial banking system. The Swiss fund could explore the possibility of leveraging its size and status to support trade financing and cooperative arrangements with state-owned banks of Afghanistan’s neighboring countries, promoting smooth cross-country commercial banking transactions, without necessarily using up significant amounts of the reserves for these purposes. And though rapidly dissipating this money, let alone using it for humanitarian purposes, is not an appropriate use of any country’s foreign exchange reserves, these funds could help smooth and dampen the adverse macroeconomic impact of declining humanitarian aid in the future.

Afghanistan Requires a Change from Humanitarian Business as Usual
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Back to the Village: Afghan city dwellers go home for a long-over-due visit

March 29, 2023

Sabawoon Samim 

Afghanistan Analysts Network

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After the Taleban seized control of Afghanistan in August 2021, the lives of millions of Afghans changed overnight. While these events have had a negative impact on the lives of many, some have seen positive changes. The end of the conflict meant that many urban dwellers who had been born in rural areas and had not returned home for the past two decades, mostly due to security concerns, could safely revisit their home villages. In this report, guest author Sabawoon Samim listened to the experiences of four such individuals and found they had mixed feelings about returning to their home villages, where happy memories mingled with the harsh realities of rural life.
Afghanistan’s cities are home to a large number of Afghans originally from rural areas who have left their home villages in search of security and better opportunities in urban areas. As the war between the resurgent Taleban forces [on one side] and Republic and NATO forces [on the other] raged in most provinces, Afghans who had joined the government quickly came under direct threat from the insurgents. The cities, particularly the capital Kabul, enjoyed better security throughout the two-decade-long conflict. The quest for security, however, was not the sole driver of rural-urban migration. The large amount of foreign aid flowing into the country since 2001 allowed the Republic to invest vast sums of money in developing the capital and other major cities, creating jobs and building infrastructure, such as schools and hospitals, that were not available in rural Afghanistan.

The war, however, made it difficult, if not impossible, for many of these new city dwellers to even pay short visits to their villages. Even those not directly connected with the post-2001 government and its international allies were exposed to many other dangers while travelling or in the villages, including firefights between government forces and the insurgents, roadside bombs and criminals. These dynamics meant that many seldom, if ever, returned to their villages.

The Taleban takeover in August 2021 ended the conflict and changed the situation drastically. The Taleban declared a general amnesty for their erstwhile enemies: those who had worked for or cooperated with the Republic. In the months that followed, many Afghans who had previously been unable to visit the rural areas made their way to the villages they had left years or even decades earlier.

To understand how they felt and what they experienced, we interviewed four individuals who had visited their home villages for the first time in many years. Our interviewees originally hailed from Paktia, Kunduz, Ghazni and Nangrahar provinces and have different backgrounds and professional experiences. Three of our interviewees lived in Kabul and one in Jalalabad. Two held positions in the previous government: one as a civil servant and the other as a member of the now-disbanded Afghan National Army (ANA). The third interviewee worked as a civilian contractor for the United States and the fourth continues to work for an international organisation. The interviews were carried out in October and November of 2022; three were face-to-face and one was conducted by phone.

For three of our interviewees, the Taleban takeover has not proved as challenging as they had anticipated. Two of our interviewees, the former US contractor and the government official, have built considerable businesses in Afghanistan and abroad using the vast profits they made over the past two decades. The international organisation employee has retained his job and has an adequate salary. None has seen their lives disrupted in the aftermath of the regime change. In fact, they availed themselves of the newly offered opportunity to travel throughout the country in safety to visit their home villages. Two of them reported smooth and even jovial interactions with the Taleban. One interviewee has befriended his former foes and built ties with some of their commanders; another secured official permission from the Taleban’s Ministry of Interior to keep a pistol for his protection while travelling; the third interviewee said he hardly noticed any Taleban presence in the rural areas.

However, things turned out very differently for the former army officer from Nangrahar. After the Taleban takeover, he lost his job and currently struggles to provide for his family’s basic needs. Finally, the cost of living in Jalalabad proved too much for him, and he decided to move back to the village with his family. While he is no longer at risk of being killed on the battlefield, he is still in danger of being arrested by the Taleban or targeted by his foes.

By contrast, the other three respondents continue to live in Kabul. They were keen to visit their birthplaces and appreciated their time there. However, they felt the villages have remained too ‘backward’, having scarcely benefited from the development that altered the country’s urban centres. They noticed how villages have grown larger and crowded with new young faces and how the village youth have few prospects for a bright future.

Our interviewees extolled many aspects of village life, such as the warm social relations and clean air, and showed interest in refurbishing their properties there to serve as second homes, but they admitted that they could not forego all the modern comforts of the city in favour of returning to the village permanently.

30-year-old father of five, Nisar Ahmad[1], was born in Zurmat district, Paktia province when the mujahedin were in power. After the fall of the first Emirate in 2001, his father moved the family to Kabul and secured a position working for the government. After he finished his studies, Nisar was able to get a senior post in the Republic with the help of his father, a job he held until the fall of the Republic when he fled the country along with the rest of his family to Turkey, where they had already obtained citizenship, presumably by investing part of the wealth the family had amassed during the Republic.

There were no schools or madrasas [in the village when I was growing up]. We went to the village mosque every morning and studied Qaida Baghdadi [the book Al Arabiya Qaida Baghdadi teaches how to read Quran using a gradual system that starts with the Arabic alphabet and reading to beginners]and later the Quran Karim with our village mullah.

After the new government was established [in 2001], my father, who was [associated] with a mujahedin tanzim [name of the party withheld] during the jihad [against the Soviet Union], went to Kabul and got in touch with his comrades. By then, many of them had become officials in the Karzai government. He was fluent in English and easily got a job in the new government and later on was promoted to more senior positions. Around this time, the Taleban also began an armed struggle against the Karzai government, which made it difficult for my father to return home. So, he took our entire family to Kabul, and we never returned to the village.

The biggest reason we moved to Kabul might have been the Taleban, who didn’t allow my dad to return home. But I sometimes ask myself, if there was no war and threats to my father, would we still have stayed in Zurmat, which was severely underdeveloped and where there were no schools, hospitals and none of the facilities we have in Kabul? Anyway, if there were no Taleban at all, I assume, the situation in Zurmat might have also been different. The new [Republican] government might have started development projects there too.

After we moved to Kabul, my siblings and I started school. I was in the 7th grade. After graduating high school, I studied for my bachelor’s at Kardan University in Kabul and later an MA in Europe. With my father’s help, who had retired during the Ashraf Ghani government, I got a senior post in the ministry of [name withheld].

And, you know the rest: the Taleban came and my family and I all left the country and went to Turkey, where we have citizenship.

After some time, when we contacted our relatives and friends in Afghanistan, the situation appeared to be settled. In fact, what we expected, that people who had held senior positions in the Republic would face difficulties and persecution, never happened. I don’t consider the Taleban to be the good guys, but what they did was a great [act of] generosity [by announcing a general amnesty for those who had worked for the Republic].

My elder brothers own a number of markets and businesses in Kabul, which require some management. We talked to our relatives about our return and they all backed the idea. So, two of my brothers and I returned to Afghanistan in March [2022]. We went to our home in Kabul, and after dealing with the businesses and some other stuff, we decided to go to our village. Our relatives there had contacted the local commanders to ask for permission, which was granted.

Since we were going there for the first time in around 15 years, I felt a sort of joy that I had never felt in Europe or Kabul, despite all the improvements and higher [quality] of life we’ve had there. Before going there [to the village], my brother went to the wazarate dakhila [Ministry of Interior] and talked to them about allowing us to carry a pistol for our protection. They often let businessmen carry them for security, and we were also allowed to do so.

In Afghanistan homecomings are characterised by rituals of hospitality, but for our interviewees, the return was also marked by the grim realities of life in rural Afghanistan. They noted the villages’ demographic growth had not been matched by adequate improvements to infrastructure, facilities or living standards. The joys of rediscovering the simple pleasures of country life quickly gave way to the realisation that not much had improved:

When I saw the village, there were some new modest houses, more cars, a paved road and improved living conditions, but only for some people. I didn’t notice much difference from when we had left. We went to our cousin’s home, and people came to greet and welcome us. To be honest, we’d helped the villagers who travelled to Kabul a lot and now it was their turn to pay it back.

On the second day, my elder brother bought a cow and slaughtered it. We distributed the meat in the village. We also held a collective ceremony for those who had died since our departure. I’d seen many of the villagers when they had come to Kabul for [medical] treatment and other reasons, but now I could see a new young generation. I noticed that the number of people living in the village had increased and there were more houses. As I remember, our village was small and only had one mosque. But now there were two new ones.

We went around all the district without any problem. It was because my father and our entire family worked on the civilian side [the Republic] and had not been involved in fighting the Taleban. So, there wasn’t any direct interaction between us [and the Taleban] during the Republic.

Also, the Taleban from our area were all sent to Kabul and other provinces. The Taleban [who are] in Zurmat [now] are from other provinces and districts and don’t know much about us. The villagers may have informed them, but our relatives had contacted the commander who used to operate in our village during the war, and he had told them there was no problem with our return.

For people like us, life was really restricted during the Republic. Due to the security situation, we barely even went to Qargha. The Taleban were not the only challenge or even the main threat to the security of the [political] elite. The mafia, thieves and other criminal gangs were the biggest threats. My father was posted to Kandahar [for a time], but he never went there by car. When we visited him in Kandahar, we went by plane. Nowadays, we go to Paktia by car without any problems. The last time I went there, all the villagers and friends proposed we go for mila [picnic] to Aryub Zazi [a district in Paktia]. We went there, cooked kabab and enjoyed the breathtaking natural scenery. It was really a great experience.

Seeing the natural scenery and breathing the clean air in the village was something special to me. In Kabul, and also in Turkey, we’ve been living an unhealthy, artificial life. Unlike in the cities, you can find wholesome food in the village. It was a great experience and the fulfilment of an old wish to see the village where I was born. But it was also a bitter [experience]. The war in these areas had shattered entire villages and left people in the same underdeveloped situation they had 15 years earlier. Another devastating feature of village life that always hits me hard is the poverty people experience.

Despite the village’s backwardness, one cannot avoid yearning for the place he’d grown up. Although it’d be naive to hope this government would do construction work, I still want to see my village experience the many facilities people enjoy in the twenty-first century.

Abdul Qadir, 45, is a businessman from the Deh Yak district of Ghazni province. He is a father of seven. Before 2001, he lived in Peshawar with his extended family, some of whom had joined a mujahedin organisation during the war against the Soviets. He returned to Kabul after the fall of the Taleban’s first Emirate. He soon became a US contractor, building military bases for the NATO troops, and made huge profits. He remained in Afghanistan after the fall of the Republic in 2001 and has managed to establish good connections with the new authorities.

Our family lived in Pakistan until America ousted the Taleban. Then we returned to Kabul. My brother took a senior position in the new government, and I worked with the Americans as a contractor in the construction of their [military] bases.

When the Taleban returned to our district [during the conflict], we were branded with different [derogatory] names and local commanders threatened to kill us if they had the chance. We didn’t return to our village after that. For the past seven years, we couldn’t even get as far as Ghazni city.

But, the suqut [fall] of the Republic brought a sudden transformation, and so many things that we never expected would change in decades vanished overnight. Initially, we were very afraid of the Taleban, but it turned out that they were sincere and committed to the amnesty they had announced. After observing the situation and seeing that other friends who had held senior positions in the [Republic] government didn’t flee the country and started travelling to the countryside, my family and I also wanted to go to our mantiqa [rural areas]. Through our village elders, I contacted the senior commander in our area who, only a few years ago, had called our family murtadeen [apostates]. He had been appointed to a job in Kabul, and I invited him and his group to dinner. They accepted my invitation and came to our home. During the dinner, we talked a lot, and I also asked him if I could return to the village. He agreed and told me that he was going to Ghazni the following week. He proposed we go together.

The readiness to reconcile is apparent on both sides, indicating a pragmatic attitude on the part of the Taleban towards a prominent family, arguably in a position to play an important role in the community, and on the part of the family who sees the value of good relations with the country’s new leaders.

The following week, we went to Ghazni together and I then made my own way to the village. Many villagers and relatives came to Ghazni city to greet us. I went to our home, where my cousins had lived while we were away. The following day, the villagers came to our home because when someone returns from Dubai [the United Arab Emirates] or Arabistan [Saudi Arabia], it’s customary in our village for people to go to his house for breakfast.[2] We talked a lot and I saw many new faces.

The youth are particularly amazing but face severe problems. Instead of studying, most of them go to Dubai and other countries to work and earn a living. Their talents are wasted in foreign countries for the sake of their family’s [financial] needs. I hope they get the chance to study in better schools and universities and work and serve their country. The boys in our village also have a cricket team, and as a gift, I bought them new kits and bats. They were all delighted.

In our village, there is a madrasa built by locals. Most of its [construction] was completed with donations from villagers, but its rooms didn’t have roofs and the yard lacked an enclosure. I donated 1,500,000 kaldar [Pakistani rupees, roughly 7,300 USD]. They appreciated it very much.

On my first visit, I spent a week in the village seeing relatives and friends who also invited us for lunch or dinner. Around this time last year, I went there again. I had bought three sheep during my first visit and gave them to my cousins to take care of so we could slaughter them before winter and make lahndi [a delicacy of dried lamb. See more on lahndi in this AAN report]. I really love lahndi and, in the past years, we could not find such watani [homemade] lahndi in Kabul.

My mother passed away in the winter [of 2022]. We carried her to our village, arranged a funeral and buried her there. When she became ill two years ago, she made us promise that we would bury her in the village. Although we promised, we were worried about how that would be possible. My elder brother died of a heart attack that same year, and we couldn’t bury him in the village because the Taleban wouldn’t allow it. We held both the funeral ceremony and the burial in Kabul, where we struggled to find a place for his grave. But my mother was fortunate and blessed to be buried where she wished. We couldn’t have delivered on our promise if the Republic hadn’t fallen.

We’ve not yet faced problems with the Taleban. Those who were once thirsty for our blood have now become friends. Three months ago, I invited most of our district’s commanders to my daughter’s wedding in Kabul. All who were [present] in Kabul came to the wedding and even allowed us to have the dhol [traditional drum] and dance the attan [traditional Afghan dance].

Now, I travel to the village frequently, but I don’t want to live there permanently. Rural areas in Afghanistan lack very basic facilities, and it’s impossible to live there when one is used to living in a city. Still, I might accept life in the village for the many good features it has, and in fact, I once discussed it with my family, but neither my wife nor my sons and daughters agreed. The former government was so corrupt that, apart from a road constructed by the Americans, a school and a hospital, it did not do any construction and development work in the entire district. One can’t hope the current government will do better because their entire system is based on taxes and they are stuck in an economic crisis.

Hamidullah, 35, is from the Khanabad district of Kunduz province. He works for an international organisation as an administrator, having moved up the ranks over the years since he was first hired as a driver.He moved his family to Kabul in 2009 because suspicion was raised in his village about the nature of his job in the capital. Here is his story:

I was 19 years old when I came to Kabul. I had not studied in a school but had learned to read and write from the village mullah. When I arrived in Kabul, I started English and computer courses and, with a fake school document, got admission to a university. I was also looking for a job, and a friend introduced me to an [name of organisation withheld] officer who was searching for a driver. I got the job, and at the same time I continued my university studies and other courses.

My family still lived in Khanabad and I used to go there regularly. After two years of working as a driver, the officer hired me for a junior job in the international organisation. By then, I had mastered [the] English [language] and [the use of] computers and got my bachelor’s in political science. Over the years, I quickly rose through the ranks and was promoted to higher positions, but I still told people in the village that I worked as a driver.

The Taleban war against the government and the foreign forces was in full swing, making it increasingly difficult to travel to Kunduz and our district. We were often stuck in firefights, and roadside bombs blew up civilian cars, killing and injuring dozens of people every day. The Taleban were arresting people who lived in Kabul on charges of spying for the Americans. So, facing all these difficulties, I moved my wife and children to Kabul.

For a few months, I could still visit the village to take care of our home and land. But, since my salary was good and my living standards had improved, the villagers who came to Kabul for [medical] treatment or other reasons started to be sceptical about my job, doubting that a driver could pay such a high rent and buy a car. The word soon reached the Taleban, and they thought I had a senior government position. So, from around 2009, I couldn’t go to the village anymore.

Since the Taleban takeover, despite the many problems it has created for Afghans, in particular women, I am again able to go not only to Kunduz but also everywhere in Afghanistan. In the past, when someone travelled on the highways, he’d surely face a firefight or a Taleban checkpoint on his way. Many of our friends were injured during the clashes. I once decided to travel to Herat, but when I spoke to friends about whether I could go there by road, they told me doing so was suicide. So, I travelled by air, which cost me 5,000 afghanis [around 100 USD].

Now, I have gone to Kandahar twice without any security problems. The only positive thing Afghans have seen with the arrival of the Taleban [in power] is security all around Afghanistan, except Kabul and Panjshir.[3]

I decided to go to the village a month after [the Taleban takeover]. The commanders and fighters who knew me had been killed or relocated to Kabul and other provinces. Since I didn’t have a high profile or position in the previous government, I didn’t even ask for permission from the [local] Taleban, something many former government officials do. I went directly to the village. My uncle was using our house. When I went there, I decided to refurbish the house so I could come on vacation and spend time there with my family. I also talked to a farmer about starting work on our large parcel of land to grow some crops.

For this interviewee, establishing a connection with the Taleban was unnecessary: potential threats were no longer present in the village, and as the employee of an international organisation rather than of the previous government, he managed to keep a low profile. Like the previous respondents, mutual help – such as hospitality in the city and the guarding of properties in the village – kept alive the relationship between those who had settled in the city and the villagers who had stayed back:

In the village, people’s attitudes towards us were very positive because many of them had come to Kabul over the years, and as they had no relatives or other places to stay, they stayed in my house. I’ve helped them a lot to get doctors’ appointments and gave them advice when they needed it, for example, on how to get a passport. So, they were very happy with me. Villagers are very hospitable, and everyone wanted to have me over for dinner. I spent four days there and didn’t even have a single meal at my uncle’s house. They also helped me decide how to restore and farm my land.

The number of youths has probably doubled in our village. Most lack quality education and educational facilities that can develop their capacities. There are a couple of schools in the district, but they don’t meet the needs of an entire district. These schools barely have qualified teachers and [lack] books and other basic material. Most of the youth spend their time playing football and cricket. Apart from working the land, they struggle to find jobs. The only thing that bothered me was this new generation’s directionless life and uncertain future.

I’ve gone to the village often since then, most of the time with my family. We haven’t yet faced any trouble from the Taleban. To be honest, except at the checkpoints on the highway, one hardly sees them in the villages. It’s like they’ve totally abandoned villages and come to the cities. But fear of them virtually rules over these areas and security is still good. Sometimes, I even leave for Kabul after sunset and arrive there at dawn.

I also planted an apple orchard and sowed potatoes and wheat on our land. So, I didn’t have to buy flour from the bazaar this year because we had our own [wheat] harvest. It saved me 50,000 afghanis [550 USD].

Rahmatullah, 30, is originally from the Achin district of Nangrahar but was born in the Shamshatu refugee camp near Peshawar, Pakistan, where many Afghans settled as refugees in the 1980s. He is married and father of four. Rahmatullah’s family returned to Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province after the fall of the Taleban regime in 2001. As he did not have a formal education and lacked marketable skills, he struggled to find a job and eventually joined the national army. After the collapse of the Republic, he lost his job and returned to the village due to economic problems.

I was born in Shamshatu, Pakistan. I spent 15 years there and then, with the fall of the Taleban regime [in 2001], we returned to Achin. I only went to elementary school in Pakistan. Upon my return, our economic situation barred me from continuing my studies. Finding work was hard for someone like me with neither higher education nor other skills. I struggled to find a suitable job. After a few years, some friends from our area advised me and convinced me to join the urdu [Afghan National Army].

I joined the army, and after completing the training, around 2009, I was deployed to the battlefield. At that time, the war against the Taleban was a very high-intensity one. I’ve been to many provinces on missions and operations and fought in many battles. I lost many comrades. Sometimes, looking back, I’m stunned at how I made it out of that bloody war alive.

When I travelled to Achin in the first years after I joined the military, the Taleban didn’t control the district but had access to every part except its administrative centre. Still, local elders and the Taleban had agreed that they wouldn’t bother the soldiers deployed in other provinces who came to the district on leave. A huge number of army soldiers were mashriqi [from eastern provinces of Afghanistan such as Nangrahar, Kunar and Laghman] and frequently returned to their homes on leave but, in those early years, based on their agreement with the elders, the Taleban didn’t arrest or bother us.

But with the emergence of Daesh [Islamic State Khorasan Province, or ISKP], the situation changed and we were barred from going to the village. So, I moved my family to Jalalabad [Nangrahar’s capital].

When the Taleban began their intensive final wave of offensives on the provinces, I was in Nimruz, the first province that fell to them. We surrendered. After two days, they let us go and gave us taslim khat [surrender letter] along with 5,000 afghanis [around 65 USD at the exchange rate of August 2021] and new clothes. After that, I went directly to Jalalabad.

The end of the conflict meant only the beginning of a different ordeal for this interviewee: he found himself deprived of his tenuous economic assets, and his former military experience meant that the Taleban did not view him as a candidate for reconciliation, but rather somebody to intimidate and monitor. For him, the ancestral village represented the last resort to cope with the prohibitive costs of living:

After the Republic collapsed, the troubles in my life began to increase day by day. The first were economic problems. I lost my job and had no other source of income.

In Jalalabad, I was living in a rented house. I moved my family to the village to at least get rid of the rent and then opened a small shop in the district bazaar. I moved to our village and didn’t face any problems in the first week. But the following week, the men of a commander from our district spotted me in the bazaar. They arrested me and carried me blindfolded to Jalalabad. There, they asked different questions and released me after a week. I don’t exactly know why I was arrested, but they said that they were investigating whether I was carrying weapons and whether I was involved in any mischievous activity [against the Taleban].

They finally released me and said everything was fine. But I suspect this was an excuse. Probably, the local commander was showing us his power. The tarburwalai[4] is very strong here. He [the commander] is from our tribe and wanted to show that they have the power now, and he can do anything to me. After that arrest, I was twice more approached by the Taleban in the district bazaar. They left after asking a few questions. Since then, I’ve not been bothered by them.

I now live again in the village I left almost eight years ago. I’m happy with my life since at least it’s safe. Contrary to what I experienced in the army, there is little risk of being hit by a bullet or a roadside bomb, but the economic situation is at its worst. I served in the army to earn a livelihood. My [monthly] salary was 24,000 afghanis [roughly 300 USD]. It was enough for my family. But after the collapse of the Republic, it dried up immediately. Now, the shop I opened is doing relatively well and can earn enough to keep us alive, but the high price of basic goods, such as oil and flour, sometimes makes it difficult to afford them.

On the first days of the Taleban takeover, I feared them a lot and waited for them to arrest and kill me. Once, I even planned to go to Iran to escape both the Taleban and poverty, but those who went there from our area were deported after being tortured and spending months in [an Iranian] prison. Getting to Pakistan and finding a job there is also difficult.

So far, I think the danger from the Taleban has faded, but the risk of poverty is still high, and I don’t know what life will do to me.

Between tradition and change: city-village connections re-established

The Taleban victory and the end of the conflict changed the lives of Afghans in many ways. While the emergence of the second Emirate disaffected many urbanites who blame the Taleban for the crippling economic crisis as well as the social restrictions they have put in place, it has, nevertheless, brought some positive developments; chief among them is the improved security situation stemming from the end of the conflict.

Two decades of conflict had fashioned barriers between rural and urban communities, cutting off many Afghans from their home villages for years because of the dangers awaiting them there or the widespread insecurity on the roads when travelling long distances. The end of the conflict has removed most of these barriers, allowing Afghans to finally reconnect with their home villages and travel across the country.

The interviewees’ interactions with the Taleban also tell us of the changed security environment: two respondents managed to establish contacts and positive relations with their erstwhile enemies, the Taleban. They reached out to the new rulers through their relatives who lived under the Taleban’s control during the insurgency to get their consent for their return to their villages. Our interviewees successfully used the strength of their family and community networks to their advantage to adapt to the changing circumstances, forget old enmities and establish new connections. One interviewee even reported driving across the country by night, a feat that would have been impossible throughout the past two decades due to the conflict and the fear of armed robbers.

The experience of our fourth interviewee stands in sharp contrast to that of the others. He was in the army for several years and lost his job after the takeover. Indeed, he returned to the village only because he could no longer afford to live in Jalalabad. For him, the takeover and his subsequent encounters with the Taleban have not gone as smoothly as they had for the other interviewees. He was arrested and imprisoned for a week and subsequently investigated twice more. In his case, the social network of the village did not protect him from retaliation. On the contrary, he was subjected to a “show of force” by fellow tribesmen who now found themselves on the winning side.

However, not all former government officials’ experiences with the Taleban have been similar to those of our interviewees. The public amnesty announced by the Taleban has curbed systematic retaliatory actions and reprisals against those who worked for the Republic, but there are reported incidents where former security and military officials are harassed, detained and even killed by the Taleban (see, for example, this Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty report and this Human Rights Watch report).

Broadly speaking, however, the security now established across the country, despite the sporadic suicide attacks by ISKP, is the first of its kind after decades of conflict and instability. Respondents found this to be the most positive feature of the post-takeover life.

Can you go home again?

The urban-rural bonds in Afghanistan have a complicated but deeply interconnected history. In fact, they have remained deep and enduring even though they were put under stress by the length and intensity of the conflict. Attachment to one’s birthplace and the economic and social interdependence between rural and urban members of a kinship or village community endured and added to the resilience of Afghan households throughout the troubled past decades. Under the Republic, many urbanites who held senior positions in the government supported their fellow villagers, relatives and tribesmen by hosting them when they travelled to cities for medical treatment, providing guidance on navigating government bureaucracies and attempting to secure positions, projects or educational scholarships for them.

Even after living for years in urban centres, many of these urbanites did not consider selling their rural properties. Like our interviewees, they maintained a virtual presence in the villages by retaining their homes and lands, which their relatives and fellow villagers took care of. The author knows of many cases of city dwellers allocating their zakat, or the Islamic alms tax, to the poor in their village despite the large numbers of needy people in cities, showing the enduring deep-rooted ties between the city dwellers and their villages of origin. The war’s end facilitated the revival of these persisting interdependent relationships that were never totally lost.

Even so, the social and economic imbalances in the past two decades have, to some extent, created an intractable gap between the two communities. Urban communities, benefiting as they did from two decades of robust economic and social attention from international donors, have adopted more ‘modern’ lifestyles. They have enjoyed years of better access to enhanced facilities and economic opportunities. They now stand in stark contrast to Afghanistan’s traditional and underdeveloped rural communities, which have not benefited to the same extent from the bounties enjoyed by their urban counterparts.

Nevertheless, the urban dwellers who had moved to the city during the past two decades and who make up a sizeable part of Afghanistan’s population can now reconnect with their rural homelands in ways that would have been inconceivable two years earlier. Since the Taleban takeover, Afghanistan’s rural areas have hosted many urbanites for the Eid holidays, allowing Afghans to engage in the age-old tradition of going to the village and visiting relatives during these festive periods. City dwellers from different walks of life can now travel to the village to participate in local ceremonies such as funerals and weddings. They can bury their dead in the plaranai hadira [ancestral cemetery], attend a cousin’s wedding or simply enjoy the natural beauty of their country in the company of their extended family. Afghans from rural and urban areas, who during the conflict were, each in their own way, “living a life under many restrictions,” are now given the chance to overcome at least this barrier.

After enjoying the return and their villages’ hospitality, beyond their idealistic designs of a ‘homecoming’, our interviewees discerned the other side of the coin – their rural communities had remained underdeveloped and largely impoverished. They noted few changes to their communities’ living standards and little economic development. They were troubled by the fact that their villages had not benefited from the vast international grants that had flowed into the country for the past two decades. Some blamed the former government, while others pointed to the war and the destruction it brought to the villages.

The economic crisis and the unemployment these rural communities were experiencing also concerned our interviewees. While they were impressed by the “new faces” of the youth they had seen, they were troubled by the lack of options, including educational opportunities and employment prospects for their villages’ younger population. They must have sensed that the apparently immutable social order of the villages was under pressure from the sheer number of unemployed youth and the lack of opportunities to match their expectations.

Although the interviewees talked about the pleasures of visiting one’s birthplace and praised the fresh air, wholesome food and hospitality, they did not intend to live there permanently, given the lack of basic facilities they enjoy in urban centres. Only one has gone back to live in the village, but only because economic constraints have forced him. The other three expressed their intentions to strengthen their ties with their communities, and at least one has since rehabilitated his lands and gardens and aimed to refurbish his village house as a vacation home.

The end of insecurity has not reversed the trend that has seen scores of Afghans abandon their villages to settle in urban areas in recent decades. Cities continue to represent the only horizon for educational and professional opportunities for the villagers, and the gap between the two has been exacerbated by the two decades of largely imbalanced evolution in Afghan society and the current economic crisis. The kinship and emotional ties to one’s home place, deep as they might be, are not strong enough to persuade city dwellers to abandon the comparative privileges of life in a city and return to the village, nor would they prevent the flight of many youth left without education and jobs, from the rural areas to Afghan cities and beyond in the years to come.

Edited by Fabrizio Foschini and Roxanna Shapour

[1] The names of respondents have been changed to protect their identity.

[2] Many Afghans go to the Gulf countries, mostly UAE and Saudi Arabia, for work and when they return, people welcome them by going to their homes. This custom applies to anyone who returns home from a foreign country or even a city in Afghanistan.

[3] The interviewee later said that he considered Kabul to be insecure because of the recent suicide attacks. He also noted increasing robberies and thefts as another sign of insecurity. On Panjshir, the interviewee referred to reports of clashes in the province.

[4] Tarburwalai is a rivalry between cousins, relatives and fellow tribesman where individuals and families attempt to have superiority and domination over others.

 

Back to the Village: Afghan city dwellers go home for a long-over-due visit
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In Afghanistan, women and girls are being erased

March 24, 2023

By

Global Opinions contributing columnist
The Washington Post
March 23, 2023 at 7:30 a.m. EDT

I was standing in the arrivals hall at Kigali International Airport in Rwanda this month, waiting for an Afghan girl and thinking about the days that brought the two of us here.

March 23rd marks one year since the Taliban decreed that Afghan girls don’t need to be educated past sixth grade. One year since they closed the doors of schools in the faces of an estimated 3 million girls, though of course these girls have been out of school much longer than that, really ever since the Taliban took power.

In 2001, when the Taliban’s first regime fell, there was officially not a single girl in elementary school and only a handful in secondary school — that’s in the entire nation of Afghanistan. Less than 20 years later, we had 3.6 million girls enrolled in primary and secondary school, and around 90,000 in higher education.

All of it is gone. Live in silence now behind the walls of your home, the Taliban say to women and girls. Live a ghost life.

In that airport terminal, I was waiting for a 12-year-old girl, a new student at SOLA, my Afghan girls’ boarding school. She was en route to Rwanda from an Afghan community in exile, one of many such girls who have arrived in March thanks to a continuing partnership between SOLA (or School of Leadership Afghanistan) and the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration (IOM).

This girl, like every Afghan girl who refuses to give up on her education, had two choices: go overseas or go underground. Become a refugee from Afghanistan or, effectively, become a criminal within Afghanistan. Pursue the limited educational opportunities open to refugees, or pursue them in our homeland and hope the Taliban never find out.

In Kabul and across Afghanistan, the secret schools are opening again, with girls coming to learn from women who may never have been teachers before, but who now quite literally risk their lives to beat the darkness back.

“To bring a sense of humanity,” one of these teachers said to me, “we share our knowledge.”

I studied with women just like her, when I was a girl attending secret schools in the 1990s under the Taliban. We, who were girls then, are women now, and we are the inheritors of bravery that we pass on to today’s girls. A generational sisterhood holding flames, each of us a light in the dark, and a signal to each other.

And then there she was. My new student, a girl walking through the airport terminal with her female IOM chaperone, and pulling her suitcase on wheels. This suitcase.

The suitcase of one of Shabana Basij-Rasikh’s new students. (Shabana Basij-Rasikh) (Photo by Shabana Basij-Rasikh)

It can feel distant to a global audience, the struggle of Afghan girls. It can be easy for policymakers and private citizens to want to look elsewhere, or to want to focus on the perceived political gains or risks of reminding voters of the horror of Kabul’s fall in August 2021. Or to simply imagine that the problem is too intractable, the need too great, the damage too deep, the Taliban simply too immune to the pressure of global public protest.

That night, after coming home from the airport, I spoke with this girl’s mother. I told her that her daughter is with us at SOLA now, that she arrived safely and that we’ll take care of her.

This Afghan mother, this woman who sent her 12-year-old child to a school in a nation neither of them had ever seen — this woman asked me: “What can I do for other Afghan girls now? Tell me how I can help these girls be where my daughter is.”

When our new students arrive at SOLA’s campus, they quarantine for several days for health screenings. When quarantine ends and they come out to meet their sister students, they find me and they ask, they always ask: “When does the next admissions season begin? What can we do to help more girls come here?”

It’s with pride that I say that SOLA’s new admissions season is opening today. It’s with sadness too, and with anger. We’re one of a vanishingly small number of options available for Afghan girls.

I look to the future in Afghanistan and see three paths: the Taliban can maintain the unforgivable status quo of vanished women and no girls’ education past 6th grade. They can roll back these restrictions and let women be citizens whose contributions to society, which, measured purely economically, is worth billions of dollars to Afghanistan’s economy. Or they can bring my country back to the 1990s, when girls education was outlawed.

I can’t foretell the future, but I can easily anticipate girls’ education being used as leverage for international legitimacy. Basic women’s rights, used as barter — and perhaps not just by the Taliban. It horrifies me.

But hope lives. It lives in Afghan mothers. It lives in the women leading the secret schools. It lives in an Afghan girl pulling her suitcase through a foreign airport.

And it lives in this Afghan girl too — a different girl, at a different airport.

One of Shabana Basij-Rasikh’s new students asleep on an airport floor, with a novel beside her. (Shabana Basij-Rasikh) (Photo by Shabana Basij-Rasikh)

I took this picture in Qatar, back in the summer of 2021, at the midpoint of SOLA’s departure from Afghanistan and its arrival in Rwanda.

It’s one of my students, a girl asleep on an airport floor, with a novel beside her.

This is what we left home to protect. A girl with the right to read, and to learn, and to have the freedom to grow into an educated woman who will teach other girls.

A girl who chooses to think for herself is a force like none other on Earth. She is a member of a global sisterhood of the brightest light.

And so today and every day, as Afghans and as women, we claim the dignity no darkness can eclipse.

Shabana Basij-Rasikh, a Washington Post Global Opinions contributing columnist, is co-founder and president of the School of Leadership, Afghanistan
In Afghanistan, women and girls are being erased
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Simple Pleasures Amidst Great Frustrations: An essentially outlawed Nawruz in Taleban-ruled Afghanistan

March 24, 2023

S Reza Kazemi • Sayed Asadullah Sadat

Afghanistan Analysts Network

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The second Nawruz, the first day of the spring and the new solar hejri year, after the Taleban’s return to power comes in an overwhelmingly frustrating atmosphere and appears even more lacklustre than the previous one. The Taleban have effectively banned it as a holiday and public celebration. A host of other crippling challenges such as severe economic hardships and women’s and girls’ exclusion from the public sphere have further dampened any remaining wishes to celebrate what was a tremendously popular spring festival all over the country. Despite daunting frustrations, at least some people will find simple pleasures at home by shaking the dust of winter from their houses, planting flowers and saplings, preparing special delicacies, visiting relatives and friends, and celebrating not only Nawruz but also the coming month of fasting, Ramadan. Guest author Said Reza Kazemi and AAN’s Sayed Asadullah Sadat hear from five women and four men from across the country about these little joys intermingled with great frustrations, which are another reminder of the profound resilience that is the hallmark of people in Afghanistan.

Nawruz, or New Day, which coincides with the first day of spring and the start of the solar hejri year, is an ancient tradition long celebrated in Afghanistan (see AAN report on the history of Nawruz here). In the approach to Afghanistan’s second Nawruz under Taleban rule, we wanted to find out if and how people from across the country plan to mark the occasion. This report is based on unstructured interviews with nine people from across Afghanistan – five women and four men between the ages of 26 and 63 –  and provides poignant insights into their feelings and experiences for their second new year living under Taleban rule. Their moving responses reveal not only the endurance of joy amid overwhelming disappointments but also the Afghan people’s deep conviviality and humanity.

Nawruz 1402: A lacklustre celebration

“The Nawruz atmosphere is even more diminished than it was last year.” This sentiment expressed by a 32-year old woman we spoke to in Nili, the centre of Daikundi province in central Afghanistan, was echoed by everyone we spoke to about the coming Nawruz.[1] This year “isn’t like previous ones [before the Taleban return to power],” a woman we spoke to in Mazar-e Sharif, the traditional epicentre of Nawruz celebration, told AAN. People from all over Afghanistan used to travel to Mazar in northern Afghanistan for the Janda Bala (flag hoisting) ceremony which was traditionally held at the city’s Rawza-ye Mubarak Shrine, but the Taleban cancelled it last year, a few months after they came to power. “In the past, the city was bustling in these days. People would come here from every corner of Afghanistan [to celebrate Nawruz]. There’s no such thing this year… In the nights around Nawruz, the youth would roam around, playing music, singing and dancing on the streets,” she said. Other people we spoke to had shared smiliar stories, such as a 38-year old woman in Paktia who told us about Nawruz celebrations in Gardez city, the centre of this south-eastern province: “[Before the fall of the Republic] the state and civic activists organised colourful celebrations. They strung up lights in Gardez city, the bazaar was bustling and people bought dried fruit and other things for Nawruz. There were concerts and people went [for picnics] to green areas with their families. The youth danced the atan [traditional dance] and sang. They cooked their food in the open air. In the past, the youth, families and even we the teachers went to picnics, but there are no such things this year.”

One key reason is that the Taleban practically outlawed Nawruz after their return to power some one year and seven months ago. First, by removing Nawruz as a public holiday, which means that the state and its numerous institutions must remain open, making it tricky for civil servants to justify taking the day off work for Nawruz. Second, by forbidding public ceremonies to celebrate Nawruz. The 63-year-old man in Kandahar city, for instance, spoke movingly about the sorrow he felt from this ban on customary celebrations at the shrines in Kandahar province, as did the woman in Nili who lamented the ban on celebrations during the blooming of almond trees in Daikundi province, where she took a very active part in organising the popular Jashn-e Gul-e Badam (Almond Blossom Festival).

The effective outlawing of Nawruz emanates from the belief by the Taleban that because Nawruz is a pre- and un-Islamic tradition, it must not be celebrated and must have no place in Afghanistan’s society.[2] As such, the Taleban do not recognise Nawruz at all, neither as the beginning of the solar hejri calendar year nor as the first day of the spring. The new solar hejri calendar year 1402, which is the most commonly used calendar across the country, falls within the lunar hejri calendar years 1444/1445 and the Georgian calendar years 2023/2024. When top officials of the Islamic Emirate launched a second sapling-planting campaign on 5 March 2023 under the motto “piruzi wa taraqqi” (“victory and progress”) as they did around this time last year under the motto “nahal-e azadi” (“sapling of freedom”), they referred to the coming of the season of the spring as the occasion for the planting campaign, not to the approaching Nawruz. Furthermore, Nawruz had already been dropped as an occasion for celebration from the Islamic Emirate’s official calendar (taqwim-e rasmi).[3] Our interviewee from the northern city of Sheberghan, the centre of Jawzjan province, spoke about how pro-Taleban and like-minded muftis and mullahs have propagated the idea of Nawruz being ‘un-Islamic’ and thus forbidden it over the years in the province.[4]

A vendor selling plants, Kabul city, Kabul province. Photo: Sayed Asadullah Sadat, 15 March 2023.

The prohibition on public Nawruz celebrations is not the only reason for the diminished festive spirit in Afghanistan, where people have been experiencing a host of other crippling challenges. The Emirate’s restrictions on the participation of women in the public sphere make it difficult and dispiriting for women even as part of families to go out for picnics for Nawruz. This has increasingly turned picnics into not only all-male affairs but also occasions for state intervention and surveillance. All our interviewees were unanimous in saying that women and families generally preferred not to celebrate Nawruz with picnics because they “are afraid of being harassed or of facing some inappropriate treatment by those now in charge,” as the woman from  from Nili city put it. “People are fearful. They think that if they have some plan to celebrate the new year, they might face threats or dangers. For this reason, no one dares to have such a plan,” echoed the interviewee from Ahmadabad district of Paktia. The 38-year-old man we spoke to in Sheberghan, Jawzjan province said that when he and his colleagues went on a Friday picnic recently, they “didn’t see a single family going out to have fun on our way from Sheberghan city to Qush Tepa district. It was all young men coming on their motorcycles or in their cars.” The interviewee from Kandahar city said that a city park had been allocated to women visitors only for one day a week and that those “people who have land and garden [of their own], they’ll go there [to their own property to celebrate Nawruz] with their families.” In Kabul, we spoke to a 28-year-old woman who recalled the times when women and girls went to picnics along with their families in parks and green hills around Nawruz fondly, but said sorrowfully that “[now] women don’t have the permission even to breathe.”

Another woman, a 28-year-old from Herat city in the north-west, said:

Going on picnics on Fridays [around Nawruz] has become less frequent. Few families go out to enjoy the coming of the spring. Those who go are all men. Women don’t go. It’s because there are now restrictions for women to go on a picnic. They can’t speak and laugh. Hijab has also become strict.

The economic crisis has also dampened the Nawruz spirit. Many families are struggling to find their daily food, never mind buying new clothes or other things from the bazaar. “There are families who have nothing to eat. We have neighbours who struggle hard to make a meagre living. People were forced to sell whatever they had. Many people sold their houses and other possessions to buy food,” the interviewee from Kabul city described poignantly.

A 45-year-old man from Jurm district of Afghanistan’s north-easternmost province, Badakhshan, said:

Poverty and unemployment are problems that have taken the Nawruz spirit from the people. People are in need of their food for the day. Currently there are people who have to borrow their food such as tea, flour and rice so that their families don’t go hungry. They borrow and they barter, because people have run out of cash. When they borrow, they do so at an interest, sometimes returning double [the amount borrowed] to the shopkeeper. When they get one kilo of something, they must return two kilos later. People live their lives with great difficulty. The dignity and splendour of the past are all gone this year.

The deteriorating poverty is exacerbated by the Taleban ban on women work, for example, in national and international non-governmental organisations, which is affecting household economies and the lives of women and their families across the country. Added to this is a growing frustration and a sense of foreboding about whether girls above grade 6 will be allowed to go back to school and female students to university in the new year. The woman from Nili city summed up these debilitating difficulties:

Right now, poverty reigns in the neighbourhood, city and province I live in. Few families can celebrate Nawruz. Most simply can’t afford it. They have almost no spirit of Nawruz this year. Nawruz meant the opening of schools for all, girls in particular. It was like having two festivals: Nawruz and going back to school. Families whose daughters are in grade 6 or 5 or even 4 are anxious and worried about the future of their daughters. Girls above grade 6 don’t have permission to go to school at all. The families who have such school-going girls [above grade 6] have lost this simple joy of seeing their daughters go back to school and the others are worried about the future of their daughters. 

The ban on women working has created many problems. In Nili and in Daikundi overall, many women worked for NGOs and they had become the breadwinners and supporters of their families. These women have now lost their jobs and their incomes. This has not only impacted Nawruz celebrations but also the overall lives of these women and their families.

Nevertheless, almost all our interviewees said that at least some people would celebrate Nawruz, mostly at home. They referred to routine activities for this period of the year that they would undertake anyway, such as completely tidying up one’s house by cleaning and washing carpets and curtains, planting saplings and flowers; arranging courtyards and gardens; and, also, visiting relatives and friends as they would do at any other Nawruz. Those who could afford would also be preparing delights at or around Nawruz, such as haft miwa (a mixture of seven fruits soaked in water some days before Nawruz) or special rice dishes such as landi palaw (dried mutton with rice) in Kandahar city or sabzi palaw (herbed rice) in Mazar-e Sharif. Women take a leading role in planning all these preparations around the time of Nawruz.

There will therefore certainly be simple pleasures amidst great frustrations: “[a] small celebration at home,” in the words of the interviewee from Nili city, and “[celebrating] local Nawruz traditions inside … houses and gardens,” in the words of the interviewee from Kandahar city. “My son is engaged. We’ve bought something for Nawruz and we’ll take it in the coming week. In the days of Nawruz, families whose sons are engaged take fish dishes and sweets to the families of their daughters-in-law. Currently fish-cooking and confectionery shops are bustling in the bazaar. Although we make our sweets ourselves at home, there are some people who buy from the bazaar,” said the interviewee from Jurm district. “We have a saying here: start the year happily and then you’re happy the whole year!” summed up a man from Nawmish district of Helmand province to whom we spoke.

Goldfish, a traditional symbol of Nawruz, are sold on handcarts, Kabul city, Kabul province. Photo: Sayed Asadullah Sadat, 15 March 2023.

Additionally, this year’s Nawruz coincides with the fasting month of Ramadan, which also brings with it a host of special traditions. The start of Ramadan, the ninth month of the lunar hejri calendar, falls most probably two days after Nawruz in the new solar hejri year. Several of our interviewees, mostly female, even in contrast to Nawruz, expressed the coming of Ramadan as “a good feeling” as they and their families would coordinate an entire month collectively, especially by planning and preparing the sahri and eftari dishes that mark the start and end of fasting for the day. “… [For] Ramadan … we prepare apple jam and aloo Bukhara (plum jam] for sahri. Padar janam [my dear dad] eats nothing else for sahri,” the interviewee from Kabul city said happily. The interviewee from Jurm district said, “I’m happy about the coming of Ramadan. It’s a month of goodness and blessing. I hope that the blessed month of Ramadan brings some light, some good changes, so that people’s living conditions improve and that we get out of this plight.” The interviewee from Ahmadabad district, her teacher colleagues and other women from her area had even found a way to celebrate the coming of Ramadan together with Nawruz in a traditional women-only event at school:

… other teachers and I plan to hold a ceremony to celebrate both Nawruz and Ramadan. One day before the beginning of Ramadan, the women in our area prepare a special food and enjoy it in an event attended by women only. It’s like mehmanwari [invitation party] that we call da rana khwara [‘food of light’]. Every year, one day before Ramadan starts, the women gather in one house, prepare this food and enjoy it together. It’s a tradition from the past. We want to celebrate it this year at school.

Although some interviewees said they had no idea what the new year would bring them, others saw in the coming Nawruz and Ramadan the possibility for tranquillity, peace, and a year less “disappointing” than the previous one, especially for girls and women. “I take the new year and the new spring as a good omen for calm and peace all over the country,” said the interviewee from Mazar-e Sharif. The interviewee from Kabul city hoped that “with the coming of the blessed month of Ramadan… all regain their access to their rights and that we get out of this plight and darkness.” The interviewee from Ahmadabad district said:

I hope that with the coming of the new year and the blessed month of Ramadan, there’ll be permanent peace in the country and that the doors of schools and universities reopen on girls and women. Every girl, every woman has hopes of her own. I hope that the new year won’t be another disappointing year for Afghan girls and women.

As a time-tested tradition that has endured over centuries and indeed millennia, it is unimaginable that the Taleban, no matter how long the second Islamic Emirate will last, will be able to universally ban and completely eliminate Nawruz and its manifestations in Afghanistan.

We at AAN wish everyone celebrating a happy Nawruz, a generous Ramadan and peace and prosperity for all Afghans in the new year, 1402.

Edited by Fabrizio Foschini and Roxanna Shapour

The transcripts of our interviews with the men and women who spoke to us about their feelings and plans for the 1402 Nawruz, Ramadan and the coming year is in the annex below. You can preview it online and download it by clicking the link below.

 

Nawruz 1402 AnnexDownload

 

References
↑1 For last year’s Nawruz, the first after the Taleban return to power, see AAN’s report ‘Marking a New Century in Afghanistan: Nawruz 1401’.
↑2 Read the Taleban’s full justification of Nawruz celebration as “an act contravening the sharia” in: Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, “tajlil-e ruz-e awwal-e hamal ba nam-e nawruz amal-e khalaf-e shar’ mibashad [celebrating the first day of Hamal in the name of Nawruz is an act contravening the sharia],” Directorate of Guidance and Mosque Coordination, Ministry of Guidance, Hajj and Endowment, 17 March 2023.
↑3 In this year’s version of the official calendar of the Islamic Emirate, the Taleban have removed all days significant to the collapsed Islamic Republic (for example, constitution day and national flag day). Instead they have added days important to the Islamic Emirate, but have not gone so far as making them public holidays (for instance, allegiance and death days of their founder Mullah Muhammad Omar, death day of their previous supreme leader Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansur, day of the US and NATO withdrawal from the country, day of the signing of the Doha accord between Taleban and the US and day of the fall of Kabul) (watch this media report of 12 March 2023).
↑4 The debate on whether Nawruz is Islamic is not new (for a similar controversy in the early 2010s, see this previous AAN report; for a background on Nawruz in history and in Afghanistan, see this previous AAN report on Nawruz in March 2021).

Simple Pleasures Amidst Great Frustrations: An essentially outlawed Nawruz in Taleban-ruled Afghanistan
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Afghanistan is ready to work with the US, but sanctions must go

March 23, 2023
Mawlawi Amir Khan Muttaqi
Interim Foreign Minister of Afghanistan
Al Jazeera
Published On 23 Mar 2023
Afghanistan’s new leaders believe in dialogue and an exchange of ideas. But it takes two hands to clap.

A year and a half after the developments of August 15, 2021, when the Islamic Emirate regained control of Afghanistan, the situation in the country remains extremely hopeful.

The security situation has improved significantly. Violence levels have dropped sharply over the past 18 months and continue to reach new lows, despite doomsday predictions from critics of the new government in Kabul.

Even in the hotel lobbies of Doha during negotiations, many diplomats had harped on about the possibility of another destructive civil war, unless their demands were met. But the leaders of the Islamic Emirate took this contingency into account and enacted measures to avoid such an outcome.

While gaining control of the entire country, we took steps to weaken the possibility of a renewed war, by answering the concerns of Afghans and adopting the humane Islamic message of general amnesty and brotherhood.

Today, not only has the war come to an end but Afghanistan is being administered by an independent, powerful, united, central and responsible government. This is a first for Afghanistan in more than four decades.

The government has taken steps to disentangle Afghanistan from the crippling reliance on foreign aid – which defined the political setup of the past decades. Not only that, we are “Afghanising” all sectors, making them more accountable to the needs of the local population, and with a focus on capacity building and sustainability. This gives strength to our feeling of ownership of our own territory.

At the same time, we also understand that the globalised nature of modern relations means that all state actors must learn to live in harmony and peace with one another. Such relations should be founded on the immutable principles of equality, mutual respect and cooperation through the pursuit of shared interests. Bearing this in mind, the current government of Afghanistan once again extends its hand of positive engagement to the world.

We think a unique opportunity has emerged to embark on rapprochement between Afghanistan and the world. Domestically, the unity and cohesion of Afghan society are stronger than ever before. We celebrate, and take pride, in our diversity and rich history. We don’t believe in imposing the majority’s will on a minority. In our view, every citizen of the country is an inseparable part of the collective whole.

The conditions are ripe for Afghanistan to rise up as a responsible and independent member of the international community and to fulfil its responsibility in promoting global peace and security. The international community, on its part, should reciprocate by welcoming Afghanistan into its fold while paying respect to its independence and assisting it to stand on its feet. Our foreign policy will be based on a balanced and independent approach, that avoids entanglement in global and regional rivalries. We will pursue opportunities for shared interests and peaceful coexistence, based on the principle of equality and respect.

As for our internal affairs, which have at times been misconceived or misconstrued, there remains the need to dispel misinformation and depict an accurate picture of the values and needs of Afghanistan. The religious and cultural sensibilities of our society require a cautious approach. Any government that has not maintained the proper equilibrium, pertaining to such sensibilities, has ultimately faced serious difficulties. This is a lesson that our recent history has emphasised over and over again.

We believe in dialogue and an exchange of ideas, in an atmosphere free from political or economic pressures, and aimed at finding practical solutions and dispelling misunderstandings. Past experiences show that weaponising human suffering does not bear fruit. Alleviating the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan is our joint moral responsibility. Seeking to obtain political concessions by perpetuating mass suffering is neither civilised nor morally justifiable.

The primary cause of the ongoing economic crisis is the imposition of sanctions and banking restrictions by the United States. This impedes and delays our efforts to address the humanitarian crisis. The only path that respects the dignity of the Afghan people requires the lifting of sanctions and other commercial restrictions on the country. Space should be created to nurture the spirit and initiative of the Afghan people. Moreover, the US should unfreeze Afghanistan’s frozen assets, and in line with the Doha agreement, lift all sanctions. What moral and political justifications can the US have for imposing crippling sanctions on a war-torn nation?

We remind the US and others that sanctions and pressures do not resolve differences. Only mutual trust does. Afghanistan has a history of failed states and collapsed governments. Not even global powers and grand alliances were able to prevent this.

What would be the consequence of weakening this government? Surely, such a scenario will be accompanied by a great human tragedy that will not be limited to Afghanistan, but rather usher in new and unforeseen security, refugee, economic, health and other challenges for our neighbours, the region and the world.

The bitter reality is that over the past two decades, the Afghan economy was made wholly dependent on foreign aid, almost to the point of addiction. With the screeching halt of foreign aid, there is now a need to address the basic and fundamental needs of the Afghan people.

We recommend that aid should prioritise the creation of jobs and the completion of infrastructural projects with a durable impact. Simply handing out bags of money will not result in sustainable livelihoods for millions of people unless the domestic economy is revived.

The first prerequisite for that is the removal of sanctions, to pave way for the private sector to be revitalised. All obstacles to transnational trade, extraction of natural resources, and the implementation of national mega projects should be removed. We, on our part, remain committed to ensuring a conducive environment and to working with all states based on our shared interests. A self-reliant Afghanistan is in the interest of everyone while a failed Afghanistan jeopardises all.

There is a need for the international community to establish political and economic relations with the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, while respecting its sovereignty and territorial integrity.

We have made important progress in the past year and a half. This, despite the fact that we inherited a collapsed narco-state, with an emptied treasury, unpaid bills, millions of drug addicts, rampant corruption, universal poverty and unemployment and a stagnant economy.

We established a professional security force, maintained nationwide security and ensured that no one uses the territory of Afghanistan against other countries. We have completely banned the cultivation of drugs. We welcome those that remain sceptical to visit Afghanistan and witness these undeniable facts up close.

Similarly, for the first time in decades, an Afghan government procured its budget entirely from domestic revenues. In the past, over two-thirds of the government budget was comprised of foreign grants. Moreover, the government has nationalised economic institutions, ensuring that these institutions serve their domestic mandates. In January, the World Bank’s latest report reflected these advances.

Furthermore, the government has clamped down on corruption, which, in the past, resulted in Afghanistan being listed at the top of the most corrupt countries. It has also facilitated movement for Afghans who wish to travel domestically or move overseas. This was done to address the demand of the international community; we also retained around 500,000 members of the previous administration, while increasing the size of the public sector.

We do acknowledge that there remain challenges and shortcomings. But their solution requires time, means and cooperation. Broadly speaking, virtually all countries of the world have problems of their own. Yet, we choose to assist and alleviate, rather than shun and exacerbate.

Let us recall that the international military coalition of the past two decades brought in hundreds of thousands of troops, and expended trillions of dollars, yet were unable to obtain their desired outcome. Even now, they have chosen to live in the past, rather than turn a new leaf. They have repeatedly chosen to turn a blind eye to the positive steps of the government, and have only adopted a policy of accusations and pressure.

Hence, there remains a need to understand and accept the reality that one hand cannot clap.

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

Afghanistan is ready to work with the US, but sanctions must go
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Two Security Council Resolutions and a Humanitarian Appeal: UN grapples with its role in Afghanistan

March 20, 2023

Jelena Bjelica • Roxanna Shapour

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Recent complex negotiations surrounding UNAMA’s mandate in Taleban-run Afghanistan have shone a light on longstanding divisions among UN Security Council members concerning key issues, such as human rights, women’s rights, peace and security and governance. This year, on 16 March 2023, member states agreed to resolve their differences by passing two Afghanistan-related resolutions; one that extended the UNAMA mandate until 17 March 2024 and another that requested an independent assessment of in-country efforts, with a report to be presented to the council before 17 November 2023. Meanwhile, the new Humanitarian Response Plan, which requests USD 4.6 billion to support 23.7 million Afghans in need, was launched in early March after a two-month delay. Defining the coming months as an “operational trial” period, the HRP plans for enhanced monitoring to ensure minimal conditions are met. AAN’s Jelena Bjelica and Roxanna Shapour take a look at the latest developments related to the UN and humanitarian aid to Afghanistan and wonder what the efforts to increase scrutiny might bring. 
UN Security Council unanimously votes on two resolutions on Afghanistan. Photo: United Nations, 16 March 2023.

On 16 March 2023, the UN Security Council (UNSC)[1] passed two resolutions on Afghanistan. The first resolution (S/RES/2678(2023) extends the mandate of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) for another year, until 17 March 2024, without changes to its mandated tasks and priorities as agreed in SC Resolution 2626 adopted in March last year. The second resolution (S/RES/2679(2023) is a brief text with only two paragraphs. The Resolution requests the Secretary-General “to conduct and provide, no later than 17 November, an integrated, independent assessment, after consultations with 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” (see UN website here). This assessment, according to the resolution, should provide recommendations for “an integrated and coherent approach among different actors in the international community in order to address the current challenges facing Afghanistan” (see here.)[2]

Emirate spokesman Zabiullah Mujahed welcomed the extension of UNAMA’s mandate, but cautioned that the assessment should not be used “for producing propaganda against the system and based on false information.” He added that the Emirate stood ready to cooperate with the assessment if it was conducted with “the aim of continuing aid and [supporting] progress” (see ToloNews here and here).

The two resolutions were agreed upon after an initial draft resolution on UNAMA’s mandate, which was circulated to the UNSC members on 1 March 2023. The draft caused deep divisions in the 15-member council. This draft resolution, co-authored by Japan and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), envisioned an extension of the mandate without any changes for nine months and asked the Secretary-General to conduct an independent assessment regarding Afghanistan and report to the UNSC by October 2023. The United States, in particular, opposed extending UNAMA’s mandate for only nine months, as well as any change to the mandate, and supported a simple technical 12-month extension instead. The Alternate Representative for Special Political Affairs, Ambassador Robert Wood, said at a UNSC briefing on Afghanistan held on 8 March 2023:

The United States opposes – repeat, opposes – any effort to interfere with a simple technical extension. Such interference is unwarranted. It would negatively affect both UNAMA and the Secretary-General’s plan to convene Afghanistan special envoys. The Council should preserve UNAMA’s mandate through a simple technical extension without delay. We have only days left.

Other members like France, Ecuador, Malta and the UK “indicated that they had reservations and concerns about the independent assessment without directly opposing it.” While China and Russia wanted to expand the focus of the independent assessment to include “engagement with the Taleban and the impact of unilateral coercive measures,” according to a detailed account published on the UN Security Council Report (SCR)[3] website on 15 March. The differences of opinion among Council members regarding the independent assessment and renewal of the mandate ultimately led Japan and the UAE to suggest two separate drafts, one extending UNAMA’s mandate and another requesting an independent assessment.

UN mandate in Afghanistan 

Last year, on 17 March 2022, after several rounds of negotiations and at least four drafts, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 2626, which redefined UNAMA’s mandate in Taleban-run Afghanistan. At the time, Security Council members disagreed on whether UNAMA should concentrate on delivering humanitarian and development assistance or also aim to have a more robust role in political dialogue with the Taleban, including on human rights, inclusive governance and gender equality. A 2022 SCR report summarised the discussions among members in February and March 2022 as follows:

It appears that China and Russia contended that UNAMA’s primary focus should be assisting with efforts to address the humanitarian and economic crises in Afghanistan. However, many other Council members strongly supported a more robust mandate for UNAMA spanning several additional areas, including the protection of human rights and the promotion of inclusive governance and gender equality. China and Russia, for their part, apparently argued that the initial draft of the resolution was unrealistic and placed too much emphasis on these issues.

In the end, the 2022 resolution placed at the core of the UNAMA mandate to “coordinate and facilitate, in accordance with international law, including international humanitarian law, and consistent with humanitarian principles, the provision of humanitarian assistance and financial resources to support humanitarian activities” (Article 5.a). Other priorities included political and governance components (outreach and facilitation of dialogue between different stakeholders and promotion of responsible governance and the rule of law); human rights and gender monitoring and reporting (also supporting gender equality and the full, equal, and meaningful participation of women in all levels of decision-making); humanitarian assistance (engaging national and subnational stakeholders, civil society organisations, international NGOs, and donors to support the delivery of humanitarian assistance); and regional cooperation with a view to promoting stability and peace. This mandate, as defined in Resolution 2626, was extended unchanged for another year by the UNSC on 16 March 2023.

The question of whether UNAMA’s primary focus should be assisting humanitarian and economic crises in Afghanistan or taking on a broader governance and human rights mandate, however, remained a point of contention. For example, Japan and the UAE, the co-penholders on Afghanistan, called a private meeting of the UN Security Council[4] on 13 January 2023 (see here) shortly after the Council’s regular quarterly meeting on Afghanistan on 20 December 2022. The two countries wanted to hear from UN and NGO officials about the Taleban’s recent decisions to bar women from higher education and ban them from working for NGOs, and to allow Council members to have a “frank discussion” on the situation in Afghanistan. As the SCR reported on its website, consensus could not be reached on the content of a draft presidential statement:

[…] members were unable to reach consensus, apparently due to disagreements about the scope of the product. It seems that some members wanted to focus on the rights of women and girls and recent developments in this regard. Other members—including China and Russia—felt that the text should have a broader scope and address such issues as the security situation and the economic crisis in the country. 

These divisions also came to the fore in a recent workshop about the mandate and political strategy of UNAMA, organised by the International Peace Institute (IPI), the Stimson Center and the Security Council Report on 14 February 2023 (see the minutes of the meeting here). The discussions illustrated how Security Council members remain divided over the appropriate level of political engagement between the UN and the Taleban and the future of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, particularly in light of the Emirate’s increasing encroachments on the rights of Afghan women and girls:

Some participants alluded to the deputy secretary-general’s characterization of UN strategy as a push-and-pull approach whereby UNAMA leverages the provision of humanitarian support to build trust with the de facto authorities in the hope of achieving commitments for more inclusive governance and reduced restrictions on the Afghan population. Some participants questioned the sustainability of this strategy given the absence of meaningful concessions to date from the de facto authorities. Others argued that the Security Council should continue to give UNAMA time and space to implement this part of its mandate, given the slow-moving nature of such political endeavours. […] Further restricting the mission’s level of engagement with the de facto authorities would arguably hamstring UNAMA’s political engagement and functionally limit its role solely to enabling humanitarian assistance. Others questioned the extent to which UNAMA can promote inclusive governance given the significant recalibration of Afghan state institutions following the Taleban’s takeover, as well as the lack of a written constitution. They argued that engaging with the de facto authorities runs the risk of crystallizing their modus operandi and legitimizing their claim to international recognition.

Most recently, following the vote on the two resolutions on 16 March 2023, the customary remarks by SC members only confirmed that these divisions run deep. The most evident division is the one between the United States and Russia. In his remarks Robert A Wood (US) said the one-year extension of UNAMA’s mandate would enable the United Nations to foster the human rights of all Afghans, especially women and girls. In contrast, Anna M Evstigneeva (Russian Federation) said it was crucial to maintain the pragmatic cooperation of UNAMA with the de facto authorities and that any attempt to politicise humanitarian assistance was immoral and unacceptable.

The UN’s centrality to the delivery of humanitarian aid

The renewal of UNAMA’s mandate is highly relevant to the ability of humanitarian actors to deliver aid to Afghans in need of urgent assistance (which is one of the drivers for the UNSC extending it, even when there are divergences of opinion on its particulars). Since the fall of the Republic, the UN has emerged, by default, as the most important international aid actor operating on the ground in Afghanistan. The reluctance of donors to work directly with the Taleban means that the UN is the preferred vehicle for delivering humanitarian aid and essential services. The scope of the programme, however, is staggering.

At USD 4.4 billion, the 2022 humanitarian appeal for Afghanistan was the UN’s largest appeal ever for a single country. A virtual pledging conference co-hosted by the United Kingdom, Germany, Qatar and the United Nations on 31 March 2022 saw donors pledge a little over half the requested amount, USD 2.4 billion, with some speculating that the Taleban’s decision a week earlier to renege on their promise to reopen girls’ high schools had caused “a backlash from donors” (see AAN reporting here and here). By the end of the year, however, donor funding stood at USD 3.33 billion (see the UN’s financial tracking service), a sizable amount but still USD 1.07 billion short of the appeal’s request.[5]

The ability of humanitarian actors has, at the same time, been challenged by the Emirate’s increasing encroachments on the rights of Afghans, particularly women. The planned launch of the 2023 Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP) in January 2023 was derailed by the Emirate’s 24 December 2022 decree banning women and the decision of as many as 150 NGOs and aid organisations to suspend some of their operations pending the ban’s rollback.

What followed was an intense round of discussions and negotiations both with the Islamic Emirate and among humanitarian actors, including a January visit by the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC),[6] led by its chair, the UN’s humanitarian chief, Martin Griffiths. In a 30 January 2023 press conference after his visit to Kabul, Griffiths provided details of his talks with Taleban officials, which had included assurances that women working in health and primary education would be exempt from the ban. He added that the Taleban authorities had asked humanitarians “to be patient” as the Emirate developed guidelines that would “provide, allegedly, the role of functioning of women in the humanitarian operations.” He was not particularly optimistic about a forthcoming reversal of the ban:

I’m somebody who doesn’t like to speculate too much, because it is a matter of speculation. Let’s see if these guidelines do come through. Let’s see if they are beneficial. Let’s see what space there is for the essential and central role of women in our humanitarian operations. Everybody has opinions as to whether it’s going to work or not. Our view is that the message has clearly been delivered that women are central, essential workers in the humanitarian sector, in addition to having rights, and we need to see them back to work. And in that regard, we need to maintain humanitarian operations in the sectors already [exempt], health and education, but expand that to the others.

The IASC mission did, however, pave the way for the launch of the 2023 HRP. The earlier aid suspension in response to the Emirates’ ban on women working for NGOs was rebranded as “a month-long partial operational pause” and, on the recommendation of the IASC, humanitarian activities moved to an “operational trial period.”[7] During this trial period, as spelled out in the HRP, humanitarian actors, including the UN, would continue negotiations with the Taleban to expand authorisations to cover all sectors; pursue local reinforcement of these authorisations with provincial and district-level authorities; and agree on minimum criteria for operations. The plan’s concept of operations also included an “enhanced monitoring and reporting framework”, including a priority indicator to track the ban’s impact on the ability of humanitarian actors to operate against minimum criteria defined by IASC (See HRP 2023, Section 2 Response Monitoring, pp 48-50).

The 2023 Humanitarian Response Plan

After several weeks’ delay, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) launched the 261-page long 2023 Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP) on behalf of humanitarian organisations working in Afghanistan on 9 March 2023. The plan requests USD 4.6 billion in assistance, USD 200 million more than the previous year, to support 23.7 million people in need, an increase of 1.6 million from 2022, with a little over half, USD 2.66 billion going to food security and agriculture.

According to the HRP, the number of Afghans in need has tripled since January 2020, from 9.4 million to a staggering 28.3 million, which it attributes to “the progressive shocks of COVID-19, the increase in conflict leading up to the takeover by the DFA [or de facto authorities, a term used by the UN to refer to the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan], the resulting economic shock, recurrent drought and the impact of policies, particularly restrictions on women’s rights and mobility, since August 2021.”

The numbers are indeed staggering. As a result of the economic crisis touched off by the collapse of the Republic and the suspension of foreign development aid, which accounted for 75 per cent of public spending, “the proportion of households reporting humanitarian assistance as their main source of income increase[ed] six-fold since 2021,” according to the HRP.

Source: 2023 Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP)

Three years of drought have resulted in diminished surface waters and a major drop in groundwater levels, with the “proportion of households experiencing barriers to accessing water increasing from 48 per cent in 2021 to 60 per cent in 2022.” The weakened household economies coupled with the severe drought conditions have left an estimated twenty million people facing acute food insecurity (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) 3 or above),[8] six million of which are facing “emergency levels” (one step away from famine) – one of the highest figures in the world.

The mix of economic collapse, natural calamity and gender repression has left the majority of the Afghan population in peril for the foreseeable future: 33 out of 34 provinces, and 27 out of 34 major cities/provincial capitals are considered in extreme need, with the rest in severe need. While the HRP noted that some needs had stabilised as a result of the humanitarian assistance provided in 2022, it did raise the alarm on unprecedented levels of need in Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) and protection. “Without economic stabilisation, large-scale investment in infrastructure for water and a shift in the restrictive policies of the [de facto authorities] on women’s rights, the likelihood of further deterioration remains extremely high,” it said.

The Emirate’s restrictive gender policies have had far-reaching knock-on effects on planned humanitarian activities. For example, humanitarian actors have now classified all secondary school age girls as people in need, as a result of the Taleban ban on girls’ education, meaning that there is less money to support other vulnerable groups within the planned appeal. Because of this, the education, emergency shelter and non-food items, and protection clusters now plan to assist far fewer beneficiaries than their original 50 per cent targets and water, sanitation and hygiene has had to scale back to only two-thirds of what was envisaged for the sector.

The Taleban’s decision to ban women from working for NGOs has left humanitarians and donors in the difficult position of working to alleviate human suffering while at the same time ensuring the participation of women in the humanitarian response and the full participation of women in public life. As the 2023 Humanitarian Response Plan puts it:

Women have a right to work and are an integral part of humanitarian action, and their participation is essential (as in all aid operations) if we are to reach populations in need safely and effectively with principled and quality assistance – be they men, women, boys or girls. Furthermore, women beneficiaries depend on the involvement of female humanitarian workers not only to directly receive assistance and services, but also for the safeguarding, meaningful engagement and quality assurance that their presence ensures.

Looking forward

While the UNAMA mandate was extended for another year (until 17 March 2024) in line with the one defined by the March 2022 UNSC Resolution 2626, it remains to be seen what an independent assessment of in-country efforts will bring to the fore in November. This assessment, along with the outcome of the IASC-mandated “operational trial” period and its attendant monitoring, could have an impact on humanitarian aid scope and delivery, as will as any future decision by the Emirate to ease or tighten the restrictions on Afghan women in general and in particular the ban on women working for NGOs.

Those on the UN Security Council who called for an assessment, Japan and United Arab Emirates, expect it to provide “forward-looking recommendations on how relevant actors can address challenges more coherently.” Other Security Council members, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, did not even mention the assessment in their remarks after the vote on 16 March 2023. Divisions and differences of opinion in the UNSC remain and it is unclear how and in which format they will be reconciled once the independent assessment has concluded. Given the UN’s centrality to the provision of humanitarian aid in Afghanistan, and the Security Council’s probable difficulty in reaching a consensus, it is very likely that UNAMA’s mandate will be extended in the foreseeable future, with few substantive changes. At the same time, however, the assessment, which will put UNAMA’s work in Afghanistan to the test, could present interesting avenues for a repurposed mandate. This is certainly something to keep an eye on in November.

Edited by Martine van Bijlert 

References

References
↑1 The UN Security Council is composed of 15 Members; five permanent members: China, France, Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and ten non-permanent members elected for two-year terms by the General Assembly. The current non-permanent members (with end of term year) are Albania (2023), Brazil (2023), Ecuador (2024), Gabon (2023), Ghana (2023), Japan (2024), Malta (2024), Mozambique (2024), Switzerland (2024) and the United Arab Emirates (2023). The United Nations Charter established six main organs of the United Nations, including the Security Council. It gives the Security Council, which may meet whenever peace is threatened, primary responsibility for maintaining international peace and security. All members of the United Nations agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council. While other organs of the United Nations make recommendations to member states, only the Security Council has the power to make decisions that member states are obligated to implement under the Charter.
↑2 The entire text of the second paragraph reads: “Requests that the independent assessment provide forward-looking recommendations for an integrated and coherent approach among relevant political, humanitarian, and development actors, within and outside of the United Nations system, in order to address the current challenges faced by Afghanistan, 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.” While the resolution itself does not spell out what the subject of the assessment should be, the accompanying UN press release framed it as an assessment of “in-country efforts”.
↑3  The Security Council Report (SCR) is a non-profit organisation that provides information about the UNSC and its subsidiary bodies to the public (see here).
↑4 A private UNSC meeting is closed to the public. This format differs from UNSC consultations, which are also closed, but as formal meetings of the Security Council allow persons other than Council members and Secretariat officials to participate.
↑5  While the 2023 Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP) reported the funding received for the appeal to be USD 2.2 billion (which is less than the amount pledged at the virtual conference), in its final tally for 2022, The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ (OCHA) Financial Tracking System (FTS) put the total humanitarian funding for Afghanistan at USD 3.75 billion, with USD 3.33 billion going to the Humanitarian Response Plan (2023) and USD 416. 6 million logged as “other funding.”
↑6 The Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) was established by the UN General Assembly in 1991 as the primary coordination mechanism for the delivery of humanitarian assistance. IASC brings together 18 UN and non-UN organisations and consortia to agree on policies, set priorities and mobilise resources in response to humanitarian crises. The committee is chaired by the Emergency Relief Coordinator, who is also Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, currently Martin Griffiths.
↑7 See this “Note on the HRP planning process and impact of DFA decree on women in humanitarian work”: Following an in-country mission, the IASC Mission recommended moving from an ‘operational pause’ to an ‘operational trial’ period supported by a related concept of operations. It was also decided to proceed with the issuance of the HRP for 2023 based on the baselines developed in the original planning period. Therefore, while references to the ban and changes to the context have been incorporated into this document, the strategy and planning have not been revised substantially.
↑8 IPC Phase 3 (Crisis) households either have food consumption gaps that are reflected by high or above-usual acute malnutrition, or are marginally able to meet minimum food needs but only by depleting essential livelihood assets or through crisis-coping strategies.

REVISIONS:

This article was last updated on 20 Mar 2023

 

Two Security Council Resolutions and a Humanitarian Appeal: UN grapples with its role in Afghanistan
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Afghan women deserve a Nobel Peace Prize

March 20, 2023

Hujjatullah Zia

A Kabul-based journalist

Al Jazeera
19 Mar 2023
Under the Taliban regime, Afghan women are facing growing hostility and restrictions, but they continue to resist.

Over the past few weeks, there has been a vivid debate among Afghans on which prominent individual from among our women compatriots deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. Some have suggested women who held official positions before the Taliban takeover of Kabul in 2021. Others have supported women’s rights activists in exile.

Still others have named Fatima Amiri, a 17-year-old girl who survived the September 30th bombing of the Kaj Educational Center in Kabul’s Dasht-e-Barchi neighbourhood. The attack killed dozens of students, mostly girls, who had gathered at the private school to take a mock test for the Kankor exam, which is needed to enter public universities in Afghanistan.

Notwithstanding being traumatised, suffering from serious injury and mourning the loss of her classmates, she took the Kankor exam and scored above 85 percent, which made her eligible to study her favourite subject, computer science, at Kabul University – something she is now barred from doing.

Indeed, Fatima has emerged as a symbol of women and girls’ struggle for their rights under the Taliban regime.

As a father of two girls, I constantly worry about the present and future of my children. But young women like Fatima and others that I see or hear about in my everyday life give me hope that things will change.

Since the Taliban took over Kabul, its government has imposed various restrictions on women. Afghan girls have been barred from going to high school and university, and even private educational institutions. Afghan women have been banned from going to parks, gyms, and other public places and from working in nongovernmental organisations and certain government institutions. They are also not allowed to travel alone and have to wear a head-to-toe covering in public.

As a result, places in Kabul that used to bustle with women and girls are now almost completely dominated by men. Many coffee shops that were the favourite hangout spots for girls and women have had to close down, as they have lost many of their customers. Parks no longer enjoy crowds, as men cannot go there with their families or girlfriends, and many beauty parlours ran out of business as women are reluctant to visit them.

But Afghan girls and women have resisted the injustice of being stripped of their rights to education, work and access to public spaces. They have held protests in many cities, especially Kabul, demanding their rights.

However, the Taliban authorities have responded with an increasingly harsh crackdown, and some of the protesters and activists have been arrested and imprisoned.

Activist Zarifa Yaqubi, for example, was arrested in November last year after she tried to launch a women’s rights movement. She was detained for 40 days.

When I spoke to Zarifa last month, she held back her tears and refused to talk about her imprisonment out of fear. She told me she was traumatised and had to take medicine and receive psychological care.

She said that the world is unwilling to support Afghan girls and their struggle, and only issues empty condemnations. In her view, the international reactions to Iranian women’s protests were much more powerful and visible.

But Afghan women have not given up. Girls and young women have started flocking to secret schools led by courageous teachers. Others have joined online classes organised on messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram.

When the Taliban declared a ban on private educational institutions in December 2022, I joined other volunteers to teach English to high-school and university-age girls. Information about online classes spreads through word of mouth and when there are enough students, we get them together in a WhatsApp or a Telegram group.

We record the lessons and send them as voice messages, along with other teaching materials, in these apps and give them home assignments. They download the lessons, listen, do their homework and then send it back in the same way.

Women have also not given up on employment. Despite restrictions and harassment, women continue to run their own businesses – such as beauty parlours and cosmetics stores – and some even work as street vendors. Women also continue to work as nurses and doctors in hospitals and teachers at elementary schools.

Afghan women abroad also contribute to the struggle. A number of activists, journalists and former officials who fled the country work tirelessly to keep the Afghan women’s cause on the international agenda.

They speak up about the imprisonment and torture Afghan women have faced and challenge the Taliban’s claims that its decision to restrict women is based on religious considerations. This pressure is contributing to the continuing international reluctance to recognise the Taliban government and normalise relations with it.

Indeed, Afghan women have demonstrated incredible bravery, resilience and dignity in their fight for their rights. They are challenging an armed group and a merciless government that many Afghan men have failed to stand up to. I know that as my girls grow up, they will have plenty of Afghan heroines to look up to.

The world needs to recognise these women and girls’ courage and support them in their fight. They more than deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.

Afghan women deserve a Nobel Peace Prize
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The Taliban Are Out of Step With Afghans on Women’s Rights

March 14, 2023
World Politics Review

Last week, International Women’s Day drew renewed media attention to the situation in Afghanistan, now characterized by the United Nations as the most repressive country on earth for women. Over the past 18 months since the Taliban takeover in August 2021, conditions for women in the country have continuously deteriorated. Despite early promises by the Taliban to keep girls in school, women and girls were immediately banned from attending high school, and since December, the same is now true for university. Women have been banned from most jobs, including NGO work. Floggings of women and men have been reinstated for violations of the Taliban’s morality code. In a particularly cruel twist, women who previously divorced abusive husbands are now being told those divorces are invalid, meaning they and their new partners could be considered adulterers and punished accordingly.

This situation is particularly paradoxical because for the vast majority of Afghans, protecting women’s human rights—especially the right to education—is among their key priorities. In a random survey of Afghan internet users conducted last year by the Human Security Lab, which I direct at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, 66 percent of respondents stated they either “agree” or “strongly agree” with the statement, “I believe women’s human rights are among the top priorities for the future of the country.” Only 19 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed, and 15 percent were undecided. Even more important are the trend-lines: Over the three months the survey was in the field, the number of those who said “strongly agree” rose, and those choosing any other answer went down.

When asked which three rights for women from a provided list matter the most to them, Afghans most frequently chose education, at 62 percent; the right to work, at 41 percent; the right to participate in government, at 36 percent; the right to choose a husband, at 34 percent; and the right to access health services, at 31 percent. Some chose “Something Else” from the list, and many of the answers included refusals to choose among rights. One Afghan wrote into the comment box, “They are all important to me.” Another wrote, “All the things mentioned in this questionnaire are important for women.”

When asked to explain in their own words what achieving women’s human rights looks like to them, some Afghans listed specific rights that mattered to them most, including many of the ones listed above, but also including things like the “right to play sports” and “the right to learn science.” And while many Afghans articulated rights as something that should be implemented “in an Islamic framework,” many of them explicitly stated that Islam was consistent with human rights. One wrote, “The right to education according to Islamic laws and other rights is guaranteed by Islam.”

This attitude is reflected as well in the condemnations of the Taliban’s prohibitions on women and girls’ access to education by the Organization of Islamic States, Islamic scholars and even ultra-conservative Muslim-majority countries like Saudi Arabia. In April, a group of Afghan clerics in Kabul also issued a statement declaring that “Islam is the bearer of rights for women, including the rights to education and work.”

The finding that women’s rights are extremely important to Afghans holds true even among Taliban supporters.

For Afghans, too, women’s rights are not just a women’s issue. The Human Security Lab’s survey shows that Afghan men and women alike are concerned about them. In fact, fewer men than women “strongly disagreed” with the idea of women’s human rights as a national priority. And men feel even more strongly than women about some specific rights. For example, 66 percent of men chose education among their top three priorities, compared to only 55 percent of women. The survey revealed similar gender gaps for the rights to health care and political participation, and the right to choose a husband, with men pushing harder for these rights than women themselves. Equal percentages of men and women feel strongly about the rights to work and travel freely without an escort, women’s freedom to dress according to their wishes, and the prohibition of domestic violence.

Even more interestingly, the finding that women’s human rights are extremely important to Afghans holds true even among Taliban supporters. Overall, 66 percent of men and women who support the Taliban “a lot” also “agree or strongly agree” that women’s human rights are a national priority, although Taliban-leaning women feel even more strongly than Taliban men on this. On specific rights, 60 percent of those who support the Taliban “a lot” listed the right to education as a priority. And they actually are more likely than Taliban opponents to mention securing health care, ending domestic violence, and the right to choose a husband when asked to list the three most important rights. The gap between strong Taliban supporters and strong Taliban opponents seems widest on rights like dress freedom, the right to work and political participation. But even here, 28 percent of strong Taliban supporters said that women should have the right to work, and 22 percent said they should have the right to participate in government.

If women’s human rights matter to most Afghans, even Taliban supporters, why are the Taliban able to get away with continually and increasingly restricting them? Many of the decisions about the treatment of women are coming from a small but influential minority within the Taliban leadership, with the most draconian orders trickling down from Hibatullah Akhundzada, the supreme leader, over significant resistance by the Taliban rank and file, who themselves appear to want schooling for their daughters. But according to a report prepared by the United States Institute of Peace, the status of women has also become a wedge issue used by competing factions within the Taliban as they jockey for power, as well as a way to prove to the West that the Taliban will not bow to foreign interference.

The survey data from Afghans also suggests other ways the international community might help. First of all, when asked about whether outside governments should recognize the Taliban absent significant improvements in human rights and an inclusive government, over half the respondents said no, and only 25 percent said yes; the other quarter of respondents didn’t wish to answer. They were evenly split on whether the international community should continue to withhold economic support to pressure the Taliban.

When asked to speak in their own words about “other” ways the international community could help, the findings are mixed. Thirty-five percent of Afghans said the international community should support a peace process between the Taliban and opposition groups, but 31 percent said they would prefer that the West either arm the opposition against the Taliban or intervene militarily themselves. Twenty-six percent would like to see neutral peacekeepers in the country.

One-quarter of respondents who answered this question wrote an answer in their own words, and the second most frequent response, after “economic support,” was “support for human rights.” However, Afghans—particularly Afghan women—also emphasized a human right seldom discussed in the context of Afghanistan and entirely in the hands of the international community: the right to flee the country.

Many of them stated that the best way the international community could help would be to evacuate Afghans like themselves and streamline asylum proceedings. “Immediate assistance must be provided for the departure of Afghans like me so that they are not killed by the Taliban,” one wrote. Another pleaded, “Take us away from this!” The advantage of implementing this human right, at least, is that it would not require negotiating with the Taliban.

Charli Carpenter is a professor of political science and legal studies at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, specializing in human security and international law. 

The Taliban Are Out of Step With Afghans on Women’s Rights
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America Is Again Failing Afghanistan’s Women—and Itself

March 9, 2023

By

CEO and co-founder of The Fuller Project.
Foreign Policy
The deteriorating status of women under Taliban rule is a strategic disaster for Washington.

On Aug. 16, 2021, the day after Kabul fell to the Taliban and the United States began its hasty withdrawal, journalist Zahra Joya woke up in despair.

Joya, then 28, was a woman to be reckoned with. Eight months earlier, using money from her government salary, she founded Rukhshana Media, a newsroom committed to listening to women and telling their stories. By 2021, it had already produced articles that won international acclaim. Now, the Taliban threatened to dismantle all she had built.

Today, 18 months later, her newsroom is a fraction of what it once was, and most of her staff toil in secret. But they persist, often anonymously—shining a sliver of light into the increasingly dark world of the women of Afghanistan.

The United States and other Western governments should take note. The women of Afghanistan, after 20 years of relative freedom, will not be content to slink into the shadows. Their continued protest and fight are an essential lever of power for the United States and all other countries that share a stake in promoting recovery and ultimately peace and security in Afghanistan.

How a nation state empowers or disempowers women is a key predictor of how it will behave among the community of nations. More than two decades of research have affirmed that women are essential to security, and their well-being and empowerment play a determinant role in the prevention of war and assurance of peace. We also know that women have a central role in advancing democratic freedom.

Simply put, it is in the strategic interest of the United States to create and maintain a foreign policy that prioritizes women. To do so, it will first have to understand what it got so terribly wrong in Afghanistan.

Whatever gains women made in Afghanistan during the past two decades have mostly slipped away over the last 18 months. In 2021, women held 27 percent of the seats in Afghanistan’s National Assembly, worked in government positions, and attended university. Afghanistan and the international community financed the training and deployment of thousands of midwives, reducing the maternal death rate from 1,600 women per 100,000 births in 2002 to 638 women per 100,000 births in 2017.

Now, a steady drumbeat of onerous restrictions ensure that women are kept in their homes, unable to access jobs, health care, and education. This year, the Taliban ordered all female health care workers to wear a full hijab, including face coverings. In late December 2022, Taliban leaders issued a decree that bars Afghan women from working for nongovernmental organizations. The lost income from barring women from the workforce could cost Afghanistan as much as 5 percent of its GDP or about $1 billion, according to the United Nations—plunging the country deeper into poverty, exacerbating food insecurity, and threatening stability.

The United States and its allies in the war on terrorism invested billions of dollars to bolster the status of women in Afghanistan, pushing programs to elevate basic health care, include women in governance, and advance educational opportunities. Many of them fell short.

For example, the Afghan Ministry of Interior Affairs—with support from the internationally funded, U.N.-administered Law and Order Trust Fund for Afghanistan—set a goal of hiring 5,000 female police officers by June 2014, yet it failed to plan for and build restroom and locker room facilities to accommodate them. Afghanistan never reached its goal. That, in turn, created a counterinsurgency security gap. In a gender-segregated society, female police officers are essential for conducting searches of women at checkpoints. Now, some suicide bombers disguise themselves as women to evade searches.

We already know in many cases that the programs created to advance women’s inclusion lacked a key component: the voices of Afghan women on the ground, the only people who truly understand how to navigate the strictures of Afghanistan’s male-controlled society. The United States’ 2017 Women, Peace, and Security Act affirms that women’s rights should be at the center of peace and security planning. Yet in the reality of the war-fighting bureaucracy, women are often an afterthought. Indeed, the U.S. National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy, two essential documents that guide the country’s peace and security posture, included few references to gender issues except with regard to gender-based violence.

Engaging in a war and subsequent stability operation without this key intelligence has real consequences. The United States “often struggled to understand or mitigate the cultural and social barriers to supporting women and girls,” which led U.S. agencies to set unrealistic goals, wrote John Sopko, special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, in his August 2021 report, “Lessons From Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction.” As Melanne Verveer, executive director of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, pointed out at a recent Atlantic Council panel I moderated, had the United States done more to empower women and done it better, Afghanistan might look different today. “When the dust settles and we finally go back and analyze all the things that went wrong [in Afghanistan], one of them will certainly be that we did not fully ensure the meaningful participation of women in Afghanistan,” Verveer said.

These shortcomings deserve close examination, both for reasons of accountability and the potential to learn from these mistakes. From its start, the George W. Bush administration used women’s rights and empowerment as a justification for its war in Afghanistan. “The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women,” then-first lady Laura Bush said during the administration’s weekly radio address, delivered on Nov. 17, 2001—a little more than a month after U.S. ground troops began their assault. She focused on the suffering of women and children under the brutal rule of the Taliban. In the Obama administration, then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Taliban that women’s rights were nonnegotiable, and she led efforts to advance understanding of the connection between gender and security within government.

Yet 20 years of war and more than $2 trillion later, the Taliban are back in power, and women are once again veiled, shut in their homes, and excluded from civic life. Given the grandeur of past gender goals and scope of the United States’ failure, U.S. taxpayers deserve a reckoning. The U.S. response to the fall of Kabul raises stark questions about whether women’s rights are valued, especially in the midst of a crisis. As the Taliban took over Kabul, officials scrambled—caught off guard—and turned to civil society to help evacuate and get visas for women leaders, who faced imminent danger.

If the United States wants to maintain peace, stabilize rogue nations, and ensure that its next military endeavor succeeds, it must examine how its policies and practices to support and empower women went so dreadfully wrong in Afghanistan. We need to know what went well so we can replicate it—and what failed so we can fix it.

The bipartisan Afghanistan War Commission is tasked by Congress with conducting a review of U.S. military, intelligence, foreign assistance, and diplomatic involvement in Afghanistan. The 16 commissioners include only two women, a composition that hardly lives up to the United States’ own Women, Peace, and Security Act, which affirms the importance of women having a full seat at the policymaking table. If this commission is tasked with examining 20 years of involvement in Afghanistan and gleaning the lessons learned with regard to women’s rights, then it is seemingly off to a poor start.

Afghanistan—the failures endured and the inroads achieved—provides some of the most important potential policymaking lessons in recent history related to applying a gender lens to foreign policy, lessons that stand to be lost if not given their full due by this commission. Gender issues are such a pervasive contributor to the United States’ failures in the country that one could argue they deserve to stand at the center of this effort, if not as a stand-alone commission.

We don’t know—and may never know—whether a different approach to women’s rights and empowerment in Afghanistan would have changed the outcome, but we need to ask the questions. The findings should inform U.S. security strategy going forward.

Until we have better answers, we must do what we can to keep what little the United States built for the women in Afghanistan from crumbling further and to support Afghan women leaders, both inside and outside the country, who have established inroads to support others—even if the effort takes decades. The Taliban are erasing women from public life in Afghanistan, wrote Richard Bennett, U.N. special rapporteur on Afghanistan, in a recent report. Women said they feel targeted and unsafe, but “they continue to resist violations of their human rights,” he wrote. “We know that what has happened to us is not right. Some of us could have left the country, but we did not. We decided to stay and fight for women’s place in Afghan society,” the women told Bennett.

Afghan women don’t have the option to walk away from the consequences of the failed promises that now govern their daily lives. The U.S. government shouldn’t either. The United States cannot hide in the shadow of its failures and hope to dodge its responsibilities. The situation is dire, and the world is watching.

The arc of history is long. If the United States give up on supporting women in a forceful way, then it will pay for it down the line. Not investing in the well-being of women is a factor in military failure. If the United States and its allies want any chance at maintaining stability and security in the region, then they must support women leaders at every level, both in and outside of Afghanistan, to promote immediate and long-term work as well as spur other countries to do the same. Most importantly, they must listen to the women of Afghanistan. That’s why we at the Fuller Project continue to support Afghanistan’s female journalists by publishing their stories and amplifying their voices—women like Joya.

Joya’s life in Afghanistan mirrors the triumphs and struggles of the women and girls of Afghanistan. She began her life under Taliban rule, dressing as a boy to attend her elementary school. In 2001, after the United States chased the Taliban from the country, Joya shed her disguise, finished her education, and embarked on her journalism career. She was often the only woman in the newsroom. The absence of women’s voices motivated her to create Rukhshana Media, named for a young woman stoned to death by the Taliban.

Joya belongs to a generation of women who experienced an Afghan society free of the Taliban. She is accustomed to freedom, and she feels its absence acutely. She feels, she said, like she has traveled back in time.

These days, Joya works in exile after Taliban threats against female journalists forced her to flee Kabul. She edits stories from her remaining colleagues in Afghanistan. When the Taliban took power in August 2021, 2,490 women worked as journalists. By December 2021, that number had dwindled to 410, according to Reporters Without Borders.

“It’s very painful and sad,” Joya told actress Angelina Jolie in an interview for Time magazine’s Women of the Year. “Honestly, we don’t do simple journalism these days; we are trying to write for our freedom.”

She is ready to do her part to pull Afghanistan back. She wants to hire more journalists, tell more stories, and maintain the freedom of expression she sees as her birthright.

That is democracy building worthy of investment.

Xanthe Scharff is the CEO and co-founder of The Fuller Project, the global newsroom dedicated to groundbreaking journalism that catalyzes positive change for women.

America Is Again Failing Afghanistan’s Women—and Itself
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A Worsening “Human Rights Crisis”: New hard-hitting report from UN Special Rapporteur

March 6, 2023

Kate Clark

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, has said the Islamic Emirate is increasingly flouting “fundamental freedoms, including the rights of peaceful assembly and association, expression and the rights to life and protection against ill-treatment” and is “ruling Afghanistan through fear and repressive policies.” He also said the authorities’ “systematic violation of the human rights of women and girls” has deepened and asked the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to consider whether the “crime of gender persecution” is taking place. As AAN’s Kate Clark reports, he also had words of criticism for the ‘international community’ and its contribution to the “widespread extreme poverty and acute food insecurity” faced by millions of Afghans.

Introduction

This is Richard Bennett’s second report to the UN’s Human Rights Council and is bleaker than his first, [1] with just glimpses of anything positive. It follows a visit by Bennett to Afghanistan in October 2022, during which he met government officials – whom he thanks for their cooperation – human rights defenders, legal professionals, women’s groups, journalists, businesswomen, teachers, clerics, representatives of minority groups, the UN, NGOs and diplomats, and visited Kabul, Bamyan and Panjshir. He will present his report to the UN Human Rights Council today, 6 March 2023.

What is in the report?

Bennett’s description of human rights in Afghanistan is of a crisis worsening, of the Islamic Emirate blocking the expression of fundamental freedoms – to assembly, free speech, and the right to life, and with policies “aimed at suppressing communities… women in particular.” Inclusiveness, he reported, is “negligible; there is very little tolerance for difference, and none for dissent.” He also criticised the international powers for how their policies contribute to the harm being done to Afghans’ economic rights and right to life. Even so, most of Bennett’s conclusions are directed at the Islamic Emirate. He assessed the various categories of rights in turn (see full report here).

Women and girls

The Special Rapporteur listed the many ways the Taleban are restricting the rights and freedoms of women and girls: banning them from higher education (adding to the ban on secondary schooling), “restrictions in their movement, attire, employment options, ability to seek public office or perform public roles and access to public spaces.” He said that instead of “taking steps to eliminate discrimination against women” and honouring the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, to which Afghanistan is a state party, the Taleban authorities are “flagrantly contravening it” and normalising discrimination. By punishing the male relatives of women they consider to be breaking laws and norms, the Taleban “pit men against women, take away the agency of women and girls, and further normalise discrimination and violence against them.”

He noted, “with profound concern,” the rise in sexual and gender-based violence against women and girls, including “report of young women found dead, with indications of having been sexually violated.” He said such violence was occurring “with impunity and with minimal support for victims.” He cited the high number of “unnatural deaths of women and children” taking place in this environment and how restrictions, coupled with the economic and humanitarian crisis, have resulted in forced and child marriage, especially among teenage girls denied an education, widespread reports of depression and suicide. Bennett also noted:

Human rights defenders, who peacefully protest the increased restrictions on women and girls, are at heightened risk and have been increasingly beaten and arrested. The intention is clearly not only to punish them for protesting, but also to deter others from protesting.

The theme of gender-based discrimination, exclusion and harm runs through this report, appearing in almost every section – economic rights, rule of law, fundamental freedoms, and the rights of disabled people. It also featured in Bennett’s welcoming of the resumption of the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) investigation into war crimes and crimes against humanity in Afghanistan that have allegedly occurred since May 2003. [2] The Special Rapporteur encouraged the ICC prosecutor to “take note of the unprecedented deterioration of women’s rights” and “consider the crime of gender persecution.” It is an indication of just how serious he believes the stripping of rights and freedoms of Afghan women and girls is. [3]

Economic, social and cultural rights

Afghanistan’s economic crisis, Bennett reported, has resulted in “widespread extreme poverty and acute food insecurity, which had severely undermined the public health system and impacted the right to work.” He welcomed the United States’ facilitation of Afghanistan’s central bank acquiring new bank notes, and the UN Security Council exempting humanitarian activities from sanctions. However, he expressed concern about the adverse consequences of various actions from international actors, including blocking the central bank from the international banking system. “Largely due to risk averseness on the part of foreign banks,” the humanitarian exemption, Bennett said, has not been effective in mitigating those consequences, while “the absence of clear guidance on the humanitarian exemption and [due] to its rigid framework” has created difficulties for businesses and international organisations trying to carry out legitimate activities. At the same time, Bennett said he was also disturbed that the Taleban authorities “have not taken all necessary measures to address the dire situation, including meeting fundamental human rights standards, such as reopening girls’ secondary schools and universities.”

Without international assistance, the Special Rapporteur said the Taleban government will be unable to “mobilize sufficient resources to ensure that the Afghan people enjoy economic, social and cultural rights at the minimum base level.” He added that the United Nations has stressed that “this cannot be achieved without female aid workers.”

Bennett noted that two-thirds of Afghan households had reported difficulties in meeting basic food and non-food needs, that healthcare has become unaffordable for many, more children have dropped out of school in order to work, about 700,000 people have lost their jobs since August 2021 and the nature of work itself has deteriorated, with casual work and self-employment, that is poorly paid and unpredictable, on the rise. He is concerned about the “large unmet portion of humanitarian funding required” by Afghanistan. He also noted the “precarious circumstances” facing humanitarian workers with local authorities “routinely interfere[ing] and restrict[ing] their operations, contrary to humanitarian principles, hampering the delivery of life-saving support.” He pointed out that “this dire situation” has been seriously exacerbated by the Taleban’s barring of women from working for NGOs.”

Minority Rights

Bennett’s reporting on minority rights covered attacks, forced evictions and political marginalisation. Hazaras, Sikhs, Hindus and other minorities, he said, “have endured historical suffering that has evolved into a form of structural injustice that needs to be addressed, including through transitional justice processes.” He noted minorities’ “low representation in public positions, both at the most senior levels of government (the cabinet has 25 Pashtuns, two Tajiks, two Uzbeks, one Nuristani and no Hazaras) and in the provinces:

Over the past two decades, locals tended to work in provincial administrations in rough proportion to their presence in an area’s ethnic make-up. However, since the Taliban return to power, the ethnic composition of governance structures has been reconfigured, including at the provincial and district levels. In Bamyan, Daikundi and Ghor Provinces, the Taliban has replaced a number of former government employees at the Departments of Justice, Agriculture and Irrigation, Mines and Petroleum and Education, including at Bamyan University and in the municipalities, almost certainly due to their ethnic affiliation.

He also reported that “forces associated with the de facto authorities” have ordered many “Hazaras and other locals” to leave their homes and farms, frequently with only a few days’ notice and without giving them a chance to assert their legal rights to the property.” They included “at least 2,800 Hazara residents [who] were forcibly displaced from 15 villages in Daikundi and Uruzgan Provinces in September 2021 alone.” Community representatives who demanded an investigation were, reported Bennett, arrested. He also reported that on 19 December 2022, the largely Uzbek and Tajik residents of Sar-e Pul Province, who protested against their forced eviction and the seizure of 6,000 jeribs [12,000 hectares] of land in eight villages by the Taleban, were “reportedly threatened with a military response.” He said the authorities responded to his concerns by saying that, in October 2022, based on a decree by the Supreme Leader, “a regulation was issued to prevent land grabbing and that subsequently a commission and a special court were established to implement the decree.”

Bennett also noted threats against and attacks on Hazara Shia and other Shia Muslims, Sikhs and Sufis: between 30 August 2021 to 30 September 2022, he said, there were 22 recorded attacks against civilians, with at least 334 killed and 631 injured. Of those, 16 attacks targeted Hazaras, including three against educational facilities. He notes that in the past, the Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISKP) has claimed such attacks, although not for the most egregious recent assault, on the Kaaj Educational Centre in Dasht-e Barchi in Kabul on 30 September 2022, which killed 54 people and injured 114. Most victims were girls and young women studying for the university entrance exam. He pointed out that after that attack, it took one hour for ambulances to reach the scene and moreover, that the authorities had reportedly “physically assaulted and humiliated” some family members, denied them access to the site of the attack, and prevented them from transporting victims to hospitals, collecting dead bodies and donating blood. Journalists, he said, were prevented from covering the incident at the site and visiting the hospitals and relatives of the victims were told not to speak to the media.

Bennett said community representatives, fearing such attacks, said they had requested protection from the authorities in vain. They had also had weapons, authorised by the Republic for guarding educational centres, confiscated and licenses not re-issued. The Special Rapporteur acknowledges “the counter-terrorism efforts by the de facto authorities against [ISKP], which indicate that they have the capacity to undertake intelligence and investigative work and should be capable of bringing those they believe responsible to justice through the holding of trials that meet international standards.”

Rule of Law

Bennett noted the absence of any codification of law, or the issuing of standardised procedures or substantive statutes relating to criminal or civil matters, that police, judges or lawyers could follow. With almost all judges appointed under the Republic fired and prosecutors increasingly sidelined, Bennett said that often, judges, who are now largely religious scholars, are acting as both investigators and adjudicators in contravention of fair trial standards.

In practice, it appears that the muftis [mullahs deemed capable of giving rulings, or fatwas, on religious matters] have become even more powerful, being involved in pretrial and trial processes, including investigations and the provision of advice on punishment, with judges mainly following their advice. Alarmingly, there are reports that it is common for alleged perpetrators to be detained, sentenced and punished by the police and other security agencies all on the same day, without any semblance of due process or judicial review. There have also been allegations of bribes.

Given that court officials are all men, Bennett says women’s access to justice is now severely restricted. They generally need to be accompanied by a man in court, and their testimony may not be allowed at all or given less weight than a man’s.

Fundamental freedoms

Bennett said he is deeply concerned about the “rapidly shrinking civic space” in Afghanistan. Journalists, he said, have increasingly been “subject to surveillance, intimidation, threats, violence, arrest and detention” and are resorting to self-censorship to try to protect themselves from the authorities. He said members of civil society have reported increased limitations and surveillance of their activities by the authorities, and human rights defenders have been “subjected to intimidation, including by phone calls, visits to their homes, physical and verbal attacks and arbitrary arrest, which have created a climate of fear and sense of desperation.” He said the authorities had raided several civil society organisations, he reported, demanding the names and contact details of the staff and associated individuals, sometimes including family members, and added:

[The de facto authorities] are increasingly using bureaucratic mechanisms to control civil society organizations. Their requests are incoherent, inconsistent and difficult to interpret. Disclosure requirements have been noted as a major obstacle for several civil society organizations which are required to re-register at the de facto Ministry of Economy.

Bennett noted the extra pressure women are under, with female human rights defenders at particularly high risk of harassment. He said the UN, international NGOs and civil society organisations had all expressed concern to him about their female staff being harassed by the authorities. He also reported an increase in the arrests of humanitarian workers, from 3 in 2020 to 76 in the first ten months of 2022.

Bennett said he is alarmed by Taleban policy towards protesters, the banning of protests, use of excessive force to disperse those who do demonstrate, deployment of arbitrary arrest and detention, abusive interrogations, denial of access to lawyers and other due process rights and coerced confessions. Again, he expressed special concerns for women protesters, who “have been subjected to threats, intimidation, arrest and ill-treatment while in detention.”

Conflict-related violence

Bennett is concerned about the ongoing clashes between Taleban and armed opposition forces in Panjshir and other provinces from where he had received “credible reports and documents” regarding a whole host of violations of the laws of war and human rights by government forces, including:

  • Torture, arbitrary arrest and disappearance of individuals perceived to be affiliated with the National Resistance Front, and extrajudicial executions of captured fighters;
  • Heavy suppression of communities and an information blackout;
  • The routine subjection of civilians considered by the Taleban to be associated with the National Resistance Front to house-to-house searches, arbitrary arrest and detention, extrajudicial killings, torture and displacement.

He also reported multiple sources describing Taleban forces looting gold and cash from people’s homes and reports of forced marriages, including of children, to Taleban fighters in the Khawak area of Paryan District.

Bennett also reported that the targeted and revenge killings of former members of the Afghan security forces and prosecutors continue, despite the 2021 amnesty given by the Islamic Emirate’s Supreme Leader. He said he believed “these killings only fuel tensions and animosity within communities and may hamper reconciliation efforts in the future.” He renewed his call for the amnesty to be enforced and for those who break it to be prosecuted.

Conclusion

Asked what he hoped to achieve from this and other reporting, Bennett told AAN he was mandated to publicly report on the developing human rights situation and to make recommendations. Beyond that, he said:

I want Afghans to feel that an independent official of the UN is monitoring the human rights situation diligently and reporting publicly, expressing concerns about the situation and the violations they’re experiencing. I want others to pick the report up and use it – I want it to be useful. I want the Taleban to take note of it. Even if they don’t like or agree with it, I want them to know someone is watching and to debate the issues with me, so that a dialogue takes place. And I’d like the recommendations to be considered, even better implemented, but at least considered.

Those recommendations are largely to the Taleban, whom he called on to recognise the equality of men and women, immediately restore equal access to education, ensure women are represented in the judiciary, government and commissions, and immediately restore the right of women to work in NGOs and other organisations. On economic rights, he wants the Taleban to take steps to meet the requirements that would allow Afghanistan’s assets to be unfrozen and to refrain from interfering in humanitarian operations. He has called on the authorities to ensure representation for minorities, support a free media and “immediately and unconditionally” release all those detained for exercising their rights to freedom of expression.

As to ICC member states and the ‘international community’, he wants them to ensure the situation in Afghanistan is “central to foreign policy, bearing in mind their responsibilities for the human rights and well-being of the population and the regional and global implications of failing to protect human rights in Afghanistan, especially those of women and girls and minorities.” He calls on other countries to increase humanitarian funding, provide clear guidance to end the “overcompliance with sanctions by financial institutions” and support international investigation and accountability mechanisms.

On 7 October 2022, the Human Rights Council renewed Bennett’s mandate as Special Rapporteur for a further year (Resolution 51/20). The Council also added a significant new responsibility, “to document and preserve information relating to human rights violations and abuses.” [4] This, in itself, looked like a challenge to impunity, a signal to perpetrators that their actions will be recorded and that there could be consequences.

You can read the full report: Situation of human rights in Afghanistan – Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett here.

Edited by Roxanna Shapour

References

References
↑1 The Special Rapporteur’s first report was published in September 2022 (see AAN analysis here).
↑2 The ICC’s investigation is into the war crimes and crimes against humanity which have taken place in relation in Afghanistan since 1 May 2003, when Afghanistan became an ICC member state, and July 2002 for international crimes allegedly committed in Poland, Lithuania and Romania, as part of the Afghanistan conflict nexus: those countries, which joined the ICC on that earlier date, and hosted CIA black sites where detainees rendered from Afghanistan were held and allegedly suffered the crimes of torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon their personal dignity and/or rape. For more on this, see AAN’s 2016 report, One Step Closer to War Crime Trials? New ICC report on Afghanistan. 

Bennett also said he “trusts that the Court will investigate international crimes by all parties to the conflict in Afghanistan,” an apparent reference to the ICC prosecutor indicating that he wanted to drop investigations into the US military, the CIA and former Afghan government forces, all of whom face. For more on the decision to resume the investigation and questions over who to investigate, see Ehsan Qaane’s report for AAN on this decision, ICC Afghanistan Investigation Re-Authorised: But will it cover the CIA, ISKP and the forces of the Islamic Republic, as well as the Taleban?, published on 11 November 2022.
↑3 On 7 December 2022, the ICC published a document, Policy on the Crime of Gender Persecution, in part, to provide clarity and direction to ICC staff on the application of this crime, as per the Rome Statute.
↑4 The new mandate also gave him a duty to report from a child’s rights perspective.

A Worsening “Human Rights Crisis”: New hard-hitting report from UN Special Rapporteur
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