Shadi Khan Saif

Charli Carpenter · Mar 14, 2023

World Politics Review

Mar 14, 2023

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.

MARCH 8, 2023, 8:04 AM

By Xanthe Scharff

CEO and co-founder of The Fuller Project.

Foreign Policy

MARCH 8, 2023, 8:04 AM

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.

Kate Clark · Afghanistan Analysts Network

Kate Clark

Afghanistan Analysts Network

6 Mar 2023

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.

03.03.2023

Murtaza Hussain

The Intercept

March 1 2023, 11:07 a.m.

Echoing America’s failure in Vietnam, a new inspector general report found the U.S. built an Afghan army dependent on outside support.

WHEN THE AFGHAN military and government collapsed in the summer of 2021, it was the worst failure of the U.S. defense establishment since the fall of Saigon. The U.S. today has moved on — providing the Ukrainian military with weapons and tactical support in its fight against Russia — but the question of why the world’s most powerful nation failed to build a capable Afghan military has not yet been fully answered.

A new report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, issued this week sheds critical light on what went so terribly wrong in America’s longest war — and how tens of thousands of ordinary Afghans were set up by their leaders and foreign partners to fight and die for a doomed cause.

“The real damning thing about what is in the report is that people had been telling the U.S. military this for years.”

The SIGAR report, “Why the Afghan Security Forces Collapsed,” paints a picture of the U.S. government’s effort to construct an Afghan military from scratch over two decades. As in many other U.S. conflicts, this enterprise relied heavily on contractors and advisers who themselves were “poorly trained and experienced for their mission,” according to the report. Among other tasks, contractors would often run logistics systems and direct airstrikes on the Afghans’ behalf.

The American mission in Afghanistan had been to build an army that could stand on its own feet to resist the Taliban. In the end, however, the Afghan military was not only riddled with corruption, but also designed to function properly only so long as the foreign contractors and soldiers remained around to manage it.

In effect, similar to its disastrous experience in South Vietnam, the United States had attempted to build an army suitable for a modern, industrialized country like itself, rather than one that would fit the realities of a poor and agrarian state.

“The types of security forces that we were trying to build, which were relatively sophisticated and relied on advanced technology and electronics logistics systems, were just not within the general capacity of what Afghanistan would be able to use in sustainable ways,” said Jonathan Schroden, an Afghanistan expert at the Center for Naval Analyses, a nonprofit military research and analysis center in Virginia. “The real damning thing about what is in the report is that people had been telling the U.S. military this for years.”

Afghans were not blameless in this debacle. Ethnic and political divisions within the government resulted in competent commanders being shuffled out of roles in favor of individuals connected to Kabul-based powerbrokers. Corruption at elite levels was endemic. The notorious issue of “ghost soldiers,” conscripts who existed only as budget-line items but not as flesh-and-blood service members in the field, continued to dog the Afghan military to its last days.

Yet the oft-repeated claim that the Afghan military itself did not fight the Taliban proved untrue. Tens of thousands of Afghans died fighting the Taliban, continuing the war until the fight became futile.

THE SIGAR REPORT outlined another reason for U.S. failure in Afghanistan that will be relevant to any future foreign conflicts or nation-building enterprises that the U.S. embarks upon: The war went on too long.

The report says that “the length of the U.S. commitment was disconnected from a realistic understanding of the time required to build a self-sustaining security sector.” For a period lasting more than a decade up until the final withdrawal, U.S. political leaders — recognizing how unpopular the war was at home, as casualties mounted and little battlefield progress was made — began drawing up timelines for when they would head for the exits.

What’s more, Schroden, the Center for Naval Analyses expert, pointed to the issue, highlighted in the SIGAR report, of U.S. government personnel and contractors rotating in and out of the country on short stints, leading them to repeat the same mistakes as their predecessors every few years. Despite the length, then, the U.S. continued its long commitment, without any realistic prospect of success on the horizon.

The half-in, half-out approach to the war was inconducive to a lasting victory over the Taliban. It pushed neighboring countries like Pakistan and Iran to hedge their bets and bide their time. And, most importantly, the short timeframes involved made it almost certain that the Afghan security forces would not have time to develop the solid institutional structure they would need to survive indefinitely, even if their training had been effective.

Given the fundamentally flawed approach that the U.S. had taken to building up the Afghan military, spending another two decades occupying Afghanistan and then withdrawing on the same terms would have been unlikely to lead to a very different outcome.

As tragically as the war ended for many Afghans, including tens of thousands who were sent to fight and die in a military that was unequipped for the task of securing the country, the withdrawal agreement negotiated in Qatar by the U.S. and the Taliban in 2020 did finally put an end to an endeavor that had already been failing for many years.

“The Taliban and D.C. ultimately wanted the same thing, which was for U.S. troops to leave,” said Adam Weinstein, a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and former U.S. Marine in Afghanistan. “The conditions of the final agreement were not as important as leaving the country as soon as possible.”

Roxanna Shapour · Afghanistan Analysts Network

Roxanna Shapour

Afghanistan Analysts Network

28 Feb 2023

Winters in Kabul are always difficult, and this year was no exception – with temperatures dropping well below zero and heavy snowfall. The snow turns the unpaved secondary roads where most Kabulis live into rivers of mud, making it difficult for people to get around. But if there’s little snow – increasingly the case because of global warming – water will be scarce in the summer. This year, winter arrived early, leaving many Afghan families, already struggling with the fallout from Afghanistan’s economic collapse, ill-equipped to manage. The start of winter also marked weeks of power outages across the country and a skyrocketing of the cost of coal and wood, the fuels people use to heat their homes. In the latest instalment of The Daily Hustle, our series of individual accounts about one aspect of daily life in Afghanistan, we hear how one family is coping with winter in Kabul.

It’s still dark when we wake up, well before the morning call to prayer. My wife has gently tapped my shoulder to wake me. I listen to the children’s slow steady breathing and savour a last few minutes under the warm covers before I face the chill that has set in the room since the fire went out in the bukhari [heater] overnight. I can hear the rustling of my brothers. I usually have to wake them, but they’re already awake this morning.

I leave the room quietly, careful not to wake the children, and light a fire in the bukhari in the dahliz [large hallway]. We used to have an electric fire there, but electricity has been scarce in Kabul since the start of winter and we’ve had to put a small gas heater instead – we use it only for an hour or two in the mornings just to take the chill off the air when we first wake up. My wife often wheels it into the kitchen when she gets breakfast ready for the family.

The price of coal has soared this year. Last year, I paid 8,500 Afs [about 97 USD] per tonne, but this year the price had almost doubled, to 15,600 Afs [177 USD]. I go out to a wholesaler in Deh Sabz [just to the northeast of Kabul city], but even then, it was difficult even to find coal. I had to put my name on a waiting list. He called me a week later to say I could come and pick up the coal. We don’t usually get enough to last the whole winter. Especially if spring comes late, we buy extra coal late in the season. But everything is so expensive this year, I don’t think we could afford more coal, so we have to economise. I mix the coal with firewood to make it last.

Wood has also got more expensive, but not as much as coal. Since last year, it’s gone up from 7,000 Afs to 8,000 Afs [79 to 91 USD] per kharwar [equivalent to about 560 kg]. We used to have a sawdust bukhari in my brothers’ room, as well. Slow-burning sawdust is an efficient way to heat a room, but it’s costly and most people have stopped using it, so it’s not easy to find. So now, there’s a sandali [a rectangular wooden table covered with a large quilt that uses a coal or electric fire under the table as a heat source] there, with an electric fire under it when there’s electricity and hot water bottles there isn’t.

My father’s room is the largest in the house and we keep the bukhari going there 24 hours a day because he’s old and he shares it with my ailing aunt and younger sister. The family spends most of its time there, watching TV, playing games, talking and generally passing the time. My aunt’s already awake when I carry the children into the room before I leave for work. She’s reading the Quran by the dim light of a solar-powered light bulb. She looks up and greets me with a smile. I point to the corner of the room where we usually pray to let her know I’m about to bring her a bowl of warm water for her ablutions.

These days we have about eight hours of electricity a day, by turns; one day, it’ll be during the day, the next in the evening. At the start of winter, we began having days-long power cuts. If we were lucky, we’d get an hour or two in a day. Sometimes, it would come on in the middle of the night, which did us no good because we were sleeping. A couple of years ago, with help from a technically savvy colleague, I installed a small solar system in our house. It generates 20,000 Watts of DC power, enough to give us light throughout the house, but not sufficient for TV or other appliances. The 300 USD I paid for the two batteries and solar panels was a huge outlay and more than most Afghans could afford.

We’re among the lucky families in Kabul who can afford such things. Many families have to make do with whatever they can find to burn, use hot water bottles [if they can boil water] or just endure the cold, putting on layer upon layer of clothes to try and keep warm. We have neighbours too poor to afford any sort of heating. We help them the best we can. We’ve given them a line of electricity from our house to use when there’s power and we also give them boiling water so they can fill their hot water bottles to try to keep warm.

This morning, there’s no electricity, so my wife has put two pots of water on the stove, one for our family to use for ablutions and another that she’s already boiled for the neighbours, which she asks me to take round to them.

By the time I get home in the evening, it’s already dark. On the nights when there’s electricity in our neighbourhood, the streetlights cast a yellow glow on the snow, turning the mounds of snow piled up on either side of the road into gold. On those nights, everyone in the family is gathered in my father’s room watching TV. But when there’s no power, the streets are dark and ominous. Every alley, every turn in the road, every dark corner could be harbouring a thief standing in wait to rob you.

On the long winter nights when there’s no electricity, we while away the time chatting about the day that’s passed. My aunt is a gifted calligrapher and tutors my sister – who can’t go to school any more because of the Taleban’s ban on girls’ education – in penmanship. My brothers sell clothes on pushcarts in the Mandawi [Kabul’s central market] and tell me about their day, how many customers they’ve had and how much money they’ve made. On snowy days, when they can’t take their carts out to tout their wares, they stay home and help my wife with the heavy housework, plough the snow from our roof and clear the snow from the yard and the road outside our house. I watch after the children to give my wife some rest after a long day of housework. My three-year-old daughter is waiting patiently, but still fidgeting with expectant eyes, for the treat I’ve picked up for her on my way home, usually a small chocolate bar. One of my greatest joys is watching her jump up and down and squeal with pleasure when I finally reach into my pockets to fish out her daily present.

As I get dressed to go to the office, the smell of freshly baked bread wafts from the kitchen, but I have no time to eat breakfast at home this morning. On snowy days, I leave the house early and walk to work. I love to walk in the snow. I enjoy the fresh air, the rare respite from Kabul’s usual pollution, which forces us to cover our faces. I find the snowflakes dancing in the air and the delicate light coming off the carpet of snow romantic. But I know that snowfall is not romantic for the poor. For them, it’s a nightmare that will only end with the coming of spring and the hope that next year there will be enough money to heat their homes and electricity to light the long winter nights.

Edited by Roxanna Shapour

02.26.2023

By Ruchi Kumar

Al Jazeera

Listen to this story:

Kabul, Afghanistan – One morning in early October last year, 16-year-old cousins Marzia and Hajar Mohammadi were laid to rest next to one another in a remote graveyard on the outskirts of Kabul. Among the roses on the girls’ graves, their grieving family members placed a few of the teenagers’ favourite books – a tribute to their love of reading.

Marzia and Hajar were among the 53 students killed last September in an attack on a Kaj education centre in Dasht-e-Barchi, a predominantly Shia Muslim and Hazara ethnic minority neighbourhood. A suicide bomber detonated his explosives in a crowded classroom among students who had gathered for a practice university entrance exam. Most of the victims were young women.

While no group has claimed responsibility for the attack, the affiliate of the ISIL (ISIS) armed group in Afghanistan, the Islamic State of Khorasan Province, ISKP (ISIS-K), has targeted places where Hazaras worship, study and work. In April 2022, explosions targeted two educational institutes attended by students in the Dasht-e-Barchi neighbourhood, killing at least six people. The centre where Marzia and Hajar were killed had been attacked before – in 2018, in a blast that killed more than 40 students. ISKP claimed responsibility for that attack.

Since the Taliban takeover in August 2021, ISKP has claimed responsibility for 13 attacks against Hazaras and is linked to at least three others, in which at least 700 people have been killed or injured, according to Human Rights Watch.

A bucket list of dreams

A day after Marzia and Hajar’s funeral, their heartbroken uncle, 42-year-old Zaher Modaqeq, discovered a number of diaries and journals among the girls’ personal effects. Deeply moved by their writing, he shared some pages from Marzia’s diary on social media, including a bucket list of things she wanted to do in life.

“My Marzia and Hajar were such amazing girls, so different than others their age. I wish more people could have known their determination,” Zaher reflected. “They could have inspired many, I believe they still can.”

Although Hajar’s parents did not wish to share their daughter’s writing in public, Zaher says Marzia’s entries provide a glimpse into both their aspirations.

At the very top of their bucket list was meeting their favourite author, Turkish-British novelist Elif Shafak. Other unfilled dreams included visiting the Eiffel Tower in Paris and eating a pizza in Italy. On social media, Zaher posted Marzia’s entry about shopping for books after the Taliban takeover. And he shared how the girls’ siblings left books on Marzia and Hajar’s graves. The posts went viral on social media and touched a nerve in a country which continues to lose its young people to continuing violence.

After Marzia and Hajar’s funeral, their 22 siblings returned regularly to the quiet, dusty, hilltop cemetery. About a week later, they found several books – mostly in Persian, some in English, and all well-worn from years of reading – left behind by strangers.

“We always knew Marzia and Hajar really loved books,” explained 21-year-old Insiya, Hajar’s older sister and Marzia’s cousin. But after pages of Marzia’s diary were shared on social media others learned “how much they liked being surrounded by books, and people honoured them with these books”.

A photo of a small building with a drawing of two girls on it. — The orange outdoor library in a Kabul graveyard dedicated to Marzia and Hajar [Courtesy of the Mohammadi family]

Strangers’ books

Pages from Marzia’s diary, daily notes she wrote to herself in neat, legible handwriting in Farsi and occasionally in English, were shared by Zaher with Al Jazeera. More than half a dozen diaries – some battered notebooks, others leather-bound planners – filled with hundreds of entries, reveal a determined young woman who found strength in books amid the attacks on Hazaras, an historically persecuted group, and other Shia Muslim communities, and growing restrictions on women under the ruling Taliban.

Since the Taliban’s return to power, it has shut down girls’ secondary schools, affecting about three million students, restricted women from entering workplaces and imposed other curbs on freedom including requiring a close male relative to accompany any long-distance travel.

On August 23, 2021, about a week after the Taliban’s takeover, Marzia wrote, “Today I stepped out of the house for the first time since the arrival of the Taliban … I had a feeling of insecurity and dread.”

The teenager went to a bookshop and bought The Architect’s Apprentice by Shafak, the author Marzia and Hajar idolised. “Today I realised how much I love books,” she wrote. “I like seeing people’s joy when they see and read books.”

As Marzia and Hajar’s siblings came upon more books left behind by strangers they decided to create a small outdoor library.

One family member brought out an old cupboard that had fallen into disuse. They cleaned and painted it bright orange – the girls’ favourite colour.

Fatema Khairullahi, an Afghan graphic designer, made an illustration of the girls after they had died showing them with a pine tree – a symbol of strength and resilience – and shared it on social media. When the family decided to set up the library they contacted the artist who agreed to recreate the image as a mural in the centre of the cabinet.

In late October, the sturdy cabinet was brought to the graveyard and placed next to the cousins’ graves. The shelves hold about two dozen books, protected by glass doors which are left unlocked so the volumes can be easily accessed.

Marzia and Hajar lived in the same household with several families. Books were always stacked around the room they shared with their siblings.

“We made this library because we know how much they loved being surrounded by books,” explained Insiya, who sat with other relatives including Zaher, on toshaks, or traditional Afghan floor cushions, in the sparsely decorated family room of the extended family home.

“We feel this is making them very happy” as reading and being around books is what they wanted in their lives, she added, tearing up as she spoke. “Hajar had written in her diary, ‘I feel so good when I am reading. I feel like I am part of that story’.”

A photo of Marzia and Hajar Mohammadi as children sitting on the floor. — The cousins were best friends and were motivated to continue their education despite growing restrictions [Photo courtesy of the Mohammadi family]

Constantly learning

Marzia and Hajar were not just cousins – they were inseparable friends. They both dreamed of becoming architects and writers like the authors they admired.

“Most of us just read the books that we are supposed to read for our school, but Hajar and Marzia were different. They would read lots of different books, constantly seeking more knowledge,” Insiya recalled with a sad smile. “They wanted to learn more than what we learned at school.”

Both loved fiction, said their 28-year-old aunt Nooria, Zaher’s sister, who sat with Insiya and wore a light pink dress and a loosely wrapped maroon headscarf. “But they were also fond of motivational books. I think one of the reasons they still had hope [after the Taliban shut down girls’ high schools shortly after returning to power] is probably because of the kind of books they read — books that encouraged them to be stronger women, to aim higher and work for their goals,” she explained.

“I am confident these books made them stronger even in times of adversity and restrictions. It taught them to not give up and continue fighting for their goals,” added Nooria, a medical student, and the first woman in the family to graduate from university.

“When the girls in our family learned that some of them would no longer get to go to school, they were all very upset,” recalled Zaher, a tall man dressed in a simple shalwar kameez.

He and Nooria gathered them one evening soon after the Taliban takeover. “I brought them a cake and had a long conversation with them about how they must not give up. I told them they need to be stronger, they have to be different,” he said.

“When I read their diary entries from those days, I saw how motivated they were to rise up despite the new restrictions and challenges. They wanted to continue their education and had hoped to take control of their future,” Nooria added.

‘No excuses’

While they were alive, the cousins hoped to attend university. With their high school graduation delayed due to the closures, Marzia and Hajar were determined to press on and start preparing for the university entrance exam, which at the time they could sit for.

In February last year, Marzia wrote, “I have to try harder than yesterday and last week. … I have to make a decision to change my future and my life. The only way to succeed in an emergency situation like this is to study.”

She wrote about passing the university entrance exam as being the “first step” to securing a scholarship abroad so she could leave Afghanistan.

“I have to believe in myself and God will help me.

Time 12:30 midnight

God!! Me and Hajar, next year this time on Feb 4, we shouldn’t be in Afghanistan.”

In an undated entry, she writes about needing to continue her studies “with or without electricity”.

In their first mock university entrance exam, Marzia and Hajar scored 50 and 51 percent respectively. Marzia was disappointed. She would aim for 60 in the next test. “Bravo Marzia!” she wrote after she got 61.

Zaher shared how her scores improved until she got 82 percent, a result she wanted to maintain. “But then…” he said, his voice trailing off.

“Marzia and Hajar turned to their education and books for solutions when the situation got worse. Even when it felt like there was no hope of university, and some people were saying girls might not even be allowed to sit for the entrance exams, they still continued to study, read and learn on their own,” said Marzia’s older sister, 23-year-old Parwana. “They inspired us.”

But not everything they read helped. With the uncertainty in Afghanistan, 50 pages into the account of Yazidi activist Nadia Murad about surviving capture and enslavement by ISIL, Marzia remarked in her diary that she did not have the “patience for it” and put the book away before later completing it.

In late 2022, just a few months after they were killed, the Taliban banned women from university. In January, the Taliban ordered private universities to not allow female students to sit for upcoming entrance exams.

‘A lot of pain’

Even before the Taliban restrictions, it was not easy for the women in Marzia and Hajar’s family to access education. “We had to struggle for it,” Nooria said.

“Our parents are illiterate and they didn’t understand the importance of equality; the boys were valued more than the girls,” explained Insiya, sharing how she and Hajar’s eldest sister stopped going to school after her marriage as a teenager. “But since then we have been fighting these traditions and gradually changing perspectives of the elders in the family towards educating girls,” she continued, referring to the many conversations that Zaher and others had to convince older relatives to allow women in the family to study.

“We live in a society where such change is hard, but Marzia and Hajar’s parents really came around to the idea and had been fully supporting their daughters’ education,” said Nooria.

Today, their parents and the rest of the family are still grappling with their loss.

“There is a lot of pain,” Parwana said, pausing briefly to hold back her tears. She took a deep breath and continued. “But building this space, this small room for them, has given us the opportunity to channel our hurt in a way that would make Marzia and Hajar proud.”

Zaher chokes back tears while speaking about his nieces, repeating how “unique” they were.

When the Taliban retook power in 2021 there was a mass exodus of Afghans, particularly those at risk of persecution.

Zaher said the family chose to stay to play their part in shaping a brighter future and peaceful society in Afghanistan.

“This is why we stayed, so we and our children like Marzia and Hajar, could be catalysts for change,” he said.

Now he only hopes that the memory of his nieces can inspire some positive change when it comes to girls’ education.

A photo of a metal cupboard, with a mural of Marzia and Hajar Mohammadi.

A metal cupboard, with a picture of Marzia and Hajar, serves as a second library established in honour of the cousins. The inscription at the top reads: ‘Hajar and Marzia had dreamed of becoming architects. Girls, you should follow their dreams’ [Photo courtesy of the Mohammadi family]

Inspiring new readers

The graveyard library on the city outskirts is not easy to access – it can only be reached by car – and as such, has not received many visitors. The library’s collection is slowly growing.

“But the reaction to it has been overwhelming, because many people are now talking about the importance of reading and education, the values that Marzia and Hajar strongly believed in,” Insiya reflected. She recalled how an older neighbour visited the graveyard and returned with one of the motivational books from the library.

“She came to our house later saying that she was inspired and wanted to read and learn more.”

In February, the family set up another small cupboard library with about 30 donated books – mostly novels including Marzia and Hajar’s favourite titles – in a primary school in their village in Ghazni province.

The family hopes to eventually set up larger libraries in memory of the cousins in Kabul and other Afghan cities. “It was Marzia and Hajar’s vision for all Afghan girls to be able to continue their learning, even if they can’t go to school,” said Nooria. “For now, this library is a symbol of that message.”

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA

02.25.2023

TOLOnews

TV Network

24 Feb 2023

The Islamic Emirate’s Spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, called aid by the international community a right of the people of Afghanistan.

Josep Borrell Fontelles, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, said that they “cannot abandon the Afghan women to be punished twice,” both by the decision of the Afghan government and with cutting of aid by the EU.

Borrell made the remarks at a press conference on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly’s meeting in support of the Afghan women.

“We cannot abandon the Afghan women to be punished twice. First by the Afghan government decision and second by us cutting development support,” he said.

The Islamic Emirate’s Spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, called aid by the international community a right of the people of Afghanistan.

“The international aid which is based on humanitarian purposes, should not be linked to the political issues. It should not be halted. The Afghan nation as a war-affected country, has the right to receive aid. On the other hand, some of the political issues are not only within the Islamic Emirate, but the policies of the international community are also not positive,” he said.

The political analysts said that the continuation of aid will benefit the people of Afghanistan but called on the caretaker government to show flexibility in engagement with the international community.

“The Islamic Emirate should not hide the current situation from the people of Afghanistan and it should not blame others for it,” said Janat Fahim Chakari, a political analyst.

“The Islamic Emirate should also show some flexibility in its policies and it should have engagement with the international community, so that Afghanistan can stand on its own feet,” said Abdul Malik Afghan, a political analyst.

This comes as the Islamic Emirate’s decree barring women from higher education and working at NGOs faced a strong reaction by the international community.

02.21.2023

Shadi Khan Saif

The Guardian

Mon 20 Feb 2023

We must make humanitarianism a global agenda, just like climate change, press freedom and gender equality

Under domestic pressures and international politics, there is a stark disparity in the way international rescue, relief and rehabilitation aid has been delivered to thousands of Syrians in comparison with their peers deserving equal care and attention in Turkey.

Timing and reach free from barriers are the key to a humanitarian response in a disaster. I learned this from some of the dedicated individuals at the Victorian Emergency Management Institute while mocking a rapid response exercise in an imaginary country.

I am a former war correspondent in Afghanistan and the week-long essentials of humanitarian practice course in Melbourne helped me explore the history of many of our household names in this sector, how they are coping or failing to cope with the ever-changing dynamics of international politics.

The setup designed for the training was imaginary, but what we are witnessing in places like Syria and Afghanistan is not a mock exercise of calamities of the worst forms but a toxic cocktail of egoistic human policies overlapping with natural disasters. For this, our global humanitarian ecosystem has no solutions, it seems.

The latest twin earthquakes of 6.4 and 5.8 magnitude in Turkey is just another reminder of the power of nature beyond state boundaries, and that a humanitarian response must be without limitation.

Generally speaking, the Syrian regime is at odds with much of the rest of the world – and of course with so many of its own citizens. It is one of the main hurdles stopping aid convoys and volunteers from reaching the needy, according to reports from the Syrian opposition-run rescue group, the White Helmets.

The Assad regime has only given the UN access to two border crossing entry points from Turkey for the thousands of earthquake victims, when much of the critical time to save lives has already been lost. We can add this to the list of atrocities committed by the regime in Damascus.

Does that mean we take this experience as a point of no hope and give up on critical humanitarian responses that are above and beyond all political boundaries? Definitely not.

The first Geneva convention of 1864 laid the foundations for many of the rules governing the mandate of humanitarian actors. Since then we have seen an array of large institutions emerge, such as the UN, the International Committee of the Red Cross and many more. Our complex world today needs more robust and binding laws globally to be effective in stopping the conflicts in the first place and ensure a universal authority and access for humanitarians to the needy wherever, whenever.

Afghanistan is another dreadful example of humanitarian support left to the mercy of a brutal regime after the west abandoned the country to the Taliban, neglecting the needs of the country and its people. Now the sanctions imposed on Kabul, particularly its banking sector, make delivery of crucial aid for the war-ravaged country nearly impossible.

Destruction in Jindires, north-west Syria

The blanket ban on a number of international non-government organisations in Pakistan following the killing of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden is another example of humanitarian assistance falling prey to politics.

All this makes headlines but so far hasn’t led to a more efficient and humanitarian system where no individual, group or country can hinder the delivery of lifesaving support in any corner of the world.

UN agencies as well as the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies with its 192-member national societies comprises a wonderful global institutional network ready to come for the rescue of humanity when local governments somehow fully or partially fail. Still, the potential of these bodies is used mainly because of the contesting political influences that undermine the actual immunity for the humanitarian workers on the ground.

These groups need to have enough resources and power to replace persistent appeals for aid with a more sustainable method.

Whenever there is tragedy – like the current one in Syria and Turkey – we feel the senseless curbs on humanitarian activities and then forget. We need to make the idea of free humanitarianism a truly respected global agenda, just like climate change, press freedom and gender equality. In order to achieve this, we must do some soul-searching and find a way to end all barriers for aid in future.

Otherwise what is happening now will happen again.

Shadi Khan Saif is an Afghan journalist based in Melbourne

02.15.2023

The Pakistani Taliban’s late January attack in Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, claimed the lives of more than 100 worshipping at a police compound mosque. The bombing was claimed by a faction of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP, also known as the Pakistani Taliban) initially, but later denied by the TTP’s central leadership. It was the group’s deadliest attack since its 2021 resurgence after the Afghan Taliban took power in Afghanistan. As Pakistan struggles with a major economic crisis, the fallout from the deadly floods of last fall and an ever-turbulent political scene, the TTP’s growing threat presents yet another challenge for the struggling nation.

USIP’s Asfandyar Mir, Andrew Watkins and Tamanna Salikuddin weigh in on what the attack indicates about the strength of the TTP, how Islamabad could respond, the Afghan Taliban’s posture toward the TTP and the options for U.S. policymakers.

What does the Peshawar bombing indicate about the scale of the TTP’s threat to Pakistan?

Mir: The Peshawar attack, conducted by a faction of the TTP, is one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in Pakistan in recent years. Its lethality and the ability of the attackers to penetrate deep inside what should be the most secure part of Peshawar suggests that the TTP has re-constituted a critical capability of urban attacks. The attack follows an escalation in the TTP’s violence including IED explosions and targeted attacks since late last year when the cease-fire between Pakistan and the TTP collapsed. Taken together, this signifies the steadily ascendant trajectory of the TTP, presenting a major medium- to long-term challenge for Pakistan.

The TTP’s escalating campaign of violence is a function of its growing political and material strength — reflected in its political cohesion, expanding cadre of trained fighters, suicide bombers, weapons and equipment. Much of the TTP’s political leadership and capability is based in Afghanistan. In Pakistan, the TTP has regained some territorial influence in southern districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, like South Waziristan, North Waziristan, Tank, Bannu and Lakki Marwat. The TTP is able to fundraise through extortion inside Pakistan as well as in Afghanistan — across provinces, there are fundraising drives for the group’s so-called jihad.

The Afghan Taliban remain very supportive of the TTP and are providing the group with a permissive safe haven. The TTP also has a lot of popular support in Afghanistan, where both Taliban and non-Taliban constituencies get behind the TTP due to a fervent dislike for Pakistan. Some Taliban fighters are also joining the TTP, and there are reports of some recent bombers being Afghan. A handful of Taliban leaders, in particular Taliban Interior Minister Siraj Haqqani, have restrained the TTP on Pakistani requests on occasion. Yet the balance of opinion within the Taliban is strongly in favor of the TTP and its campaign. In particular, Taliban Amir Hibatullah Akhundzada agrees with the TTP that Pakistani system is “un-Islamic.”

Could this attack shift the Afghan Taliban’s calculus regarding its TTP’s ties? How is the Afghan Taliban likely to respond going forward?

Watkins: The Afghan Taliban appear unlikely to shift their strategic calculus on providing support to the TTP. In the weeks prior and days after the attack, their public messaging has been almost defiant, offering the weakest of condemnations and painting Pakistan as ultimately responsible for militancy within its borders. Speaking to a gathering in Kabul two days after the attack, the Taliban’s acting foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, warned Pakistan against “pointing fingers” or “sowing the seeds of enmity.”

This undiplomatic rhetoric underscores the Taliban’s determination to continue supporting the TTP, even in the face of intensified pressure from Pakistan. In January, Taliban security officials leaked a memo to local press that offered a description of training camps allegedly based in Pakistan and supported by the Pakistani security establishment, where thousands of Islamic State fighters were preparing to attack Afghanistan. In effect, the Taliban’s response to being confronted about their support for TTP has been to level counteraccusations — which does not signal an impending shift away from that support.

These rhetorical signals are matched by anecdotal reports from U.N. officials and other observers of TTP individuals moving freely and conducting business in Afghan cities. Meanwhile, interlocutors with access to Kandahar report that the emir and his close advisors are unlikely to waiver in supporting the TTP on ideological grounds.

However, in spite of the Taliban’s firm strategic calculus in favor of the TTP, their leadership appears to understand the importance of maintaining a functional relationship with Pakistan — or at least preventing tensions from deteriorating into full-scale conflict. The Taliban’s posture moving forward will likely appear like a tug-of-war, alternating between moments of tension and de-escalation.

How is Pakistan likely to respond?

Mir: Pakistan’s response to the TTP’s resurgence remains incoherent — and it is unlikely to improve in the near-term. After downplaying the TTP’s strength as well as the Taliban’s influence on and relationship with TTP for several years, Pakistani leaders now seem to be contending with the depth of Taliban support for the TTP. Yet Pakistani officials still seem to be searching for a deal — ideally a cease-fire arrangement — through the Taliban. The military and intelligence leadership, as well as officials at the Foreign Ministry, appear to want to work with the Taliban, viewing it as more favorable than the former republic government — which is indicated by Pakistan continuously asking the international community to engage the Taliban. But the Taliban’s uncompromising commitment to the TTP means that Pakistan has to either ignore the violence or concede to the TTP to maintain a relationship with the Taliban.

Another key factor shaping the Pakistani response is the country’s deteriorating economy, which is on the brink of a default. That limits Pakistan’s military options. Pakistan can carry out raids and undertake defensive actions inside the country, but it doesn’t have the resources for a sustained high-intensity campaign. Pakistan has flirted with the idea of cross-border airstrikes again, which it last conducted in April 2022. There is some growing pressure for action, as parts of the Pakistani political spectrum are framing the terrorism resurgence as a conspiracy by the military to block former prime minister Imran Khan’s return to power and to get American aid. Yet economic pressures and the risk of a conflict spiral, especially amid reports of Taliban fighters joining the TTP, may induce doubts in Pakistan about such a cross-border operation.

Does the TTP threaten U.S. interests?

Mir: While the TTP’s threat to Pakistan is clear, the threat it poses to American interests is nebulous. When the group first emerged in 2007, it posed a direct threat to the United States in several ways. It was supporting the Taliban’s insurgency against the U.S. military and the now defunct Afghan government. It was attempting to — and at times actually killing — U.S. personnel in complex attacks. For example, in December 2009, in a joint operation with al-Qaida, the TTP succeeded in flipping a spy sent by the CIA to infiltrate al-Qaida leadership in Pakistan’s Waziristan region, dispatched him back to his CIA and partner government handlers with a suicide bomb at a forward base in eastern Afghanistan, which killed multiple CIA officers. In 2010, the TTP attempted an attack in New York City’s Times Square, which failed.

In 2023, the TTP doesn’t pose such a direct threat to the United States, at least in the near-term. In contrast to the past, TTP messaging makes the point that it has no direct aims against the United States. In general, the group appears more focused on its local agenda against Pakistan. One of the main reasons for this shift is the current leader of the TTP, Mufti Noor Wali Mehsud.

In Mehsud’s diagnosis of the decline of the TTP from 2011 to 2017, the biggest setback for the group was its targeting by U.S. drone strikes, which eroded the TTP’s combat potential. Mehsud is deterred from taking on the United States by the fear of drone strikes. So, he is steering clear of provocations and plotting against the United States, in the hope of not triggering another campaign of drone strikes against his group. The TTP’s calculus could always change with new leadership. And even under Mehsud, some risk remains as the TTP is unpredictable, having undertaken attacks that belie its stated targets including against Chinese diplomats in Pakistan.

With that said, the TTP continues to incubate other direct threats to the United States. For one, elements of al-Qaida and its South Asia affiliate continue to shelter behind the TTP in Afghanistan. In general, the TTP remains helpful to al-Qaida — although perhaps less so than in the past. If the TTP gains territory in Pakistan, al-Qaida will look for space in territories controlled by the TTP. There are other foreign fighters in Afghanistan with varied regional agendas, who will find a haven in Pakistan should the TTP make major territorial gains. The more important way in which the TTP can threaten U.S. interests is by seriously destabilizing Pakistan. This possibility is real yet not imminent. If it were to materialize, it will raise the specter of eroded Pakistani nuclear security, broader regional instability and migration concerns.

What policy options does the United States have?

Salikuddin: Unlike the TTP’s previous terror campaign from 2007 to 2014, this time the Afghan Taliban are in control in Afghanistan and the United States has no military presence in the region: two factors which make U.S. policy options against the TTP far more limited. In previous years, the United States had the intelligence and military posture to be able to help the Pakistani government and military when it went after the TTP. Today, the United States is far more constrained even in its understanding and capacity to help in any kinetic action against the TTP. As mentioned, the threat to the United States from the TTP is also far more nebulous — a reality that will not make this growing threat a U.S. policy priority. On the flip side, the United States does not currently factor in the TTP’s calculus, and any direct policy options which would change that and make the United States a target of the TTP or even the Afghan Taliban would not be palatable in Washington.

Given the current economic and political crisis in Pakistan, U.S. policymakers may be well placed to have conversations with Pakistani leaders about the need to focus and develop a clear counter-TTP plan. However, Washington’s ability to shape or assist on such a plan will be limited. Continued U.S. support to Pakistani police and other law enforcement agencies, including training and tactical equipment, may be useful in the fight against TTP. The larger question will be how Pakistan will handle the Afghan Taliban who provide safe haven to the TTP. It is unlikely that the Pakistanis will heed any U.S. suggestions to pressure the Afghan Taliban in Kabul (let alone break ties). If Pakistan takes action within Afghanistan and against the Afghan Taliban, it will be because of decisive move emanating from Islamabad, and not at the behest of the United States.

02.13.2023

Gordon Brown

Gordon Brown is chairman of the UN’s Education Cannot Wait fund and was UK prime minister between 2007 and 2010

The Guardian

12 Feb 2023

As a child, Ramzan’s fight for an education almost cost her her life. Worldwide, there are 222 million children out of school who urgently need our help

Shazia Ramzan has spent most of her young life fighting for her right – and the right of all girls – to go to school. In 2012, at the age of 14, sitting alongside her friend Malala Yousafzai on a bus that was going from school to her home, in the Swat valley in the north of Pakistan, she was shot at by an extremist intent on stopping girls from getting an education. She suffered injuries from which she, Malala and their friend Kainat took months to recover.

Now completing a nursing degree at Edinburgh University, and preparing to start her own nurses’ training school in Pakistan, Shazia almost always has the needs of girls in her home area in her thoughts. In her time between classes, she is raising funds for Pakistani charities that are quietly but effectively helping Afghan girls who have been losing out on their education since the Taliban shut them out of the country’s secondary schools.

There are 5 million girls in Afghanistan who are currently out of school, and they urgently need our support. Many have risked everything by demonstrating in the streets of Kabul. While sooner or later the regime will find that they cannot forever oppress brave women who have known what it is like to be free, for now the young protesters face arrest and torture.

*‘Between classes, she is raising funds for Pakistani charities that are quietly but effectively helping Afghan girls.’ Shazia Ramzan.*

Theirs is an untold story of courage and resilience. Girls in Afghanistan are also at risk of punishment beatings if they attend underground schools run by their parents and teachers. Many more are fleeing across the border into exile in Pakistan in the hope of an education.

But, sadly, those who have crossed the border are joining Pakistan’s ever-lengthening queue for schooling that is already 23 million children long. This is not just because of the country’s recent floods, which have closed 27,000 schools, but because of Pakistan’s long-term failure to invest in girls’ education.

Step back and the picture becomes even graver: these girls are only a fraction of the world’s 222 million crisis-affected children who are in dire need of educational support. Of them, 78.2 million, including 42 million girls, do not go to school at all, while the others are suffering so many disruptions in their education that they fail to acquire even the most basic literacy and numeracy skills.

Their numbers, so large that they already exceed the combined populations of Germany, France and Britain, are rising every year. More than 100 million people are refugees or internally displaced because of conflicts and civil wars, from Ukraine and Myanmar to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia.

A large number of children today, though, are exiled from their homes not because of war but because they are the victims of droughts, floods and other climate-induced disasters, or of natural disasters. In Turkey and Syria the dead are still being counted, but we must also address the urgent needs of the living, all those forcibly displaced by a 7.8-magnitude earthquake from which it will take years to recover. Even if we manage to feed, shelter and treat the victims, there will be little cash left over to provide temporary schooling, unless we do better than in the past; the child victims of the earthquake could spend years excluded from education.

In Turkey and Syria, as elsewhere, it will be girls who will suffer most: they are 35% more likely to be out of school than their male contemporaries, according to data from Unesco. And we have been warned to expect that by 2030 many of them – an additional 10 million girls – will have been forced into child marriages, the number of girl brides rising yet again after years when forced marriage was on the decline.

Children should not have to wait for wars to end, or for the effects of natural disasters to subside, for the opportunity to learn and thrive. It is to finance the education of the forgotten 222 million that Education Cannot Wait (ECW), which I chair, was created in 2017. Its replenishment conference will take place in Geneva this week in the presence of Andrew Mitchell and other international development ministers from all over the world.

Seeking to bridge the divide between humanitarian aid, only 2% of which was spent on education, and development aid, which always comes too late to deal with refugee crises, ECW is asking donors for $1.5bn to support its new strategic plan. Initiatives that will prevent child labour, early marriage and trafficking include the provision of safe schools in countries where Boko Haram still abduct girls from their classrooms; the expansion of online learning; and of double-shift schools that, piloted in Lebanon, use school buildings more effectively by teaching local children English and French in the morning and Syrian refugee children Arabic in the afternoon.

We know from unspeakable recent tragedies that hope dies when food convoys and rescue workers cannot get through to besieged towns, and when flimsy boats carrying refugees capsize at sea. Hope also dies when children are locked out of education and denied the chance to plan and prepare for their future. At the age of 11, 12 and 13, young people should be optimistic and excited about great opportunities that lie ahead, but I cannot forget hearing from charity workers in a refugee camp in Moria, Greece, who had discovered three refugees in their early teens so desolate that they were planning a joint suicide. For them, behind barbed wire in an insanitary camp with no schooling and little else, there was only the bleakness of despair.

But hope can come alive, even in the harshest and least promising places in the world, if we offer children the chance of an education. It is the one way to honour the international community’s as yet unredeemed promise set out in sustainable development goal 4 – to be the first generation in history where every single boy and girl, stateless or not, goes to school. As Shazia’s work of mercy reminds us, it is also a moral obligation that we owe to the next generation. Instead of developing some of the potential of only some children in some parts of the world, we should be developing the potential of every child everywhere.

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Is Pakistan Poised to Take on the TTP?

What does the Peshawar bombing indicate about the scale of the TTP’s threat to Pakistan?

Could this attack shift the Afghan Taliban’s calculus regarding its TTP’s ties? How is the Afghan Taliban likely to respond going forward?

How is Pakistan likely to respond?

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What policy options does the United States have?

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