Taleban Bans on Drugs: What is the Emirate’s counter-narcotics agenda?

June 15, 2023

Jelena Bjelica • Fabrizio Foschini

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

The opium ban

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cannabis ban

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

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

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

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

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

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

What about meth?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can the bans be sustained?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edited by Kate Clark

References

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

In the name of Allah, the most merciful

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

Number: (30)

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

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

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

Wa al-salam [Regards]

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 9, 2023

BY: William Byrd, Ph.D.

United States Institute of Peace

Thursday, June 8, 2023 /

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

The Taliban’s Highly Successful Opium Ban

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

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

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

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

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

Immediate Economic Damage

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

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

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

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

Delayed and Longer-term Impacts

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

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

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

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

What Happens Next?

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

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

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

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

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

International Response?

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

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

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

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

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

The Taliban’s Successful Opium Ban is Bad for Afghans and the World
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The Growing Threat of the Islamic State in Afghanistan and South Asia

June 9, 2023

BY: Abdul Sayed;  Tore Refslund Hamming

United States Institute of Peace

Wednesday, June 7, 2023

When the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in 2021, counterterrorism experts were alarmed at the possible resurgence of Islamist terrorist groups within the country. This Special Report lays out why those concerns, particularly about the regional Islamic State affiliate known as Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), were well-founded. The report discusses the likely trajectory of ISKP’s activities in South Asia and recommends measures to minimize potential threats to the West and build regional resilience to extremism.

Summary

  • Since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in August 2021, the threat posed by terrorism in the region has grown. The primary threat, however, is neither the Taliban nor their close ally al-Qaeda, but the Islamic State’s regional affiliate the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP).
  • ISKP’s “core” territory remains Afghanistan and Pakistan. Although ISKP first emerged as a Pakistani-dominated network, it soon focused on Afghanistan. It has switched its strategy there from controlling territory to conducting urban warfare. It posed a serious security threat to the former Afghan government and now seeks to disrupt the Taliban’s efforts to govern.
  • The Islamic State’s presence in South Asia is not limited to Afghanistan and Pakistan but extends to include “periphery” territory, including India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, the Maldives, and Sri Lanka. In these periphery states, however, the Islamic State faces a struggle for relevance in the face of competition with rival militant groups and strong counterterrorism pressure.
  • ISKP poses a growing threat to the West and its South Asian partners, and ISKP’s alarming potential calls for the West to take a variety of countermeasures, including even limited counterterrorism cooperation with the Taliban.

About the Report

This report analyzes the origin, status, and future of the Islamic State in South Asia and the threat it may pose to the West. Drawing on primary sources issued by ISKP and associated networks and individuals, the report explores the situation and prospects of the Islamic State not only in its regional “core” territory of Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also in its “periphery” territory, including India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. The work was supported by the Asia Center at the United States Institute of Peace.

About the Author

Abdul Sayed is an independent researcher on jihadism and the politics and security of the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. Tore Refslund Hamming is senior research fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicali-sation at King’s College London and director of the research consultancy Refslund Analytics.

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The Growing Threat of the Islamic State in Afghanistan and South Asia
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The Daily Hustle: Being a widow in Afghanistan

June 5, 2023

Roxanna Shapour

Afghanistan Analysts Network

The word most often used by Afghans to refer to widows is bisarparast (without someone to take care of you). In Afghanistan’s highly patriarchal society, where men are expected to be the breadwinners and opportunities for women to work are relatively few, being a widow is likely to be socially and economically precarious. They are often stigmatised, passed over for jobs and considered burdens on their families. One of the legacies of almost a half-century of war in Afghanistan it the high number of widows – there are no official statistics, but news reports put their number at two million or more. The position of widows without sons is even more insecure, especially since the Taleban takeover has intensified the requirement for women to have a close male relative to act as a chaperone (mahram) and legal guardian. The subject of our latest Daily Hustle is such a widow, an older woman who never had children and who has learned to live on her wits to survive widowhood, economic upheaval and her marginal status in society. 

A daughter’s legacy 

There is a pear tree outside the room in the house that I share with my three brothers and their families. It grew from a cutting taken by my father from a tree in his father’s garden in our ancestral village, brought with him to Kabul when he and my mother moved here in search of work and a better place to raise a family. This is the house I grew up in and this room is my birthright. The room and the pear tree outside its window – a daughter’s inheritance amounts to half of a son’s share – are the only things I own in this world .

I am the only daughter and the youngest in my family. I’m also a childless widow.

I spent my girlhood at home doing chores and caring for my parents, who, by that time, were ailing and needed me to look after them. So, I never expected to get married. But after my mother died, my father came home one day with a man he said had asked for my hand. I was 25 years old – an old maid by Afghan standards – and lucky to have found a husband. He was a distant relative several years older than me, with a grown son from his first marriage. His first wife had died in childbirth and my husband, unable to care for his son, had left him in the care of his grandmother. That son still lived in our remote village in Afghanistan’s central highlands.

Our wedding night was the first I had spent away from my father’s house. We lived in the piyada khana (outbuilding) at the bottom of the garden of the guesthouse of the small NGO where my husband worked as a driver and odd-job man. He was a gentle, caring man with a great sense of humour. He always treated me with respect. He never beat me and never mistreated me. Eventually, the NGO also hired me as a cleaner and we settled into a routine. Later, his son and wife came to Kabul in search of work and lived with us for a time before they moved into their own place and got going on starting their own family. These were happy years and I thought they would last forever.

The precarious life of a widow

My husband died unexpectedly from a heart attack ten years after I married him. I had to move back to my room in my father’s house. Society cannot abide a woman living alone in a house full of strangers without a mahram. By then, my brothers were married and had children of their own. At first, they weren’t happy giving me back my room, but they came around to the idea when they realised I could contribute to household expenses and ease their financial burdens. With the help of my stepson, I fixed my room, put carpeting down and bought new toshaks (floor cushion or narrow mattresses). Several months later, the manager of the NGO gave me an old TV that was no longer being used in the guesthouse. The arrival of the TV raised my status in the household and my room became the gathering place in the evenings. When we had electricity, we used to watch Turkish soap operas over dinner.

Then, the NGO closed its guesthouse and I was suddenly without a job. I had worked there for 15 years and never considered the possibility that I might lose my livelihood. It was the only job I had ever had and I didn’t know how to find another. My old colleagues used their contacts to find me jobs, but they never lasted. First, there was the woman who didn’t like how I cleaned and thought I was too old and, later, a foreign organisation with a big guesthouse in Wazir Akbar Khan [an affluent neighbourhood in Kabul]. That job paid well, but the NGO eventually downsized and moved its staff into one of the big compounds near the airport. I again lost my job.

After my husband died, I’d been forced to start thinking about my future. My late husband was a good man, but not so good at planning for the future or putting away a nest egg for a rainy day. I used to give him all my salary, so I had no savings. I had been left only with the room I’d inherited from my father. I also knew I couldn’t count on my brothers for financial support. Instead, it was my stepson and his wife who were my safety net.[1] He had a good job and he and his wife are warm and generous people, but their family was growing and I couldn’t contemplate having to impose on their goodwill into my old age. So, every month, I started saving some of my salary. I resisted all efforts to get me to open a bank account. Instead, I bought gold, mostly bangles as well as other gold trinkets – savings that I could see and touch and keep on my person at all times.

Facing an uncertain future 

Finally, after two years of working sporadically and living mostly on the generosity of my stepson, I was introduced to a young couple who’d moved back to Afghanistan from America. The wife was pregnant and they needed someone to clean the house and care for the baby when it was born. I worked for this family for five years. I was there when their daughter took her first steps and spoke her first words and later, also, when they came back from America with their second daughter. I had grown to love this joyful young family and knew they cared for me in return.

But this was not to last. Afghanistan was changing. There were peace talks in Doha and rumours that the Taleban were going to come back to power soon. Finally, [President] Ashraf Ghani ran away and the Taleban came into Kabul the same day. The young couple I worked for started making plans to leave the country. When the Taleban took power, their jobs disappeared and they decided to return to America, where their families lived and where they had a support system. So, on a cold December morning, several months after the Taleban came back to Kabul, they left. There were tears and hugs and promises that they’d soon return.

Their departure took an emotional and financial toll on me. Once again, I was facing an uncertain future. Most people were busy making plans to leave Afghanistan and there were no jobs to be had for a middle-aged widow. My former colleagues, who’d helped me find work in the past, were no longer in Afghanistan. They called to check I was OK and some occasionally sent money. Luckily, I’d grown my savings into a long row of gold bracelets and I had some cash – several months’ salary – that the family had given me before they left. When the banks closed after the Taleban takeover, my gold bracelets kept food on the table for my brothers and my stepson’s family. I sold them one by one and got a good price for them too. The price of gold had gone up and I was able to sell them for much more than I’d paid. But with each bracelet sold, I watched my little nest egg dwindle and still I had no job.

Counting my blessings

I am truly blessed to have people who care about me. Once again, friends and former colleagues clamoured to help. Finally, with the help of a former colleague, I got a job cleaning a small organisation’s office. The work is easy, but the pay is low. I don’t think I can ever make enough money to replenish my savings. Still, I’m not complaining. For now, I earn enough to make ends meet and keep my sisters-in-law from complaining that they might have another mouth to feed.

On my way to work every morning, I walk past a group of burqa-clad women, each indistinguishable from the next, huddled together in front of the neighbourhood bakery. They are widows like me. They sit there all day, waiting for a kind passer-by or the baker to give them some bread. They must be from the neighbourhood. I probably know some of them, but any gesture of recognition would be a terrible breach of their abero (dignity). If I have any extra money, I buy a few pieces of bread for them. As I walk away, I say a prayer for them and thank God for his blessings.

Edited by Roxanna Shapour

References

References
↑1 This is unusual and not something expected of a stepson in Afghan culture. Rather, it should be a widow’s birth family, especially her brothers, who look after her, if needed.

 

The Daily Hustle: Being a widow in Afghanistan
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Who Are the Taliban Now?

June 2, 2023

Steve Coll

Hassan Abbas’s book surveys the second Islamic Emirate’s ideology and leading personalities and probes its internal tensions.

The New York Review of Books

June 22, 2023 issue

The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan After the Americans Left

by Hassan Abbas

Yale University Press, 286 pp., $26.00

Nearly two years after the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul, the UN refers to the regime only as “the de facto authorities,” to avoid any hint of formal recognition of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as the Taliban call their government. By any name, the Taliban today control Afghanistan’s territory, as well as federal ministries and local administrations. They also preside over a nation in severe crisis. Food insecurity haunts at least half of the population; a country shattered by more than four decades of war again faces the shadow of famine.

A succession of edicts by Taliban clerics has disrupted the delivery of vital international aid. The Taliban have forbidden girls and women from attending school beyond sixth grade and from working for NGOs, prompting dozens of international aid groups to suspend or reduce operations. In April the Taliban extended their work ban to the four hundred Afghan women employed by the UN, a decision that threatens about $3 billion in annual food, medical, and other humanitarian assistance. (The US and other wealthy donor nations funnel their Afghan aid mainly through UN agencies, to prevent the Taliban from controlling the funds.)

The Biden administration and European governments have many quarrels with the Taliban, but the regime’s policies denying education and work to women lie at the heart of the current emergency over international aid. “This extreme situation of institutionalised gender-based discrimination in Afghanistan is unparalleled anywhere in the world,” Richard Bennett, the UN’s special rapporteur for human rights in Afghanistan, and Dorothy Estrada-Tanck, chair of a UN working group on gender discrimination, reported in May, after an eight-day visit to the country. The Taliban’s practices amounted to an “apparent…crime against humanity,” they concluded.

The Taliban’s position is that their gender policies are an internal matter and that shielding Afghan women from foreign-run workplaces is necessary to prevent sin.

During the Taliban’s earlier stint in power, from the mid-1990s until their overthrow after September 11, the movement banned women from working outside the home for NGOs, the UN, universities, and most government agencies, although it did allow women, under restrictions, to work for private businesses and occasionally in occupations such as midwifery, as it does now. Movement spokesmen say that the bans on female education are temporary while the regime works out acceptable forms of supervision and gender segregation in classrooms. Yet in view of the authorities’ tightening of restrictions, and the Taliban’s history of denying education to women and girls, it is doubtful they will ever adopt policies acceptable to the West.

These days, triumphant after their defeat of America and “half-believing” that they don’t need international aid groups at all, the Taliban see foreign-run organizations as “an even greater threat,” as Kate Clark of the Afghanistan Analysts Network wrote recently. The movement’s policies toward women and girls have left the UN and its aid delivery partners with only terrible choices, she noted: comply with discriminatory rules that may violate international law, ignore or finesse the rules and put local employees at risk of Taliban punishments, or withhold food and medical aid from a population in acute need.

Is there a way to prevent yet more suffering by the Afghan people under Taliban rule? The questions of who the new Taliban are, what makes them different from the regime of the 1990s, and how the world should manage them are subjects of Hassan Abbas’s The Return of the Taliban, which surveys the second Islamic Emirate’s ideology and leading personalities while probing its internal tensions. Abbas, a Tufts-educated scholar and former senior Pakistani police officer who wrote an illuminating earlier book about the Taliban,

invites us to take them seriously, and the questions he explores are difficult and important. They are also largely ignored in the US, where the Biden administration and the Republican Party have turned their backs on America’s painful failure in Afghanistan, or else mined the disaster’s controversies for partisan talking points that have little bearing on the present situation.

The Taliban have established their second emirate on the rubble of the Islamic Republic constructed and defended by the United States and NATO allies after September 11, a project that exacted an enormous cost in lives and resources. After the US-led invasion of 2001, war against the Taliban and terrorist groups sheltered by the movement killed more than six thousand American military service members and contractors, and roughly 165,000 Afghans, including about 50,000 civilians. Military operations and reconstruction cost more than $1 trillion.

Initially vanquished, the Taliban used sanctuary and support in Pakistan to mount a gradual comeback as a guerrilla force, drawing NATO into a grinding stalemate that proved politically unsustainable. The Trump administration negotiated an exit of US forces in exchange for minimal concessions by the Taliban, and when Joe Biden announced a final departure in April 2021, the Islamic Republic collapsed even faster than the most pessimistic analysts had forecasted. In August 2021 President Ashraf Ghani fled by helicopter, and the US evacuated personnel and at-risk Afghans amid infamous scenes at the Kabul airport.

The Taliban of 2023 are not the same as the Taliban of the 1990s. Many of the movement’s cadres under arms today were toddlers or not yet born at the time of the September 11 attacks. They grew up as part of South Asia’s smartphone and social media generation, even as they fought to overthrow the US-forged Kabul republic, whose donors made digital technology available across Afghanistan. During the 1990s the Taliban banned cameras, tape recorders, and other modern gadgets. After September 11 they modified those doctrines and embraced online media as a propaganda vehicle. Taliban leaders today retain large Twitter followings and benefit from a sophisticated social media presence.

The rise of the digital Taliban may be ironic, but it should not be misunderstood as evidence of some new accommodation of global norms. “I will not let the disbelievers implement their rules on us,” Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban’s emir and supreme leader, who is in his mid-seventies, told a gathering of clerics and tribal leaders in July 2022. “Now is the time for us to take complete control. We do not want to live according to others’ expectations nor will we deal with them even if they use an atomic bomb on us.”

That month the chief justice of Afghanistan’s Supreme Court, Abdul Hakim Haqqani, published a book entitled The Islamic Emirate and Its System, a manifesto for Taliban governance with an introduction by Hibatullah. The work “brims with fear and insecurity,” Abbas writes, as well as misogyny and intolerance of minorities. Crucially, the volume affirms the emir’s absolute power and a religious obligation to obey him.

Hibatullah is the third Taliban supreme leader and the one most obviously concerned with Islamic jurisprudence. Mullah Mohammad Omar, the deceased founding emir, was a conservative rural cleric, but he also gained renown among his followers as a guerrilla fighter who lost an eye battling Soviet forces during the 1980s. His successor, Mullah Akhtar Mansour—who was killed in Pakistan in May 2016 by a US drone strike—was a more worldly figure, a hefty former aviation minister who reportedly ran sanctions-busting endeavors, frequented Dubai, and maintained ties with Iran. By comparison, Hibatullah is self-isolating and scholarly. He served as deputy chief justice on the Supreme Court during the 1990s. After the US-led invasion of 2001 he followed other Taliban leaders to safety in Pakistan, where he supervised a madrassa and joined the Taliban’s ruling council. According to Abbas, following Hibatullah’s appointment as emir, he got rid of Mansour’s team. He governs today mainly from Kandahar, the Taliban’s birthplace.

In 2018 Donald Trump appointed Zalmay Khalilzad, a former US ambassador to Afghanistan, to negotiate with the Taliban for a withdrawal of American forces. Khalilzad was one of a number of international diplomats who saw promise in the attitudes of Taliban negotiators who represented the movement at a political office in Qatar. These men (all men, of course) included Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, now a deputy prime minister. According to Khalilzad, Baradar expressed openness to a deal in which the Taliban might share power with non-Taliban Afghan leaders, and it was certainly Baradar who helped to seal the Doha Agreement of February 2020, whereby the US pledged to pull out its military forces from Afghanistan by May 2021 in exchange for Taliban counterterrorism pledges.

Since the Taliban took power, their policymaking has been dominated by Hibatullah’s harsh, idiosyncratic ideas about Islamic law and society, even as Baradar and other figures from the Qatar office have taken positions in the new cabinet. Looking back, we can see—as Afghan and other skeptics of the Taliban’s diplomacy warned at the time—that Hibatullah used his Doha negotiators as American presidents often use State Department diplomats in treaty talks: they were not making decisions but rather cultivating international credibility while talking and maneuvering their way to the best deal possible. As Abbas notes, “At the end of the day, Hibatullah and Baradar made a great team for the Taliban.”

Hibatullah’s leadership has reaffirmed that the Taliban’s cohesion depends on the authority and supremacy of the emir and the advice of his favored religious scholars. The supreme leader’s views on female education are rejected by many international scholars of Islamic law in Muslim-majority countries. Yet in Afghanistan today, only Hibatullah can change the rules, and he does not show any sign of doing so.

Supreme though he may be, Hibatullah is not the Taliban’s only powerful figure. The costs Afghanistan is enduring because of his edicts have given rise to persistent rumors of splits within the government—and even, this year, some notable if fleeting public evidence of internal dissent. In addition to threatening humanitarian aid, Hibatullah’s policies all but guarantee that neither the US nor European governments will formally recognize the emirate, help to fund the Afghan economy, or ease travel sanctions on Taliban leaders.

It is a measure of the worldwide unacceptability of the Islamic Emirate’s gender policies and other forms of extremism that, despite Afghanistan’s mineral wealth and crossroads location, not a single nation has yet formally recognized the government, although about a dozen countries—including Russia, China, and Pakistan—have accepted Taliban diplomats. It is fair to ask, as Abbas does, how long pragmatic Taliban leaders who have economic interests or who seek influence beyond Afghanistan’s borders will put up with Hibatullah’s decisions.

The second most powerful person in Afghanistan today is probably Sirajuddin Haqqani, the minister of interior affairs and the leader of an eponymous network founded by his late father, Jalaluddin. The Haqqanis pledge loyalty to the Taliban’s emir but are seen as more of a coalition partner than a subordinate faction. The family has long had ties to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the major Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI. (Jalaluddin was also a paid ally of the CIA during the 1980s, when he fought against the Soviets.) From their base in eastern Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan, the Haqqanis have commanded thousands of guerrillas, run businesses, and founded Islamic seminaries. During the US war, their network carried out ferocious attacks, suicide bombings, and assassinations that killed thousands of Afghan civilians. The US and the UN have designated Sirajuddin and other family members as terrorists.

Nonetheless, Sirajuddin has lately positioned himself as a practical figure seeking to normalize Afghanistan’s place in the world. Last year he told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, “We would like to have good relations with the United States and the international community based on rules and principles that exist in the rest of the world.” In February, without naming the emir, Sirajuddin hinted publicly at his network’s dissatisfaction with Hibatullah’s leadership. “Monopolizing power and hurting the reputation of the entire system are not to our benefit,” he said in a speech. “The situation cannot be tolerated.”

Not all Taliban leaders want to keep women and girls locked up at home. After the Taliban’s overthrow in 2001, some movement leaders living in exile in Qatar and Pakistan, or underground inside Afghanistan, sent their daughters to secondary school and even university.

Today some Taliban ministers may recognize how Afghanistan changed during the US-led war, which poured tens of billions of dollars into the country and promoted urbanization. A phantasmagoria of images and ideas—including Western ones—enter Afghan homes on social media. Literacy rates for women and men have risen, and a generation of girls grew up with a new set of expectations. The Taliban, without yielding their extremely conservative principles, have already adapted some of their rules to accommodate realities of the digital era. Some cabinet-level leaders seem clearly willing to also update their policies to allow Afghan girls and women—not just those related to powerful Taliban figures—greater scope to study and work.

Another perceived Young Turk in the Taliban cabinet is the defense minister, Mullah Yaqoob Mujahid, who is in his early thirties and is a son of Mullah Omar. He told NPR’s Steve Inskeep last year that it was “obvious” that he wanted better relations with the US. As the rising scion of a well-known family, he belongs to a class of dynastic politicians familiar across South Asia. Photographed on an official visit to Qatar last year, he looked at ease aboard his government jet and during conversations with Qatari leaders. Earlier this year, following Sirajuddin’s speech, Yaqoob too made remarks that were seen as obliquely critical of Hibatullah.

Abbas’s take is that “the battle lines…are drawn” between “the relatively pragmatic Taliban in Kabul and their highly conservative counterparts” in Kandahar. Yet, he observes, the divisions have resulted only in “policy paralysis.” In fact, the movement is not likely to crack up violently over issues like female education, even if such policies cause international isolation. The Taliban have a long record of maintaining military and political unity under severe pressure. And it is not obvious why Sirajuddin or Yaqoob (who do not get on with each other, according to Abbas) would risk their power in a confrontation with the supreme leader over women’s rights, a favored cause of the very infidel powers that the Taliban fought for two decades to expel from Afghanistan.

Some sort of political transition in Kabul that tests the contours of Taliban factionalism seems more likely during the next year or two than an ideological split does. Mullah Hassan Akhund, the prime minister, who is reportedly in his seventies, “is believed to be quite ill,” Abbas reports, and in May Maulvi Abdul Kabir was named as a temporary replacement. Kabir participated in the Doha talks with the United States, but it is unclear whether his appointment portends a change in direction on access to education or work.

We should be very cautious about forecasting changes to the Taliban’s policies toward women or in any other field. Again and again in assessing the Taliban, American and European diplomats have assumed that its leaders will act as conventional politicians might, adjusting their doctrine to obtain funding and diplomatic legitimacy. But the Taliban’s empowered clerical leaders believe they have been called by God to wage an eternal war of ideas against devilish enemies of Islam and must remain vigilant. They do not describe this conflict as a material one or as a struggle to be managed through the give-and-take of international politics. As Hibatullah explained in his speech last year:

Infidels and foreigners were not fighting us for territory or money. They were fighting against our faith and beliefs to stop the practice of Islam and jihad. This fighting is still not over and will continue until the end of times…. We have not done any kind of consultations with them and will never do so in future.

On July 31, 2022, a missile fired by a US drone killed Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaeda, as he stood on the balcony of a home in a comfortable quarter of Kabul. Al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s successor, was a guest of the Haqqani network, according to the White House. The strike showed that the CIA could still assassinate an al-Qaeda leader even without American troops and intelligence officers in Afghanistan, a fact that offered credence to the Biden administration’s argument that the US withdrawal from the country wouldn’t sacrifice its counterterrorism goals. Yet it also offered vivid evidence of the persistent presence of globally ambitious terrorist groups in Afghanistan, and of Taliban collaboration with some of them.

The Taliban’s revived rule over Afghanistan has dramatically reduced violence in the country, yet an array of independent armed groups still operates there. Some, like al-Qaeda, whose presence in Afghanistan was the reason the US invaded in the first place, remain allied with the Taliban, but one formidable group, the Islamic State–Khorasan Province, or ISIS-K, has battled the Taliban repeatedly. ISIS-K is a branch of the group that originated in Iraq; it emerged in Afghanistan around 2015. Since the Taliban’s takeover, ISIS-K has assassinated Taliban leaders, mounted attacks in a dozen provinces, and carried out devastating bombings inside Kabul.

During the US-led evacuation through Kabul’s airport, an ISIS-K suicide bomber killed eleven US Marines, a Fleet Marine Force corpsman, a US Army soldier, and more than 170 Afghans. Defeating the group is the most obvious interest shared by the US and the second Islamic Emirate. David Cohen, the CIA’s deputy director, met with Taliban leaders in Qatar last fall to discuss counterterrorism, and American advocates for greater engagement with the Taliban often place counterterrorism at the top of their agenda. In late April, the White House announced that the Taliban had killed the latest leader of ISIS-K. It is unclear whether the CIA and the Taliban today maintain contact or cooperate in any way against ISIS-K, but they might.

In addition to ISIS-K, former commanders of Ashraf Ghani’s security forces have mounted scattered armed resistance against the Taliban. The most visible group is the National Resistance Front (NRF), led by Ahmad Massoud, the British-educated son of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the legendary anti-Soviet resistance fighter assassinated by al-Qaeda shortly before September 11. The NRF has fought the Taliban in and around Massoud’s former stronghold in Panjshir Valley, but it does not currently threaten the Kabul regime militarily. It is one of several groups operating mainly from exile that have embarked on political programs to establish a broad-based anti-Taliban opposition.

Shamed by defeat and focused on Ukraine and other priorities, US and European governments have taken little interest in the political potential of the evacuated Afghan diaspora—a fractured, struggling, and traumatized population whose leaders include figures from the Islamic Republic now discredited among their own people. In addition to the exiles, a sizable but largely unmapped population of Afghans inside the country either oppose the Taliban (judging by occasional daring public protests) or merely wish to have a say in their country’s governance and direction. The more the second Islamic Emirate acts as a dictatorship and excludes huge numbers of its people from opportunity and influence, the more important these non-Taliban Afghans are likely to become—whether or not international governments help them.

In The Return of the Taliban, Abbas provides a well-informed survey of the second Islamic Emirate through 2022. The book’s tone is oddly conversational, however, and the text is laced with exclamation points—more a professor’s riffing lecture than a narrative or well-organized argument. Abbas’s main conclusion is that the Taliban of today are adapting to governance and have “proven to be relatively pragmatic.” This is a hard judgment to accept, unless the standard of comparison is merely the pre-digital dystopia of the first Islamic Emirate. Since 2021, despite being urged by such Islamic allies as Pakistan and Qatar to form a government that includes non-Taliban figures and a fair representation of Afghanistan’s ethnic diversity, Taliban leaders—who are almost all Pashtun, members of the country’s largest ethnic group—have failed to do either.

Abbas argues forcefully for engagement with the Taliban regime, nonetheless, noting that this “does not in any sense equate with endorsement.” He writes, “Engaging with the Taliban will, at the very worst, result in the inflation of their egos—and at best will restore life to a nation and people who have long deserved peace and prosperity.”

In some respects, this argument is uncontroversial and is already accepted in Washington and European capitals. The US, Europe, and neighboring countries such as Pakistan and Iran have an interest in preventing a humanitarian catastrophe in Afghanistan that might produce a total collapse of the state and yet more destabilizing emigration by desperate Afghans. Biden administration special representative Thomas West and EU and UN envoys have regularly engaged with the Taliban on humanitarian aid and technical efforts to improve the country’s banking system and private market.

Since Hibatullah has reaffirmed the Taliban’s ban on university and secondary education for women and girls, and tightened work rules, the Biden administration has pulled back some, but it remains committed to providing humanitarian relief through UN agencies—assuming that the UN can find a way to work under the Taliban’s gender restrictions.

The questions get thornier if diplomatic engagement ranges beyond emergency aid into areas such as counterterrorism, economic reconstruction, and counternarcotics. (Afghanistan has been the source of about four fifths of the world’s opium, but the Taliban announced a ban on poppy cultivation last year, though it isn’t clear how effective the ban will be.) Opponents of further engagement argue that to talk and bargain with the Taliban on matters beyond humanitarian aid is to implicitly legitimize their gender and human rights policies, and their tolerance of terrorists.

In any event, the language of professional diplomacy typical in this sort of sustained negotiation—the search for “leverage” to fashion a “quid pro quo”—seems misplaced. All of the Taliban’s leaders, whether perceived as extreme hard-liners or not, are under the impression that they won a great and historic military victory over the world’s superpower, a victory ordained by God, and they are not likely to be moved by US leverage or enticed by promises of financial investment, if this would require them to compromise the values that underpinned their triumph.

One problem with Abbas’s argument about engagement is that it is too narrow. Afghanistan is not only the Taliban. The Afghan diaspora includes politically active women flown out of the country by the US and European governments for their protection. They and many thousands of younger people seek a voice in their country’s future, judging by their social media postings. For the US and Europe, engagement with this other Afghanistan—supporting the diaspora’s new and unexpected lives as refugees and empowering them to argue about Afghanistan’s direction—is surely as important as engagement with Hibatullah’s regime. The Biden administration—led by Thomas West and Rina Amiri, the US special envoy for Afghan women, girls, and human rights—has done this by continuing to fund Afghan civil society groups since the withdrawal, even if they must work from exile. Yet the US and its major allies have developed no meaningful political strategy to challenge the Taliban’s monopoly on power in Kabul or nurture credible alternatives to them.

The Biden administration allowed the Afghan embassy in Washington to close in March 2022, depriving both the Taliban and their opponents of access to the building—a telling sign of the administration’s caution. Infuriatingly, it has botched the one part of Afghan policy it has the greatest power to control—clearing the enormous backlog of visa applications by the tens of thousands of eligible Afghans who served the US after 2001 but were left behind in the 2021 evacuation. These people remain at risk of Taliban persecution. The administration insists that it is speeding up visa paperwork, but its record to date is indefensible.

How, exactly, to support Afghan exiles who seek to end or change Taliban rule is a fraught subject. The Soviet invasion of 1979 ignited more than four decades of civil war exacerbated by outsiders—not least the US—who have fostered violence in the name of Afghanistan’s “liberation.” Neither the Biden administration nor any other government currently advocates arming the Taliban’s opposition. But there are unsettled debates over how severely to sanction Taliban leaders and whether to more actively support a political opposition—for instance, by setting up a political office in Qatar similar to the one the Taliban enjoyed. If Hibatullah’s policies on women’s education and work do not change, international human rights advocates and exiled Afghan women, buoyed by global public opinion, will surely challenge the status quo in American and European political strategy—as they already have since 2021, by pushing the Biden administration to empower Amiri’s role at the State Department and by helping to place gender rights consistently at the top of the UN and EU agendas. The Taliban are a fact of life in global politics, but so are international law and the worldwide movement to improve the status of women and girls.

There is something repetitive, performative, and self-deluding in America’s search for leverage over the second Islamic Emirate. Yet abandoning Afghanistan to its fate is not a moral or self-interested choice for either the US or Europe. A further collapse of the government might cause another wave of mass migration toward Europe, which would strengthen the continent’s nativist and far-right political parties. Ignoring groups like ISIS-K and al-Qaeda would risk repeating the policy errors of the 1990s, which helped set the stage for September 11. For the foreseeable future, Taliban-ruled Afghanistan will present a nightmarish diplomatic challenge: to deliver emergency aid under acceptable conditions while pressing for an end to the Taliban’s practices of gender discrimination. In early May UN Secretary-General António Guterres met with international envoys to Qatar to “reinvigorate the international engagement” and find a “durable way forward,” as a UN spokesman put it. Guterres did not invite the Taliban, saying that it was not the right time to include them. If the experience of the 1990s is any guide, UN aid agencies will manage the Taliban’s restrictions on women’s work by muddling through. Meantime, the Afghan population finds itself in the familiar position of being victimized by a conflict in which every party claims to be fighting on the people’s behalf.

Steve Coll is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Directorate S: The CIA and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. (June 2023)

Who Are the Taliban Now?
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The West has a golden opportunity to engage the Taliban

May 31, 2023

Sultan Barakat
Al Jazeera
Published On 30 May 2023
The appointment of a new prime minister in Kabul signals the Taliban’s openness to dialogue. Western leaders should not miss this chance.

On May 18, the interim Taliban administration in Afghanistan announced that it has replaced caretaker Prime Minister Mullah Mohammad Hasan Akhund with his deputy, Maulvi Abdul Kabir. Akhund had been ill for a while and was unable to carry out his duties.

The appointment of Kabir, who hails from the Pashtun Zadran tribe and who played a key role in negotiating the 2020 Doha agreement with the US, is said to be a routine process, but the timing of it is significant and must be read very carefully, particularly by the West.

The announcement came following growing international dismay at the Taliban’s edicts limiting girls’ education and preventing women from working. This change in leadership can be seen as a positive development and an indication of willingness on the part of the Taliban to open up.

Pride may stay in the way of a drastic reversal of policy, but a desire to alter course can be read in the Taliban making small but important steps towards incremental change.

For example, the recent decision by the authorities in Herat to allow several middle and high schools for girls to reopen is one such step. Kabir may well make another soon by lifting the ban on women working in the humanitarian field, considering that there already are exemptions in the health sector and for certain key NGOs.

In the past, when the Taliban showed a willingness to engage with the international community, foreign leaders failed to seize the opportunity. They should not make the same mistake again.

In considering a response to this strategic move by the Taliban, the international community would be well advised to consider a few points.

First, from a Taliban perspective, the appointment of Akhund as an acting prime minister in 2021 was inevitable. It was meant to symbolise continuity with the previous Taliban regime of 1996-2001, in which he occupied different ministerial positions.

Also, as one of the most conservative among the Taliban leaders, Akhund no doubt played a role in reassuring its rank and file, particularly those coming from rural areas, that the movement would not abandon its values now that the war was over.

Feeling more confident on the domestic front and in their ability to govern without serious opposition, the Taliban appears ready for a greater degree of openness and dialogue with the outside world. Kabir’s appointment is a reflection of this openness.

Second, the Taliban must have learned a thing or two as a result of its isolation over the past two years. Most importantly, its leaders have certainly observed that in our interconnected world, the concept of absolute sovereignty is hard to apply, particularly in a country on the verge of a major humanitarian crisis.

Adopting rigid attitudes in the name of protecting sovereignty antagonises the international community, including those countries that are willing to help Afghanistan. A case in point is the Taliban’s position on the management of Kabul Airport.

The Taliban government, led by Akhund, was determined to have complete control over the airport’s commercial affairs and security, and hence, ended up accepting an offer from the UAE, which agreed to its demands. A year later, regional and international airlines, including those owned by the UAE, have not resumed flights to Kabul, and the airport continues to be in bad shape, as the Taliban authorities have failed to manage it properly.

Third, the appointment of Kabir reflects a significant shift from the traditional rigid Taliban decision-making to a more contemporary “Taliban 2.0” that is more open to dialogue.

It also shows the importance that the Doha Agreement holds for the Taliban as a point of reference for future talks with the international community on issues of security and inclusivity. Although on the face of it, the Taliban has refused any form of dialogue with other Afghans, the group has not ceased to engage.

One initiative that has sought to promote dialogue with the Taliban is the Afghanistan Future Thought Forum (AFTF), chaired by Ms Fatima Gailani, an Afghan politician and former negotiator. It has convened six times, bringing together leading Afghan figures from various ethnoreligious communities, professions and political persuasions. Away from the media spotlight, the forum has been quietly changing attitudes among Taliban and opposition participants.

Thus, the international community should not waste this opportunity, debating whether a change in the premiership is a sufficient indicator that the Taliban is willing to shift its domestic and foreign policy. It is, indeed, a clear signal that there is space for engagement.

The West should reach out to the Taliban and demonstrate readiness to negotiate the lifting of sanctions and the gradual reintroduction of development aid. Such engagement is crucial to prevent one of the worst humanitarian crises of the past decades and a new conflict destabilising the region.

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

  • Sultan Barakat is a Professor in Conflict and Humanitarian Studies at Qatar Foundation’s Hamad Bin Khalifa University and an Honorary Professor of the University of York. He is a world-renowned scholar known for pioneering the study of war-torn societies and their recovery. Professor Barakat founded the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies and directed it between 2016 and 2022. Previously he served as Director of Research at the Brookings Institution’s center in Doha (between 2014 and 2016). At the University of York, he founded and led the Post-war Reconstruction and Development Unit between 1993 and 2019
The West has a golden opportunity to engage the Taliban
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What caused deadly Afghan-Iran border clashes? What happens next?

May 30, 2023

Al Jazeera

Published On 30 May 2023

The two countries call to de-escalate the situation after deadly clashes erupt apparently over river water-sharing dispute.

Last week, deadly clashes broke out between Afghan and Iranian guards at their border raising fears of a new conflict.

Both sides have accused each other of initiating the shooting in which at least two Iranian and one Afghan guard were killed. However, they have issued measured statements aimed at de-escalating the situation.

Following the border violence, Iranian authorities closed the Milak-Zaranj border post, an important commercial crossing – and not the site of the clash – until further notice, Iran’s IRNA news agency reported.

Despite a treaty in place since 1973 on the sharing of Helmand River waters, the two sides have wrangled for decades. The river flows from Afghanistan towards eastern Iran.

What caused the fighting?

The reasons for the clashes are still unknown but the shooting at the border post between the Afghan province of Nimroz and Iran’s Sistan-Baluchistan province comes as Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi earlier this month accused Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers of restricting the flow of water to Iran’s eastern regions in violation of the 1973 treaty.

“We will not allow the rights of our people to be violated,” Raisi said on May 18.

The Taliban, which has denied the accusation, called on to “solve the problem” in accordance with the treaty. The Taliban, which remains diplomatically isolated since it came to power in August 2021, said it wanted “good relations” with Tehran.

According to Sina Toossi, a senior non-resident fellow at the US-based think tank Center for International Policy (CIP), there is a “lack of clear demarcation and understanding of border boundaries and rules” on both sides.

Interactive_Afghanistan-Iran borderclashes
(Al Jazeera)

Iranian officials have repeatedly blamed the Taliban for its disregard for international laws and border protocols since its takeover of Afghanistan two years ago. Clashes have erupted on multiple occasions, but have rarely led to casualties and have been routinely blamed on “misunderstanding”.

A day before the border clashes, Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian called on the Taliban to “follow legal framework” to resolve the water dispute.

“In recent years, this treaty has not been adhered to by Afghanistan’s rulers, including the Taliban,” CIP’s Toossi told Al Jazeera, adding that Kabul has delivered only “a fraction of the agreed amount”.

“It has been exacerbated by Iran’s worsening drought conditions, making the water issue increasingly critical,” he said.

The Taliban issued a statement saying it did not want to “fight with its neighbours”.

What is the Afghan-Iran water dispute?

The Helmand River, which is more than 1,000km (621-mile) long and flows across the border, is being dammed on the Afghan side to generate electricity and irrigate agricultural land.

Drought has been a problem in Iran for some 30 years, which has worsened over the past decade, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The Iran Meteorological Organization says that an estimated 97 percent of the country now faces some level of drought.

According to the Helmand Water Treaty signed by Afghanistan and Iran half a century ago, Afghanistan should annually share 850 million cubic metres of water from Helmand with Iran.

It also calls on both sides to address their differences via diplomatic channels and, if that fails, through an advisory board headed by a mutually chosen arbitrator.

Iran has accused Afghanistan of failing to adhere to the treaty on several occasions and has opposed its decision to construct dams on the river.

How have both countries reacted to the clashes?

The Taliban leadership has called for the resolution of such issues “through diplomatic channels”.

“We don’t want relations with our neighbouring countries to deteriorate. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is never in favour of escalation,” Hafiz Zia Ahmad, deputy spokesman of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told Saudi Arabian newspaper Arab News on Monday.

Analyst Toossi believes the border clashes have prompted both sides to de-escalate the situation and “reaffirm their commitment to dialogue and cooperation”.

He said there is an indication that Iran is open to dialogue, given that the Taliban’s acting foreign minister met an Iranian envoy to discuss the Helmand River water rights on the day of the clash.

Iran Afghanistan Map
Hirmand county along the Iran-Afghanistan border [Al Jazeera]

Where does the Afghan-Iran relationship stand?

As Kabul and Tehran are “trying to balance their interests and concerns”, according to Toossi, their relationship remains in a state of “uncertainty”.

“It is not clear whether the Taliban have pulled back their fighters from the border or whether they will abide by the agreement in the future,” he said after videos showed large numbers of Taliban fighters approaching the border with Iran last week.

Additionally, while Iran has held a dialogue with the Taliban, it has not officially recognised them as the legitimate rulers of Afghanistan.

The Shia-majority country has called for the formation of an inclusive government that represents all ethnic and religious groups in Afghanistan.

“Iran has expressed concerns about the security and welfare of the Afghan people, especially the Shia Hazara minority, who have faced persecution and violence from the Taliban in the past,” said Toossi.

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA
What caused deadly Afghan-Iran border clashes? What happens next?
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Gender Persecution in Afghanistan: Could it come under the ICC’s Afghanistan investigation?

May 26, 2023

Ehsan Qaane

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Since their return to power in August 2021, the Taleban have enacted successive laws and orders which apply to women and girls, but not to men and boys. Earlier this month, United Nations experts reported their assessment that these measures violated women and girls’ rights to education, work, freedom of movement, health, bodily autonomy and decision-making, peaceful assembly and association, and access to justice and amounted to ‘gender persecution’. One of the experts has also asked the International Criminal Court to consider whether the crime against humanity of gender persecution was taking place in Afghanistan. In this Q&A, Ehsan Qaane* unpacks the term as it exists in international law, and in that light, analyses whether the court might consider Taleban restrictions on women as amounting to gender prosecution and whether an investigation could lie within its mandate.

Introduction

Since the Taleban regained power in Afghanistan in August 2021, they have imposed multiple orders and regulations on Afghan women and girls that do not apply to men and boys. [1]Two United Nations independent experts, Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Afghanistan Richard Bennet and Chair of the Working Group on Discrimination against Women and Girls Dorothy Estrada-Tanck, have concluded that these restrictions, which they say are “violating girls’ and women’s rights to education, work, freedom of movement, health, bodily autonomy and decision-making, freedom of peaceful assembly and association, and access to justice,” amount to “gender persecution.” In a statement, published on 5 May 2023 at the end of an eight-day joint visit to Afghanistan, they also shared their concerns that these measures have:

…decimated the system of protection and support for those fleeing domestic violence, leaving women and girls with absolutely no recourse. They have imposed extreme modesty rules and detained women and girls for alleged “moral crimes”. These measures have reportedly contributed to a surge in the rates of child and forced marriage, as well as the proliferation of gender-based violence perpetrated with impunity. We are also particularly concerned by the fact that women who peacefully protest against these oppressive measures encounter threats, harassment, arbitrary detentions and torture…. We are alarmed about widespread mental health issues and accounts of escalating suicides among women and girls.

Earlier, Bennett asked the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), whose office has been looking into war crimes and crimes against humanity in Afghanistan since 2006, to consider whether the “crime of gender persecution” was taking place there (see Bennett’s report to the UN Human Rights Council, published on 6 February 2023, and AAN’s analysis of it.)

This report first unpacks the legal basis for the experts’ use of the term ‘gender persecution’, [2] before delving into whether and on what grounds the ICC could prosecute the Taleban for allegedly perpetrating it.

1. What is gender persecution?

‘Gender persecution’, as a crime against humanity, was first criminalised by the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the International Criminal Court (ICC) and which was adopted in 1998 and came into force in 2002. The term refers to “any crime within the jurisdiction” of the ICC perpetrated on the basis of the gender of the affected individual or individuals. The crimes falling under ICC jurisdiction are genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression (see articles 5 to 8 of the Rome Statute). Furthermore, article 7 outlaws the “persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender as defined in paragraph 3, [3] or other grounds that are universally recognized as impermissible under international law” (article 7(1)(h)) [4] and ‘persecution’ as the “intentional and severe deprivation of fundamental rights contrary to international law by reason of the identity of the group or collectivity” (article 7(2)(g)).

An act, considered a crime within ICC jurisdiction and which violated the fundamental rights of women and girls as a collectivity, could therefore amount to gender persecution if it reached ICC thresholds: the act or acts would need to be “systematic or widespread,” “intentional” and involve the “severe deprivation of fundamental rights contrary to international law.”

Some of the criminal acts under ICC jurisdiction and considered crimes against humanity when “committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack” are listed in paragraph (1) of article 7 of the Rome Statute:

[M]urder; extermination, enslavement; deportation or forcible transfer of population; imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law; torture; rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilisation, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity; enforced disappearance of persons; the crime of apartheid; other inhumane acts of similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.

There is one ongoing case in front of the ICC, which includes some of the acts listed above. The Malian, Al-Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz, is standing trial for various war crimes and the crimes against humanity of torture, rape, sexual slavery and other inhumane acts, including, inter alia, forced marriages and persecution. It is alleged he perpetrated these acts as a member of the armed group, Ansar Eddine, and the “de facto chief of Islamic police” at a time when the city of Timbuktu fell under the control of his group and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, in 2012 and 2013 (see ICC notes on the case here). The trial has been described as ‘ground-breaking’, for example by The Guardian when it was launched in 2018, because it was the first to go to ICC trial with charges that included “the crime of persecution on the grounds of gender.” The judges of the ICC are currently deliberating their verdict.

Any case against the Taleban would be somewhat different, centring on their alleged deprivation of fundamental rights of women and girls. This term is not defined in the Rome Statute, but examples of these rights have now been listed in a new policy on the crime of gender persecution published by the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor in December 2022 (paragraph 24):

[T]he right: to life; to be free from torture or other inhumane or degrading treatment or punishments; to be free from slavery or the slave trade, servitude and retroactive application of penal law; to freedom of assembly, opinion, expression, movement and religion, including the right to be free from religion; rights to equality, dignity, bodily integrity, family, privacy, security, education, employment, property, political or cultural participation, to access to justice or health care. Human rights violations can constitute a severe deprivation of fundamental rights on their own or when considered cumulatively.

The phrase ‘fundamental rights’ and the Office of the Prosecutor’s explanation of what this term means has expanded the scope of gender persecution beyond the acts mentioned in articles 6, 7 and 8 of the Rome Statute to violations of social, political, economic and civil rights. These are preserved in international human rights documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and other human rights conventions. However, to be addressed by the ICC, the violations must pass the court’s high thresholds of being “systematic or widespread,” “intentional” and involving the “severe deprivation of fundamental rights contrary to international law by reason” of gender.

The Office of the Prosecutor’s policy says that gender persecution could be “enforced by means of violence or destruction, or occur via the imposition of regulations,” and significantly, that it cannot be “ignored, dismissed or justified on the basis of culture.” [5] Under international law, crimes against humanity are jus cogens, ie the principles which form the norms of international law that cannot be set aside or made ‘legal’ through domestic legislation. Another example would be torture, which is also illegal in all circumstances. [6]

Whether this new policy was brought in because of the Islamic Emirate’s restrictions on women and girls and the need to address them is not known. [7] However, it does represent a major development in the understanding of the law.

2. Is there a legal formula for analysing whether the Taleban’s policy on Afghan women and girls amounts to gender persecution?

To argue whether the Taleban’s discriminatory bans against Afghan women and girls amount to the crime against humanity of persecution on the basis of gender or not, Taleban policy must be assessed in accordance with article 7 of the Rome Statute and other relevant documents like the Office of the Prosecutor’s “Policy on the Crime of Gender Persecution” and the ICC’s “Elements of Crimes”. The formula these documents provide is that the crimes must be:

  • intentional (referred to as the ‘mental element’);
  • involve the severe deprivation of fundamental rights contrary to international law on the basis of gender (the ‘actual element’) and are;
  • carried out in a systematic or widespread manner (the ‘contextual element’).

This paper uses this formula to analyse whether the Taleban have intentionally, systematically and in a widespread manner deprived Afghan women and girls of their fundamental rights to employment and political participation because of their gender.

The choice to scrutinise these rights complements another recent report which examined the Taleban’s alleged deprivation of Afghan women and girls’ rights to education, freedom of movement and assembly. That analysis, by professor of law and special advisor on gender persecution to the Office of the Prosecutor, Lisa Davis, used a somewhat different method of legal argument and was published by the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law in March 2023.

3. What does international law say about the right to work and to political participation?

Political participation as a fundamental right, including specifically for women, has been secured in several international human rights instruments, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention on the Political Rights of Women, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and, more importantly, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) of which Afghanistan is a signatory. For example, article 7 of CEDAW declares:

States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to eliminate discrimination against women in the political and public life of the country and, in particular, shall ensure to women, on equal terms with men, the right: (a) To vote in all elections and public referenda and to be eligible for election to all publicly elected bodies; (b) To participate in the formulation of government policy and the implementation thereof and to hold public office and perform all public functions at all levels of government; (c) To participate in non-governmental organizations and associations concerned with the public and political life of the country.

Additionally, article 8 of CEDAW obliges states to ensure women have “the opportunity to represent their government at the international level and to participate in the work of international organisations,” like the UN. [8]

Article 11 of CEDAW defines the right to work as the ‘inalienable right of all human beings.” It obliges states to “eliminate discrimination against women in the field of employment” and to provide, among many other rights, equal opportunities and benefits for women and men. [9]

Violating rights mentioned in these paragraphs could amount to the crime against humanity of gender persecution if they fit the formula mentioned earlier.

Analysis of Taleban policy vis-à-vis Afghan women’s political participation and their access to work

a. The actual element: Have women been severely deprived of their fundamental rights to political participation and work, contrary to international law

The Taleban’s Islamic Emirate consists of one executive and one judicial body. It has no independent legislative branch (the Taleban formally dissolved Afghanistan parliament on 17 May 2022). The highest authority, policymaker and lawgiver in the land is the Emirate’s supreme leader, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, known by the title of Amir ul-Mu’minin (the leader of the believers). He sits in Kandahar and is advised by a 20-member ulema shura (council of Islamic scholars), but ultimately, all decisions are his. Under his supervision and at the top of the executive branch, an acting all-male cabinet is chaired by a prime minister and has a membership of around two dozen acting ministers (on the initial cabinet appointments, see this AAN report and this BBC report).

The highest judiciary body is a high council of six senior male judges, chaired by Sheikh Abdul Hakim Haqqani under the command of Hibatullah (on the Taleban’s judiciary structure, see this video on the Taleban Supreme Court’s website). All female judges were fired after the Taleban came to power.

No women have been appointed, nor allowed to remain in post, to any position involved in policymaking, administrative rule or judicial in any organ of the Taleban government or state institution.

Under the previous administration, the Islamic Republic, although representation was far from equal, women were appointed to policymaking positions as cabinet ministers, deputy ministers and ambassadors to other countries and international organisations like the United Nations. An Inter-Parliamentary Union report, published in January 2021 and quoted by CNN, noted that 6.5 per cent of ministerial positions were held by women in President Ashraf Ghani’s administration. Such positions were both political and administrative. Women had the right to vote and to nominate themselves for any elected position, including the presidency (there were female candidates for both president and deputy president). There were also no legal restrictions on their membership in the High Council of the Supreme Court, although no female judges were ever appointed.

The 2004 constitution, which the Taleban suspended during the first days of their return to power, guaranteed the vote for both men and women and a quarter of the seats of the lower house (wolesi jirga) of the parliament were reserved for women (see article 83) (on the suspension of the constitution, see this ToloNews report). According to CNN, women occupied 27 per cent of parliament seats. Female lawmakers were also members of the upper house (meshrano jirga) and provincial councils.

Since the Taleban takeover, women were also blocked from attending the only national-level jirga called. Such gatherings are forums for discussion and were attended by both men and women during the Republic. In June 2022, the Taleban organised an ulema jirga, attended by more than 3,500 ‘representatives’ from Afghanistan’s 400 plus districts. Most were ulema, although traders, businessmen and elders were also invited – but no women. At the end of the jirga, which discussed the most serious political affairs of the country, the participants pledged loyalty to the Taleban’s supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, and opposed armed resistance against the his government (see Etilaatroz reporting). When asked about the absence of women, Deputy Prime Minister Mawlawi Abdul Salam Hanafi said they were not necessary – they were “somehow involved” because “their sons will be part of the gathering” (see Radio Liberty’s report).

Under the Republic’s constitution, women and men were, in principle, equal (see article 22), albeit the personal status law, concerning marriage, guardianship of children and inheritance, was discriminatory. Discrimination against women in practice in government, civil service, the courts and other institutions was rife (the United States Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction’s 2020 ‘lessons learned’ report on US support for gender equality has lots of interesting detail and data on this). At the same time, there was a space for women to try to occupy. Struggle was a given, but they might also see success. Institutions were also established to support women’s political participation and promote gender equality, for example, the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. There were also special courts, police and prosecutorial units, especially when it came to the Elimination of Violence against Women (EVAW) Law, adopted by presidential decree in 2009 by President Hamid Karzai (see HRW’s report on special courts and units, AAN’s reports on EVAW Law) and gender units in each ministry and independent directorates. The Taleban dissolved all these entities when they came to power (for detail, see the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Situation in Afghanistan’s first report to the UN Human Rights Council published in September 2022.)

Women used to work in all branches of the state (civil servants, military personnel, judges and prosecutors and also as defence lawyers), although forming a higher proportion in the middle and lower posts. With the exception of health workers and teachers of primary-aged girls, women who worked in the public sector have been asked to stay at home because they are women. Most are required to come in regularly to sign their hazeri (timesheet) and are still paid. However, in some sectors, all women were fired, for instance, judges and journalists working in state-own media outlets. (For more on this and salary payments in general since the Taleban returned to power, see AAN’s March 2023 report, What Do The Taleban Spend Afghanistan’s Money On? Government expenditure under the Islamic Emirate.)

Afghan women have also been banned from working in NGOs, UN agencies and embassies. Female defence lawyers are not allowed to practice law (see the International Law Assistance Consortium’s report on the justice sector). Women cannot be actresses.

The Taleban have not outlawed women working in the private sector, including private media outlets, but discriminatory conditions apply, for example, compulsory dress code (hijab), segregation of the workplace and the need for a mahram, a close male relative acting as a chaperone. A mahramis not required according to the Taleban’s own rules unless a woman travels more than 78 kilometres from her home, but women may be targeted by the Vice and Virtue police if outside and alone (see AAN reporting of a recent UN report on corporal punishment and the death penalty, available here).

Women who protested these discriminatory measures have been subjected to arbitrary threats, harassment, arrests and torture, according to this Human Rights Watch report and this report by the UN Special Rapporteur from September 2022. Male political opponents have also been subject to arbitrary arrest and torture (see this report by Amnesty International).

Mental element; perpetrating of the actual element by knowledge and intent

The ‘mental element’ means that the authorities issuing discriminatory orders and regulations know their content and intend to implement them. Furthermore, the authorities must know that these fundamental rights are persevered in international law and, therefore, that their decisions and/or actions violate international law and norms.

The Taleban’s intent, indeed their core belief that, women should be treated differently from men and, specifically, that it is against divine law for them to act as political or religious leaders, and that their place is in the home (by implication not in paid employment) can be drawn out from a book authored by their chief justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani. He is an influential figure who was a teacher to many Taleban’s senior members including their Supreme Leader, Hibatullah. He wrote a forward to the book, thereby endorsing its contents.

The book, written in Arabic with the title, “Al-Emarah al-Islamiah wa Nedhamuha” (the Islamic Emirate and its System), and published in April 2022, argues that under sharia: women should stay at home as their homes are their ‘cover’ (al-satr); they should stay with their children and parent them; women are weak and; their intellect and religion are deficient (naqes al-aql wa al-din). Thus, they cannot be imams (leaders) or judges. Haqqani further elaborated his argument as to why women cannot become leaders. First, they would have to go out in public and meet men other than close relatives, which he said was forbidden in sharia. Second, ruling is difficult, and women are weak: a weak person cannot rule over others. Third, women are not permitted to rule over men. Here, he cited a hadith (the words of the Prophet Muhammad) – “A people which has a woman as a leader will never prosper” [10] – and a text from the Quran, “Men are the guardians of women.” [11] A woman, he said, could neither be an imam al-kubra (big leader), managing both religious and worldly affairs, nor an imam al-suqra (small leader) leading congregational prayers.

It could be argued that when it comes to political participation, neither men nor women currently enjoy that right in today’s Afghanistan. Therefore, the question of gender persecution does not apply to this right. There are no elections, and senior appointments are skewed heavily on the basis, not only of gender, but also ethnicity (most senior figures are Pashtun) and background (most are clerics) (see AAN analysis of the cabinet from autumn 2021). Nevertheless, no man is barred from holding posts in the Emirate because he is a man. Women have no such opportunities, neither in principle nor practice, because of the Taleban’s belief that their place is in the home and they cannot have a leadership role.

Since before the Taleban’s return to power, the accusation that the Emirate violates women’s fundamental rights has been one of the primary sources of international criticism, including from Islamic countries, directed against it. That their intention to deal with women differently from men, knowing this is contrary to international law, can also be seen in the explicit distinction the Taleban draw between sharia and international law and norms. They argue that the latter are ‘human-made’ and where contrary to Islamic law, as they perceive it, are irrelevant and may even be harmful to human wellbeing. Their supreme leader Hibatullah, for example, has ordered his provincial governors to put aside human-made law and implement sharia (see this BBC Persian report from 28 June 2022). A similar argument was made in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ response to the May 2023 UNAMA report, “Corporal Punishment and the Death Penalty in Afghanistan” (published in an annex to the report):

[I]t should be stated that 99 per cent of the people of Afghanistan follow the holy religion of Islam and Islamic principle, therefore, the laws are determined in accordance with Islamic rules and guidelines, in the event of a conflict between international human rights law and Islamic law, the government is obliged to follow the Islamic law.

b. Contextual element: has the deprivation of the fundamental right to work and to political participation been systematic or widespread?

Intentionally perpetrating a criminal act is classed as a crime against humanity if the act is committed systematically or in a widespread manner. ‘Systematic’ here means the act must be pre-planned or be continued or repeated over an amount of time which leaves an organised nature of a pattern. In other words, it must not result from coincidence, randomness or human error.

‘Widespread’ here means the act and/or its consequence must be grave in scale. The measurement of gravity itself is complex: how many persons need to be affected, and how badly must these persons be affected to count a criminal act as ‘grave’? The interesting point about gender persecution is that article 7 of the Rome Statute acknowledges that there could be just one victim if they were severely deprived of their fundamental rights based on their gender. ‘Gravity’, here, is measured according to the quality or severity of the criminal act and/or its consequences rather than the number of victims.

The deprivation of Afghan women of their fundamental right to work and to political participation is systematic. It has been enforced by orders issued and executed, with rights increasingly restricted, creating a pattern of gender persecution since the Taleban’s return to power. A final point to make when considering the ‘mental element’, whether acts were perpetrated with knowledge and intent, is to look at how orders and regulations have successively and systemically chipped away at women’s rights to employment and political participation (see a detailed timeline in footnote [12]).

The Taleban’s policy of depriving women of political participation and work is widespread. Afghan women have lost any role in political-administrative public institutions (see this UN Women’s report from July 2022). The instruments and mechanisms supporting women’s political participation and employment had been dissolved. Afghan women are generally prohibited from working in government jobs and with NGOs and UN agencies outside the healthcare sector and girls primary education. Where women can work, they face additional discriminatory conditions imposed on them, like compulsory dress code, segregation from their male colleagues, restricted movements and censorship, as reports have detailed (for example, see this UN experts’ statement and this Crisis Group’s report).

How might the ICC act on the Taleban’s alleged gender discrimination?

It is a principle of criminal law that individuals, not institutions, have criminal liabilities. International criminal law is no exception. Perpetrators of crimes against humanity cannot enjoy impunity under international law, but should be brought to justice either in domestic or international courts. The ICC could be one of those courts with jurisdiction and an obligation to respond, if it considered the Taleban’s actions to amount to the crime of gender persecution.

This report has focused on two fundamental rights – the right to work and to political participation. However, Lisa Davis’s conclusion on whether the Taleban have deprived Afghan women and girls of their rights to education, freedom of movement and assembly is strong. According to her, “These and other acts likely amount to the crime against humanity on the basis of gender (gender persecution) under the Rome Statute.” She argues that gender persecution is “the only holistic charge that recognizes crimes committed on the basis of gender,” and that it is “a vital tool for holding perpetrators accountable.”

The Taleban orders restricting women and girls’ rights, including to work, education, and political participation, have been issued by specific individuals, including but not limited to the Supreme Leader, the Minister for the Propagation of Virtue and Prohibition of Vice, the Minister of Economy, Minister of Education and Minister of Higher Education. Although in the Emirate, the Supreme Leader has supreme power and bears ultimate responsibility for all law, policy and practice, when it comes to the execution of the bans, almost all senior members of the Taleban have been involved. Each of them, as an alleged perpetrator, could have criminal responsibility.

The ICC, as a permanent international criminal court, has a responsibility to end impunity for international crimes, including the crime against humanity of gender persecution if perpetrated on the territory of a member state or on the territory of any state which has accepted the court’s jurisdiction. Afghanistan has been a state member since May 2003 (see AAN’s dossier on the ICC-Afghanistan).

The Office of the Prosecutor of the ICC has been mandated to investigate any alleged crimes within the court’s jurisdiction perpetrated on Afghanistan soil since May 2003. The alleged gender persecution perpetrated by the Taleban could lie under the investigatory mandate of the Office of the Prosecutor. Gender persecution is within the ICC’s subject-matter jurisdiction as a crime against humanity. The alleged gender persecution by the Taleban has been perpetrated on Afghanistan’s territory, at least since August 2021.

The alleged ongoing gender persecution in Afghanistan could be a relatively easy and quick case for the Office of the Prosecutor to build. Evidence to prove the necessary elements (actual, mental and contextual) are publicly available. The alleged perpetrators are known and victims and eyewitnesses accessible. However, it would be one of just many crimes, some ongoing, dating back to May 2003, which the ICC has examined or is investigating. These include the use of torture by US military forces and the CIA, and by the forces of the Republic, and for the Taleban and the Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISKP), among other allegations, intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population, humanitarian personnel and protected objects.

The ICC Prosecutor, Karim Khan, has already stirred up controversy over his desire to prioritise the investigation of the Taleban and ISKP and deprioritise US and Republic forces’ alleged crimes (see AAN’s October 2021 report, Creating a Hierarchy of Victims? ICC may drop investigations into US forces to focus on Taleban and ISKP for more on this). Given what Khan has said are the scarce resources at his disposal, choosing to focus on gender persecution, if it were at the expense of investigating other crimes, would need to be carefully backed up and argued.

* Ehsan Qaane worked for AAN from 2012 to 2022, including as Country Director, and is now a research fellow with the Raoul Wallenberg Institute for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (RWI), based in Lund, Sweden.

Edited by Kate Clark and Roxanna Shapour

References

References
↑1 For example, the orders that ban women and/or girls from secondary schools, universities, gyms, parks and from working for NGOs and UN agencies.
↑2 The experts also spoke of “gender apartheid” and “femicide,” terms also used by advocacy groups and activists, including, most recently, the leading African humanitarian and women’s rights activist Graça Machel (media coverage here). ‘Apartheid’ has a legal definition, but relates to racial discrimination only: it is the implementation and maintenance of a system of legalised racial segregation in which one racial group is deprived of political and civil rights and is considered is a crime against humanity. ‘Gender apartheid’ has no legal definition. Nor does ‘femicide’, although the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “the killing of a woman or girl, in particular by a man and on account of her gender.” There are no legal national or international institutions which could address any act which these terms might describe. 

Another term used by the experts was “systemic gender-based discrimination,” which they said was “unparalleled anywhere in the world.” ‘Gender discrimination’ is used in international human rights instruments like the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).

This paper prefers to use the term ‘gender persecution’ for its legal analysis. It is the strongest existing term providing legal grounds for criminal accountability mechanisms to address severe systemic or widespread gender-based violence or discrimination. As it is in accordance with the ICC legal system, it is also a crime that the ICC has jurisdiction over and which it has an obligation to investigate.
↑3 The Rome Statute defines gender as “refer[ing] to the two sexes, male and female, within the context of society.”
↑4 Article 7(1)(h) of the ICC’s Elements of Crimes on the crime against humanity of persecution says: 

(1) The perpetrator severely deprived, contrary to international law, one or more person of fundamental rights. (2) The perpetrator targeted such persons by reason of the identity of a group or collectivity or targeted the group or collectivity as such. (3) Such targeting was based on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender as defined in article 7, paragraph 3, of the Rome Statute, or other grounds that are universally recognised as impermissible under international law. (4) The conduct was committed in connection with any act referred to in article 7, paragraph 1, of the Rome Statute or any crime within the jurisdiction of the Court. (5) The conduct was committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directly against a civilian population. (6) The perpetrator knew that the conduct was part of or intended the conduct to be part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against civilian population.
↑5 See paragraphs 24 and 27 of the Policy on the Crime of Gender Persecution. Paragraph 27 says: “The Office recognises that human rights violations prohibited under international law are not culturally determinative. Breaches of fundamental rights cannot be ignored, dismissed or justified on the basis of culture.”
↑6 For more details on jus cogens see this document published on the UN’s website.
↑7 The author saw a draft copy of the policy in which measures taken by the Taleban and ISIS against women were named as examples of gender persecution as a crime against humanity. The author, in a side event with ICC prosecutor Karim Khan and his deputies, asked about these examples. Two days later, the final version of the policy was published on the court’s website giving only ISIS as an example.
↑8 Article 8 of CEDAW says; “State Parties shall take all appropriate measures to ensure to women, on equal terms with men and without any discrimination, the opportunity to represent their government at the international level and to participate in the work of international organisations.”
↑9 Article 11 of CEDAW states: 

1. States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to eliminate discrimination against women in the field of employment in order to ensure, on a basis of equality of men and women, the same rights, in particular: (a) The right to work as an inalienable right of all human beings; (b) The right to the same employment opportunities, including the application of the same criteria for selection in matters of employment; (c) The right to free choice of profession and employment, the right to promotion, job security and all benefits and conditions of service and the right to receive vocational training and retraining, including apprenticeships, advanced vocational training and recurrent training; (d) The right to equal remuneration, including benefits, and to equal treatment in respect of work of equal value, as well as equality of treatment in the evaluation of the quality of work; (e) The right to social security, particularly in cases of retirement, unemployment, sickness, invalidity and old age and other incapacity to work, as well as the right to paid leave; (f) The right to protection of health and to safety in working conditions, including the safeguarding of the function of reproduction. 2. In order to prevent discrimination against women on the grounds of marriage or maternity and to ensure their effective right to work, States Parties shall take appropriate measures: (a) To prohibit, subject to the imposition of sanctions, dismissal on the grounds of pregnancy or of maternity leave and discrimination in dismissals on the basis of marital status; (b) To introduce maternity leave with pay or with comparable social benefits without loss of former employment, seniority or social allowances; (c) To encourage the provision of the necessary supporting social services to enable parents to combine family obligations with work responsibilities and participation in public life, in particular through promoting the establishment and development of a network of child-care facilities; (d) To provide special protection to women during pregnancy in types of work proved to be harmful to them. 3. Protective legislation relating to matters covered in this article shall be reviewed periodically in the light of scientific and technological knowledge and shall be revised, repealed or extended as necessary.
↑10 لن یفلح قوم ولوا امرهم امرا (lan yufleha qawmun wa law amrahum amarahu)
↑11 الرجال قومون علی النساء (Al-rujala qawamuna ala al-nisa)
↑12 A detailed timeline of various orders and announcements is: 

  • On 17 August 2021, two days after capturing Kabul, Taleban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahed, in his first press conference, mentioned four times that women would have the right to work and study ‘within an Islamic framework’ and according to Taleban regulations. He gave the education, health and criminal justice prosecution sectors as examples of where women could work. He made no mention of politics or senior appointments. Nor did he explain what an Islamic framework or Taleban regulations might be, but when asked, he told reporters to wait for a future announcement about regulations and laws (for a full press conference transcript, see this Al-Jazeera report).
  • On 24 August 2021, Mujahed told working women to stay home, calling the order “a very temporary procedure.” Taleban security forces, he said, were “not trained (in) how to deal with women – how to speak to women. Until we have full security in place… we ask women to stay home” (see this BBC report).
  • On 27 August 2021, Mujahed announced that the Ministry of Public Health had told “all women employees in the centre and provinces that they should attend work regularly,” as this Reuters reported. Reuters also mentioned that “women have been discouraged from going to work and even turned away from their offices.”
  • This has remained the situation for most female government workers ever since. They have been blocked from returning to work, except for health workers, teachers in girls’ primary schools and a few other minor exceptions, such as women in the security services needed to deal with, guard or search other women.
  • On 23 August, the Taleban’s Education Commission announced to its “dear compatriots” that following the closure of schools because of coronavirus and the postponement of their reopening “due to the takeover of provincial capitals and Kabul,” all primary schools should reopen for lessons on 28 August. As to the start-back date for secondary schools, it said: “Instructions will be given later.” When the announcement came on 17 September 2021, the Ministry of Education asked schoolboys and male teachers only to return to school, but made no mention of girls or female teachers (see AAN reporting). After secondary schools for girls were briefly allowed to open in March 2022, they were shut again by order of Hibatullah. Female teachers who had taught boys in primary or secondary schools were also blocked from doing so. The only female teachers legally allowed to work are those in girls’ primary schools (grades 1 to 6).
  •  In September and early October 2021, Supreme Leader Hibatullah appointed an all-male acting cabinet (see AAN reporting).
  • On 21 November 2021, the Minister for the Promotion of Virtue and Prohibition of Vice issued guidelines for the media, which imposed compulsory ‘Islamic hijab’ on female journalists and media staff and banned the broadcasting of dramas and films with women appearing in them.
  • On 7 May 2022, the Virtue and Vice minister ordered women to wear ‘sharia hijab’, defined as loose clothing covering the body, head and face, except for the eyes, either a burqa (best) or black abaya and shawl (permitted) (see AAN’s report and BBC’s report). “Not venturing out without cause,” the order also said, was “the first and best type of adherence to Sharia hijab.”
  • On 21 May 2022, the Virtue and Vice minister banned female anchors and other women from any on-screen television presence unless they fully covered their faces, except for their eyes (see Human Rights Watch’s report).
  • On 29 June 2022, the Taleban organised a grand ulema jirga, a gathering of Muslim clerics from Afghanistan’s provinces and districts to discuss major political, economic and social concerns in Kabul. Politicians, traders and businessmen were also invited, but women were not invited.
  • On 24 December 2022, the Minister of Economy banned women from working for domestic and international NGOs (see BBC and AAN reporting). In an interview with BBC Pashto on 30 December, Mujahed said the Emirate wanted to preserve Afghan women’s “dignity and chastity” and that because NGOs were not under the control of the government, the risk to women was high (reported by BBC Persian). The ban has also hit some embassies (see AAN reporting).
  • On 4 April 2023, the Taleban banned Afghan women from working with UN agencies in Afghanistan.

Gender Persecution in Afghanistan: Could it come under the ICC’s Afghanistan investigation?
read more

The uncounted: how millions died unseen in America’s post-9/11 wars

May 21, 2023

Simon Tisdall

The Guardian

Sun 21 May 2023

A new report puts the loss of life from Afghanistan to Yemen at 4.5 million – the bulk of them poor women and children who are victims of economic collapse and continuing trauma

Abdoulaye is a lost child of the post-9/11 world – one among millions. Born into a village community displaced by Islamist violence, he and his family found refuge in an abandoned school near Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso. Weakened by malnutrition and anaemia, Abdoulaye, 3, contracted malaria. Despite frantic efforts to save him, he died, unremarked and unknown to the world at large.

“Abdoulaye is doubly uncounted: as a displaced person and as a war death,” writes Stephanie Savell, a cultural anthropologist, recalling his brief life in a disturbing new report that reveals the vast, unacknowledged human costs of contemporary global warfare. “Though he is mourned by his family and his community, officially, he never existed. His story is emblematic of how this kind of death, and its omission in counts of the dead, happens in any number of conflicts.”

Savell’s report, How Death Outlives War: The Reverberating Impact of the Post-9/11 Wars on Human Health, published by the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute, focuses on what she terms “indirect deaths” – caused not by outright violence but by consequent, ensuing economic collapse, loss of livelihoods, food insecurity, destruction of public health services, environmental contamination and continuing trauma, including mental health problems, domestic and sexual abuse and displacement.

Calculated this way, the total number of deaths that occurred as a result of post-9/11 warfare in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia rises dramatically from an upper estimate of 937,000 to at least 4.5 million, of which up to 3.6 million were “indirect deaths”. Such deaths grow in scale over time. In Afghanistan, where the war ignited by the 2001 US-led invasion ended in 2021, the indirect death toll and related health problems are still rising.

Experts suggest “a reasonable, conservative average estimate for any contemporary conflict is a ratio of four indirect deaths for every one direct death”, Savell says. The poorer the population, the higher the resulting indirect mortality when conflict erupts. “Indirect deaths are devastating, not least because so many of them could be prevented, were it not for war,” she writes. Generally speaking, men are more likely to die in combat. Women and children are disproportionately affected indirectly.

Savell does not attempt to apportion blame between various actors, although the US, which launched the “global war on terror” in 2001, bears heavy responsibility. She concedes that establishing definitive figures for war deaths of any kind is problematic and politically contested. Using the best available sources and data, her aim, she says, is to expand awareness of the fuller human costs of these wars and support calls for governments to alleviate continuing harms.

“The mental health effects of war reverberate through generations, impacting parents and children, and then their children after that. Estimates [suggest] … anxiety and depression are two to four times greater among conflict-affected populations than the global average,” she writes. “Women tend to suffer [these effects] more acutely due to gender-based violence, which is heightened in wartime. In Iraq, rape and sexual violence increased sharply after 2003 [when the US and UK invaded] … Children are also particularly vulnerable. [Those] who experience high levels of collective violence are twice as likely to develop chronic diseases.”

Levels of child malnutrition are indicators of the scale of war-related damage. “More than 7.6 million children under five are suffering from acute malnutrition, or wasting, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia,” the report estimates. “‘Wasting’ means not getting enough food, literally wasting to skin and bones, putting these children at greater risk of death, including from … weakened immune systems.”

In Afghanistan specifically, where the economy has collapsed after the Taliban takeover, more than half the population now lives in extreme poverty. Tens of thousands of children under five are dying of preventable diseases such as cholera and measles, of acute malnutrition and neonatal complications. “As much as anyone killed by an airstrike or a gunshot wound, their deaths must be counted among the costs of war,” the report says.

This scrupulously compiled examination of war’s unconsidered, long-term lethal impacts has great power to shock. In Pakistan, for example, between 2004 and 2010, the US conducted “double-tap” drone strikes, mostly on Pashtun villages in Waziristan, along the Afghan border, in which a second strike targeted people rushing to help victims of an initial bombing.

“Reports document that residents of these regions suffered from PTSD, chronic anxiety and constant fear,” Savell writes. “A local resident explained: ‘God knows whether they’ll strike us again or not. But they’re always surveying us, they’re always over us, and you never know when they’re going to strike.’” Untreated, such trauma is debilitating and unceasing.

In many conflict zones, deliberate attacks on healthcare facilities are a favoured tactic. Both direct and indirect deaths result. At one point in Syria’s civil war, according to a 2019 study quoted in the report, “each attack on a healthcare facility corresponded to an estimated 260 reported civilian casualties in the same month”, because of the resulting non-availability of medical assistance.

Displacement is another big driver of indirect deaths, caused by physical insecurity, heightened mental stress, and abuse, exploitation and indifference suffered during attempted flights to safety. An estimated 38 million people have been displaced since 2001. Britain fought in many of these wars. As it debates tougher anti-migrant regulations, the UK must acknowledge its part in causing this crisis.

The report details many additional, lingering deathtraps, including environmental contamination, unexploded ordnance, landmines, and damage to water, sanitation and aid and food distribution systems. More research data is badly needed, Savell writes, but it’s already evident governments must do more to mend what they broke – and that “reparations … are imperative”.

Those who have died are beyond help. But for millions of adults and children still suffering the consequences of the post-9/11 conflicts, the need is urgent. They are condemned to war without end.

The uncounted: how millions died unseen in America’s post-9/11 wars
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