New Lives in the City: How Taleban have experienced life in Kabul

February 3, 2023

Sabawoon Samim

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A large number of Taleban fighters have moved to Afghanistan’s cities since the movement’s capture of power, many of them seeing life in the city for the first time in their lifetime. These fighters, many of whom are from villages, had lived modest lives, entirely focused on the war. Their circumstances have changed entirely since the Taleban’s victory. Guest author Sabawoon Samim has interviewed five members of the Taleban who have come to live in Kabul, a city they had seen as being at the heart of the ‘foreign occupation’ with its ‘puppet government’ and a population degraded by Western ways. How have they found the actual Kabul and its people, and what do they think about having to earn a living for the first time, keep office hours and live in a city full of traffic and millions of other inhabitants?
In the aftermath of seizing power in Afghanistan in August 2021, a huge number of Taleban foot soldiers rushed to the country’s capital, Kabul. For many, born into rural families and with their adult lives spent primarily on the battlefield, it was the first time they had come to the capital. They had not even been born or were still children when the Taleban’s first emirate fell. Even their seniors, who had experienced life in a major city like Kabul, would find the Afghan capital of 2021 a very different place to when the Taleban had last ruled there – the ruins left by the civil war had long ago been re-built, the city itself had become vastly bigger and the population increased manifold. Some of those newcomers to Kabul have settled in the city and we wanted to find out how they had experienced this sudden shift and what they thought of Kabul – and Kabulis.

To this end, the author conducted in-depth conversations with five members of the movement about their new, post-takeover life. They ranged in age from 24 to 32 and had spent between six and 11 years in the Taleban, at different ranks: a Taleban commander, a sniper, a deputy commander and two fighters. They were, respectively, from Paktika, Paktia, Wardak, Logar and Kandahar provinces.

All the interviewees had spent their formative years within the Taleban, typically joining as teenagers. Following the fall of the Islamic Republic, they had secured jobs in the new government. Two were appointed to civilian roles, the other three to security jobs, one in the Ministry of Interior and two in the armed forces. All are now living in Kabul, without their families, and only return to their home provinces during vacations. Four out of the five interviews were conducted in October 2022 and the last in November, all face-to-face in Kabul. The interviews have been lightly edited for clarity and flow.

The interviewees refer to ‘the fatha’, pronounced fat-ha. This is the Arabic word for conquest or victory, used for when new lands are ‘opened up’ to Muslim victors, or lands ‘recovered’ from non-Muslims. The interviews also refer to the war as a jihad and themselves as mujahedin. They speak of going on ‘tashkils’, which are similar to deployments – specific periods of time when they were away fighting.

In the Taleban hierarchy, fighters were organised into ‘groups’, bands of a few dozen men under a sub-commander, known as a ‘sar-group’ (head of the group). Several groups formed a ‘dilgai’, headed by a senior commander, known as a ‘dilgai meshr’. He was directly associated with the Emirate’s Military Commission.

Throughout the text, the interviewees refer to their old commanders as ‘Mawlawi Sahib’, as a mark of respect, combining the term used for an advanced religious scholar with the word for ‘sir’.

Omar Mansur, 32, Yahyakhel district of Paktika province, married and father of five, head of a group

I was born in North Waziristan but spent my childhood in Yahyakhel. I started my education in the village mosque and then moved to a small madrasa that was built during the first emirate in the neighbouring district. At the time the Americans invaded, I was only 11 years old. Because of that invasion and the subsequent indiscriminate bombardments and night raids, I was determined that the jihad against the foreigners[1] was fard [obligatory in Islam]. I had only studied up to wara dawra [12th grade of madrasa] when I abandoned the rest of my madrasa studies, and for the next 14 years or so, I would go on tashkil.

The jihad was already in full swing in our district at the time. I did my first three tashkils in Yahyakhel and then relocated to Kunar province. The rest of my jihad was in various provinces, including Laghman, Nangarhar, Paktia, Paktika and Ghazni. I first became a deputy of our group in Mawlawi Sahib’s dilgai and then its commander.

Praise be to Allah, after the fatha, Mawlawi Sahib introduced me to the Minister of [name withheld] and told him to appoint me somewhere. I was appointed to a grade 3 position as head of office.[2]

I haven’t brought my family to Kabul. The rent of houses is very high for us since our salary is no more than 15,000 afghanis [roughly 180 USD]. It is fully sufficient for Yahyakhel but not for Kabul. As soon as, God willing, I have a good salary, I will bring my family here.

I had never been to Kabul before. We heard from the radio and people who travelled there that it was constructed very beautifully by the Americans and [Hamid] Karzai. But still, you know, it’s not as beautiful as it should have been. The Americans brought untold amounts of money, but rather than spending it on building the city to a higher standard,[3] most of it went into the pockets of [Marshal Qasem] Fahim [the late vice president and Shura-ye Nizar/Northern Alliance military leader], Karzai, and their like. Yet, I assume, it’s the most gorgeous city in Afghanistan. In contrast to Kabul, our Paktika seems very displeasing. It’s like the Karzai government only spent money on Kabul.

What I don’t like about Kabul is its ever-increasing traffic holdups. Last year, it was tolerable but in the last few months, it’s become more and more congested. People complain that the Taleban brought poverty, but, looking at this traffic and the large number of people in the bazaars and restaurants, I wonder where that poverty is.

Another thing I don’t like, not only about Kabul but broadly about life after the fatha, are the new restrictions. In the group, we had a great degree of freedom about where to go, where to stay, and whether to participate in the war.

However, these days, you have to go to the office before 8 AM and stay there till 4 PM. If you don’t go, you’re considered absent, and [the wage for] that day is cut from your salary. We’re now used to that, but it was especially difficult in the first two or three months.

The other problem in Kabul is that my comrades are now scattered throughout Afghanistan. Those in Kabul, like me, work from 8 AM to 4 PM. So, most of the week, we don’t get any time to meet each other. Only on Fridays, if I don’t go home, do we all go to Qargha, Paghman or Zazai Park. I really like Paghman and going there with friends makes me very happy. Such a place doesn’t exist in the entire province of Paktika.

What I like most in Kabul is its relative cleanness and how facilities have been modernised and improved, the buildings, roads, electricity, internet connection, and so many other things. You can find taxis even at midnight, hospitals are on the doorstep, and schools, educational centres, as well as madrasas are all easily available on every corner of the city. The other positive feature of Kabul is its ethnic diversity. You can see an Uzbek, Pashtun and a Tajik living in one building and going to the same mosque.

Some people have a very negative picture of Kabul. What I experienced here in the last years, though, is that one can come across the perfect Muslim and the worst. Unlike villages where a lot of people go to the mosque to impress others, people in Kabul go there just for the sake of Allah. Unlike the villages where people endeavour to be called generous, people here do charity for the sake of Allah – people know little about each other and so they don’t need to impress each other.

Similarly, there are plenty of bad and wicked people. They’re morally corrupt, Muslim only in name, sinners. I can’t make up my mind whether there are more good people or bad here, though there are both, and it’s up to you who you interact with. Living in Kabul could have either consequence; it could corrupt a very good mujahed or turn a very bad mujahed into a good man. It all depends on who you socialise with.

Huzaifa, 24, from Zurmat district of southeastern Paktia province, married and father of two, sniper

I grew up in Zurmat. I was around 13 years old when my father enrolled me in a nearby madrasa. I left it without finishing my studies after five years because a friend of mine convinced me to join him in the Taleban. My family tried their best to persuade, at first me to leave the Emirate, and then our commander to expel me from his ranks. They said if I came home, they’d get me engaged to someone. But once someone spends time in the group, leaving that friendly and endearing environment is difficult. There was love, sincerity and above all the thirst for martyrdom. Worldly pursuits were not even a minor part of life at that time. All we were doing was sacrificing in the way of jihad as hard as we could.

I was a lizari [sniper] and spent most of my time in Paktia, only on some occasions going to Khost and Paktika provinces. In the time of jihad, life was very simple. All we had to deal with was making plans for ta’aruz [attacks] against the enemy and for retreating. People didn’t expect much from us, and we had little responsibility towards them, whereas now if someone is hungry, he deems us directly responsible for that.

After the fatha, we moved to Kabul and our dilgai meshr was appointed head of a police district and later head of a directorate at the Ministry of Interior. I, along with a few other friends, were given masuliat (official jobs) in the police district the day we arrived in the city, while other friends were sent to the MoI.

It was the first time I ever saw Kabul. I haven’t seen all the provinces, but people say Kabul is the most beautiful city in Afghanistan. When I joined my group, I was of the idea that Kabul would be full of bad people, but to be honest, in the last couple of years, after we met some of the people living here, I realised I was wrong. Of course, it has plenty of negative aspects, like their support for the occupation, women not wearing proper clothing, youths flirting with girls and cutting their hair in a style even people in America might not adopt, but these are the problems that nowadays exist also in the rural areas.

After we arrived in Kabul, we were stunned by its complexity, its expanse, its size. We didn’t know where to go. Everything was strange to us and of course, we were strange to the local people – to the extent that they were afraid of talking loudly to us. When we came to our hawza [police district] and saw the compound, the weapons and the security measures, it was unbelievable how they’d abandoned such places without firing a single bullet. We were stunned by the cowardice of the [former] army and police. If even a very small number of them had tried to fight us, we couldn’t have made it to Kabul for years, given its complexity and the weapons they had. Praise be to Allah, [the victory] was directly because of His help.

One thing I don’t like about Kabul is that people have moved here from all of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces and among them, a large number of criminals from across Afghanistan have made their way here and turned the city into a hub for their illegal activities. We face a lot of difficulties in eliminating crime, particularly robbery.

And the savageness of people against each other, in particular against women – dozens of women approach the hawza on a daily basis and register their complaints. They’re victims, subject to different forms of brutality. The head of the hawza and all other mujahedin pay special attention to solving their problems. During the first days when women approached us, many mujahedin, including myself, were hiding from them because never in our whole lives have we talked to strange women. In the days that followed, the head of the hawza instructed us that sharia does allow us to talk to them because we are now the authorities and the only people that can solve their problems.

I prefer to live in Kabul. It has its good sides and its bad, in fact, not only Kabul but everywhere has positive and negative features. In Kabul, what’s good is that you have access to every facility. Most importantly, our jobs are here now, and it’s necessary to move our families here as well.

What I don’t like about the city is that it’s like a closed society. People live cheek-by-jowl but don’t interact with each other. This is in part bad, as people don’t cooperate with each other, but also has a positive feature: unlike the village, no one bothers you about what you do, what you wear, who comes to your home and who leaves it. People don’t interfere in your life and don’t talk about you behind your back.

There is another thing I dislike and that’s how restricted our lives are now, unlike anything we experienced before. The Taleban used to be free of restrictions, but now we sit in one place, behind a desk and a computer 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Life’s become so wearisome; you do the same things every day. Being away from the family has only doubled the problem.

I’ve made friends with three guys who are from our province but have been living here [in Kabul] for more than 15 years. We sometimes go to Qargha, Bagh-e Wahsh [Kabul Zoo], Sarobi and Tapa-ye Wazir Akbar Khan. To be honest, every time I go with them, they pressure me to play and listen to music in the car. At first, I was resisting, but now I have given in, with the one condition that they turn it off when passing through security checkpoints because many other Taleban don’t like it, and it’s bad for a Taleb to be seen listening to it.

Although my new friends are from good families and are good lads, there are a lot of bad circles of youths in Kabul who smoke, use drugs and do bad things, so it’s hard for us to become friends with them. Our nature and values differ, and therefore most of our friends don’t make many friends in Kabul because we don’t fit in with them. Despite this, some Taleban have now become friends with such youths and are inclined to do many bad things, such as going hookah cafes [qilun khana].

Kamran, 27, Sayedabad district, Wardak Province, married, father of two, deputy group commander

I graduated from a government school in Sayedabad and then abandoned any other studies for the sake of jihad at the age of 19. This has been my 8th year in the Emirate. Most of the time, the areas our group controlled were in the various districts of Wardak province. I participated in many battles. Sayedabad was a place in which the Americans left dozens of dead bodies. The intensity of Sayedabad battles is well-known throughout Afghanistan.

In the last three years, I was deputy to the commander of our group, responsible for most of the day-to-day activities we dealt with since the head of our group was busy doing other non-military stuff.

During the jihad, the fear of drones followed us like a shadow, and the area where we operated was geographically very small in the early years. When travelling along the road to Ghazni city, we frequently attacked the Americans with RPGs, dashakas [DShK, a type of heavy machine gun] and roadside bombs, inflicting dozens of casualties on them. They then came after us in retaliation. Their drones often bombarded our positions. Everywhere we went, went the fear of drones. Even though the situation changed in the last two or three years [of the fighting] – the Americans and government army [owrdu] completely disappeared from the scene – the danger of drones still affected our movement. In fact, excluding their bombardments, we never considered the Americans and their puppets superior to us, [certainly not] in face-to-face battles.

Circumstances have now, Praise be to Allah, changed completely. We can go wherever we want. There is freedom and liberty in the entire country.

I’d been twice to Kabul before the fatha, once for treatment to a doctor in Baharistan [a neighbourhood in Kabul’s PD2].[4] Both times, I was in fear of being arrested. At that time, Kabul was occupied, and the police were harassing men if they had a beard. During one of my visits, I was going from the Kampani area to Kot-e Sangi, and our bus was passing through a checkpoint near the Kampani bazaar. When they saw me, they immediately stopped the bus and started asking me questions. I was about to be captured but, Praise be to Allah, I deceived them. From that day, I started hating Kabul. However, you see, I’m now here in Kabul, but it is not the same Kabul I visited before. It’s now liberated and belongs to us, not the Americans.

I was appointed to a job in the Ministry of Interior. I’m sort of happy with my job but often miss the time of jihad. During that time, every minute of our life was counted as worship.

After the fatha, many of our friends abandoned the cause of jihad. Many others betrayed the blood of the martyrs on which foundation this nizam [the government] is built. Nowadays, people are fully busy gaining wealth and fame, more and more, in this worldly life. Previously, we were doing everything for the sake of Allah, but now it’s the opposite. The first priority of many is to fill their pockets and become famous.

If you ask me why I’m unhappy in the aftermath of the fatha, it’s that we immediately forgot our past. Then, we had only a motorcycle, a mukhabira, [a type of Walkie-Talkie] and a mosque or madrasa. Now, when someone’s nominated for a government job, he first asks whether that position has a car or not.[5] We used to live among the people. Many of us have now caged ourselves in our offices and palaces, abandoning that simple life.

I don’t interact with Kabulis much, given that here, the ministry is full of my fellow Taleban. Anyway, sometimes I sit with the employees of the former regime who still come to their jobs. They show themselves to be very good people and sincere to the Emirate, but I can tell you that, in reality, they hate us. I don’t exactly know why, but I’ve identified some possible reasons this past year. First, these employees were ‘doing business’ in the ministry, making illegal wealth through corrupt practices. Second, the Americans invested in them heavily, and they became so Westernised they now hate our real Afghan culture and Islam. When the Emirate came, their illegal business and corruption vanished entirely and they have nothing but their salaries. They are no longer able to make millions of afghanis. So, you tell me, why shouldn’t they hate us?

I’m very concerned about our mujahedin. The real test and challenge was not during the jihad. Rather, it’s now. At that time, it was simple, but now things are much more complicated. We are tested by cars, positions, wealth and women. Many of our mujahedin, God forbid, have fallen into these seemingly sweet, but actually bitter traps. They forgot their old comrades on whose shoulders they secured victory and instead seek the praise and approval of sycophants. The old, the real mujahed doesn’t know the meaning of sycophancy. So they are sidelined, while their places are filled by people who, until the past year, were against us in so many ways.

I’ve not considered living in Kabul [permanently with the family]. Of course, it’s beautiful from the outside, but it lacks tranquillity. In the village, people are with you in good times and bad, in life and death.[6] You have a community. You sit together with people, talk over problems and cooperate with them. In Kabul, it’s the opposite. People don’t have time to even give you directions, let alone help you, for example, with a wedding ceremony. People are hurrying and running after this worldly life. They feel like, if one day they don’t go to work, they would die of poverty. For me at least, I belong to the village, and I can hardly imagine surviving without it.

Abdul Nafi, 25, Logar province, Baraki Barak district, married, father of two, fighter

I grew up in Baraki Barak. I studied school up to sixth grade and then continued the rest of my education in a madrasa up to 12th grade, joining the Taleban from there – almost seven years ago.

At that time, we were doing jihad, it was a holy path and gave us real delight. During jihad, you couldn’t have known the difference between a commander and a foot soldier like me. We sat together, we talked without any inconvenience, and they were sympatric towards us. Our superiors fought shoulder-to-shoulder alongside us, and we all wept together for our martyrs. It was an environment of sacrifice. We fought the war with high morale and determination.

However, all that changed after the fatha. I am myself a mujahed, but now I struggle to get to see a small director, let alone a deputy minister or minister. This isn’t true of all of them, but many of the leaders have turned their backs on their comrades of the hard times.

On the second week of the fatha, I made it to Kabul. I hadn’t been there before. It seemed a very big city and I worried about how we’d all find our way around. Now, I might better know the streets of Kabul better than many Kabulis. I go home once a month, sometimes twice. In the village, I look like a haji because when a haji comes back from pilgrimage, his skin looks soft and his face pale and I’ve, similarly, come back from pleasanter weather and the cleaner environment of Kabul.

In the first days [of our coming to Kabul], our dilgai meshr was assigned to a key position in the Ministry of [name withheld]. He told two other comrades and me to be his guards. The rest of our dilgai was strewn about in Kabul and Logar. Mawlawi sahib is a very kind man and hasn’t abandoned his old friends. For the first five months, I was with him with no official status. He paid some of my expenses from his own salary. After that, he told me he’d appoint me to a job in the ministry and registered the two other friends as official guards. He said I’d easily learn how to work. Thus, I was appointed to a grade 4 position as executive director, and in the meantime, I continued my job as his guard. I live with him in his house. It’s a big villa that [a senior leader, name withheld] has given him. He’s always telling me to bring my family and live on one of the floors. But I’m hesitant because of the cost.

When I started my job, I didn’t have a clue how to deal with the tasks. Mawlawi sahib told me to take a computer course and an English course. Almost four months ago, I started both courses near our Ministry. I learned many computer programmes during this period. Not only that, I quickly learned the tasks related to my job. All the staff, including Mawalwi sahib, have been happy with my work. People blame the Emirate for all the professional people fleeing the country, but when I see the employees in our ministry, they’re neither professional nor educated. All of them were appointed through wasita [connections] and knew little about how to manage and do their jobs. You might not believe me, but I now do my work better than many of them. You might not believe what I say about learning the various aspects of my job and mastering Kabul streets, but let me tell you a fact about the Taleban: We are very smart and intelligent, and we are fast learners.

I sometimes miss the jihad life for all the good things it had. Similarly, in the beginning, I yearned for the village, but I’ve now become accustomed to my new circumstances.

In our ministry, there’s little work for me to do. Therefore, I spend most of my time on Twitter. We’re connected to speedy Wi-Fi and internet. Many mujahedin, including me, are addicted to the internet, especially Twitter.

In those first days, when we sometimes came out of the ministry to Macroyan bazaar, there were a lot of women wearing indecent clothes. We anticipated they would wear hijab,[7] but after the initial days when women feared the mujahedin a lot, their attire has actually become less proper.

Now, they’ve become assertive to the extent they’re entirely heedless of us. Many of our friends say that, apart from us coming and replacing the police and officials of the former regime, little has changed from the Republic’s time in Kabul. During the first few days, many of my comrades and I hardly dared to make our way to the bazaar because of them [women]. We hoped the situation would soon get better, but it didn’t. Even worse, one of my classmates in his computer course is also a woman. We sit in the same classroom. Although I despise women that don’t wear proper clothes, nonetheless, I can’t turn my back on the bazaar or my class because of them. If they’re unashamed, let us also be so. This is the only thing I never imagined a Taleb would encounter in his lifetime.

In the first days, everyone feared us and we had the chance to change many things, but I think in the last year, people observed us, interacted with us, and now no longer fear us because they understand that Taleban are neither Punjabis[8] nor any other sort of strange human being.

What I dislike about Kabul is its traffic and what I fear is its thieves. We have never seen this much congestion, and in comparison to Kabuli drivers, we can hardly make our way through the streets. I don’t know how people live in such a mess. The other thing is Kabul’s thieves. Although Taleban have had the good fortune to capture [many], rather than diminishing, they increase in number, day by day. I keep my pistol on my person all the time after two of our comrades were robbed.

Abdul Salam, 26, Dand district of Kandahar province, married, father of three, farmer

I joined the Taleban when I was 20. At the time, I was helping my father in farming and only joined the Taleban after my elder brother was martyred. I studied neither at madrasa nor at school.

I did all of my tashkils in Dand, Maiwand and Shah Wali Kot districts [in Kandahar province]. The time of jihad was very good for us. I myself, for example, was not responsible for contributing to the livelihood of the family since my other brothers took care of it. They did so because they understood that jihad is obligatory.

Not only this, but at that time, people would also do their best to help, shelter and buy us clothes, shoes and petrol for our motorcycles.

However, everything has changed since then. The family wouldn’t tell you blatantly to bring home your entire salary so they can feed your children because it’s no longer a jihad, and you should take that on your shoulders, but you could feel from their behaviour that this is exactly what they mean. Furthermore, when sometimes I want to come from home to Kabul, for example, and I don’t have a vehicle to go with, I come to the nearby road so a passer-by could pick me up and drive me to Kandahar. But once an old man with his old Corolla stopped, I thought he did so to pick me up, but he didn’t. Rather, he mockingly told me that now the entire government is in your hands, so you no longer deserve help, adding that now it’s your turn to pay back all the help we have given you.

Whatever happens in Afghanistan, people blame us. Even a minor misdeed by us makes it to the media that the Taleban are doing this and that. It’s like the cameras of the entire world are watching us.

I came from Kandahar almost two months after the fatha. Our friends who’d arrived before me were given control of a police district. I was also given a job there. Currently, I, along with a few other mujahedin, man checkpoints on the road.

Around my second month, I became fed up with this life and intended to leave the Emirate and start a small business. My friends drew me back from that, saying: If we all leave, who will run the government and what will happen to the Emirate? Living in a place where you don’t understand the language and don’t fit in with its environment isn’t easy, especially for a mujahed. Praise be to Allah, it’s now more than a year since I’ve been in Kabul. I only go to Kandahar every four or five months. Unlike others, the people of Loy Kandahar [Greater Kandahar] are very resistant to being away from family.

I hadn’t visited Kabul before. I thought Kabul would be a city full of evil. In fact, it’s not as evil as we assumed. I don’t know if all that was eliminated by the mujahedin or if we were mistaken about that from the beginning.

In Kabul, it’s very difficult for us to live. When we sometimes go to Haji mullah sahib’s [referring to a senior commander] home, it’s a very small place with an inflated rent. Unlike homes in Kandahar, people only have three rooms in a pocket-sized apartment. There is no separate guestroom.

Although now we can go everywhere without fear, the war is over, and an Islamic system is in place, it’s still difficult not to miss the days of the jihad. At that time, we weren’t under strict supervision, we weren’t curbed because the Emirate needed us, and as a consequence, they provided us with more freedom. Now, on the contrary, they don’t need us as much as they did at that time. Besides, they pay us money. There is a proverb in our area that money is like a shackle. Now, if we complain, or don’t come to work, or disobey the rules, they cut our salary. Unlike jihad, now particularly, when the battles are long gone and the risk is zero, the Emirate could find countless people to work with them in return for a salary.

I spend most of my time with my fellow Taleban. On Fridays, we go on mila [picnic] to Qargha, Paghman, or other places. From Saturday to Thursday, we’re busy manning the checkpoints day and night, but I’m trying to get a job in Kandahar.

What do the interviewees’ experiences of their new life tell us?

At the end of the war, the gravest risks to which our interviewees had been exposed, of bombardments and night raids, evaporated. They were the winning party and, as such, these rural Taleban fighters were rewarded with government jobs and significant privileges. Yet, victory also precipitated many difficulties for them. City life is so absolutely different from what they were used to, presenting unexpected problems but also unexpected delights. Three of our interviewees said they were going to bring their families and live permanently in Kabul, whereas two said they would leave them in the village and are actually hoping to be able to leave Kabul themselves at some point.

Broadly speaking, all of our interviewees preferred their time as fighters in what they considered a jihad. Then, their lives were simple. They had few responsibilities or complications. Everything they faced was associated with war and the battlefield and their behaviour was bound by the strict norms of the madrasa. Our interviewees perceived the jihad as a religious duty and living such a life or dying in this way was deemed a form of worship and an honour.

Integrating into the formal order of government administration has turned into a major headache for our interviewees. The old structures with which they were familiar and comfortable vanished with the takeover and the dynamics of their lives changed utterly. Interviewees remarked on how their leaders and commanders, who used to live among them, have now shut themselves away in far-off offices. They also feel the degree of sincerity shown by fighters towards each other has faded. They lost many of the freedoms they enjoyed throughout the insurgency. The shift to working within government structures has forced them to adhere to official rules and laws they never faced before. They find ‘clocking in’ for office work tedious and almost unbearable, although some said they were now getting used to the routine.

The trouble that victory has brought to their lives does not end there: they also now need to earn money to support themselves and their families, something that was not needed during the insurgency when their own expenses were covered by the movement and they were entirely exempted from family needs. Now, Taleban must provide for themselves and contribute to the family finances. The jihad, a religious duty which exempted them from such everyday concerns, is over: they now have to work for the survival of their families like everyone else. The sudden reversal of roles experienced by Taleban fighters, from being able to foment popular discontent against the corruption of the Republican government to being cast as the cause of the country’s current economic woes has made a deep impression on the respondents. Three of them mentioned this in their interviews.

For our interviewees, despite all these problems and hassles, life in peacetime Kabul has had its pleasing sides. Interviewees were delighted by the city’s sights and development and nearby places of natural beauty like Paghman and Qargha. They thought Kabul far better than their native provinces in terms of development and modern facilities. Contrary to their assumptions, most had been surprised to find both good and bad people living in Kabul as in the rural areas, and at least one pointed out that the social ills that nowadays exist in Kabul also exist in Afghanistan’s villages.

The social influence of living in an urban context on these Taleban is noticeable. Our interviewees had a negative picture of Kabul before the takeover, but living in the city has changed their perceptions. Their interaction with women has come a long way from what one could expect, given the Taleban movement’s conservatism. Our interviewee with the female classmate, for example, spoke to the author in the company of a fellow Taleb who, after the interview, jokingly told him, “Why didn’t you tell him the story about when your female classmate started a conversation with you, and you talked to her quite comfortably?” On the streets of Kabul, Taleban fighters have often given interviews and spoken to female YouTubers, an act that would have been completely forbidden throughout the movement’s past (see for example this, this and this video).

Some of our interviewees, and other Taleban, have slowly begun to look critically at their own attitudes and the way they dress and conduct themselves in public. One Taleban fighter told the author in early July 2022 that “I don’t know when we [Taleban] will learn to be like normal people. The style most of us have in Kabul [long hair and a style of wide, baggy piran tomban] is very strange at this time and in this situation. The time this style looked good is long gone and we need to adjust to these new circumstances.” The reduction in the number of Taleban carrying AK-47, M416 and M16 guns in bazaars is possibly also stemming from such considerations.

The Taleban Ministry for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice has been vehemently attempting to keep former fighters occupied with religious studies. This has been successful to some degree, but the bulk of the fighters are now both away from the strict environment of the madrasa and the movement’s rural bastions. Not only that, but working in ministries has meant their interest in religious studies has suffered significantly, with a considerable number registering themselves instead in English and computer classes, which they deem necessary if they are to strive in their new roles.

What may have prevented Taleban from undergoing a greater degree of change in attitudes and public behaviour is just how strong the norms established in the madrasa and the insurgency still are. This is in part due to the strict bonds of friendships the Taleban have built up. They still live and interact mostly with fellow Taleban and so there is a lot of mutual reinforcing of their social norms.

The conservative notions of our interviewees, who have interacted with non-Taleban, have eased a great deal. External influence and interactions with actual Kabulis have already made inroads into their thinking. However, the author has also encountered Taleban who have remained strictly within their old circles and say they dislike the city and condemn its inhabitants for not living in accordance with what they consider true Islam. They are also worried about comrades ‘back-sliding’. One scholar recently warned a gathering at a mosque in Kabul attended by the author that: “The mujahedin need to be ideologically and intellectually strengthened,” so, “they don’t fall into the traps of this shar ul-qurun [the worst of times.].”[9] Another Taleban-affiliated mullah at the same gathering said, “The possibility that we could go in the wrong direction is now at its highest, God forbid. I see many mujahedin turning away from the cause of jihad and sharia and instead chasing worldly pursuits.”

Maybe, some Taleban have wondered, should smart phones and the internet be banned for their former fighters, given they are, as claimed in an audio recording from one cleric that is circulating, among the biggest sources of “corrupt[ion] among the ranks of the mujahedin.” As to the reason why some Talebs from Kandahar prefer to stay there rather than getting jobs in the capital, according to a commander from that city who spoke to the author in December 2021, it is down to their concerns about “the immoral environment of Kabul [which] is very harmful to the faith of everyone, especially the mujahedin.”

Victory for the Taleban in August 2021 brought Afghans who had had little to do with each other suddenly face-to-face as the winning party took power in the cities. Rural and urban, fighters and civilians, madrassa and school-educated, victors and those they now rule, women outside in public with ‘open’ faces and men whose female relatives live in purdah are all now mixing.  Among some Taleban, the desire to keep the movement away from ‘city influences’ and indeed wrench the entire urban society ‘back’, as they see it, to true Islam, is strong. At the same time, others have come to have a more nuanced view of city life and a more realistic appreciation of its good and bad sides.

Edited by Kate Clark and Fabrizio Foschini

References

References
↑1 Literately, ‘Jews and Christians’, a term picked up from non-Afghan Islamist discourse and now used by Taleban generally to refer to non-Muslims.
↑2 Head and deputy of a directorate and head of a sub-directorate (amiriat) would be appointed as grades 1, 2 and 3 employees in a scale for civil servants going from 1 to 8, which the Emirate has kept from the Republic.
↑3 The post-2001 expansion of Kabul and other cities was the result of private and personal investment rather than overseas aid.
↑4 He did not talk about his second visit; perhaps it was for military purposes.
↑5 Directors and deputy directors are given a governmental vehicle.
↑6 ‘People are with you in your death and your life’ is a Pashto proverb which means that community members stand shoulder to shoulder with and help each other in ceremonies, funerals, weddings and in times of hardship.
↑7 ‘Hijab’ has a specific meaning in Afghanistan, as this AAN report explains: Strangers in Our Own Country: How Afghan women cope with life under the Islamic Emirate, stated:

Unlike other parts of the Muslim world, when Afghans refer to ‘hijab’, it is a reference to clothing that is bulky and covers both head and body and possibly face, either the chadori (burqa), which covers the face, or the abaya, with or without a niqab, or in some areas, an Iranian-style chador.
↑8 During the war, those opposed to the Taleban, government officials and others, used derogatory names for the Taleban, such as Pakistani and Punjabi, to imply they were so unpatriotic as to not even be considered Afghan.
↑9 Literally, the ‘evil of the centuries’. Many mullahs in Afghanistan say the world has almost reached its end and, 15 centuries since the Prophethood of Muhammad, which was khair al-qurun or the best of times, now is the worst when it comes to fitna (social disorder or chaos, which facilitates sin), immorality and irreligiousness.

REVISIONS:

This article was last updated on 3 Feb 2023

 

New Lives in the City: How Taleban have experienced life in Kabul
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Winter has come for Afghanistan

February 2, 2023
By Ishaan Tharoor
with Sammy Westfall
The Washington Post

January 30, 2023

For much of the past year, the West’s policymakers and analysts were possessed by one haunting question: How bad will Europe’s winter be? Energy prices on the continent surged because of the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia’s energy industry. The prospect of a deep cold spell as European governments rationed gas supplies conjured images of a bleak winter from Lviv to London, with industry going dark and pensioners scavenging for firewood.

But consider another part of the world that has receded from the West’s attention over the course of the Ukraine conflict. Afghanistan is currently in the grips of its worst winter in more than a decade. Temperatures recently plunged to below minus-34 degrees Celsius (minus-29.2 degrees Fahrenheit). Officials in the local Taliban government said the cold has been lethal, leading to more than 160 deaths over the span of about two weeks, and killing more than 70,000 livestock.

My colleague Sammy Westfall noted the details at the end of last week: “Of the 162 people who have died because of the cold weather since Jan. 10, more than half died in the past week, said Shafiullah Rahimi, a spokesman for the Ministry of Disaster Management, Reuters reported Thursday. Afghans have been dying of hypothermia, as well as carbon monoxide poisoning and gas leakage, amid a widespread lack of heating systems, local outlet Tolo News reported.” The death toll is expected to rise as communities in rural areas dig themselves out of the snow.

The dismal conditions have struck a society ill-equipped to cope. Afghanistan is already buckling under the stress of a rolling humanitarian crisis, triggered by years of drought and the economic implosion that followed the Taliban’s takeover in 2021. The country’s foreign reserves are frozen by U.S. sanctions; its banking system has collapsed, partially due to the disappearance of foreign aid; and the price of ordinary goods — including firewood and coal — have skyrocketed. Two-thirds of the country’s 40 million people will likely require humanitarian assistance of some form in 2023, including some 15 million children. Roughly half the country may face acute food insecurity.

Afghanistan imports the bulk of its electricity from its neighbors and the country is accustomed to shortages and power cuts. But the blackouts this winter have proved all the more miserable, forcing families in some instances to choose between feeding themselves or trying to keep warm. Many are struggling to do either.

“If we buy coal and wood, then we won’t be able to buy food,” a woman named Maryam in Samangan province, north of the Hindu Kush mountain range, told Al Jazeera. “This is the coldest winter of my life, and I don’t know how we will survive it without food or heat.”

Sharafuddin, a resident of the city of Herat, told Radio Azadi last week: “During the cold nights, we are awake with our children and cannot sleep. It is already midday, and I have neither had breakfast nor drank tea. … I’m sitting here praying to God.”

The country’s hospitals are “on life support,” according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. A health worker in Kabul described to the New Humanitarian what happened when her clinic had to turn off its generator after continuous use: “We had to shut it for two hours, and we told the mothers to find a way to warm their newborns. If we kept them in the incubators without electricity they would freeze. If we took them out, they could have problems breathing.”

The difficulty of the situation is exacerbated by the defiance and extremism of the Taliban authorities. Since seizing power 18 months ago, the fundamentalist Islamist movement has set about reversing the legacy of two decades of U.S.-backed government, banning girls from secondary schools, then universities and most recently barring women from working in domestic or foreign-backed nongovernment organizations, many of which are instrumental in delivering what meager aid is available to the Afghan public.

The Taliban, whose pariah government in Kabul is not recognized by the international community, has shown little inclination to bend to either local or outside anger over these discriminatory moves. Individual governments, even those that have a long history of dealings with the Taliban, like Qatar and Pakistan, claim to have little leverage over the factions of the Taliban dictating policy on the ground in Afghanistan. The United States has limited diplomatic tools beyond more targeted sanctions to place more pressure on the Taliban.

U.N. officials have pressed the Taliban to allow exemptions for female workers in the health nongovernmental organizations, a concession that shows it’s possible to chip away at the Islamists’ entrenched position. “We have not seen the history of the Taliban reversing any edict,” U.N. Deputy Secretary General Amina Mohammed told reporters after visiting the country earlier this month. “What we have seen is exemptions that, hopefully, if we keep pushing them, they will water down those edicts to a point where we will get women and girls back into school and into the workplace.” She added that “a lot of what we have to deal with is how we travel the Taliban from the 13th century to the 21st. And that’s, that’s a journey.”

Martin Griffiths, the U.N.’s humanitarian chief who also recently traveled to Afghanistan, said it was important for his organization and other agencies to be able to work with women and necessary for the Taliban to make “practical exceptions” given the circumstances.

“We don’t have time,” Griffiths said. “The winter is with us, people are dying, famine is looming.”
Winter has come for Afghanistan
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Wrestling with a Humanitarian Dilemma in Afghanistan

January 31, 2023

William Byrd, Ph.D.

United States Institute of Peace

Wednesday, January 25, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conditionality for Humanitarian Assistance?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reducing Dependence on U.N. Cash Shipments

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

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

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

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

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

Wrestling with a Humanitarian Dilemma in Afghanistan
read more

To Help Afghanistan, Engage Its Political Opposition

January 31, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Help Afghanistan, Engage Its Political Opposition
read more

Wrestling with a Humanitarian Dilemma in Afghanistan

January 27, 2023

William Byrd, Ph.D.

United States Institute of Peace

Wednesday, January 25, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conditionality for Humanitarian Assistance?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reducing Dependence on U.N. Cash Shipments

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

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

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

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

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

Wrestling with a Humanitarian Dilemma in Afghanistan
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The Daily Hustle: How Afghan women working for NGOs are coping with the Taleban ban

January 27, 2023

Roxanna Shapour

Afghanistan Analysts Network

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facing an uncertain future

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making plans to cope

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

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

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

Sonita moves between hope and dejection

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

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

Edited by Roxanna Shapour

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

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

Mr. Kasza served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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

And I helped build Vladimir Putin’s foreign legion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 20, 2023
By Fawzia Koofi

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

The New York Times

20 Jan 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 18, 2023

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

United States Institute of Peace

Thursday, January 12, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What impact will these bans have within Afghanistan?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is there a way out?

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 14, 2023

The New York Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That the refugee crisis is manageable, not insoluble.

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

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

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

What are some concrete steps that can be taken?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any final thoughts for the Davos conferees?

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

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

A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 17, 2023
As Humanitarian Crises Escalate, So Do Demands to End Them
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