Officials, armed fighters widen ‘enforcement,’ beatings, puberty exams for schoolgirls.
Afghanistan’s Taliban are escalating restrictions against women, sending armed men into girls’ classrooms and forcing staff to inspect girls’ bodies for signs of puberty to disqualify them from further schooling. Afghan women report Taliban enforcers beating women whom they find wearing Western-style pants beneath their regime-mandated outer robes. The Taliban are intensifying these assaults in response to women’s rights campaigns in Afghanistan and Iran, and amid their own struggle to consolidate power. The Taliban’s intensifying violations against women risk mass atrocities and may presage greater violent extremism and threats to international security. Policymakers must respond.
Taliban Repression — and Its Danger
The new abuses of women reflect Afghanistan’s manifold, rising crises. Fourteen months after the Taliban recovered power in Kabul, they rule by force and are unlikely to make any significant effort to broaden the base of their regime, USIP analyst William Byrd argues. Their repressiveness is heightened by the country’s economic collapse.
The Taliban’s top leaders — largely ethnic Pashtuns from southern regions around Kandahar and educated in hardline religious schools in Pakistan — face murky divisions among Taliban sub-groups such as the Haqqani network, rooted in eastern provinces, and ethnic Uzbeks in the north. (While the Taliban often are identified as a Pashtun organization, they do not represent the Pashtun population broadly.) Indeed, USIP’s Andrew Watkins has noted, the Taliban’s internal divisions are most dramatized over women’s rights. In March, the group’s Kandahar-based emir, Haibatullah Akhundzada, suddenly vetoed a promise by Kabul-based Taliban officials to lift their prohibition on schooling for girls beyond sixth grade.
Peacebuilding experience shows that campaigns of threat or violence against marginalized groups, notably women, pose risks of mass atrocities. While narrow, openings exist to influence Taliban behavior. U.N. Special Rapporteur Richard Bennett, who yesterday underscored the deepening crisis, deserves more resources and a more robust mandate to investigate the myriad abuses of women’s rights that are being reported and, if warranted, refer crimes to the International Criminal Court. In addition, governments that engage with the Taliban or shelter Afghan refugees should appoint special envoys for Afghan human and women’s rights to press the case for reform in diplomatic engagements with the Taliban.
A New Spiral of Abuses
Afghan women activists, who cannot be identified for their safety, said this week the Taliban’s newly intensified attacks and threats against women are partly a response to Afghan women’s sustained demands and protests for basic rights — and to the high-profile women’s rights uprising in neighboring Iran. An alarming development, the women told USIP, is this: The Taliban previously forced their restrictions on women through their official “morality police.” But now, Taliban leaders’ more strident directives to control women have emboldened, or compelled, countless other men into abusive roles as “enforcers.” Men ranging from ordinary Taliban gunmen, many with little to do since the end of their long war last year, to civilian supporters of the regime have begun ad hoc enforcement against any woman they may see. Taliban have forced shopkeepers, teachers and other ordinary citizens into enforcement roles.
Women activists in Kabul are reporting the new abuses to colleagues abroad via e-mail and encrypted text messages. Details also are emerging via social media and notably from Rukhshana Media, a news website run by Afghan women journalists. Rukhshana published several articles this month on new restrictions and violence against women and girls, in Kabul as well as Herat and other provinces.
Soon after re-taking power last year, the Taliban scrapped the 20-year-old Women’s Affairs Ministry and re-established the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, which the 1990s Taliban regime used to repress women’s rights and their roles in public life. While the regime declares it is respecting women’s rights, its “virtue and vice” enforcers — most of them bearded men wearing white tunics with a ministry emblem — have policed women’s dress in streets, on buses and in other public spaces. The Taliban have steadily tightened restrictions on women’s dress, their ability to move in public spaces, and their study or work in roles it dislikes. They declared new restrictions in May, ordering women to cover their faces in public, halting the issuance of driving licenses to women and forbidding them to travel long distances from home without a close male relative as chaperone. Still, the degrees of enforcement vary.
The recent weeks’ heightened repression and assaults on women have come heavily in Kabul, which, with 4.5 million people, shelters more than 10 percent of the country’s population. Increasingly, Afghan women said, abuses are committed by gunmen dressed in ordinary street clothes, whom women could not identify. These armed squads entered women’s classrooms in universities and private schools across Kabul, demanding to inspect female students’ clothing. They forced the students to lift their long skirts and robes to show their garments underneath. Where the enforcers found girls or women wearing Western-style pants, they beat them with electrical cables, the women said.
Puberty Exams and Beatings
In public elementary schools, the Taliban have been appointing women, trained in the regime’s approved madrassas, as teachers and principals. The Taliban order them to enforce the regime’s requirements for women and girls to wear all-concealing clothing. In recent weeks, the Taliban’s virtue and vice ministry has in some schools instructed principals to examine the bodies of girls as young as 10 or 11 for signs of puberty — and to expel from school any girls who appear older or whose bodies are beginning to mature.
Women in Kabul said Taliban have entered girls’ elementary schools to enforce the regime’s months-old order that students and teachers keep their faces, except for their eyes, covered even in class. In the raids, as recent as yesterday, enforcers beat accused violators with electrical cables, sticks or gun butts.
“My fifth-grade daughter was beaten by Taliban for not having her face covered” in her classroom, a mother in Kabul told USIP. “She is terrified to go outside and refuses to attend school.” Another woman described Taliban enforcers stopping her family in their car this week. “They asked my husband about his relationship with the ‘black head,’ referring to me.” When he said they were married, the enforcers took each out of the car to ask them separately “what we had for dinner the night before, the name of my uncle and where we lived.” They let the family go, but only after ordering the woman to move from the front seat, next to her husband, to the back, with the children.
Women in Kabul report new abuses by Taliban gunmen in residential districts across the city. On Sunday, enforcers raided several girls’ schools and privately run education courses in the southern neighborhood of Chihil Sutun, beating students and teachers for wearing pants as undergarments, outer robes that did not reach their ankles, or clothing in colors other than black, the women said. Taliban abuses and restrictions reported by women in recent weeks include these:
On October 11, enforcers expelled about 60 female students, most from the ethnic Hazara minority, from dormitories of Kabul University. A university student said the expulsions appeared to be reprisals for Hazaras’ public protests over violent attacks against their community, and for Taliban’s suspicions that students had joined protests against the September 30 suicide bombing that killed at least 53 people at a Hazara education center in Kabul that was teaching girls. The student said Taliban warned it would retaliate against anyone reporting the expulsions to news media.
Female students who earned high school diplomas before the Taliban takeover, and who this month sat for university entrance examinations, report that Taliban officials prohibited them from registering for studies in fields including engineering, economics, veterinary science and journalism. An education official confirmed the prohibitions to Spain’s EFE news agency but was contradicted by an official Taliban spokesman.
Taliban are continuing routine torture and killings of women. Their officials in the central province of Ghor this month condemned a 24-year-old to execution by being buried to the waist in a pit and then stoned to death for alleged adultery. She committed suicide before her scheduled killing, two Afghan news agencies reported.
Afghan women’s resistance to the new Taliban repressions continues in part via protests — at times in public and often in private but shared via social media. It continues as well through women’s reporting of the rising violence. In an effort to throttle both tactics, women told USIP, Taliban enforcers also have been forbidding girls from carrying cellphones that can record video — a primary way that women in both Afghanistan and Iran have energized their movements and international support for them.
Taliban Escalate New Abuses Against Afghan Women, Girls
The inside story of Kabul Bank and the nearly $1bn of money laundering and corruption that devastated Afghanistan.
From its foundation in 2004 to its collapse six years later and subsequent attempts to recover its vast losses, this is the inside story of the rise and fall of Kabul Bank.
Involving nearly $1bn of money laundering, deception, embezzlement and failure of accountability, the banking disaster hit the savings of many Afghan families and left a legacy that contributed to events in Afghanistan years later.
In The Kabul Bank Crash, this financial “house of cards” story is told by those on the inside and beyond.
The collapse of the economy has led families across Afghanistan to make desperate decisions, including, for some, giving young daughters in marriage in exchange for a bride price. To gain more insight into this, AAN’s Ali Mohammad Sabawoon sought to interview fathers of young brides. He identified about a dozen such men, but most felt too ashamed and remorseful to talk about it. The four men who did speak described the pressures that had led to their decision, one they never imagined they would have to make, and the emotional turmoil that accompanied it. Unfortunately, for all four men, the difficult decision to marry off their daughters did not end up solving their problems (with input from Kate Clark). Although there are no solid statistics to corroborate whether underage marriages are on the rise in Afghanistan,[1] anecdotal evidence, media reporting and the context of widespread and deepening poverty strongly suggests they are. The first report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Afghanistan, published on 10 September 2022, which quoted some survey data, expressed concerns about “the reported surge of child marriage.”[2] Anecdotally, it also seems that more Afghans than in the past knew or had heard about families marrying off a young daughter. For this reason, the author decided to talk to such families to better understand how they had come to this decision and whether there was indeed a trend.
It turned out to be difficult to find people willing to be interviewed on the topic. While the author managed to identify and contact 11 fathers who had married off an underage daughter, and they all admitted to having done so, seven were unwilling to speak about it. Only four of the fathers agreed to an interview. Those who did speak – and most of the ones who did not – admitted to feeling guilty, depressed and ashamed over what they had done.
The four fathers who spoke to AAN were from Helmand, Kunduz, Laghman and Kabul city; the girls who were married (or promised in marriage) varied in age from 5 to 13. The two oldest girls, both 13 years old, had a wedding ceremony and moved into the houses of their husbands, respectively a 45-year-old mullah who already had a wife and the 20-year-old son of a business partner the father owed money to. Both fathers said they thought their daughters were happy in their new lives, although it would probably have been difficult for them to admit otherwise, and the girls themselves may have felt it impossible to ‘complain’ to their fathers if they were unhappy.
The arrangements for the two younger girls, a 11-year-old girl contracted to the 20-year-old son of a landowner and a five-year-old girl contracted to the seven-year-old son of a neighbour, were different. These girls were only promised in marriage. However, in Afghanistan, this ceremony, often translated as ‘engagement’ – kozdhda in Pashto and shirin khori in Persian – is considered binding and backing out of the subsequent marriage itself will bring enmity between the families. The families of these girls reached an agreement that the marriage would take place only after their daughters had reached puberty or the parents thought that their daughter was ready to be married. Till then, they would stay at their parents’ homes.
None of the girls were consulted about their marriage. In some cases, they were not even informed beforehand. The fathers generally feared they would cry a lot. All four of the fathers did say they had consulted their wives, and most also more widely within the family. One of the wives decided to meet the prospective groom to see if he and his family were suitable and herself agreed to the marriage; two opposed the marriage, but were eventually ‘persuaded’ or ‘gave in’, and the views of the fourth mother were not reported.
One striking feature of the interviews is that none of the fathers who spoke would normally have considered marrying off a young daughter. In all four cases, they felt the pressure to repay their debts was inescapable and there was no other way to find the money. All of them, including the ones who did manage to clear their loans, quickly found themselves again without money or income – no better off than before, but now having married off a young daughter.
The interviews were conducted in July/August 2022, by phone and in person, and have been lightly edited for clarity and flow.
1. Father of six children, 62 years old, Pashtun originally from Ghazni, living in Kabul city: “In our community, people call a bride price the ‘meat of a daughter.’ I’ve been eating my daughter’s meat and soon I will finish it.”
I married my 13-year-old daughter to a 45-year-old mullah from our village in Muqur district in Ghazni province. We’re relatives, but not very close. He’s a wealthy man and already has another wife who’s older than him; he has three children from her. His brothers came to my home and said they wanted me to marry my daughter to their brother. I asked them to give me some time so I could talk their proposal over with my family. I consulted my close relatives, and my wife and son as well. After two weeks, we reached the decision that I should do it and give my daughter to the mullah.
I threw a party and invited the other family. The mullah’s six brothers and some of his other relatives came. I also invited some of my own close relatives, men and some women. At the [engagement] party, I gave my daughter to the mullah. We agreed on a bride price – 1,000,000 Pakistani rupees (about USD 5000). We also agreed that the jahez would be bought by the groom’s family.[3]So they were the ones who supplied all the necessary things for my daughter’s household, not me.
Marrying my girl off at this early age was the most difficult decision I ever made in my life, and to a 45-year-old man who already had a wife. But speaking frankly, I had no other options left. I had been a police officer, first in Dr Najib’s era and then in the Karzai and Ghani eras. I was retired when Ashraf Ghani was president and had been getting at least some of my pension every year, but for the last two years, I didn’t receive any. My son was a police officer in the interior ministry in Kabul. He lost his job too.
I was in debt for eight months of rent to the landlord – a total of about 50,000 afghanis (around USD 550) – and I’d also spent money on the wedding of my older daughter. Shegot married three years ago to a teacher, when she was 21. I only took money from the groom’s family to buy her jahez [so, no bride price] and I spent about 100,000 afghanis (around USD 1150) on the different ceremonies. We have to follow some of our traditions. If you don’t, people will laugh at you. I also owed about 70,000 afghanis (around USD 800) in loans from friends and relatives. I paid off these debts using the bride price I received for my younger daughter.
The wedding was about four months ago. The groom’s family paid the bride price in three steps. They gave me 400,000 rupees (around USD 2000) when the couple was engaged. Two months later, they gave me 300,000 (around USD 1500). I received the remaining 300,000 a few days before the wedding of my daughter.
Recently she came to my home. It was during Eid, she spent four days with us. I think she’s happy because she didn’t complain about her life. In the beginning, after she was engaged, she cried a lot. I was also very frustrated and anxious and I couldn’t sleep for several nights. For weeks, I felt exhausted and my heart didn’t want to speak to anyone. But there was nothing left that we could do, other than marry off my daughter so we could feed the rest of the family.
In the past, people would sometimes marry their daughters while they were still children, but for the last fifteen years or so, I hadn’t heard of any girl being married in childhood – at least not until recently. Now, the practice has increased again and I’ve been hearing about it again.
I never imagined I would marry one of my daughters while she was still a child. And I’ve been spending my daughter’s bride price. In our community, people call this money the “meat of a daughter” because taking a bride price is completely illegal in Islam. But I’ve been eating my daughter’s meat and soon I will finish it.
2. Father of five children, 40 years old, Tajik from Dasht-e Archi district, Kunduz province: “I really made a blunder. I married my underage daughter because of poverty and now I still remain in poverty.”
There are eight people in my family. I have two wives and five children. The daughter who I gave in marriage is my eldest child; she is 11 years old. She doesn’t go to school. My whole family, including my wife and brothers, are uneducated.
I used to have a job in the government where I received 13,000 afghanis as my monthly salary (nowadays worth around 150 USD). I was able to feed my family on this. When the government collapsed, I lost my job. I didn’t have any alternative, except to marry my daughter to someone. I married her to a 20-year-old man. He is the son of one of our villagers, but we’re not relatives. In our family it isn’t a custom to marry small girls, we always waited until puberty. I’m the only one within my family who’s marrying a daughter who’s still a child.
I did this, even though her mother didn’t agree. But my other wife, who’s the girl’s step-mother, helped me make the mother of the girl agree. Finally, after about a month, she consented. We didn’t tell our daughter at first that we were getting her married. When she found out about it, she cried a lot.
We had a small celebration, in which the father-in-law of my daughter gave me 30,000 afghanis (around USD 350). At the engagement party, we repeated our agreement that my daughter wouldn’t be married until she reached puberty. We’d also decided that the father-in-law of my daughter would pay me the rest of the bride price within six months. The full bride price was 250,000 afghanis (around USD 3000).
But more than six months have passed and he hasn’t given me the remaining money yet.
He’s not a bad man. I thought he had enough money to give me, because he has more land than many of us in the village, but unfortunately it turns out he didn’t have the cash. He’d also made a plan to marry his daughter and I knew he would probably receive more money than me because his daughter was an adult. The bride price for a woman in our area is usually around 400,000 to 500,000 afghanis.
He did get his daughter married – to someone who is not from our village and not even from our tribe. I went to the engagement party. I think the bride price they agreed upon was 600,000 afghanis. But the father-in-law of my girl was only given 50,000 afghanis by his in-laws on that first day. Since then, he has received nothing.
I’m now helplessly waiting for the money he owes me. I really made a blunder. I married my underage daughter because of poverty, but now I still remain in poverty. I believe this happened to me because of the sin I perpetrated by marrying off my small daughter.
3. Father, 50 years old, Tajik from Nangrahar, living in Laghman province: “After I paid off the loan, very little money was left. I’ve now finished all of it.But I’m happy that at least one of my children can find a meal three times a day.”
I married my 13-year-old daughter to a young man of 20. I was indebted to shopkeepers for around 150,000 Pakistani rupees (around USD 750). Some were continuously demanding that I repay the loans. They were even going to my relatives and telling them that I should pay back the money I owed. Finally, I decided to sell my land. After that, I took the money and started a business with another person. We were buying cows and after a few days selling them in the market, making profit on the difference in price. We both invested in the business, but my partner, who was also from Nangrahar, invested more than me.
After two months, we sold six cows with a profit of about 60,000 Pakistani rupees (around USD 300). The buyer took the cows and told us he’d send the money via hawala. We trusted him because we’d sold him cows twice before. But he went away and didn’t send us our money. He just disappeared. We still don’t know where he is. We searched a lot for that man, but we couldn’t find him.
My business partner gave me about 200,000 Pakistani rupees as a loan (around USD 1000), but after we didn’t find the person who robbed us of our money, my partner kept calling me to give him back his money. One day, he came to our home. I offered him tea and my daughter brought it in. When he saw my girl, he suggested I should marry her to his son, instead of paying him back his money.
I was very angry but said nothing. I just laughed, but I felt furious. When he left, I told my wife what the man had said. My wife wept but said nothing. She was also anxious about our economic circumstances. My business partner kept coming and asking me for his money. Finally, my wife said she would go to his home to meet his son and his wife. She went and when she came back, she said she’d agreed to the marriage. She said the boy was a good boy and his mother was a good woman, but I could see that she was unhappy about it.
Finally, we decided to marry our daughter to the son of my partner. We had small celebrations on both the engagement and the wedding day. My partner invited his close relatives and so did I. In our community, we don’t take too high a bride price. It’s not our custom. I only took 200,000 afghanis (around USD 2500).
After I paid off the loan, very little money was left. I’ve now finished all of it. I go to the bazaar looking for work. Sometimes, I can find some, but most of the time I come back empty-handed. When my wife and children see me come home without finding any daily labour work, they become unhappy.
I think my daughter is happy with her new family. And I’m happy that at least one of my children can find a meal three times a day. At least one of my children is fed.
We didn’t consult our daughter because we knew if we talked it over with her, she would cry. And she did weep a lot on the day of her engagement, as did her mother. But we could do nothing else. I was in such a bad economic situation that I had to marry my girl at such a young age.
4. Father of three children, 36 years old, Pashtun from Helmand province: “I used to condemn people who gave their children in marriage. And I really regret what I did, but there was no other alternative.”
I married my five-year-old daughter to a seven-year-old boy in our village. I talked it over with my wife beforehand. She didn’t agree, but I persisted and finally she gave in because she knew there was no alternative.
I owed 100,000 Pakistani rupees (around USD 500) after I bought a cow on credit. I thought I would graze the cow and sell the milk, and use the money to support my family and repay the loan. But the cow died. So, I tried to find a job in Lashkargah and elsewhere in Helmand. but I couldn’t find any work. For a while, I worked with a man in his shop, but then I lost that job too.
Three months after I lost my job, the due date to pay back my loan arrived. The man I owed money to kept coming to my house twice a week, asking for his money. After a month, I decided to shift my family to another district to hide myself from the man, because there was no way for me to find work and make money to repay the debt on the cow. But two months later, the businessman found me. He insisted a lot that I pay him back his money.
When my neighbour found out I was in debt, he suggested that I marry my daughter to his son. We eventually agreed he would give me 300,000 Pakistani rupees (about USD 1,500).[4]He gave me 100,000 rupees in the week after we agreed to the match and said he’d pay the remaining money during the wedding. We agreed that the wedding would take place after my daughter’s 15th birthday, so in about ten years’ time.
After I received the money, I gave it to the owner of the cow. Now I don’t have any money left and I don’t know how to find work. I really regret what I did, but there was no other alternative.
I always used to condemn people who gave their children in marriage. I even tried not to go to their engagement parties. Now I’m full of remorse. I didn’t consult my close relatives at the time, but I hear that my fellow villagers are criticising me a lot, though they don’t say anything to my face. The people castigating me are my close relatives, who I didn’t consult when I was making this decision.
The four child marriages in context
Child marriage, especially of girls, is not uncommon in Afghanistan. Young girls are sometimes married to close relatives to strengthen kinship ties. For example, two brothers living together in an extended family may want to reinforce their bonds and decide not to delay the engagement until a girl has reached puberty. In that scenario, a brother contracts his young daughter to a nephew, but the two would usually not actually get married until she was considered old enough.
There are also darker reasons for giving a young girl in marriage, for example, to end a blood feud. In a so-called bad marriage, the family of the person accused of murder or manslaughter gives a bride to a male member of the victim’s family. Such marriages, always relatively rare, have become rarer in recent years. For example, in the author’s community there have been only three cases of bad marriages in recent decades, all about 35 years ago; two were to settle of cases of elopement and one followed a murder. However, where they do take place, a young bride is often preferred by bride’s family, as she is less likely to object or be able to block the marriage. Young girls also fetch lower bride prices, so her family loses less than if they were to marry an older daughter.[5]
As our four interviews illustrate, a more common reason driving early marriage is economic distress, and the practice, usual in Afghanistan and many other countries, of the groom’s family paying money to the bride’s family in the form of a bride price (walwar in Pashto and toyana and sherbaha in Dari). In general, older girls (but not too old) fetch a higher bride price. However, if a family has no older unmarried daughters and they are in desperate need of money, they might feel forced to consider marrying off a younger girl, especially in times of extreme economic hardship.[6] In Islamic law, the groom should also pay a financial pledge, mahr, to his wife. In Afghanistan, as elsewhere, the mahr payment rarely reaches the bride. She can exempt the groom from paying it, or ‘voluntarily’ give it to her father.
The author has witnessed marriage agreements in his community between close relatives who wanted to strengthen the ties between their families by promising their children to each other, but these engagements rarely involved the payment of mahr or a bride price, because of the close ties between those involved. If they did, the payments were minimal. He has never witnessed the marriage of an underage girl that involved significant payments of money if her family had a comparatively good economic life.
Many Afghans consider the practice of child marriage harmful, saying it ends a girl’s childhood far too early and raises the risk of maternal mortality, as girls who get pregnant during puberty are more likely to die in childbirth. It also takes away the opportunity for girls to have a say in whether, when and to whom they will be married.
The Afghan Civil Law, ratified in 2009 by then president Hamid Karzai, fixed the marriage age at 18 for boys and 16 for girls, although girls who are 15 were allowed to marry if their guardian or the court agreed. Underage marriages, below the age of 15, were banned although the laws forbidding it were never actively enforced.[7] Regardless of the law, the age of first marriage has been slowly rising, at least it was up till 2016-17 when the last major nationwide survey of living conditions was carried out. At that time, nationally, 4.2 per cent of all women had been married before the age of 15 and 28 per cent before the age of 18.[8] The average age of first marriage at that time was 21.6 years for women and 24.4 years for men.
The survey, conducted by the Central Statistics Office, illustrated the rising age that Afghan women marry with a graph, reproduced below. A higher proportion of women now aged 35 and over in 2016-17 had been married by age 18, whereas for the younger age groups the percentage married at that age is lower: 58 per cent of those aged 30-35, 50 per cent of those aged 25-29 and 40 per cent of those between 20-24. In other words, the younger generations were, on average, getting married later. The graph also shows that the proportion of much younger girls, 15 and under, who were married had progressively fallen.
Source: Central Statistics Organisation (2018), Afghanistan Living Conditions Survey 2016-17. Kabul, CSO.
What do we know about the current situation?
The current leadership of the Islamic Emirate has not said anything about child marriage. The Taleban supreme leader Sheikh Hibatullah Akhundzada did issue a “decree regarding women’s rights” on 3 December 2021 which said, among other things, that forcing a girl or a widow to marry was illegal. However, he did not put a lower limit on the age at which girls could marry (see this Pajhwok report).[9] According to a Taleban judge, who gave his view to the author but did not want to be named, a girl must in principle have reached puberty to be married. However, if her guardian (wali), her father or grandfather, acts with her well-being in mind and there is “a good match” which could be lost while she grows up, exceptionally, he said, a prepubescent girl could be promised in marriage (kozdhda or shirin khori). The judge said that getting money in exchange for a girl of any age was illegal – haram – under Islamic law: any mahr paid had to go to the bride herself, while bride prices were illegal.
According to a recent report by Save the Children on children’s lives under Taleban rule, more than one in twenty (5.5%) of the 122 girls aged 9-17 whom they interviewed in May and June 2022 had, that year, “been asked to marry… to support their family.” The cases were more common for girls in female-headed households, which the charity said, “are experiencing the greatest financial pressures and gaps in meeting basic needs.”[10] The children in the study said that early marriages were happening:
…because families do not have enough money and are poor. Children recognise that this way of coping mainly affects girls, including very young ones. A few girls mentioned that if a girl in the family gets married, there is more money to take care of, and feed, her siblings. In addition, because older girls are no longer allowed to go to school, some parents believe that getting married instead will give them a chance at a better life.
Since the interviews for our report were only with fathers, they provide only limited glimpses into the feelings of the girls concerned, as well as their mothers. The Save the Children study did get a child’s-eye view of early marriage, although it seemed mainly from their peers, rather than the brides themselves. Girls aged 9 to 14 told the researchers how other girls in their community when they were married had been forced by their parents to give up school and/or move away to other areas. The girls worried that the same thing would happen to them and that “because of child marriage, they will never be able to go to school again, and that they will not have a future.” They said the possibility of having to marry an older man when they were still young was depressing, while they felt “frustrated and powerless” that their parents would not listen to them when it came to marriage.
None of the daughters of the four fathers interviewed had been ‘listened to’ when it came to their marriages. Girls who are engaged at this young age are never listened to. If they were, it is likely they would just cry.
Even so, of the eleven fathers contacted, most expressed shame about what they had done. They did not consider that marrying off their young daughters had been normal or good, but said that that in a situation when they were struggling to provide even food, they had been obliged to sacrifice one of their children to save the others.
The tragedy, of course, is that for most families the short-term injection of cash the marriage provided, while briefly solving the pressure and shame of owing large sums of money, did not solve the underlying problem. Most of these families were left still with no steady means of income and will be incurring more debt again soon.
Edited by Martine van Bijlert
References
References
↑1
The UN Population Fund (UNFPA) told AAN it was not currently measuring child marriage. It had earlier, under the previous regime, been giving technical and financial support for the National Action Plan to End Early and Child Marriage in Afghanistan (2017–2021), developed by the then Deputy Minister for Youth Affairs and the Ministry of Women’s Affairs. A UNFPA official in Kabul told the author that the plan was, however, never implemented.
↑2
The report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Afghanistan cited a draft document, The UN Rapid Gender Analysis Afghanistan – Secondary Data Review (Draft 3), dated October 2021 (excerpts seen by AAN). It quoted surveys that had found “the overall rate of child marriage has increased in the face of the current economic crisis and humanitarian need, with 6% of households reporting the marriage of daughters earlier than expected.” The prevalence of child marriage as a strategy to cope with economic distress was, the report said, most common in Helmand Province, followed by Kandahar and Faryab. The Special Rapporteur’s report can be found by searching for A/HRC/51/6 on this page, see also AAN analysis here. More survey data can be found in the recent Save the Children report, Breaking Point: Children’s Lives One Year Under Taliban Rule, quoted elsewhere in this report.
↑3
The jahez are the things needed to run a household, which might include dishes and cooking utensils, bedding and furniture and for richer Afghans, washing machines, televisions and cars. The jahez is traditionally given to the bride by her father. The interviewee added that the bride price is customarily agreed on in Pakistani rupees by those living in southern and southeastern provinces or among people who are originally from these regions.
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The interviewee also said: “Before the takeover of the Taleban, the bride price for a woman used to be 1,200,000 to 4,000,000 rupees (USD 6000 to 20,000), but now it’s less, around 800,000 to 1,200,000 rupees (USD 4,000-6,000) for a woman.”The bride price for young girls has always been lower.
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For more background on how bad marriages and how bride prices are fundamental to assessing ‘blood money’, another means of assuaging a blood feud, see the 2011 AAN special report Pashtunwali – tribal life and behaviour among the Pashtuns by Lutz Rzehak.
The Shia Personal Status Law provided no minimum age, but said that underage girls could be married only if their guardian proved theircompetency and puberty to a court and the marriage would be in the girl’s interest. The extraordinary gazette of the Law on the Elimination of Violence against Women (EVAW) fixed a punishment of not less than two years imprisonment for people marrying or giving in marriage underage daughters. But, as said before, this was not actively enforced.
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In urban areas, the percentages of women married before the age of respectively 15 and 18 were lower, 2.1 per cent and 18.4 per cent respectively, and in rural areas, higher, 5 per cent and 31.9 per cent, respectively.
↑9
Bad marriages were not mentioned specifically by Hibatullah. However, they were banned by the first Taleban supreme leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar. It was reported at the time that he was prompted by a moving storyline in the popular BBC radio soap opera, New Home, New Life about the plight of a girl who had been given in such a marriage. See this media report and this AAN obituary of one of the show’s actors.
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Breaking Point: Children’s Lives One Year Under Taliban Rule, August 2022, Save the Children. The charity said that of all the strategies adopted by households to cope with economic pressure, child marriage was not the only one affecting children. The main strategies were: children being sent out to do paid work, children having to migrate for work (6%), children leaving the household to stay elsewhere (4%), begging (2.5%) and child, early, and forced marriage (2%).
Living in a Collapsed Economy (4): The desperation and guilt of giving a young daughter in marriage
Here’s how to promote projects inside Afghanistan that benefit and empower the people.
The Taliban waged an impressive military campaign and removed the prior government in August 2021. They know how to fight, but they clearly do not know how to run a government. The new Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has not been able to get international recognition. Western nations have suspended most humanitarian aid while the World Bank and International Monetary Fund also halted payments. In February 2022, the United States seized the frozen reserves of the Afghan central bank, severely crippling the overall banking system. Just last month, the United States used part of these frozen funds to set up the Afghan Fund at the Bank for International Settlements in an effort to kickstart the economy without financially supporting the Taliban government, which has been systematically diverting international support to its own favored recipients.
The situation in Afghanistan is dire. Saad Mohseni, who has managed media operations in Afghanistan for 20 years, notes that it is difficult to overstate the multiple crises facing the country, including food shortages and sky-high food prices. According to the World Food Program, more than a third of the population is “marching to starvation,” and an astonishing 97 percent of the population risks falling below the poverty line by the end of 2022. Meanwhile, through its profound disenfranchisement of women—girls older than 12 have been banned from school—the Afghan government has become the most gender repressive in the world. Western intelligence experts are also concerned that the country is once again becoming a haven for terrorist groups. In the opinion of UN expert Richard Bennett, reprisals targeting opponents and a clampdown on freedom of expression amount to a further descent towards authoritarianism.
The Taliban have been totally unresponsive to pressures to change their fundamentalist policies despite the steadily worsening internal situation. One result is a growing resistance movement that encompasses the National Resistance Front (NRF) and the Afghanistan Freedom Front. So, the one positive aspect of the Taliban takeover—the secession of fighting—is in danger of disappearing, compounding the already dire situation.
In terms of alternatives, Anna Larson at the U.S. Institute of Peace sees stable democracy as an elusive prospect. Anatol Lieven at the Quincy Institute sees some potential for Taliban pragmatism and recommends that the Biden administration provide basic food and humanitarian assistance while keeping a watchful distance. Both Adam Weinstein and Saad Mohseni recommend sustained interaction with the Taliban to encourage moderating tendencies and help empower the realists.
The Taliban are notoriously fragmented. They had barely consolidated control in late 2021 when reports emerged of friction within the leadership. A more recent assessment notes that many policies still vary greatly from one province to the next as Taliban officials react to local community expectations. Many issues are still resolved via personal connections with influential Taliban figures, regardless of their official position in government. Opportunities abound to influence Taliban policies, not with pressures from outside but from within.
No international actor is interested in promoting new warfare in Afghanistan. The United States withdrew its troops. Russia is distracted by its intervention in Ukraine. China is involved in trade with Kabul but is not in any way promoting insurgency. Pakistan is presently overwhelmed with natural disasters. Turkey has been supportive of efforts to stabilize Afghanistan and promote development. There is some friction with Central Asia, especially low-level fighting on the Tajik border area, but none of these states has any interest in promoting the renewal of active hostilities.
On the contrary, there remains strong international interest in stabilizing Afghanistan. UN agencies and other international organization are working hard to prevent the country from slipping back into war and chaos.
Concrete Assistance
The United States and the international community want to support the Afghan people but without providing legitimacy to the repressive Talban government. There are no easy ways to help people at the bottom without helping the government at the top. The challenge is to develop projects that provide direct support to the Afghan people with a maximum impact at the lowest levels. These projects must be compatible with the Taliban’s basic principles and, where possible, satisfy the Taliban’s general interest in overall economic development. At the same time, these projects must meet international standards of transparency so that external support does not get diverted to the Taliban’s preferred projects.
Agriculture, the main component of the Afghan economy, is badly in need of basic improvements. One obvious possibility is providing better seed stocks, increasing crop diversity, and returning to traditional crops in areas where they have been deemphasized. Water usage is also a challenge as increasing temperatures and decreasing rainfall impact many areas of Afghanistan. This may require introducing more resilient crops, but even simple measures making water usage more efficient can provide significant benefits. Urban agriculture with hydroponic or aquaponic systems could also be introduced into Afghanistan, with facilities run entirely by women, which would be compatible with Taliban restrictions.
Agriculture needs a smoothly functioning support system. At the operational level, this means creating a network of reliable equipment providers and professional maintenance operations at the village level. This local network has to connect to reliable supply chains, both in supplying key ingredients such as fertilizer and in providing a route from farmer to customer, including export markets. At the high end, the support system needs to include agricultural processing. It is distressing, for example, that Afghanistan produces so much wheat but, because it has to send it abroad for processing, ends up buying foreign flour.
Opium remains a serious challenge. The previous Taliban government forbade it, but it became an important source of funds during the time of insurgency. Now that they have returned to power, the Taliban has officially condemned the drug, although practically it is difficult for them to destroy production. Fifteen years ago, there was a concerted efforted to turn opium into legitimate pharmaceutical products that are badly needed in the region. But both the U.S. and Afghan governments were against giving any legitimacy to opium, so the effort collapsed. But a new version of this approach to opium could be very attractive to sections of the current Taliban leadership as well as to international supporters.
Power generation remains a major challenge for the government, with almost total dependence on imported electricity. The most cost-effective approach is to reduce power use through increased efficiency in cities and in industries. Although earlier efforts to promote distributed local hydropower in Nangarhar province gradually faded away, the project could be revived. Solar, too, is a promising alternative for large sections of the country, as is biofuel, with a whole range of possible applications.
Education also provides a wide range of possibilities. Two are of particular interest. Afghan Education for a Better Tomorrow (AEBT) is an organization that links professors in the United States with universities in Afghanistan to provide classroom instruction at a professional level. AEBT and the Raqim Foundation also provide tele-medicine support with a satellite connection.
Transport is another area of potential foreign investment, particularly railroad expansion. A rail connection from Uzbekistan to Mazar-e-Sharif was established with help from the Asian Development Bank in 2010, but it was little used and associated rail developments languished. In 2020, another short rail link, this time from Iran into Herat, was established. Other efforts include a Five Nations Railway Corridor in the northern part of Afghanistan.
Finding Partners
There is a huge potential for projects that would directly benefit Afghans, be acceptable to the Taliban, and serve to empower local leaders and managers. The necessary starting point is assembling a local project team to identify specific projects. This team needs to discuss potential projects with local authorities and then build out a business plan, Then the team can discuss the project with potential supporters, including NGOs and international organizations. This effort needs to provide specific project outlines in some detail and with a clear route to implementation.
U.S. organizations, such as the Afghan-American Chamber of Commerce, the Society of Afghan Engineers, the Society for International Development, United States, and the Grand National Movement of Afghanistan could be very helpful in this regard. Such organizations could obviously provide technical and business support. They could also assemble working groups in specific areas of interest to identify potential projects, as well as possible staff and operational support, and assist them in the development of business plans. Finally, they could publicize projects to a wider audience including the Afghan diaspora.
Watching Afghanistan slip into greater poverty, hunger, and war is not the only alternative for those outside the country. In fact, outsiders can still partner with Afghans themselves in promoting development projects that provide concrete benefits to the population but also help to empower them to pressure the Taliban for internal change.
Ed Corcoran is a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus. He was a strategic analyst at the U.S. Army War College, where he chaired studies for the Office of the Deputy Chief of Operations.
For many Afghans the first year of Taleban rule was marked by uncertainty and anxiety over the country’s sudden change in fortunes. Virtually every area of daily life, from banking and shopping to travelling around the country to marriage celebrations has been affected. We wanted to find out from a variety of people how an aspect of their daily life had changed and how they were negotiating this changed landscape. In this first instalment of a new series, AAN guest author, Rama Mirzada, writes about what it has been like for her, a young woman, to overcome her fears, and the anxiety of her family, at her leaving the house to enroll in an English language course.
I’m a 23-year-old Afghan woman, ambitious and with big dreams for my own future and the future of my country. In February 2021, I returned to Afghanistan from Pakistan where I had gone for undergraduate studies. I arrived home with my BA in International Relations in hand and a long-held dream of winning a coveted place at Oxford University in the UK for post-graduate studies.
That was the plan anyway.
Months later, the old government fell and on 15 August 2021, the Taleban entered Kabul the same day and with them a new era for Afghanistan began. Overnight, our country became a harder place for a woman to pursue her dreams. In those early months, I mostly stayed at home, trying to imagine what the new Afghanistan would look like and what this sudden change would mean for my own future. Life settled into a quiet routine – working from home, reading and helping my mother with chores around the house. I even started to learn Chinese online. I would leave the house once a month, with my mother in tow, to collect my salary. But I knew this was not sustainable. I had to put my anxieties and reservations aside and properly breach the four-wall confines of our house. I needed to re-engage with the world outside, renew my social relationships, upgrade my skills and revive my plans to get a master’s degree.
So in April 2022, I bought a black hijab and announced to my family that I intended to enroll in an English language course at one of Kabul’s universities. My loving parents were understandably anxious. They tried every argument they could think of to change my mind. In Afghanistan, where decision-making is often a whole of family affair, even our relatives chimed in to dissuade me. These were uncertain times, they said, no time for a girl to travel clear across town for any reason, least of all to take an English course. My parents asked if I couldn’t find a course online or closer to home. The chorus of naysayers was loud and compelling and I had to be strong to keep up my resolve. I even fibbed a little and told them my supervisor at work wanted me to improve my English writing skills – a white lie to further the cause of my education and independence.
Finally, after weeks of negotiations, sometimes lasting well into the night, they relented. The discussions about safety measures then began. They cautioned me against talking to people I don’t know, telling people where I work, and talking politics. They even hired a driver to take me to school and back. As I was leaving the house to register, my father said: “You don’t listen to anyone’s advice. That’s why I’m not going to say anything to you on this subject ever again.”
I’m not particularly brave. On the day I went to register, I was very anxious. As the car travelled the long distance between my home and the university, my parents’ words of caution were on replay in my head, but all that disappeared as soon as I walked into the university, anxiety gave way to relief. I was energised by the staff’s welcoming attitude to the women and girls who had, like me, come to register.
There were no Talebs inside the university and if anyone judged what I was wearing, I didn’t notice. I asked the staff about the rules of attire for female students – they were not too particular about this. They stressed, instead, that the classes were segregated by gender and that there were separate areas for male and female students. Later, but only much later, we were told that a delegation from the Taleban’s Ministry of Higher Education would spend ten days on campus. They would observe classes, examine the curriculum and ensure classes were in fact segregated by gender. We were cautioned to adhere to the hijab rules as defined by the new government. They have not come to inspect our classes yet.
We faced a new problem though: our class was undersubscribed. It had not reached the minimum number of students (ten) required to convene it. Our instructors said the school would have to cancel the class because it could not run courses at a financial loss. There were relatively few female students, in sharp contrast to the boys’ classes, which according to our instructors, were oversubscribed and bursting with students.
As it turned out, the numbers in our class slowly grew. A new student one day, another two the next, until we reached the requisite 10 girls enrolled in the class. Every time a new student walked into the classroom, my classmates and I would cheer and congratulate them and each other and our spirits rallied as we saw the possibility of the course being cancelled diminish.
For most Afghans, finding the spare cash to pay for the course in the current economic environment is difficult, if not impossible. The 11,000 afghanis (about USD 125) I paid for this three-month course is equivalent to one month’s rent for the family that lives next door to us. I can bear the cost because I have a job and live at home with my parents. In a country where most families have difficulty putting food on the table. I am fully aware of my privilege.
My parents have always pushed my siblings and me to excel at school, to persevere and aim high. Sometimes, I think they care more about our education than we do ourselves. These days, my mother scours the internet for post-graduate scholarships and sends me the ones she finds, even if they are unavailable to Afghans. Their support gives me the energy to dream big and stick with it. Behind every successful person are doggedly supportive parents. This is also a privilege.
In my lifetime, Kabul has always been a city of unexpected incidents – suicide bombings, sticky bombs, roadside IEDs and kidnapping. Things go back to ‘normal’ quickly and people return to their routines – work, school, shopping, family visits – grateful if the incident has not touched them and the people they love, but heartsick with grief for their neighbours and compatriots. They make some adjustments to their routines and hope the next dreaded attack does not come.
Yet ‘the next attack’ when it came, targeted students like me – women and girls taking a mock university entrance exam at the Kaaj Higher Education Centre in Dasht-e Barchi – a district in west Kabul inhabited mostly by Hazara Shia Muslims on 30 September 2022. Some 60 people, mostly women and girls, were killed in the attack.
The morning after, as I prepared to leave for school, I could read the concern in my parents’ eyes, but there was no longer any question of my not continuing with the course. In our house, the issue had already been debated and decided. And now after the attack, the stakes were even higher; people were taking to the streets in Afghanistan and abroad to protest against what they consider to be a genocide of Hazaras. Women and girls who, like me, are in education have a role to play in defining the future for ourselves and our daughters. Our job is to keep going.
There were fewer people at the university that morning. Only half of my classmates showed up. All were, no doubt, concerned about the possibility of a similar attack against our school. In the days that followed, students slowly started showing up for class and by the end of the week, the numbers were nearly back to normal.
We continue to arrive every morning on a campus segregated by gender. Although there are no male students in the building when female classes are in session – except for the instructors and university staff, who are mostly male – female students must leave the campus immediately after their classes end. Coaxed by the guards to make haste and vacate the premises, we make way for male students to enter the campus 30 minutes after our classes are dismissed. This doesn’t leave much time for us to get to know our classmates or have side conversations outside the classroom. But, for now, sharing space in a classroom where we can learn together is enough.
Edited by Roxanna Shapour and Kate Clark
The Daily Hustle: One young woman’s journey to an English course in Kabul
According to Rubin, the Doha agreement does not specify that the US will recognize the Islamic Emirate.
Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert with the Center on International Cooperation, said the US’s sending the deputy head of the CIA for talks with the Islamic Emirate indicates terrorism is a priority.
He made the remarks in an interview with TOLOnews.
Rubin said that there should be a process of discussing the elements of the sanctions.
“I prefer to say that there should be a process of discussing the elements of the sanctions because there are sanctions against the individual members of the Taliban, there are sanctions against the organizations and so on,” he said.
“I think the fact that the US sent the deputy head of the CIA … in addition to the officials in the State Department, shows that they put a very high priority on discussion of issues of terrorism,” he said.
According to Rubin, the Doha agreement does not specify that the US will recognize the Islamic Emirate.
“The Doha agreement doesn’t say that the United States will recognize the Taliban or an organization known as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. It says it will recognize the government that results from negotiations among all the Afghan sides,” he said.
Barnett Rubin: Counter-Terrorism ‘High Priority’ for US
The country is, once again, the worst place in the world to be a woman.
Hajera gave birth to her daughter, Sarah, in Kabul two weeks after the Taliban took over Afghanistan last summer. Hajera is 35 and worked as a government economist. She and her husband already had two sons and were happy to be welcoming a daughter. But they soon lost their jobs, and the Taliban erased the rights women had gained over the previous two decades.
An Afghan women’s-rights activist had connected me with Hajera, who was too afraid to share her last name. “We had a job,” she told me. “We had money. We had a home. We had a country. We had a family.” Now, she said, “we have nothing.”
Afghanistan is, once again, the worst place in the world to be a woman.
I asked her: What did she hope would happen now? “Hich omid nist,” she said. There is no hope.
I was born in 1999, two years before the September 11 attacks and the subsequent invasion of my country. For Afghan women, the overthrow of the Taliban marked the beginning of a luckier time. Schools were opened to girls. Women were no longer imprisoned at home—they were allowed to work, and would no longer be beaten if they chose not to wear the burqa.
Freedom came too late for my mother and her generation. They had prayed and protested for these rights. But many were married off as children. My mother was married at 16. Our mothers and grandmothers refer to these times as the “unblessed years.”
Now that the time of unblessing has returned, it has become clear that as we grew up, my generation was witnessing not the beginning of a new future, but an anomalous moment in our country’s sad history. We had been enthusiastic, energetic, happy, and hopeful. On August 15, 2021, Afghanistan returned to zero. Or even less than zero, because the path to freedom feels even longer and more dangerous now, and Afghan women are so very tired.
I am a refugee in the United States now, but I have been talking with my family and friends, with former teachers and colleagues, to understand what they have been going through and what they want the rest of the world to know.
Faryal is a 14-year-old girl in Kabul. As with many of the women I spoke with for this story, I’m using only her first name to protect her privacy. She should be in ninth grade this year at Hussain Khail High School, where she loved her classes, even though the students had no chairs or tables and studied in hot, overcrowded tents. She used to wake up every morning and leave for school with her 12-year-old brother, but now she watches from the window as he boards the bus. She stays home all day, doing nothing, looking at her old books.
Soon after returning to power last year, the Taliban banned secondary school for girls. The Ministry of Education indicated that these schools would reopen once the Taliban settled on a dress code for female students and teachers “in accordance with Islamic law and Afghan culture and traditions.” But everyone knows it was a lie.
Faryal told me she misses her friends and the playground, where they would braid one another’s hair. She asked me with a crying voice questions I couldn’t answer. Why have they only closed our schools, not the boys’ schools? Are the Taliban at war with women?
Not everyone is waiting for the Taliban to open the schools. Some people are running secret schools for girls out of their homes. One person told me that she knew of at least two such schools in Kabul and three or four elsewhere in the country, but there may be many more.
Recently, I spoke with a teacher at one of these secret schools. Ayesha Farhat Safi, 22, teaches roughly 80 teenage girls in the basement of her family’s house in Kabul. She doesn’t make any money doing it, and she could be arrested or beaten. She told me, “A lot of students are reaching out to us, but we don’t have enough space to have them all participate, and it hurts me.”
NPR and other news organizations have reported on female students’ attempts to get around the ban. Some schools that teach young girls legally are secretly instructing teenagers as well. When Taliban inspectors visit the schools, the older girls scatter and hide.
None of these secret schools is close enough to where Faryal lives for her to attend. But she knows of them, and dreams about going to one someday. She told me she doesn’t care if the Taliban catch her.
Ispoke with a 26-year-old woman who, until the government fell, had worked for the Ministry of Education, analyzing national enrollment data. She loved her job and the difference she was making in the country. Now she has no job, and many of the schools she watched open have been closed. She told me she feels small and weak, an “observer of the miseries of women.”
Her former colleagues at the ministry have told her that many teachers who taught in girls’ schools have been reassigned to teach boys. Others have left the country. She has had many opportunities to leave, but she doesn’t want to go. She teaches English classes for girls and women, as well as classes in computer coding and other technical skills. Some are streamed online, but others are in person. She told me that her girls gather in a secret location where they pretend to be studying the Quran and Sharia. She believes that the only way we can help Afghan women is to empower them through education. She told me, “I want to stay until it becomes impossible for me to stay.”
Saira Saba, 42, is a former teacher too. She helped organize a protest in August in front of the Ministry of Education, in Kabul, and held a sign reading bread, work, freedom. News reports said about 40 women participated in the protest, though Saba told me there were even more: mothers and daughters, women who’d never learned to read and women who’d worked as professors at universities.
Saba participated despite knowing that the Taliban were arresting and beating female protesters. She said, “We want a country where we have our rights. We want a country where we will be able to work. We want a country where we know who our president is and who our leaders are. And where we have the right to choose our own leaders.”
Of course, it’s not only women who are suffering in Afghanistan. The Taliban are also targeting religious and ethnic minority groups. The economy is paralyzed; the health-care system has broken down; people are starving.
Recently my mother told me that she was walking back from the bakery with three loaves of bread when she decided to share the food with some beggars she passed by. But there were far more hungry people than there were loaves of bread. She says there are more beggars now than she can ever remember seeing in Kabul, and more kids on the streets than in schools.
We lost our freedom of speech the same day we lost our country. There is no constitution, and Taliban commanders set up their own courts to judge individuals on whatever charges they want, whenever they want. Terrorists are finding a haven in Afghanistan, and deadly bombings of civilians in mosques and markets have increased.
But the fear and oppression are worse for Afghan women, because they can’t fight back; they’ve been systematically removed from society, imprisoned in their homes once again. My conversations with the friends I grew up with get shorter and less cheerful each time we speak. They have stopped planning for their futures—they can see that there is no future. Some of them have accepted the first marriage proposal that came their way, no matter who it came from, because they think their only escape from their current circumstances is to find a husband.
My sister’s closet is filled with colorful clothing. But when she goes out she can only wear black; she says it’s like the whole nation is in mourning, and the people in the streets look like zombies. She used to wear lipstick and eyeliner; she no longer bothers, because she knows no one will look her in the eyes. She says that, covering her face wherever she goes, she has forgotten what she even looks like.
It would be nice to think that, in the privacy of their own homes, women have remained free; that they could turn their back on an oppressive government that doesn’t see them as fully human, and continue, at least in their own personal relationships, to be who they’ve always been. But that’s not the case. By removing women from the public sphere, the government has also reestablished the patriarchy within the home, where men are once again judge and jury.
I want to believe that there’s something to be done—that foreign governments or institutions or refugees like myself could somehow help the women back home. The United Nations has restricted the travel of some Taliban leaders. The United States has imposed sanctions on Afghanistan to pressure the Taliban to create a democratic government in which women and other minorities have equal rights. It has also frozen $7 billion of Afghan money in U.S. banks, and announced that it will use about half of that for a fund to support the Afghan economy, in ways that will help the people without enriching the government.
But human-rights activists are calling for more penalties. The UN could ban all Taliban leaders from traveling; Twitter could cut off access (as Facebook has done already) to the official Taliban accounts as well as those operated by anyone lobbying on the Taliban’s behalf. Additional humanitarian aid could be provided on the condition that women are allowed to work, go to secondary school, and participate in politics. Governments and nonprofit groups could help women’s-rights activists by providing financial support and political backing. They could also set up and fund online education and more secret in-person schools.
Afghanistan is not far from becoming the country we were in the Taliban’s first regime. But some things are different now. Few in rural communities have access to the internet, but those who do can organize and resist in new ways. In secret, behind closed doors, Afghanistan is still breathing.
Hajera told me there was no hope. I want to believe that there is a little.
Afghan and Iranian women’s movements share a struggle, a language—and an opportunity.
Iran’s women are seizing worldwide admiration with 26 days of courageous defiance against their authoritarian government’s violent confinement of females as second-class citizens who may not freely work, marry, divorce, travel or even be seen with their heads uncovered. Less noted are this audacious movement’s existing, and potential, connections to the tenacious, 14-month campaign by Afghan women resisting the even tighter oppression of the Taliban. Street protest slogans, social media posts and other links illustrate a synergy between the movements that both should use in the difficult task of converting their inspiring courage into real change.
Afghan women protest Taliban rule in Kabul in August before gunmen dispersed them with gunfire into the air. Women have continued to resist a gradually tightening Taliban crackdown against them. (Kiana Hayeri/The New York Times)
Iran’s Unprecedented Uprising
Iran’s widened protests this week, including workers’ strikes and Iran’s vital oil sector, underscore that its women are now leading the most potent challenge in years to the authoritarian rule by clerics and their allied security forces. The uprising began as a protest against the death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, in the hands of Iran’s morality police, who arrested her on a Tehran street for allowing some of her hair to stray from beneath the head scarf that her government requires all women to wear in public.
“Protest chants about her death quickly evolved into calls to oust the regime,” USIP fellow and Iran specialist Robin Wright wrote this week. They began chanting “‘Death to the Dictator,’ and ‘Our disgrace is our incompetent leader,’ and ‘We don’t want the Islamic Republic.’” In a default response, Iran’s security forces, such as the Basij militia, have attacked protesters, multiplying popular anger. As of Tuesday, those attacks have killed 185 protesters, including 19 children, reports the monitoring group Iran Human Rights.
Iranian women have protested Iran’s narrow, discriminatory theocracy since the 1979 revolution that erected it in place of the ruling monarchy. Indeed, Wright notes, “The first protest after the ouster of the shah was a women’s rally demonstrating against the imposition of conservative Islamic dress. … Women led much of the 2009 Green Movement protests against an allegedly fraudulent presidential election, chanting ‘Where’s my vote?’ and ‘Death to the Dictator!’”
Iranians’ demands for reform have grown stronger in recent years and news accounts, tracked by USIP’s Iran Primer, reflect how the current uprising has won unprecedented support from a broad swath of Iranian society.
Afghanistan, Iran: Sisters’ Synergy
Like other nonviolent protest movements of the past decade, in Sudan, Tunisia, Libya, Myanmar and elsewhere, the Afghan and Iranian women’s campaigns are using social media as vital amplifiers. Despite their governments’ obstructions of the internet, the two movements can share ideas more quickly because both can discuss them in the Persian language. Women demonstrators in both countries have been using the same Persian-language slogan — “Zan, Zindagi, Azadi” (“Women, Life, Liberty!”) — against their governments’ efforts to control their bodies and choices.
An Iranian protest group called Khiaban Tribune, which is painting street graffiti as part of the protests, last week posted its support for Afghan women, who have defied arrests, beatings and other violence by the restored Taliban regime. The Iranian group declared, “we are both fighting … against a Taliban.” Activist writer Masih Alinejad and other Iranian women campaigners have echoed the comparison between the two countries’ regimes and women’s responses.
Over the 20 years in which a U.S.-led international intervention held Afghanistan’s Taliban out of power, millions of Afghan women won greater freedoms to study, pursue careers and hold public roles in society. Women served as judges and provincial or district governors, headed four national government ministries, held between 20 and 30 percent of parliament seats (compared to about 6 percent in Iran), and ran for president and vice president. A generation of Afghan women built a foundation of experience and skills that they are now using to resist the re-imposition of misogynist oppression by the new Taliban regime, winning local-level concessions from officials in various provinces who are relaxing enforcement against women’s activities to avoid drawing public protest.
A throng of countries offered years of support for Afghan women’s struggles via government aid programs, civil society campaigns, TV talk shows, parliament sessions and national and international conferences. Many Iranian women’s rights activists lament that their own movement has had vastly less international support. But with the Taliban’s return and Iran’s crisis, the two women’s movements are sharing — and can increase — much-needed support for each other.
Afghans’ Continued Resistance
Retaking power in August 2021, the Taliban quickly replaced Afghanistan’s women’s affairs ministry with a “Ministry of the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice,” an organ that was highly oppressive during the Taliban’s 1990s rule. Taliban spokesmen protest to the international community that their regime intends to moderate past oppressions and respect women’s basic rights, but Taliban actions have steadily tightened restrictions. In the past six months, the regime has:
Dissolved the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, for years the nation’s most prominent human rights authority and long directed by women.
Halted the issuance of driving licenses to women and banned women from using public transportation unless accompanied by a close male relative, called a mahram. The Taliban’s restored Ministry of Vice and Virtue ordered bus drivers to install curtains to close off the designated seats for women in buses.
Ordered schoolgirls in the fourth to sixth grades in Ghazni province to cover their faces while walking to or from school, or to face expulsion.
Banned women from going to public parks where authorities cannot ensure segregation between men and women.
Instructed women employees of the Finance Ministry, in phone calls to each one personally, to send male relatives to their offices to replace them.
Afghan women began a wave of protests in the days after the Taliban seizure of power, rallying in the capital, Kabul, and in towns across many provinces, including Balkh, Herat, Kunduz, Baghlan, Takhar, Kapisa, Panjshir and Bamyan. Taliban enforcers beat protesters with batons and arrested them, both women and men. They also arrested protesters’ family members. Under this assault, women this year began holding smaller protests. Fourteen months on, women are gathering in offices or homes to produce photos and videos in which, masked for security, they present speeches and signs with their demands for justice and then share them via text messages, WhatsApp, Twitter or Facebook.
Still, Afghan women also continue to defy the Taliban with periodic public rallies, including street protests this month against an increase under Taliban rule of attacks and hate speech against Afghanistan’s ethnic Hazara minority, who are adherents of Islam’s Shia sect, which also is a minority in a country dominated by Sunni Islam. These latest rallies condemned a horrific September 30 bombing in Kabul that killed more than 35 ethnic Hazara girls and women at a school. The women activists in Iran, a Shia-majority country, have joined Afghan women in specifically condemning the attacks on the Hazaras. As both the Iranian and Afghan authoritarian regimes suppress ethnic and religious minorities as well as women, the two women’s movements should strengthen efforts at building coalitions with other marginalized communities to more powerfully press for real democratic change.
In both countries, some religious clerics have supported the demands of women that authorities stop using force to require women to adhere to government requirements that they cover their hair or faces. In Iran, these include former president Mohammad Khatami. In Afghanistan a group of 15 religious scholars published a statement via social media that called such coverings a moral choice rather than a subject of criminal law.
In the past month, Afghan women have drawn their own inspiration from Iranians’ protests. On September 29, about 25 Afghan women activists protested outside Iran’s embassy in Kabul, waving signs declaring, “Iran has risen, now it’s our turn!” and “From Kabul to Iran, say no to dictatorship!” the AFP news agency reported. Taliban gunmen soon arrived and unleashed volleys of automatic rifle fire to disperse the group.
Building a Sisterhood
One lesson that Afghan women may be drawing from Iran’s protest movement is the need to bolster the support they receive from men in their communities. Afghan men — district-level officials and elders in Kandahar, Paktia, Parwan and Baghlan provinces, for example — have joined women in pushing for the resumption of girls’ schooling that has been halted by the Taliban. But Afghan women have noted the much greater prominence of men publicly with women in Iran’s protests and have said the same is needed in Afghanistan.
Alongside mutual encouragement, the Afghan and Iranian women’s rights campaigns can offer each other complementary elements of support. Afghans provide an example and experience of managing a longer, lower-profile resistance movement under the extremely harsh repression of the Taliban. And with the reduced global attention to Afghanistan following last year’s withdrawal of international troops and most government and non-government assistance programs, it is the Iranians who are galvanizing world attention right now for the goals that the two movements share.
It is only natural that two communities tied by language, culture and their oppression by authoritarianism masquerading as religious faith, are finding synergies. With women in both Iran and Afghanistan facing crisis and opportunity, it is time to strengthen their connections. Whether in person, or on the cellphone screens that feed millions of women and girls in these neighboring countries with emotional support, organizational ideas and clearer visions for their future, Afghan and Iranian women must now all the more strengthen each other as sisters.
Iran’s Protests … and the Afghan Sisters Next Door
NATO’s last man in Kabul helped facilitate the airlift and had a front-row seat to the Taliban takeover of the capital.
At 6:21 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 27, 2021, NATO’s Afghan adventure formally ended. At that moment, the Italian C-130 on which I was flying as the last representative of the Atlantic Alliance to leave the country crossed the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. For the first time in 20 years, Afghanistan was without a NATO presence.
We had left behind just under 7,000 U.S. and British soldiers, under national command, who would soon withdraw after having destroyed all the sensitive material left at Kabul’s airport, following the chaotic evacuation of Afghan personnel. We left the country and left it badly—in the hands of the same Taliban we had thrown out of power in just a few weeks 20 years earlier. And we left a country that had believed in us, condemning Afghans once again to a very different future from the one we had given them a glimpse of.
The U.S. and NATO exit from Afghanistan may seem simply an episodic defeat. In a broader context, however, the Afghan withdrawal adds to a series of U.S. failures, from Lebanon to the Arab Spring, Iraq, Somalia, Syria—all these adventures ended badly, and the situation left behind was worse. We find ourselves today with the same security problems we had 20 years ago.
The collapse began well before the tragic events of July and August 2021. The Afghan state and its economic and social fabric were progressively disintegrating under the weight of endemic corruption, weak democratic institutions, and political mistakes the West had committed and allowed others to commit.
The constant calls for an early withdrawal from Afghanistan made by successive U.S. presidents and European leaders over the past 20 years convinced the Taliban and their supporters, but above all the Afghan people, that the West did not collectively have the determination necessary to carry out the task.
The signing, on Feb. 29, 2020, of the Doha Agreement between the United States and the Taliban, which sanctioned the withdrawal of foreign forces from the country, was the beginning of the end for the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.
The Doha Agreement, controversial since its negotiation, had the explosive effect for Afghanistan of formalizing a precise date for the end of the international military presence in the country, which was the only element capable of keeping the system in that condition of unstable equilibrium to which the authorities and the population had become accustomed and which had held in check the growing Taliban activity that the Afghan security forces were unable to defeat on their own.
This article is adapted from L’ultimo aereo da Kabul: Cronaca di una missione impossibile (The Last Plane From Kabul: Chronicle of an Impossible Mission) by Stefano Pontecorvo (Piemme, 320 pp., €18.50, June 2022).
This article is adapted from L’ultimo aereo da Kabul: Cronaca di una missione impossibile(The Last Plane From Kabul: Chronicle of an Impossible Mission) by Stefano Pontecorvo (Piemme, 320 pp., €18.50, June 2022).
The deal was presented as a peace agreement, but it was always clearly aimed at allowing the withdrawal of U.S. (and international) forces by securing them against Taliban attacks.
Contrary to the wise practice of negotiating from a position of strength, the United States entered the negotiations from a position of relative weakness, given the imperative to find a way to safely leave the country within a relatively short time frame.
The effect of the agreement was profoundly disruptive as it definitively broke the balance of power in Afghanistan in favor of the Taliban, from whom nothing was asked except the safety of U.S. and allied troops and anti-terrorism guarantees that were more cosmetic than real.
The agreement also signaled to the Taliban and to the Afghan population that the United States and the West did not have the determination and strategic patience to finish the work that had started with the 2001 invasion and carry out the plan for a peaceful Afghanistan.
In this environment, the announcement on April 14, 2021, that U.S. President Joe Biden had decided to go ahead with the U.S. withdrawal kneecapped the Doha talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government, which continued for a short time before being suspended altogether.
Between the initial announcement of the U.S. withdrawal in February 2020 and the confirmation of its date by the new U.S. administration in April 2021, there had been an evolution in the sentiment of the Afghan population toward the United States and NATO—and our Afghan colleagues were no exception. Rather than friends and benefactors, we were now portrayed as untrustworthy and, more and more openly, as traitors.
By July 2021, the Taliban were confident and on the offensive. The pace of the Taliban conquest of the country was impressive. On June 25, the Taliban controlled 99 of the 412 districts in the country; by July 14, they controlled 218. Taliban fighters stopped on the outskirts of Kabul for a couple of days, not only to wait for the finalization of the agreement that was emerging but also because of the instructions given by the Taliban’s senior leadership council, the Quetta Shura, which wanted the Taliban leaders of Kandahar and of the South to take possession of Kabul.
Still, Western officials did not expect the Afghan government to flee or for Kabul to fall so quickly. Indeed, a memorandum marked “For Official Use Only”—drawn up following a coordination meeting of the U.S. National Security Council on the afternoon of Aug. 14 and later leaked to the press—gives a snapshot of the dramatic lack of preparedness with which Washington faced the evacuation.
As Taliban forces entered Kabul and approached the presidential palace on Aug. 15, President Ashraf Ghani abruptly fled the capital in a helicopter bound for Uzbekistan. The news of the president’s flight, which spread like wildfire, immediately led to the few remaining Afghan guards abandoning their posts together with the staff of the civilian airport, which by the afternoon was completely unguarded. Eight Taliban arrived a few hours later, apparently out of curiosity—but then stayed and took possession of it—settling down to drink tea and Coca-Cola in the VIP room on the ground floor.
On the evening of Aug. 16, given the lack of a U.S. guarantee to secure the capital, former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, in agreement with Abdullah Abdullah, the head of the High Council for National Reconciliation, invited the Taliban to enter Kabul to “protect the population and prevent the country and the city falling into chaos.”
To say that the evacuation took place in a surreal atmosphere is an understatement. The planning that the various countries, starting with the United States, had belatedly put in place collided with a reality that no one had imagined, the disappearance of the Republic already in mid-August, putting us in a situation for which, consequently, no one was ready.
As often happens, there was a discrepancy between the realism of the intelligence services and the military and the picture that is painted at the political level. As late as July 8, 2021, Biden was publicly declaring that the Afghan government was unlikely to fall, whereas the coalition military did not hide that the Afghan state was shaky and the armed forces were not in a position to fight. These signals were clearly provided to the U.S. leadership and to the other members of the coalition, who reacted in opposite ways: Washington insisting on the withdrawal and the others calling for a revision of conditions and dates.
Meanwhile, the crowd had grown around the airport and became unmanageable in the absence of any control. The few government guards had vanished, and the Taliban had not yet ventured to the military part of the airport. When they arrived, we noticed it, not because the crowd became more orderly but because the only way the Taliban knew to keep people at bay was to shoot rounds upon rounds of bullets in the air.
The unease was increased by the fact that we had no knowledge of what was happening outside the walls and of the developments regarding the timing of operations, which largely depended on the decisions that would be made in Washington. In Kabul, the Americans were grappling with the sheer size of the problem they had on their hands and struggling to reorganize the evacuation and the consular functions at the airport that they could no longer perform in the city.
Planes of various nationalities, scattered in the region among the Gulf, Pakistan, and neighboring countries, waited for passengers who could not get through the airport gates. The troops did their best, but the planes, including the U.S. ones, took off empty or nearly empty.
The U.S. bases in the Gulf became refugee camps, set up quickly, in which those who were evacuated were herded for weeks in makeshift facilities with temperatures of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
I did the seemingly simpler thing. On the basis of the needs expressed, I organized a coordination meeting, inviting the ambassadors and the heads of the military contingents of all the countries involved, for 4 p.m. on Aug. 15. Everyone came, including the United Nations, the European Union, the United States, and all delegations present in the airport.
From that point, it was a continuous negotiation among the Americans, British, and others. I spent my days and often nights in contact with colleagues and military representatives of the various contingents to smooth out any misunderstanding that could risk disturbing the cooperation I was trying to foster and without which we would have risked leaving most of our Afghan colleagues behind. The atmosphere improved as the hours passed, the numbers of people leaving began to rise, and we soon started to see results as planes filled and took off.
The images of the thousands of desperate Afghans crowding around the airport gates trying to get in to board a plane to a different life will remain etched in our collective memory for a long time.
Was it supposed to end like this? Not necessarily. The epilogue of the Afghan intervention constitutes the final stage of a series of other Western misadventures that ended in almost the same way, starting from Vietnam onward, in which the common threads are always the same.
Stefano Pontecorvo was NATO’s last senior civilian representative for Afghanistan. In his last days in Kabul, he helped coordinate the airlift through which more than 124,000 Afghans who worked with NATO allies and partner countries were evacuated. In his 40-year diplomatic career, he has served as Italian ambassador to Pakistan and as deputy head of mission at the Italian embassies in Moscow and London.
How Western Errors Let the Taliban Win in Afghanistan
But first they must present a united front to win the support they need to dislodge the Taliban.
Afghanistan is now perhaps the most dangerous country in the world, controlled by Taliban terrorists who are sheltering dozens of anti-Western jihadi groups while torturing, raping, starving, and killing their Afghan opponents. Yet the one person who could make a credible claim to be the leader of an opposition group to overthrow the Taliban has been unable to draw international support or unite fellow Afghans behind him.
Ahmad Massoud, the 33-year-old son of an anti-Taliban war hero, leads the National Resistance Front (NRF), which is concentrated in the Panjshir Valley, a lush and mountainous province close to the capital, Kabul, where the Taliban have been struggling to dislodge them in the year since they took control of Afghanistan. The NRF is one of at least 22 resistance groups the United Nations says have emerged since the Taliban’s takeover last year. A few thousand men are fighting in disparate groups, taking and holding territory in a dozen provinces mainly across the north, where anti-Taliban sentiment is strongest. But they’ve yet to form a cohesive opposition to the Taliban, who have an increasingly tenuous hold on power as factional feuds emerge and international legitimacy remains elusive.
Not that the Afghan resistance is getting any help from Washington. The Biden administration has insisted it will not support an armed opposition and seems to regard the Taliban—led by dozens of sanctioned terrorists—as partners in counterterrorism rather than part of the problem.
Despite repeated warnings of the Taliban’s long-standing relationship with al Qaeda and its affiliates, the world only just awoke to the danger, Massoud said, when a U.S. drone killed al Qaeda’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in a Kabul villa associated with Taliban deputy leader and interior minister Sirajuddin Haqqani.
“Now the world is paying attention,” Massoud told Foreign Policy during a recent trip to Europe. “Afghanistan is turning into a hub for terrorism. And the goal of this terrorism is not to only have Afghanistan; the idea is to spread worldwide.” Afghanistan is a recruitment and training center, he said, where terrorist groups teach skills like bomb-making “in the languages of Central Asia.” The killing of Zawahiri, he said, brought home to countries like Qatar, Pakistan, Russia, China, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan that “the export of terrorism has already started.”
Like many Afghans, Massoud finds it difficult to understand U.S. policy toward the Taliban. “It’s very confusing and will leave a very bad stain on the reputation of the United States as a great country which always stands for great values,” he said. “I believe it is happening because it is cheaper [than an armed presence], but it is a catastrophic mistake.” He pointed to the consequences from the last time Washington ignored a Taliban power grab in the 1990s: A few years later, the Taliban’s guest, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, launched the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.
“We had the experience in the ’90s of not paying attention to the situation. And it can be catastrophic again,” he said.
Massoud’s inability to forge a united opposition in the year since the Taliban’s takeover isn’t due to a lack of name recognition. Massoud regularly invokes the name of his late father, Ahmad Shah Massoud, who led the Northern Alliance in its fight to keep substantial swaths of territory out of Taliban hands the last time they ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. The elder Massoud was assassinated by al Qaeda two days before the huge attacks on the United States that sparked the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan and the ousting of the Taliban.
After the fall of the Afghan republic, he said he tried and failed to negotiate his inclusion into Afghanistan’s government with Taliban leaders. He is now based, alongside other NRF figures, in neighboring Tajikistan, from where he travels widely to drum up support, arms, and money. But he has assumed a Ernesto “Che” Guevara air rather than becoming the fulcrum of an effective anti-Taliban opposition.
And there are blocks to build on. In many regions of the country, the NRF fights alongside the Afghanistan Freedom Front (AFF), which is led by Lt. Gen. Yasin Zia, a former Afghan deputy defense minister and chief of the general staff. Like Massoud, he travels widely, pleading the case for support to dislodge the Taliban. But he describes a Catch-22: Without victories, the resistance cannot attract arms and funding; without arms and funding, victory over the Taliban will be difficult.
Demonstrating the fundamental problem of the anti-Taliban resistance, Zia said he and Massoud have not met. Massoud and Zia stand out as patriotic democrats, but neither have grabbed the imagination of Afghanistan’s war-weary people or governments whose support they need to win a war both say is now the only option.
“We could win a big uprising, but only if we come together,” Zia said. “Brother Massoud” has the ability, charisma, and recognition inside and outside Afghanistan to build a team. “Anti-Taliban groups say they are working for the good of the people. We all say that we want democracy; there is no difference between us and our aims. But if we work individually and independently, it will take too long. Only by bringing our resources together will we be able to bring changes on the ground.” Along with others who claim to have the best interest of their country at heart, it seems they’re just too busy pursuing their own interests to pool resources—an enduring condition of Afghan leadership that arguably led to the fall of the republic.
Despite the Biden administration’s hands-off approach, both NRF and AFF leaders say they are getting some support. Both are attracting former members of the U.S.- and NATO-trained Afghan army, special forces, and police, as well as financial support from diaspora Afghans. And on Capitol Hill, there has been a smattering of support for the Afghan resistance among top lawmakers, including Sen. Lindsey Graham, who has advocated for both Massoud and his NRF colleague, former Afghan Vice President Amrullah Saleh.
But Massoud and Saleh recently met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in an effort to build a regional support base, according to a source who accompanied them, in a move that could lead to a backlash for the resistance in Europe and on Capitol Hill, as Russia’s war in Ukraine deepens economic hardship for hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
Still, the Taliban’s support for terror is wiping off any lingering smiles among countries that cheered the Taliban’s rise and America’s ignominious departure. Pakistan supported the Taliban’s insurgency, but it is now a target of their terrorist partner Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, which seeks the overthrow of the Pakistani state and enjoys safe haven in Afghanistan. China’s demand that the Taliban eliminate the anti-Beijing Turkistan Islamic Party (formerly the East Turkestan Islamic Movement) has gone unheeded. Central Asia fears a variety of Taliban allies, including the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and Jamaat Ansarullah, which targets Tajikistan. But none of this has stopped China, Russia, and Pakistan from pursuing economic opportunities with the Taliban, their lack of legitimacy notwithstanding. Russia just inked a provisional deal on oil, gas, and wheat supplies; China is keen on minerals, including gold, uranium, and lithium; and Pakistan is getting cheap coal.
Even as he struggles to win international support and unify the resistance, Massoud said the Taliban “leave us with no option” but war.
“I believe that even with the slightest support of the world, we will be able to liberate some portion of our country because the people are not happy. The people are not with the Taliban,” Massoud said. “By establishing a fair, just, democratic system that will be a role model for the rest of the country and attract internal migration so people do not have to leave Afghanistan, this will encourage more people to rise against the Taliban’s tyranny and authoritarianism. Then resistance will continue and will grow stronger.”
Lynne O’Donnell is a columnist at Foreign Policy and an Australian journalist and author. She was the Afghanistan bureau chief for Agence France-Presse and the Associated Press between 2009 and 2017.
Afghanistan Peace Campaign
