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The Pastures of Heaven: An update of Kuchi-Hazara disputes as spring approaches

February 24, 2024

Fabrizio Foschini • Rama Mirzada

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The central highlands of the Hazarajat are gearing up for a third year of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) managing one of the most polarising land conflicts in the country, that between Hazara villagers and Pashtun nomads, the Kuchis. The re-establishment of the IEA in 2021 allowed the Kuchis to return, after 40 years, to what they regard as their summer pastures and to revive claims to property and land. There began a process of adjudicating claims and ruling on compensation for alleged losses. While major outbreaks of violence were prevented last year, abuses and intimidation of individuals and communities, mostly by Kuchis against Hazaras, still occur. Winter has offered the occasion for Fabrizio Foschini (with Rama Mirzada’s help) to recap the developments of last year and reflect on where Kuchi-Hazara land disputes might go in 2024.

A flock of Hazara sheep in Yakawlang district, 2012 – photo by Fabrizio Foschini

The Kuchi-Hazara dispute flares up every spring when the nomads travel from lower altitude provinces like Khost and Nangrahar to spend the summer in the central highlands, which are inhabited year-round by Hazaras (and also Sadat, more on whom below). This, they have been able to do for the past two years, after having been prevented from accessing most parts of it by the war and the armed opposition of locals almost continuously since 1978. With their newly found access to the region, they have vigorously renewed claims on lands they used to own and pastures they had been granted rights to, historically, helped by the political turnover that Afghanistan experienced, which completely reversed the balance of power in Hazarajat.

Many Pashtun Kuchi households and clans have, throughout the years, supported the Taleban insurgency and have thus found themselves on the ‘winning side’ of the war – unlike the Hazaras. In the 1990s, some of the Hazara mujahedin factions fought the Taleban as part of the Northern Alliance, with the Taleban retaliating with collective punishments against civilians in the Hazarajat. After 2001, Hazaras turned out to be broadly supportive of the new institutions. Hardly a privileged socio-economic group under the Republican government, the Hazara villagers of the central highlands had at least seen members of their community in government and parliament. They had also, largely, been able to prevent the return of their former landlords, the Pashtun Kuchi nomads, who had enjoyed politico-economic superiority over them for eighty years before the Soviet invasion stopped their seasonal transhumance in the late 1970s. If in other parts of the country the Taleban takeover of August 2021 has resembled a return to the mid-1990s, in Hazarajat it has represented a veritable travel even further back in time, to the monarchic Afghanistan of the early 1970s. And, if this is a distant era that only some among the elders can now recall first-hand, most young Hazaras nurture a radically different idea about it from that of a golden age of peace idealised by some other Afghan groups.

The Kuchis, in turn, lost their affluent and socially prominent status because of the Soviet intervention and the following conflict. This resulted in the loss of their wealth of flocks in war or exile and, while the more prominent families had already started to invest in other business ventures and some eventually emerged as Afghanistan’s most prominent businessmen, the majority ended up as an impoverished group, particularly those settling down as returnees in informal settlements around major Afghan cities.

Roughly a year ago, AAN reported on the first summer in the Hazarajat under the new government. We have now taken a look at what changes the second year of the new era has brought, speaking to twelve key informants from the main provinces affected: Bamyan (three Hazara interviewees and two Kuchis), Ghazni (three Hazaras and two Kuchis) and Maidan Wardak (one Hazara and one Kuchi). Summarising, we have noted in particular that:

  • Already in 2022, Kuchis were able to go to most areas of Hazarajat. Compared to the previous year, it was mostly single men who travelled to the innermost parts of the region in Bamyan province, while their families and livestock, for reasons of security and obeying a government request, stopped their course in parts of Hazarajat which are more accessible and where their claim to the use of pastures had been given the green light by the local authorities.
  • Episodes of violence were not as widespread as under the Republic, when the Kuchis’ frustrated attempts at pushing into Hazarajat and the polarised political loyalties between the two groups, both of whom had members and supporters in the government and in parliament, caused major casualties and destruction. The IEA has been able to enforce overall security, although this came at the cost of local residents widely perceiving it as supportive of the Kuchis.
  • Subtler types of violence and foul play are widely employed, however. Kuchis have been able to intimidate and coax Hazaras, both in day-to-day interactions and in the seats of power, while the latter have resorted to non-cooperation tactics, evading or refusing outright to participate in the institutional mechanisms (joint commissions for dispute resolution) set up by the IEA to solve disagreements.
  • Trust and acceptance of the dispute resolution mechanisms available, such as joint commissions and courts, have varied depending on the area, the type of dispute and the profile of the individuals involved, frequently causing the parties to try and have their cases shifted to a different area.
  • From a legal point of view, the situation has reached an impasse. While some disputes concerning private land and houses have been adjudicated, implementing the verdicts is proving problematic. More decisions have been made on compensation for past murders and loss of livestock suffered by the Kuchis, putting economic strain on impoverished Hazara communities, while at the same time tempting more destitute Kuchi households to advance further claims. The major issue of the rangeland of inner Hazarajat and the right to its use as pasture is still pending and the Islamic Emirate, despite its reassurances to the Kuchis, seems reluctant to tackle this thorny matter.
Main features of the Kuchi presence in the Hazarajat in 2023

Kuchi access to Hazarajat has changed significantly over the past 50 years. In the 1970s, the nomads enjoyed rights to use the rich summer pastures there as grazing areas for their animals – granted to them from the 1890s onwards after they had helped Afghanistan’s rulers quash Hazaras’ autonomy. Moreover, acting also as an economically and politically prominent class of traders, who supplied the isolated Hazarajat with much of its needed ‘imports’, they had progressively bought up many lands, which they then rented to local labourers for cultivation (for more background on this and subsequent developments, read AAN’s 2022 report and also this longer paper by the author).

Central Afghanistan, showing the main routes used by Kuchis to reach Hazarajat in 2022-23, based on open sources and interviews by the author, by Roger Helms for AAN

Between 1979 and 2021, Kuchis were largely barred from accessing the region, apart from during the few years of the first Islamic Emirate (1999-2001), which, however, saw bitter fighting and widespread destruction. During these four decades, in general, a number of Kuchi landlords were able to receive payments from their tenants in Kabul or by occasionally visiting the region, but for the majority of Kuchis, the region remained off-limits. However, for a number of years between and until the very end of the Republic, they attempted to force their way in, only to clash with the resistance of local Hazara villagers and provoke the intervention of the central government (read AAN reports at the time here and here). Besides deploying security forces, the latter would regularly bribe the respective groups’ leaders to help defuse the conflict.

The failure of the Republican institutions to seek other than temporary solutions for the issue and the long string of violence contributed to raising the stakes of the confrontation, transforming it into a primary marker of identity for Hazaras even beyond those living in the region and affected by the Kuchi claims, a veritable symbol of their struggle as a disadvantaged group for equal affirmation in Afghan society. Many Kuchis too, by now one of the Afghan communities that lag behind in economy, education and other social indicators, attribute all-encompassing importance to regaining their ‘lost rights’ in the Hazarajat. Both in terms of household perspectives and as a communal rallying cry, many Kuchis have come to link what they perceive as the long-delayed redress of their loss with the expectations of a return to their pre-war wealth and status.

Now, the balance of power in Hazarajat has been dramatically overturned: the Hazara communities find themselves vanquished and disarmed while the Kuchis, usually on better terms with IEA security and administrative officials who are often fellow ethnic Pashtuns and, like the Kuchis, also come from outside the region, are allowed to carry weapons in self-defence. In 2022, a large number of Kuchis coming from various provinces of the south and east of Afghanistan (when not from their Pakistani exile) took their chance to travel to Hazarajat in order to find grazing opportunities, inspect or reclaim past family properties and exact the payment of many years of arrears of the ejara (the rent) from their former Hazara tenants or sharecroppers.

2023 saw the continuation of the overall trends of the previous year. Kuchi households started moving to the highlands in springtime, before the start of the month of Saur (hence by mid-April), many retracing their steps only at the end of Sunbula (late September). The number of Kuchis who travelled to Hazarajat has again been significantly high, although compared to the previous year, some areas reported diminished numbers.

In the vast Nawur district of Ghazni province, for example, one Hazara informant reported that the number of Kuchis was less than that of the previous year; it was mostly Kuchi families who did actually have a history in the district during the King’s time who arrived, unlike 2022, when, he said, many ‘alien’ Kuchis from northern Afghanistan or Pakistan came. However, he concurred with other interviewees from the same district in saying that these Kuchis had brought big flocks of animals[1] and that, this year, they let them graze over all the available land in the district, including non-irrigated fields (lalmi) planted by local people and pastures also used by locals. According to the Hazara interviewees from Nawur, no pasture at all was left for villagers to use. Local Hazaras had to use crops to feed their own animals, and those who could not afford to do so were forced to sell them. Though this situation did not lead to serious episodes of violence, this was mostly due to the locals’ feeling forced to accept it, as Kuchi shepherds were allowed to go armed and displayed a very assertive and predatory attitude towards the local resources.

A Hazara member of the High Shia Commission, originally from Behsud of Maidan Wardak, told AAN that only a minority of the Kuchis who travelled to his district in 2022 were members of families or clans who had used to do so in the King’s time. Rather, most were unrelated people who acted as shepherds for livestock they had rented, or which anyway belonged to other people and arrived under the name of ‘Kuchi’ in order to claim the right to graze. He cited their being utterly unfamiliar with the region’s geography as proof. He also said that in Behsud, Kuchi livestock had caused severe shortages of fodder for local livestock.

There is no doubt that, during the warm season, Behsud has come to host a great number of Kuchi households whose original destination would probably have been areas further inside Hazarajat. In the past, it would have been a staging point for many Kuchis on the road to the higher pastures located in the province of Bamyan, particularly in Waras and Panjab districts. However, as Kuchi elders interviewed by AAN related, they were asked by the government not to enter Bamyan province with their families until the issue of the pastures had been solved and so a number of Kuchis aiming to reach Waras and Panjab may have found themselves bottlenecked in neighbouring Behsud.

One of AAN’s Kuchi interviewees, currently a member of the commission for the resolution of disputes in Maidan Wardak, but representing a group of 800 families, many of whom claim rights to areas in Panjab district, complained about the government preventing them enjoying these rights. He claimed that some families had actually travelled to Panjab early in the warm season, but after a few days, had been sent back to Behsud by government officials. Most of his tribe eventually settled in Behsud, Jalrez and other highland areas of Wardak for the summer before travelling back to Logar and then to Khost.

Another Kuchi interviewed by AAN, the head of the Commission for Dispute Resolution in Bamyan, stated that there was some variation in government orders: it had given back to Kuchis the right to the use of pastures for which they had the King’s farman (decree) in some areas, such as Behsud, where they should, in his words, “use pastures jointly with local residents,” However, he said this permission had yet to be given in Bamyan because of “some problems still to be solved” over the use of rangelands there.

All the interviewees concurred that it was mostly single men who travelled furthest, into the central part of Hazarajat, in Bamyan province, and that they brought only a fraction of their livestock with them. In Yakawlang district in 2023, Kuchis had also appeared to be mostly men travelling alone, bringing no animals at all except to two areas, Foladi and Kham. Reportedly, most of those going toYakawlang were mainly interested in ‘reclaiming’ lost properties, not pasturing their livestock.

In 2023, in Waras district, the Kuchis did not bring their families nor any livestock and their number, albeit greater than the previous year, was still comparatively small. Reportedly, a few dozen individuals travelled to each area where they owned some land. Many did not stay throughout the summer, but rather visited the district twice, at the beginning of spring and then again in October, in order to get rent paid from Hazara tenants. Others, who had disputes over private properties to follow, probably commuted between the central areas of Bamyan province and the district.

An initial influx into Panjab district in 2023 of whole families with livestock was stopped. Thereafter, it was single men without flocks who moved into the district. However, given the high incidence of land disputes in this district, their number was larger than in Waras and their presence extended over a longer period.

Many legal cases raised last year are still awaiting adjudication, and the Kuchis involved arguably returned to follow the proceedings. Moreover, this year, new cases arose, with Kuchis who had not shown up last year coming to claim properties or compensation, while some disputes that had apparently been solved had to be reopened when more heirs of the original Kuchi landlord or creditor appeared and claimed their share of the compensation paid out in 2022. During the summer of 2023, the commissions and the courts took several decisions regarding land ownership and compensation, and their implementation was attempted. We will take a closer look at these developments in selected areas of Bamyan and Ghazni provinces.

A follow-up from 2022: Adjudication of cases, attitudes by the conflicting parties and the authorities
Bamyan province

Panjab is arguably the district of Bamyan where Kuchis have claims to the most and best plots of land, as much as one-third of the district’s arable land, according to the claim of a Kuchi elder interviewed by AAN. The amount of property already retaken or still claimed by the Kuchis in the district and the fact that some of them belong to particularly prominent members of the Kuchi community raised the profile of the Kuchi presence and spurred a higher degree of involvement by the provincial authorities. For this purpose, Abdullah Sarhadi, the governor of Bamyan, visited Panjab three times during last year’s warm season. The first was on 20 Saur 1402 (10 May 2023), when he arrived with Salim Naeem, son of the late Naeem Kuchi.[2] As many as 400 armed Kuchis also came, both as delegates of each Kuchi group with interests in the district and as bodyguards to Salim, who, after his father’s death in 2020, has risen to a paramount position among the Kuchis wintering in Logar and Loya Paktia.

At the time of this high-profile visit, the Commission for Dispute Resolution was the sole institutional mechanism working on cases in the district, as Panjab did not have a court. Kuchis had been complaining about their lack of representation on the Panjab commission; all its six members were chosen among Hazara residents, as the Kuchis had no accommodation or were unwilling to stay for longer periods in the district. They had instead been regularly referring cases to the Bamyan court, or even, when unsatisfied by this, to the provincial Commission for Dispute Resolution in Bamyan city. In 2023, according to a former member of the Panjab commission, Salim Naeem impressed this complaint upon Governor Sarhadi and it was decided that a court should be set up in Panjab to rule on cases for it and neighbouring Waras.

The court was established in July and was staffed by four judges, Sunni Tajiks from Kahmard and Saighan districts in northern Bamyan. Soon, the situation from the previous year was overturned: if in 2022 the Kuchis were asking that cases from Panjab be sent to the court in Bamyan, this year, they preferred to have all cases adjudicated by the ad hoc court in Panjab and refused Hazaras’ requests to refer some cases to the Bamyan court. The Commission for Dispute Resolution in Panjab, deemed by the Kuchis too partial to Hazara interests, was eventually disbanded. According to a former member interviewed by AAN, it had at most been able to advocate for a mitigation of the compensation to be paid by Hazaras, for example invoking their past struggles to defend the district, including the lands belonging to the absent Kuchis, during the jihad against the Soviets.

Among the first decisions by the Panjab court were those on the claims by Kuchis to the land in Pushta Ghorghori and a few other areas,[3] which it ruled in the Kuchis’ favour, ordering the eviction of the people living on the land, which had been left vacant by the Kuchis since 1979 and since developed by local Hazaras. The former member of the disbanded commission summed up the court’s decisions:

There are 44 land disputes in Panjab and 16 have been settled. All 16 disputes were resolved by the court. Eight of those were in Pushta Ghorghori, five or six in Dara Mandi and two in Derazqul. The people’s houses and lands were given to Kuchis. The value of the houses was also counted and it was decided to be given to the Kuchis as part-payment for the 43 years of back rent [ejara] due to them.… Fifteen houses have been taken in Pushta Ghorghori, as well as land belonging to eight houses in Dara Mandi and another four in Derazqul.

The people in Dara Mandi, Derazqul and Kerman had built the houses themselves. None could believe that the land belonged to Kuchis when they saw how people were living there, how they had built houses and planted many trees.… The Kuchis did not come to Panjab for 43 years, so some of their tenants were using the lands and some tenants had sold the Kuchi land to other villagers and now the sellers were not here.… The people have no option but to accept the court’s decision because during the kings’ time, the Kuchis were getting the land documents and sharia (ownership) letters from the Hazaras’ fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters, and now they still have those documents.… There was no clash or violence because the government warned that if someone started a fight, the security forces would suppress it.

A small protest organised by locals went largely unheard and some of the residents of Pushta Ghorghori have since left their homes, relocated to Kabul or gone abroad, while those in the other areas retaken by the Kuchis have seen only their lands seized. Those who have left seem to have been mostly tenants, while parts of the families of the Hazara owners were still living in Pushta Ghorghori as of February 2024.

Hazara livestock near Sadbarg, on the road between Yakawlang and Kerman, 2012 – photo by Fabrizio Foschini

Neighbouring districts, such as Waras and Yakawlang, saw an increase in new legal cases where Kuchis claimed private land. In Waras, the outcome of a major land dispute regarding an estate in Band-e Kusa, which includes three schools and a bazaar with around 200 shops, is still unclear at the time of writing: a first ruling in 2023 went in favour of the Kuchis, however, local sources reported to AAN that in February 2024, the district authorities were arguing with the Kuchis that the schools and the bazaar plots were public property. In Yakawlang, a major dispute revolved around plots of lands in Firuz Bahar that were reportedly bought by the Hazaras from the Kuchis some forty years ago, but that the latter claim had simply been usurped. Our Hazara interviewee from Yakawlang, personally involved in this dispute, reported episodes of violence, intimidation and attempted kidnapping suffered by locals at the hands of Kuchis, which he claimed took place in the provincial administrative centre, Bamyan city:

The court in Bamyan decided that the Firuz Bahar case should be sent for investigation to the Yakawlang court. The Kuchis got angry at this decision, so they attacked us in front of the court and wanted to take us with them by force. They didn’t want the case to be sent to Yakawlang because we have documents and witnesses to prove that we bought those lands and they know they will lose the case in Yakawlang.… They attacked us physically in front of the court in Bamyan on 12 September. They attacked us three times. Once it happened in the dispute resolution commission. Then they attacked us in the bazaar and, for a third time, in front of the court.… They wanted to kidnap us and carry us off, so we shouted loudly, the people gathered, the police arrived and they couldn’t [take us] in front of the court in Bamyan city. We were eight people and they wanted to kidnap two of us, me and another.… In the bazaar, I was alone. They slapped me three times and wanted to lock me inside a shop, but I escaped. The day they attacked us in front of the court, the Taleban were unable to control them. The Kuchis were using force, they slapped a police officer and wanted to seize the gun of another, until many people gathered and restrained them. On the day when we had a clash with them inside the commission, they drew guns, but the police of PD1 of Bamyan city came and rescued us.

On 9 September, six Hazara members of the central Bamyan Commission for Dispute Resolution resigned, to protest at the unilateral decisions made by the Kuchi members of the commission and the pressures and threats they had been subjected to. The head of the commission, a Kuchi, gave AAN a different explanation for their resignation:

After we [the commission] had checked the deeds and lease documents and wanted to make a decision about the lands whose claimants were known, those six members left the commission and then they didn’t come to any more meetings.… They said they’d received threats from different directions. They say they’ve been threatened with death by Khalili and Mohaqeq.[4] and other Hazara elders who are out of the country. They were told to leave the commission and not to take part in its meetings, or they would be considered enemies. Therefore, they were forced to leave the commission.… Initially, they didn’t say anything. They participated in meetings, but were hiding when decisions were made. We asked them many times to attend the meetings and, in their absence, we told the governor about it. Finally, they confessed and said they couldn’t attend the meetings because Hazara elders had threatened them.

Whatever the ultimate reason behind the resignation of the Hazara commissioners, it all looked similar to the strategy resorted to by other Hazaras involved in legal suits with Kuchis – absconding.[5] Hazara representatives and defendants have often made themselves absent to avoid being forced to officially sign over lands – in Pushta Ghorghori and other places. Such was eventually the case in Firuz Bahar as well, as related by the interviewee from Yakawlang:

We are eight people who are in dispute with the Kuchis. All have escaped now except for two or three of us. People are escaping because the Kuchis want to get their signatures by force.… They escape because a decision cannot be made in the absence of one of the sides.

The absence of six out of 20 members left the Kuchi head of the dispute resolution commission of Bamyan complaining about decisions not being implemented and the government not giving its support:

Since the beginning of the year, the commission has made approximately 35 decisions.… 14 members of the commission made their decision about those lands, but practically nothing has happened. I mean, the lands have not been given to the Kuchis because the Hazaras don’t accept the decisions and the governor doesn’t push them either. We didn’t have the force to implement the decisions we made. Therefore, we stopped doing our work.

The commission activities had indeed stopped by the end of September 2023, but the local government did actually try to push for the implementation of the decisions made by it and the courts. According to reporting by independent organisations, on 10 September, General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI) officials arrested two Hazaras in Pushta Ghorghori on the grounds that they were preventing Kuchis’ access to their farmland. On 3 October, in the administrative centre of Panjab district, IEA security forces arrested nine Hazaras and subjected some of them to a lashing at the district governor’s office, with the purpose of forcing them to put their fingerprints on a document stating that they handed over their farmland to the Kuchis (also reported by Etilaat-e Roz).

As related to AAN by a Hazara interviewee, governor Sarhadi returned to Panjab shortly after this incident to invite the locals to comply with the decisions about lands and houses to be given up and compensation to be paid. He said that if Hazaras did not comply, their prayers would become invalid and they would stop being considered Muslims. This injunction to abide by the decision of an Islamic court and not breech an earlier commitment arguably represents a much milder form of pressure compared to arrest and torture, but it can become easily charged with a more sinister and threatening meaning to members of a religious minority that has often been subjected to stigmatisation and even open persecution.

Ghazni province

Nawur district of Ghazni province sits on the road that Kuchis use to approach the higher areas of Hazarajat. Because of this, it has frequently witnessed armed confrontations between incoming Kuchis and Hazara villagers during the past two decades. Compared to Bamyan, where the Kuchis hold many claims to land ownership, legal cases adjudicated in these districts include a higher proportion of requests for compensation for alleged losses of lives or property during earlier years. As such, cases can date back several decades, specific perpetrators often cannot be found and relatives or indeed whole village communities have been held responsible.

Many cases were raised in 2022, but most were not brought to a close, often because of the inability or unwillingness of local villagers to pay large amounts of money to Kuchis as compensation. In many instances, groups of Hazara villagers have been detained for long periods in order to force the rest of their community to collect the required sum, in what amounted to the taking of hostages and collective punishment. This continued into 2023.

One of the most serious cases left from the previous year regarded the death ten years ago of two Kuchi shepherds, a man and his son, in the area of Jagashew of Nawur. Already in the summer of 2022, as many as 70 Hazara villagers from the area had been detained in a bid to force locals to pay the blood price to the relatives of the victims. This year, according to a Ghazni resident who owns land in Nawur, another 22 villagers were detained in connection with the case. Negotiations on the compensation involved both the amount of money and who should pay it. As the killing occurred in a deserted area – Jagashew, a rangeland area, which is considered a mel, a gathering point, by the nomads – it was hard to determine who the perpetrators were and until these were found, the residents of the nearby hamlets have all been held responsible. Then the Kuchis introduced the name of five culprits and local Hazaras added six more. These, according to locals interviewed, were local robbers and armed goons and many have fled the country for Iran. At the time of AAN’s field research in November 2023, the agreement stipulated within the parties was that if the culprits did not pay the sum within six weeks, all the local villagers would provide it in the form of a loan, until it could be recovered from the perpetrators. However, local Hazaras wondered why the government did not pressurise the specific individuals indicted or at least their families into paying, by confiscating their assets, and feared the mechanism could be a ruse to extract the money twice, from both the culprits and the other villagers.

As for the sum agreed by the dispute commission, the Kuchis did not accept the 40 lakh afghanis (around USD 53,000) that had been proposed by the Hazara commissioners with the support of local authorities. Eventually, the total amount reached was AFS 55 lakhs (around USD 75,000), 44 lakhs as the blood price for the dead men and another 11 lakhs as compensation for the theft of around 200 sheep the shepherds had with them. Even then, according to a Kuchi member of the commission, the Kuchis accepted this only after much pleading by the Ministry of Border and Tribal Affairs, which argued that the number of past disputes was so great that if nobody accepted a compromise, they would never be solved.

The list of cases is indeed long and only a few seem to have found a durable settlement. While some cases clearly involve serious crimes or acts of violence, though their having happened in the context of a civil war would make one think that they could be included in the amnesty declared by the IEA in the wake of its takeover, other claims for compensation revolve around smaller incidents – some almost trifling – and are nearly impossible to pin down. Nonetheless, the compensation money obtained by (or promised to) the Kuchis bears proof of the effectiveness of such a ‘claim campaign’ in the context of the economic crisis afflicting Afghans. The situation is adding a burden to the economic plight of the affected villagers and is described as an organised racketeering scheme by some observers.[6]

The unregulated use of pasture by Kuchis is also proving a major problem for residents of Nawur. Already in 2022, the district administration promised locals they would have determined the boundaries of pastures to be used by the respective groups, but have yet to do so. Hazaras interviewed said they would like this to be done quickly, as in the meantime, it is Kuchis who are using most of the pasture available in the district.

Locals interviewed by AAN went on to complain that Kuchis damage their crops when moving through the districts, despite an agreement reached last year between them and the nomads through the mediation of the Minister of Tribal and Border Affairs and the court about which route the Kuchis should follow in order to reach their mel without causing damage to crops. Locals claimed that, apart from the central areas close to the district centre, the rule is not enforced by the security forces and added that whenever farmers have tried to prevent damage to their fields, the Kuchis have attacked and beaten them.

The cases of damage to the crops were solved through the Commission for Dispute Resolution and compensation payments ranging from 40,000 and 100,000 Pakistani rupees (USD 143 to 3,575) have been offered to the farmers. However, complained one Hazara from the district, Kuchis have been made to pay compensation only for the damage to the crops, but have never been condemned or fined for the aggression or the injuries caused to farmers. He described the commission as dominated by its Kuchi members. Indeed, Hazara chances to get redress for wrongdoings[7] were probably not enhanced by the fact that, until recently, the head judge of the Nawur court was himself a Kuchi from the Niazi tribe. According to locals, he was very mindful of maintaining good relations with other Kuchis and easily swayed in their favour. He has now been replaced by a new judge from Kandahar, whom locals hope will be more independent.

Timid signs of improvement in relations between residents and local government in Nawur were reported by one of the local Hazaras interviewed. In particular, he singled out two developments. The composition of the Commission for Dispute Resolution has changed and the new Hazara members, albeit still in a weaker position, are not as utterly helpless as the previous ones. Moreover, the newly appointed security commander, a Pashtun from Ghazni, with his focus on targeting the real culprits, and not arresting random villagers, and seeking the involvement of tribal leaders and elders in resolving disputes, had made a good impression on him.

Broadly speaking, however, the morale of local villagers is at a low ebb. According to those interviewed by AAN, the oppression and uncertainty brought by the yearly Kuchi inroads are pushing many residents of Nawur to leave the area. Even the landlord from Ghazni complained that, in 2023, it had become difficult to find sharecroppers or labourers to work his lands in the district.

Tangled up in green: complexities of a seemingly schematic confrontation

The temptation to see the situation in Hazarajat as merely the outcome of ethno-religious fault lines is high. Many elements of these have been present since the inception of the dispute and undoubtedly keep contributing to the development of the Kuchi-Hazara conflict. Some of the factors at play, while true, risk being overemphasised. For example, an aspect of organised collective politics is always present in the narratives of the conflicting parties. Hazaras from both Hazarajat and the diaspora speak of ‘genocide’ and of the continuation of age-old policies aimed at ‘Pashtunisation’ of Afghanistan, while Kuchis clearly count on aspects of their identity shared with the Taleban authorities (Pashtun even if not the same tribal background, and Sunni) and play on political revanchism and hostility against a group, the Hazaras, considered by many Taleban to have been hostile to their insurgency and supportive of the previous government.

At a closer look, this monolithic vision of the confrontation shows some cracks: behind ethnonationalist postures hide more nuanced and opportunistic attitudes, which may, in turn, ease or further complicate the solution of disputes.

Not all sedentary Shia inhabitants of Hazarajat identify as Hazaras. Despite being often counted together and sharing most cultural and socio-political aspects of life, Sadat (singular Sayyed) constitute a recognisable minority group in the Hazarajat (as in other regions inhabited by Shias). Traditionally held in great respect because of their claims of descent from the Prophet’s family, they are interspersed among Hazaras across the whole region and highly integrated into the same communities, of which they traditionally constituted the cultural and economic elite. Decades of war in Afghanistan saw momentous changes in the society of Hazarajat: not only were the Kuchis denied access, but the Sadat lost some of their previous prominence in the face of a new class of mujahedin religious leaders who were Hazara by ethnicity, had been trained or educated in revolutionary Iran and often opposed to Sadat traditionalism and privileges. Despite a great degree of Shia solidarity between the two groups, some of these fault lines may be reappearing nowadays, resulting in different responses to the new situation. As reported by one interviewee:

In Dara Mandi area, which is located between Ghor province and the Panjab district, some aghayun (term of respect for the Sadat) were the tenants of the Pashtuns and the aghayun themselves are now saying to the Kuchis that the land had been grabbed by their fathers by force.

What may sound like a self-damaging statement could be aimed at showing a higher degree of cooperativeness with the newly powerful to guarantee the survival of the Sadat community. This has by no means been an unknown attitude among vulnerable minorities throughout history and it is often encouraged by the majorities in power. Indeed, one source from Yakawlang, himself a Sayyed, told AAN that he was approached by a Kuchi leader about a land dispute who sought to gain his support, claiming that the Kuchis wanted to “reclaim what the Hazaras had usurped and give back to the Sadat what had legitimately been theirs.” The Kuchi head of the Bamyan commission also said that the four Hazara members who remained in the commission after the resignation of the other six are in fact Sadat and they accepted all of the commission’s decisions.

Even without invoking these identitarian nuances, in the harsh economic situation of Hazarajat, one of Afghanistan’s poorest regions, competition by people for their very survival can emerge among the Hazaras. Interviewees from Panjab reported how some villagers would offer themselves as tenants to the Kuchis who had just reclaimed some lands in exchange for higher rents than what the Hazara families who had, until recently, been tilling the land had been due to pay:

There are other problems as well as disunity. For example, some people tell the Kuchis that the previous tenant was giving them 20 sers of wheat (one ser equates to around seven kg), while they promised they would give the Kuchis 40 sers as ejara for the land. Disunity exists, and from the time that Kuchis started the dispute, they have been using such disunity among the Hazara people.

Local rivalries inside a community also play a role: some local Hazaras proved ready to testify that other Hazaras had not bought the land from the Kuchis. But are only Hazaras permeable to disunity and cooperation with the ‘enemy’, and are the Kuchis as united as they get portrayed by their opponents? That would definitely go against popular wisdom about Pashtun tribes and indeed a Kuchi elder interviewed by AAN criticised both the IEA and his fellow Kuchis:

The Taleban somehow defend the Hazaras. There is a Hazara who in the past usurped the majority of Kuchi lands in Panjab. He is the closest adviser to the current governor of Bamyan. This person was also in power in the previous government and currently has the support of the governor.… On the other hand, the Taleban always ask us to compromise with the Hazaras. Among the Kuchis, there are some who only consider their own interests. For example, the son of Naeem Kuchi only takes care of his land and the government supports him. The rest of the Kuchis are homeless. We have no representative. There are some people whom no one listens to. Only to solve the problem of Naeem Kuchi’s son, this year the governor travelled to Panjab – Hazaras had burned his wheat harvest. The government only addressed the problem of Naeem Kuchi’s son, and that was it.

Internal competition for resources among the Kuchis has also started to appear. According to an interviewee from Nawur, the Dafdani Kuchis have now been occupying the pastures of the Kharroti Kuchis in the district for two years. The latter, the Hazara said, are more interested in agriculture and own less livestock; hence, they do not damage Hazara crops as much as the Dafdani do. Quite understandably, the Hazaras would support the Kharroti claim to the pastures were the issue to be addressed by the government.

Even the duality between commissions and courts shows inconsistencies in the IEA’s overall political management of the conflict and, sometimes, offers room for manoeuvre to the Hazaras, who typically find themselves on the weaker side. Hazaras interviewed preferred that their cases be sent to a high court (mahkama marafiya) such as that in Bamyan and not be adjudicated by hastily set up primary courts (mahkama ebtedaiya), such as that in Panjab or by commissions reportedly dominated by Kuchis, as one interviewee said:

We’re not happy with the work of the commission. We want the court to solve the disputes. Even the local people who don’t have any disputes believe that the disputes must be settled in court. The marafiya court in Bamyan makes decisions according to the law and based on justice.

The preoccupation of the Emirate with the juridical soundness of its court system – which has in the past earned them some recognition even among non-supportive parts of the Afghan population – emerges in the more impartial attitude ascribed to the high court in Bamyan, as well as in the uneasiness created among the Kuchis by the impossibility to perfect their recent reappropriation of lands by getting the signatures of the absconding Hazara commissioners and disputants.

A recurrent concern of the Hazaras interviewed was the ‘landslide effect’: for each Kuchi claim that gets accepted and satisfied, there will be more or bolder claims in the next year. While possibly not so monolithically united in exploiting their renewed superiority over the Hazaras, it is true that Kuchis are spread far and wide and as news travels, it is probable that more of them will show up year by year. This is adding another layer of complexity to the disputes, even to cases that had apparently been satisfactorily settled, as related by two Hazaras from Bamyan:

(Hazara villagers) had paid the ejara last year, but some other Kuchis came this year and said that the person who was receiving the ejara was only one of the heirs and that they were also heirs, so they should be paid too. Now, one heir has become 30 to 40 heirs.

Last year, some Kuchis had sold the land [they had just successfully reclaimed] to Hazaras, but this year, more [Kuchi] heirs to that land showed up and said the sale was null [because they had not agreed to sell it].

That leads to another issue of fundamental importance: What do the Kuchis mean to do with the land they have reclaimed? Many Hazaras would indeed be interested in buying back some of the lands from which they are being evicted and in 2022, some tried to do so, although this has not proved easy. According to a Kuchi elder who spends his time between Logar and Panjab district, the answer is categorically negative:

Kuchis have made a promise among themselves that they will not sell the land at any price. We just want our lands to be determined and submitted to us. Then, we will rent it to local people again because we Kuchis won’t live in those areas all the time. We’re on the move. We spend two or three months there and then we move to warmer areas.

His words are identical to those of the other Kuchis interviewed by AAN, showing a common position has been agreed upon, at least for the purpose of communication with the outside world. But Kuchis have travelled along a wide range of paths in life over the last 40 years of displacement and not all prospective heirs will be interested in resuming a transhumant life or be in a position to visit Hazarajat twice a year to exact rent from tenants.

However, even if Kuchis, looking for quick money, wanted to sell the land they have just reclaimed in the future, that may be more complicated. As the land has recently been confiscated from other Hazara families, it would be considered disputed land locally and few potential buyers from the area could be expected to step forward.

Conclusion: irreconcilable positions and no real solution in sight

The debate goes on over whether IEA’s management of the Kuchi-Hazara dispute is part of a broader political strategy or simply the result of the attitude of local IEA officials, often sympathising with and in some cases related to the Kuchis. Still, the main trends arising over the past two years are clear:

  • The IEA has permitted the adjudication of claims related to private property, payment of rent arrears and debts and the redress of other losses sustained by the Kuchis over the decades when they were absent from Hazarajat and the years in which they tried in vain to regain access to it. In general, the authorities have accepted the legal ownership documents from Zahir Shah’s time. Despite the political and economic imbalance inherent in them from that era, that they are weighted against the Hazaras and have been denounced by a number of Afghan Islamist tanzims in the past, they have apparently not been questioned by the IEA.
  • The IEA has refrained from addressing the highly contentious and symbolically relevant issue of the right to the exclusive use of the higher mountain rangelands, especially those located in Bamyan province. Rights to graze this land were granted to the Kuchis in various decrees from the time of Abdul Rahman onwards. The IEA, stressing that it is state land and does not belong to any group, seems to be postponing a decision over its use.
  • Proceeding from the previous point and hinting at the need for a ‘shared use’ of those pastures and citing security, the government has prevented the migration of Kuchis en masse to the most prized but also more distant grazing area of inner Hazarajat in Panjab and Waras districts.
  • Conversely, there has been a strengthening of the seasonal presence and opportunities available for Kuchis in some districts, which form a sort of ‘outer belt’ of Hazara-inhabited areas. Districts such as Nawur or Behsud, despite not being the main focus of Kuchi property claims, have witnessed a major and more prolonged influx of Kuchis over the past two years. The nomads have consumed massive amounts of local resources, such as pastures, non-irrigated cultivated land and water, to the detriment of locals. If this trend continues, it could turn into a seasonal relief valve for dispossessed Pashtun communities across the country, whether or not they belong to the original Kuchi clans and families who moved to Hazarajat in the distant past, while making life for local Hazara villagers intolerable.

The IEA has certainly played a major role in the current direction that the Kuchi-Hazara dispute is taking. The Taleban have a previous history of ethnically and religiously polarised conflict with Hazara militias in the late 1990s and of meddling in Kuchi attempts at gaining access during the Republic. Moreover, the IEA has a strongly connotated identity as a Pashtun-dominated government where Kuchis easily have the upper hand on Hazaras in terms of political and military power and wasita – connections with the powerful. Thanks to this, the Kuchis’ position has been strengthened not only by the active collaboration of local IEA officials related or sympathetic to them but also because they have been able to exploit the feelings of powerlessness and fear among Hazaras that the Taleban takeover has engendered. However, the IEA did not invent the Kuchi-Hazara dispute. Rather, they inherited it from previous Afghan governments all the way back to Abdul Rahman’s campaigns of subjugation in the Hazarajat, achieved with the help of the Kuchis in the 1890s. This is not something that needs to be stressed in order to remove responsibility from the IEA leadership for what it does now, but rather to serve as a reminder about where the roots of the conflict lie.

If a national collective take on the Kuchi-Hazara conflict is of any value, it would have to be tackled in terms of historic experience, not of contingent legal suits. A fundamental problem is the diverging perception of whole periods of recent Afghan history and of the value and significance attributed to them. For most Kuchis, such as the head of the Bamyan resolution commission, the last forty years are, legally speaking, a black hole:

All the deeds and documents reviewed were from before 1357 [1978].… We do not make decisions about the deeds distributed after 1978. And we told the Hazaras that they must bring any kind of [ownership] documents they have from before 1978: those we would check. They don’t have any such documents. They made fake documents after 1978 when it was a time of wars and Kuchis didn’t come to their lands at all.[8]

For Kuchis, the last four decades of war and turmoil saw them traumatically lose not only their hegemony over the Hazarajat, but their nomadic lifestyle. Yet their rejection of what happened in the past forty-five years mirrors the rejection by Hazaras of the decrees and deeds issued by governments that dispossessed their forefathers and, with few exceptions, largely left the Hazara community discriminated against and marginalised over a timespan of eighty years, from 1893 to 1978. For the time being, as one Hazara interviewee described it, the upper hand is with the Kuchis:

We asked them why they hadn’t come in the past years to make their claim. They said that they were afraid of getting killed by us and that: “At that time, power was yours, now it’s the turn for our power.

In the long run, however, without some sort of shared understanding of what has happened in the past, no possible application or interpretation of legal provisions can satisfy both parties. If such a rapprochement does not happen, history will simply keep taking turns of abuse and retaliation in the Hazarajat highlands until they become inhospitable to humans, no matter how rich their beautiful pastures are for the grazing of animals.

Edited by Kate Clark

References

References
↑1 It is difficult to get precise figures about the number of animals, mostly sheep and goats, that Kuchis brought with them. Hazaras from Nawur would estimate between 500 and 1,000 for each family, but one Kuchi source from the district gave much wider variations, saying that, depending on the household wealth, a family could own from 70 to as many as 30,000 animals. Sources in Behsud estimated flocks there to be composed of 4-5,000 animals each.
↑2 Naeem Kuchi, arguably the foremost tribal leader of the nomads during the Republic, had previously been a Taleban commander and Guantanamo inmate. During the brief and bloody Taleban conquest of Hazarajat in 1999-2001, he led Kuchi militias there, before the abuses they committed against Hazara villagers induced the Taleban leadership to recall them.
↑3 In the past, Pushta Ghorghori, near the Shato Pass leading from Panjab to Yakawlang, was a major stopping place for Kuchis, as it was located just above the irrigated areas, which was the limit marking the beginning of state-owned rangeland upon which grazing rights had been granted to the Kuchis by the kings’ decrees. Of the other areas mentioned by the interviewee, Dara Mandi is in western Panjab, Derazqul on the border with Behsud of Maidan Wardak and Kerman is an area split between Ghor’s Lal wa Sarjangal district and Panjab. The dispute over land in Pushta Ghorghori has been frequently reported on by some Afghan media outlets, for example here.
↑4 Karim Khalili, a former vice-President of Afghanistan under Hamid Karzai, is also the leader of one of the factions of Hezb-e Wahdat-e Islami (Party of the Islamic Union), the main Hazara/Shia political organisation in Afghanistan; Muhammad Mohaqeq is the leader of another such faction, labelled Hezb-e Wahdat-e Islami Mardom-e Afghanistan (Party of the Afghan People’s Islamic Union). Both are currently living outside Afghanistan.
↑5 Only occasionally does the tension underlying the new imbalance of power trigger other forms of resistance. Last year, the wheat harvest of Salim Naeem’s lands in Panjab district was burned by a local farmer. According to the Kuchi head of the Bamyan dispute commission, Governor Sarhadi hurried there to resolve the issue and a compensation of AFS 200,000 (around USD 2,700) was eventually paid to the perpetrator.
↑6 A recent report by an Afghan news website, Kabul Now, currently based abroad, gives a comprehensive list of cases across Afghanistan and has attempted to estimate the compensation paid by or required from Hazara villagers. It calculates that, up to August 2023, Hazaras would have paid, only as compensation for harm done to persons or animals, almost 17 million afghanis and 24 million Pakistani rupees, roughly the equivalent of USD 310,000, while an additional 42.7 million afghanis (USD 570,000) had been fixed by the courts and commissions but remained to be paid.
↑7 In 2023, Nawur saw at least one major case where a crime perpetrated by Kuchis against a Hazara was addressed. In the summer of 2022, a Hazara man was murdered by some Kuchis. His body had not been recovered and, not knowing his fate, nobody had filed a complaint for murder, until the issue was disclosed one year later by other Kuchis and the matter was investigated. The commission eventually settled for a blood price of 60 lakh Pakistani rupees (around USD 21,500) to be paid to his family.
↑8 This rejection of all proceedings made by courts during the years of mujaheddin government in Hazarajat can influence land disputes in many ways: one of the Hazara disputants in the case of Poshta Ghorghori claims that some land owned by the Kuchis there was allotted to his family in the 1980s as blood price in compensation for the murder of his grandfather by a group of Kuchis in 1974, which the previous government had failed to prosecute. The IEA, however, has not considered the decision of the mujahedin court valid.

The Pastures of Heaven: An update of Kuchi-Hazara disputes as spring approaches
read more

The Contest for a Special Envoy: Will the meeting in Doha yield a shift in the world’s engagement with the Emirate? 

February 21, 2024

Roxanna Shapour

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres will host a second meeting of Special Envoys on Afghanistan in the capital of Qatar, Doha, on 18-19 February 2024. Unlike the last gathering in May 2023, the Emirate has also been invited, although it has not yet confirmed that it will send a delegation. The two-day meeting is expected to focus on the UN Security Council-mandated Independent Assessment Report, particularly its recommendation for the appointment of a UN Special Envoy for Afghanistan, something the Emirate has emphatically opposed. Meanwhile, a January meeting of the regional countries in Kabul appears to have signalled a shift in Emirate thinking, that engagement closer to home might yield better outcomes and strengthen its position vis-à-vis its Western interlocutors. AAN’s Roxanna Shapour looks at the debate around the assessment report, especially as it has solidified into the merits of appointing a UN Special Envoy, and what an Emirate tilt to the region might mean for discussions in Doha on international engagement. 

Since its re-establishment in August 2021, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) has repeatedly called for international recognition and demanded that the country’s UN seat be given over to its representative (see AAN reporting here). Yet, at the first meeting of special envoys for Afghanistan hosted by the United Nations in Doha in May 2023, the Emirate was not even invited (as AAN reported). Two weeks before that meeting, remarks made by UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed, had sparked a media and social media storm by appearing to suggest that recognition of the Emirate might be on the table – and:

We hope that we’ll find those baby steps to put us back on the pathway to recognition [of the Taliban], a principled recognition,” Mohammed said. “Is it possible? I don’t know. [But] that discussion has to happen. The Taliban clearly want recognition, and that’s the leverage we have.

UN Secretary-General’s spokesperson Stephane Dujarric stepped in to clarify Mohammed’s remarks: “She was reaffirming the need for the international community to have a coordinated approach regarding Afghanistan, which includes finding common ground on the longer-term vision of the country.” He went on to tell reporters that the purpose of the May 2023 Doha meeting was to “reinvigorate the international engagement around the common objectives for a durable way forward on the situation in Afghanistan.” Dujarric said he believed that achieving these objectives required “an approach based on pragmatism and principles, combined with strategic patience, and to identify parameters for creative, flexible, principled, and constructive engagement (see AAN’s analysis here). The Emirate’s ban on women working for NGOs (on 24 December 2022) and extended on 4 April (less than a month before the meeting) to the UN, however, loomed large and dominated the agenda.

Unlike that first meeting of the special envoys, this time, the UN has extended an invitation to Kabul. The IEA’s anticipated participation was touted by many, including European Union Special Envoy for Afghanistan, Tomas Niklasson, who said it represented a “significant opportunity to meet, to hold meaningful discussions about Afghanistan, and to show, on all sides, readiness to engage on a way forward, based on the [independent assessment] report, in a UN-led process” (see EU statement here).

However, the Emirate has not rushed to confirm its attendance, initially saying it was considering the matter and would announce its decision in due course (see for example Hasht-e Sobh here). Later, it appears to have set two conditions for its participation (more on which below) and a day before the meeting is due to start, we still do not know if the IEA will attend.

In this report, we lay out the background to the meeting, why there was the move to assess international engagement with the IEA, what the Assessment said, responses to it, and the political manoeuvrings ahead of this second Doha meeting, which have focussed on whether or not there should be a UN Special Envoy for Afghanistan, and the balance between regional perspectives on the assessment report, the IEA’s response and the viewpoints of Western countries.

Background to the 18 February meeting – a controversial assessment report 

The initiative to assess international engagement with Afghanistan emerged out of weeks of complex negotiations over Afghanistan and the annual renewal of UNAMA mandate in early 2023. Out of this, on 16 March 2023, the UN Security Council (UNSC) passed two resolutions on Afghanistan – one (Resolution S/RES/2678(2023) extended the mandate of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) until 17 March 2024, while another (Resolution S/RES/2679(2023) asked the Secretary-General to conduct an independent assessment which would provide recommendations for “an integrated and coherent approach among different actors in the international community in order to address the current challenges facing Afghanistan” (see AAN report here which looked at the politics behind this move in detail).

About a month later, Guterres appointed senior Turkish diplomat Feridun Sinirlioğlu as the Special Coordinator for the independent assessment (see 25 April announcement here). The appointment preceded the first meeting of Special Envoys on Afghanistan, which was, by then, long-awaited and which was held in Doha on 1-2 May 2023. The gathering, said host Guterres, was “about developing a common international approach, not about recognition of the de facto Taliban authorities” and that it was important to “understand each other’s concerns and limitations” (see a readout of the press conference here). Participants in this meeting, Guterres said, had agreed on “the need for a strategy of engagement that allows for the stabilisation of Afghanistan but also allows for addressing important concerns” (see also AAN analysis here).

Following the deadline set for him by the Security Council resolution, Sinirlioğlu submitted his independent assessment on Afghanistan to the Council on 10 November 2023. It was not published on the UN website until 6 December (here), although it was leaked and widely distributed soon after Security Council members received it (see, for example, the independent, women-led, non-profit news website Pass Blue here.) It seems that most people, including the IEA, were able to read the leaked report before it was officially circulated – a fact that Emirate officials have commented on with displeasure, according to a source who asked not to be identified because he is not authorised to comment on the issue.

As AAN reported in a detailed breakdown and analysis of the Assessment, it says it has one “overarching goal” – to “advance the objective of a secure, stable, prosperous and inclusive Afghanistan in line with elements set out by the Security Council in previous resolutions.” It does not, however, identify what those elements are. Widespread consultations with Afghans and others, it says, have underlined that “the status quo of international engagement is not working.” It does not “serve the humanitarian, economic, political or social needs of the Afghan people,” nor does it address the concerns and priorities of “international stakeholders, including the neighbouring countries.”

The assessment report identifies five key issues and priorities: human rights, especially of women and girls; counterterrorism, counternarcotics and regional security; economic, humanitarian and development issues; inclusive governance and rule of law and; political representation and implications for regional and international priorities (concerning the lack of recognition of the IEA).

Its recommendations start with the economy and include expanding international assistance, including technical assistance, finalising some near-finished infrastructure projects that were started before August 2021, establishing economic dialogue and financial reforms to reduce the effects of existing sanctions on the banking sector, all with the aim of addressing the basic needs of the Afghan people and strengthening trust through structured engagement. It then has a second set of recommendations addressing international security concerns about terrorism, illegal narcotics and shared water resources. A third set of recommendations lays out a broad and rather vague roadmap for political engagement intended, it says, to fully reintegrate Afghanistan into the international community in line with its international commitments and obligations.

The final set of recommendations suggests three mechanisms designed to coordinate and oversee the recommendations made in the report: a UN-Convened Large Group Format (which already exists – this was the group which met in Doha in May 2023 and will do so again on 18 and 19 February); a smaller and more active International Contact Group and; a UN Special Envoy, complementary to UNAMA which would focus on “diplomacy between Afghanistan and international stakeholders as well as on advancing intra-Afghan dialogue.” It has been that last mechanism, the appointment of a special envoy, which has ended up eclipsing the rest of the Assessment.

The Security Council did take action on the Assessment, but only after a month and a half of meetings, mainly held behind closed doors, and two weeks of intensive negotiations on the text of UNSC Resolution 2721. It was adopted on 29 December, the Council’s last working day in 2023. Although the resolution stopped short of fully endorsing the Sinirlioğlu report, it did, nevertheless encourage “member states and all other relevant stakeholders to consider the independent assessment and implementation of its recommendations” and asked the Secretary-General to “appoint a Special Envoy for Afghanistan” (see AAN analysis here). Importantly, Resolution 2721 was adopted by 13 votes in favour, with China and Russia abstaining, rather than using their power as permanent members of the Council to veto it (see here).

Reactions to the Assessment and the Emirate’s opposition to having a special envoy 

There have been widespread reactions to the Sinirlioğlu report among Afghans and others since it was first made public, with some political figures and rights activists calling the report “weak, incomplete, and merely declarative,” according to Hasht-e Sobh. There have been numerous discussion programmes on Afghanistan’s airwaves, with proponents and detractors alike debating the pros and cons of the report’s findings and recommendations (see, for example, ToloNews’ evening discussion programme Farakhabar here and Ariana News’ Tahawol here). Analyses of the Assessment have been published, for example, DROPS’ Shadow Report,[1] which provided a response from the perspective of Afghan women, as well as numerous meetings both public and behind closed doors, including this briefing session at the Security Council on 20 December 2023, at which former head of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, Shaharzad Akbar, spoke.[2]

The IEA, for its part, sent an immediate reaction to the assessment report to the Security Council on 21 November, ie before it was officially published. Its response was not officially released, but was widely shared on social media and reported on by the Afghan media (AAN has seen a copy and screenshots were aired and posted on X by AmuTV; see also @JJSchroden’s post on X). While the Emirate said it welcomed “recommendations of the Assessment that supports the strengthening of [the] national economy of Afghanistan, opens pathways to the recognition of the current government and encourages regional connectivity and transit via Afghanistan,” it warned against viewing Afghanistan “as a political vacuum or an ungoverned space.” It voiced strong and unequivocal opposition to both a UN-appointed Special Envoy and to an intra-Afghan dialogue:

Afghanistan should not be viewed as a conflict zone where foreign-imposed political solutions like intra-Afghan dialogue are deemed necessary, and neither should the time of the international community be wasted with such endeavors. It must be understood that stability and security have returned to Afghanistan, and all its affairs are being managed by a central government. 

Afghanistan has a strong central government that is perfectly capable of independently managing its internal affairs as well as conducting its own diplomacy, hence the establishment of parallel mechanisms by the United Nations such as a Special Envoy are unacceptable. 

The appointment of a special envoy by the UN is, then, for the Emirate a red line. At the same time, Kabul appears happy and has expressed support for the rest of the report.

The IEA turns to the region

If the IEA chooses to go to Doha, it would be the first time its representative had sat at a table with all of Afghanistan’s interlocutors since taking power. That could be seen as going a long way to moving the needle toward its stated goal of international recognition. Yet, in recent months, the Emirate’s focus seems, rather, to have shifted closer to home, with a renewed vigour in its ongoing agenda to engage with Afghanistan’s neighbours to increase economic and political ties. Perhaps the strongest indication of this was a recent meeting hosted in Kabul, which was proposed by Iran’s Special Envoy for Afghanistan Hassan Kazemi Qomi in his discussion with IEA acting Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi on 9 January 2024 (see Amu TV website and the Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA) here). This was part of a more expansive proposal, which was put forward by Iran, to create a regional contact group of special envoys, something Kazemi Qomi has aired on numerous occasions since (see for example ToloNews here and Iran’s state News Agency IRNA here).

On 29 January 2024, three weeks after it was first mooted by Iran, Kabul played host to what was called the Afghanistan Regional Cooperation Initiative. It brought together representatives of 11 countries in the region (and in Indonesia’s case, a little beyond) – China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Turkey, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. While the hastily organised meeting was initially envisioned as a regional envoys’ summit, most countries were represented by their resident representatives in Kabul; only the Russian and Chinese Special Envoys travelled to Kabul to participate. Iran was represented by its special envoy, who is also the ambassador, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, India by the head of its Kabul-based technical team, Rambabu Chellappa (see Indian media outlet The Wire here).

Many have downplayed the importance of the meeting, saying it lacked high-level participation from countries in the region. For example, an Afghan former Deputy State Minister for Peace, Abdullah Khenjani, noted in a 2 February interview with Afghanistan International, that none of the participating countries had allowed its flag to be displayed in the room, which is a normal practice in diplomatic meetings. He interpreted this as underscoring the participants’ position that none had officially recognised the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan as the country’s government. To have the IEA represented by its acting Foreign Minister, but regional countries mostly by resident ambassadors, with only three special representatives, showed that those participants were neither very senior nor empowered “to make commitments or decisions on such important issues.” The ambassadors, he said, communicate all the time; the only unique feature of the meeting was that they were “sitting around the same table.”

It would be rash, however, to dismiss the significance of this meeting. First, it was the first international meeting to take place in Kabul since the fall of the Islamic Republic and the ability of the IEA to convene such a gathering in Kabul at whatever level is significant. Second, it presented an opportunity for the IEA to spell out its foreign policy priorities and put its opposition to a UN-appointed Special Envoy officially on the public record. Finally, the timing of the gathering (about a month before the UN-convened meeting in Doha) sent a strong message to the foreign capitals not only about the Emirate’s intentions but also about sentiment in the region. The calculation seems to have paid off, at least in the short term. The day after the meeting, China accepted the credentials of the IEA representative in Beijing, effectively recognising the Islamic Emirate as the legitimate government of Afghanistan (see VoA here and this AAN report for a more comprehensive discussion on the prospects for the Emirate’s recognition).

The way that countries in the region, led by Tehran and Kabul, were organising to share their views and possibly consolidate their position, may have prompted another pre-Doha II meeting, that of the G7 countries. The little publicised gathering of special envoys from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States in London on 23 January was also attended by representatives from Norway, the UN, and other international organisations, notably the World Bank (see AmuTV here); there was no final statement and little gleaned as to the contents of the discussion.

What did Muttaqi’s speech at the Kabul gathering say about Emirate policies?

It is worth taking a closer look at what acting foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi said at the gathering and how it may signify a considered tilt by the Emirate to the region. His government’s primary objective for hosting the meeting, said Muttaqi, was to create a “region-centric narrative aimed at developing regional cooperation for positive and constructive engagement between Afghanistan and the countries of the region” (see a video of his speech here).[3]

Muttaqi’s exceptions that heavily bent on the protection of IEA political interests were set high. He said that besides common regional economic interest, he expected discussions to focus on the creation of “a region-centric narrative for positive and constructive engagement with the Afghan government to confront existing and potential threats in the region” and “speaking with one voice to call for the removal of unilateral sanctions on the region and on Afghanistan in particular.”[4]

He told participants that regional economic cooperation was a top foreign policy goal for the “new Afghanistan.” The end, he said, to 20 years of occupation and 45 years of conflict had paved the way for an “independent central government,” which had already made significant headway in trade and transit with the region. This, he said, had previously been “a dream due to the imposed wars and insecurity.”

He encouraged all actors to reject a “zero-sum” approach in favour of “win-win” policies, which he said was not “merely a slogan” but rooted in the belief that economic dependencies in the region meant progress and development could only be achieved through an “interaction-oriented narrative in all fields, as opposed to an inconsistent and evasive interaction narrative.” This, he said, would allow the region to reduce potential security threats and exploit economic opportunities, especially in “post-war Afghanistan,” for the benefit of the region at large.

Muttaqi did acknowledge that Afghanistan, “like any other country, has problems,” which he said were mostly inherited from the past. While he emphasised his government’s resolve to find solutions, he stressed that it was not possible to solve all problems in the short term in a country that had experienced “foreign invasions and interventions and civil wars” for the past half-century. He made it clear that the IEA’s domestic policies and actions were not up for discussion, and that attempts at ‘meddling’ would not be tolerated.

Our choices shall be respected. Instead of proposing governance models and pointing fingers at the system, it is better to engage on [issues of] mutual interest.… Within the framework of such regional consensus, we usher in incentive mechanisms to reach thematic agreements that serve mutual interests.

However, he saved his strongest words for the widely anticipated appointment of a UN Special Envoy for Afghanistan, saying that the international community’s interventions in Afghanistan and the 20-year “fight for freedom” had proven that “imported prescriptions and the models they offer do not heal what ails the Afghan people.” In particular, Afghanistan’s previous experience with UN-appointed Special Envoys, he said “has led to nothing but war, instability, and occupation for Afghanistan.” Afghanistan was a now sovereign, free, and safe country with a government that represented all Afghans and “stands ready and has the capacity to conduct talks on issues of mutual concern with different regional and international sides.” It was yet another reason why, he said, a UN Special Envoy was unnecessary.

Ahead of the Doha meeting: diplomacy intensifies

The Emirate’s repeated opposition to the appointment of a UN Special Envoy has led to a steady stream of foreign officials and special envoys travelling to Afghanistan, as well as numerous meetings held in various capitals, presumably to discuss common approaches and next steps in what has certainly become an impasse between the West and Kabul. Since December 2023, they have held talks with Emirate officials about the proposal, seemingly to no avail. They have included Feridun Sinirlioğlu, who was in Kabul on 6 February for several days of meetings with senior IEA officials, including acting Deputy Prime Minister Abdul Kabir and acting Foreign Minister Muttaqi (see ToloNews here and Pajhwok here). Commenting on Sinirlioğlu’s meeting with Abdul Kabir a series of posts on the official Arg (Prime Minister’s office) X account noted: “The Emirate supports most parts of the above-mentioned report, but does not agree with the calls for the appointment of a special representative for Afghanistan.”

Speaking to the media on 8 February at the end of a four-day visit to Afghanistan, EU Envoy for Afghanistan Tomas Niklasson said the meeting’s agenda had been set by its organisers, the UN (see ToloNews here and here and this press statement published by the EU on 8 February) and that is aim was to “set realistic expectations and prepare better for a constructive Doha meeting.” He said that those officials he had met had expressed “a positive appreciation of the main findings and recommendations of the report,” but, at the same time:

The only specific question I heard referred to the need for a UN Special Envoy, as requested by the UN Security Council, which I understood as being based on negative experiences from a different historic context and a perceived lack of clarity about the precise function and mandate, also in relation to UNAMA’s future mandate. 

The interminable round of diplomacy over the past few weeks seems to have achieved no change in the Emirate’s position. Its unyielding position on the special envoy issue has provoked strong reactions from some, including former US Chargé d’Affaires in Afghanistan, Hugo Llorens who told Voice of America on 8 February (see here):

The Taliban are not in a position to set conditions for the international community. The Taliban need the international community more than vice versa. They should think and act rationally…. Should the Taliban refuse to cooperate with a new U.N. envoy, it could further limit the international community’s capacity to respond to the political and humanitarian crises in Afghanistan.

The UN and the US, meanwhile, have continued to express strong support for the appointment: “The United States strongly supports the resolution’s call for a UN special envoy for Afghanistan,” said US Department of State Spokesperson, Matthew Miller in his 13 February press briefing, “and urges the secretary-general to appoint a special envoy as soon as possible. A special envoy will be well-positioned to coordinate international engagement on Afghanistan to achieve the objectives laid out in this resolution.”

The Emirate’s opposition to a UN Special Envoy seems likely the primary reason it has not confirmed its participation at Doha. However, Afghan media sources have speculated that a major barrier could also be that “the Taliban does not accept the presence of protesting women at this conference, despite women’s participation being one of the major demands of women’s rights activists in this event,” according to Kabul-based news website Khaama Press. Although, a separate meeting with Afghan women representatives was always on the agenda of the Doha event.

There have also been references to the IEA giving two pre-conditions, not publicly specified, for its participation at Doha: “If the conditions are not met,” BBC Persian reported Muttaqi saying on 14 February, the Emirate would prefer not to participate in this meeting. It also reported that foreign ministry spokesman Abdul Qahar Balkhi had confirmed that the issue was discussed in the minister’s meeting with Russian Ambassador to Kabul Dmitry Zhirnov on 15 February (see here the Emirate’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ readout of the meeting here).

Finally, the foreign ministry released a statement on X concerning the meeting in Doha, on 17 February, which clarifies the conditions for the Emirate’s participation in the meeting:

The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan believed that the meeting of Special Envoys for Afghanistan being convened by UN Secretary-General António Guterres in the capital of Qatar, Doha, was a good opportunity to hold frank and productive dialogue on issues of disagreement. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has clarified to the UN that if the Islamic Emirate is to participate as the sole official representative of Afghanistan and if there exists an opportunity to hold frank talks between the Afghan delegation and the UN about all issues on a very senior level, then participation would be beneficial. Else, ineffective participation by the Emirate due to non-progress in this area was deemed unbeneficial.

… 

It should be noted that if the UN takes stock of current realities, rebuffs influence and pressure by a few parties, and takes into consideration the fact that unlike the previous twenty-year regime, this government of Afghanistan cannot be coerced by anyone, then there exists possibility of achieving progress in talks with the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

The controversy over the special envoy and the IEA’s reluctance to accept the UN’s invitation to Doha seem to have made the UN less sure-footed about the very idea of a UN Special Envoy. Interestingly, when asked about the matter during his regular daily press briefing on 7 February, Spokesman for the Secretary-General Stéphane Dujarric sounded equivocal and would not be drawn into commenting:

I mean, it’s a lot of hypotheticals. No new envoy has been announced. The Secretary-General will be in Doha in February for the meeting of special envoys on Afghanistan, and these are national envoys. Of course, his Special Representative will be there, but I don’t want to prejudge any decision that the Secretary-General may decide to take. 

Also, no doubt, giving pause to many in Western capitals is the possibility of a strong regional bloc emerging with a consensus position on Afghanistan at the Doha meeting. Andrew Watkins from the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) said this could be especially so, given the growing divide and “the tense geopolitical climate” between the United States and Russia and China in the Security Council. In a Q&A piece co-authored with USIP’s Kate Bateman, he compared US support for the appointment of a special envoy with Russian and China’s “lukewarm” position on the issue. He also pointed out another complicating factor, France, another permanent member of the Security Council, “which is strongly critical of the Taliban and suspicious of widening engagement with their regime.” He argues that this may also prove to be a stumbling block for US attempts to “rally allies and partners around a common position” (read the USIP piece here).

As the Doha meeting loomed, a last chance at some pre-gathering talk came at the fifth meeting of Special Representatives and Envoys of the European Union and Central Asia on Afghanistan, held on 14 February in Bishkek. EU Special Envoy Niklasson and head of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) Roza Otunbayeva (who herself served as the president of Kyrgyzstan from 7 April 2010 until 1 December 2011) travelled to the Kyrgyz capital for the meeting, which Kyrgyzstan’s Foreign Ministry said focused on “the current situation in Afghanistan and the process under UN disguise [sic] in run up to the second international meeting in Doha,” (reporting by AkiPress).

Little information has been released about the two-day meeting in Doha, neither the agenda, nor the format, although we know it will bring together special envoys from 28 nations as well as representatives from several international organisations.[5] However, according to several sources who are familiar with plans, three separate sessions are scheduled one between the special envoys, chaired by the UN Secretary-General; another between IEA representatives and the UN Secretary-General (with the possible participation of some, if not all, special envoys); and a third meeting between the special envoys and six, as yet unidentified, representatives from Afghan civil society from both inside and outside Afghanistan, including women, chaired by UN Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, Rosemary Dicarlo.

“The objective is to discuss how to approach increasing international engagement in a more coherent, coordinated and structured manner, including through consideration of the recommendations of the independent assessment on Afghanistan,” said UN Secretary-General spokesperson, Stephane Dujarric in his press briefing on 15 February. , with discussion expected to focus on the appointment of a UN Special Envoy and the practicability of convening a smaller contact group:

Looking ahead

As the representatives of some 28 countries and international organisations prepare to deliberate the course of future international engagement with Afghanistan, a shared vision seems as elusive as ever. The verdict over the fact of an impasse, as the assessment report points out, “that the status quo of international engagement is not working” – led to its commissioning, intended to find a new method of engagement “that learns from previous efforts, focuses on the needs of the Afghan people, and acknowledges the political realities in Afghanistan today.”

If a new method of engagement was indeed to take “political realities in Afghanistan today” into account, then surely the Emirate’s adamantine opposition to the appointment of a UN Special Envoy would have made it a non-starter. Intended to be a mechanism to coordinate an intra-Afghan dialogue and the international response to Afghanistan, it is a path that the Emirate persistently refuses to take.

On the other side of the argument is the Emirate, whose repeated calls for recognition have reverberated across the globe for nearly three years. If it indeed coveted recognition and the international legitimacy it affords so strongly, then surely an invitation to sit at the same table with the world’s special envoys to discuss a roadmap for the future could be expected to have been accepted without pre-conditions. After all, going to Doha did not mean accepting the appointment of a special envoy.

Instead, the conversation seems to have stalled at its first hurdle and all the many outstanding issues seem to have fallen by the wayside. The Assessment makes recommendations which, depending on your point of view, need to be supported as benefiting the Afghan people, or strongly opposed as they would help the Emirate consolidate power. Yet, with the different parties so deeply embedded in their own positions on the issue of the special envoy, the prospects that the Doha meeting on 18-19 February might yield a change to the status quo and open the way to a new form of engagement do not look great.

Edited by Kate Clark and Jelena Bjelica 

References

References
↑1 DROPS, the Organization for Policy Research and Development Studies, in its shadow report, it describes itself as: 

… an Afghan think tank founded in Afghanistan, now based in Canada. It has a long track record of informing policymakers and other stakeholders through evidence-based research. Its ongoing BISHNAW-WAWRA (which means listen in Dari and Pashto) initiative has been conducting regular surveys with women in Afghanistan to increase the number and diversity of women’s voices feeding into the decisions and programs designed by the international community to mitigate the current political, humanitarian, economic and security crisis faced in Afghanistan. Since August 2021, DROPS has continued its work conducting remote surveys and virtual interviews, roundtables and focus group discussions.
↑2 Shaharzad Akbar is currently the Executive Director of the Afghan civil society organisation, Rawadari (tolerance).
↑3 Translation of Muttaqi’s speech by Ariana News here; in text by Afghanistan Analysts Network.
↑4 Muttaqi identified five key discussion points for the regional meeting: 

Exploring region-centric and engagement pathways based on common regional interests;

Creating a region-centric narrative for positive and constructive engagement with the Afghan government to confront existing and potential threats in the region;

Exploring ways for soft and hard connectivity which would lead to regional economic development for the benefit of all the people of our region;

Speaking with one voice to call for the removal of unilateral sanctions on the region and on Afghanistan in particular; and

Respecting one another’s indigenous and traditional development models and governance mechanisms.
↑5 28 special envoys from the following countries and organisations are set to participate in the meeting: Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Norway, Pakistan, Qatar, the Republic of Korea, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, the United States and Uzbekistan, in addition to the European Union (EU), the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).

REVISIONS:

This article was last updated on 19 Feb 2024

The Contest for a Special Envoy: Will the meeting in Doha yield a shift in the world’s engagement with the Emirate? 
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The ‘inclusive’ Afghan government Afghans do not want

February 17, 2024

Obaidullah Baheer

Lecturer of Transitional Justice at the American University in Afghanistan

Al Jazeera
Published On 17 Feb 2024
The Taliban does not want to share power with warlords and corrupt former officials and neither does the Afghan population

On February 18, UN Secretary-General António Guterres will host a meeting of special envoys for Afghanistan in Doha, Qatar. The Taliban had earlier confirmed it will be sending a delegation to the event, which will also be attended by other Afghan political stakeholders and representatives of the Afghan civil society.

This gathering is being held to accommodate one of the recommendations presented by the UN Special Coordinator for Afghanistan Feridun Sinirlioğlu in his November report (PDF) on the state of affairs in the country.

Although the report highlighted the need to focus on confidence-building measures between the international community and Afghan stakeholders, which would imply identifying areas of possible cooperation that are not politically sensitive, some difficult issues are bound to be brought up at the meeting. Prime among them would be the matter of the formation of an inclusive government in Afghanistan. This demand has been reiterated by regional and international actors as one of the key preconditions for the recognition of the Taliban government.

Seeking inclusive governance after a conflict is a routine diplomatic intervention. The idea is that inclusion is vital in peace-building, as it can resolve grievances produced by exclusion and prevent the re-emergence of violence.

However, the term evokes unpleasant memories for the Afghan people because it reminds them of the Bonn Conference that followed the US invasion of Afghanistan where the exiled and reviled warlords of the country were given a clean slate and an opportunity to participate in the subsequent power-sharing arrangement.

This inclusion of the warlords effectively meant impunity for crimes and played a vital role in the failure of the subsequent attempts at state-building in Afghanistan. The warlords were also spoilers of the peace process with the Taliban, the failure of which led to the eventual fall of Kabul to Taliban forces in August 2021.

Some of these exiled warlords who still have eyes on power include Abdul Rashid Dostum who has been accused of sexually assaulting political opponents and of committing war crimes during the US invasion and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf who was one of the warlords responsible for the Afshar massacre of 1993 in which up to 1,000 people were butchered in a western district of Kabul.

Ahmad Massoud, the son of the late Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was also involved in the Afshar massacre and the Afghan civil war, has also recently emerged as a political player. He is currently attempting to rally exiled warlords and allies of his father to fight against the Taliban while seeking funding from foreign governments.

Apart from the warlords, there is a great number of former Afghan officials of the previous government who have expressed a desire to come back to power. Many of them are being included in conversations on the future of Afghanistan despite standing accused of large-scale corruption and even drug trafficking.

It is not clear if any of the warlords or other problematic political players will participate in the meeting in Doha. The invitation process has not been transparent and it seems attempts were made to include some controversial figures, as the Taliban warned it would not attend if the selection of the Afghan participants was not agreeable to its leadership.

While it is clear who should not be part of a future government, finding qualified and trusted figures from non-Taliban political forces can be a challenge. That is because, between 2001 and 2021, the elections in the country were repeatedly rigged, making it unclear who represents the will of the Afghan people.

Ultimately, the Taliban should be allowed to choose who beyond its movement to include in government. This is not an ideal outcome but it would be an improvement on the current status quo.

The demand for the Taliban to break its current monopoly on power should be framed differently if it is ever to be realised. The term inclusivity not only is a non-starter for the Taliban but also evokes bad memories in Afghanistan’s general population.

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

Obaidullah Baheer is a lecturer of Transitional Justice at the American University in Afghanistan. He holds a postgraduate degree in International Relations from the University of New South Wales, Australia. His research was titled “A Study of the Ideational and Structural Factors Hindering Negotiations with the Taliban”.
The ‘inclusive’ Afghan government Afghans do not want
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What to Expect from the Doha Conference on Afghanistan

February 16, 2024

 BY: Kate Bateman;  Andrew Watkins

Thursday, February 15, 2024

United Nations meeting of special envoys aims to seek a way out of humanitarian and human rights crises in a Taliban-led Afghanistan.
On February 18-19, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will convene a meeting on Afghanistan in Doha to discuss the ongoing humanitarian and human rights crises and the recent report on a way forward by U.N. Special Coordinator for Afghanistan Feridun Sinirlioğlu. Special envoys from U.N. member states and international organizations will attend; representatives from Afghan civil society, women’s groups and Taliban officials have also been invited. The conference is a critical, high-level opportunity for donors and the region to chart next steps on how to improve the situation in Afghanistan and engage with the Taliban regime.

USIP’s Kate Bateman and Andrew Watkins discuss the significance of the meeting, its implications for U.S. interests and obstacles to broader international coordination on Afghanistan.

Why is the U.N. organizing this conference on Afghanistan and why now?

Watkins: U.N. Secretary-General Guterres convened an initial conference of the world’s special envoys to Afghanistan in May 2023 (also in Doha) to address the potentially destabilizing conditions in Afghanistan, including a failing economy and increasingly restrictive Taliban policies on women’s rights.  At that point — 21 months into the Taliban’s rule — the international community was grappling with the reality that the Taliban were effectively consolidating their rule and had proven unwilling to yield to international pressure that the country follow international obligations to combat terrorism, protect human rights and practice inclusive governance. These concerns began to impact the U.N. directly, in late 2022 and into 2023, when Taliban authorities issued restrictions on Afghan women working to deliver aid and assistance with nongovernmental organizations, and even as U.N. staff.

Last spring, the U.N. Security Council also called for an independent assessment of international engagement with Afghanistan. A special coordinator was appointed and tasked to report back to the council by November 2023 with forward-looking recommendations for how the international community can engage with Afghanistan in more coordinated, more effective ways.

U.N. Special Coordinator for Afghanistan Feridun Sinirlioğlu’s report called on donors to continue and strengthen engagement, development assistance and economic integration with Afghanistan — for the benefit of the Afghan people, in spite of the challenges of dealing with the Taliban. The assessment recommended a road map for reintegrating Afghanistan back into international economic and political systems, contingent on the Taliban meeting Afghanistan’s international legal and treaty obligations. This process would incrementally expand engagement and assistance in tandem with steps by the Taliban to implement and enforce women’s rights, human rights and key commitments on security and other concerns. The assessment also recommended that a U.N. special envoy be appointed to shepherd international engagement and link various processes and platforms.

The Security Council endorsed the report’s recommendations in a resolution just before the new year (but without support from Russia and China). Guterres and many donors hope the Doha conference will help build consensus on a process or road map for collective engagement, as proposed in the assessment.

How does this conference, and the process it seeks to build toward, address U.S. policy interests relating to Afghanistan?

Bateman: U.S. interests in Afghanistan are countering terrorism, obtaining the release of detained U.S. citizens, addressing the country’s humanitarian and economic crisis, enabling the departure of Afghans eligible to immigrate to the United States, advancing human rights and ensuring instability in Afghanistan doesn’t threaten regional stability.

In his January testimony to Congress, U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan Thomas West said the Taliban were taking sufficient efforts against al-Qaeda and ISIS-K, and described engaging with the Taliban for the release of wrongfully detained U.S. citizens. However, he also underscored the “reprehensible Taliban policies” that continue to repress women and girls, more so than in any other country in the world.

Overall progress to improve the situation in Afghanistan will require more intensive multilateral cooperation and coordination. The United States and like-minded partners want to see the Taliban rescind their oppressive policies against women and girls, and be more politically inclusive. Meanwhile, China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan and other regional states are more concerned about Afghanistan’s economic crisis that could destabilize the Taliban’s hold on power, exacerbating cross-border threats like terrorism, crime, drug trafficking and migration.

The withholding of formal recognition is one of the international community’s main tools of leverage to address any of these concerns. That consensus has held for two and a half years, but it looks increasingly fragile — as signaled by Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s acceptance last month of ambassador credentials from a Taliban representative, amid other steps toward normalization by regional actors.

The region, less troubled by human rights violations, appears readier to normalize relations with the Taliban than does the United States/West. For the latter, the risk is that the Taliban get what they want from the region (economic and trade ties, the appearance of legitimacy), weakening collective international leverage to push for improved protection of women’s and human rights, political inclusion and shared security interests. And yet regional neighbors also argue that several potential levers to address the economic crisis lie in the hands of the United States and other Western states: continued aid, removal of sanctions and unfreezing Afghan central bank assets. But the West is highly unlikely to make concessions on sanctions or assets, a difficult and messy process both politically and bureaucratically, unless the Taliban take significant steps to reverse restrictions on women and girls and protect human rights. This is highly unlikely under the status quo of Taliban leadership, hence the current impasse. Ultimately, U.S. leverage remains weak.

A U.N. special envoy and a multilateral mechanism for a potential road map to normalized relations with the Taliban (as recommended in Sinirlioğlu’s report), can help align these various interests and levers, and perhaps chart a path to break the impasse. A U.N. envoy may have more credibility with and ability to talk to regional states, as well as U.S. rivals Russia, China and Iran; an envoy can thus be a force multiplier for the United States vis-à-vis Afghanistan.

How will Afghanistan be represented in this conference?

Watkins: In the lead-up to last year’s meeting, there was no representation from Afghanistan.

For next week’s meeting, the U.N. formally invited the Taliban, and reportedly plans to also invite an equal number of other, non-Taliban Afghan participants, to include women and civil society leaders living in Afghanistan. Numerous Afghan activists have publicly called for the participation of Afghan women in this conference and other international forums. Last year’s U.N. assessment explicitly cited the need for women’s participation in both international and domestic political decision-making about Afghanistan.

But how, exactly, Afghan participation will play out remains up in the air. The Taliban have publicly spoken about the conference in vaguely positive terms, but have also quietly conveyed concerns about attending. The Taliban seem to seek assurances that if they attend they will be treated, at least de facto, as the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban perceive the invitation of other, independent Afghan voices as a slight against their legitimacy.

Sources say that the U.N.’s invitation to independent Afghans includes an equal number of men and women, though the details will likely depend on if and how the Taliban attend — this element of the conference is in flux, and may remain so until just before it begins.

What could impede broader international coordination on Afghanistan?

Watkins: The broadest hurdle facing the envoys’ gathering is the tense geopolitical climate: the divide between the United States and Russia and China in the Security Council continues to grow.

China’s steps to normalize diplomatic relations with the Taliban are significant gains in the Taliban’s quest for international legitimacy. China insists that it has not technically recognized the government in Kabul. Nevertheless, warming relations with China are likely to only further entrench Taliban perceptions that they can continue to safely ignore Western demands on human rights and inclusive governance. Russia, for its part, has kept the Taliban at arm’s length, continuing to warn about the threats their regime poses to the global terrorism landscape, but also seeks to stymie any U.S.-led or U.S.-friendly efforts and initiatives in the region.

Even among Western allies, there is a wide range of opinions on how to engage with challenges in Afghanistan — and with the Taliban. France’s position, which is strongly critical of the Taliban and suspicious of widening engagement with their regime, is especially relevant given its permanent seat (and veto vote) on the Security Council. It may prove difficult for the United States to even rally allies and partners around a common position.

Finally, the recommendation for a U.N. special envoy is highly contentious. While the United States has voiced its support for the swift appointment of an envoy, the Taliban have been emphatic in their opposition to such an appointment. Russia and China have been lukewarm on the idea. The envoy is likely to be a key topic of discussion — and could turn into a stumbling block.

In public messaging, the Taliban’s chief complaint is that U.N. envoys are appointed to help resolve conflicts — and they forcefully reject the insinuation that they have not brought peace and stability to Afghanistan. Broadly, the Taliban appear to be averse to the very idea underpinning the envoys’ gathering: that the international community adopt a collective, coordinated approach. As advancing relations with China and other regional countries seem to demonstrate, the Taliban have much more to gain from differing, bilateral engagements — and hope to avoid any chance of being ganged up against.

What would be a successful outcome from the U.S. government’s perspective? What is feasible/likely?

Bateman: The United States would like to see greater consensus on the appointment of a U.N. special envoy and their mandate to shepherd a broader process or road map. But the Taliban are unlikely to drop their opposition to an envoy. Thus, an acceptable outcome might be a quiet concession that an envoy will not be fully blocked from traveling to Afghanistan, or a title change like “coordinator,” which implies a function more concerned with corralling international actors than taking the Taliban regime to task. The United States will want to avoid an outcome that appears to dramatically weaken an envoy’s mandate, or scratches the idea altogether.

Another important outcome would be to maintain, at least for a while longer, the consensus on nonrecognition of the Taliban government (for instance, as conveyed in public statements by the U.N. or individual envoys).

The Doha II conference is not where concrete policy decisions on aid will be made. Nevertheless, a “win” from the U.S. perspective would be to bolster envoys’ commitment to advocate in their state capitals for continued humanitarian aid for Afghanistan — to at least slow the precipitous decline in aid.

It will be important that the voices of Afghan women and advocates of women and girls’ rights have a strong platform at Doha II. The U.S. delegation may also look to individual envoys from a diverse range of countries to underscore human rights issues and Afghanistan’s obligations under international law, to demonstrate a united front to the Taliban delegation. The conference could help reinforce the consensus that normalization will not happen without huge improvements on women’s rights.

Finally, the United States may aim to shore up support for the U.N. Assistance Mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA), whose mandate will be up for renewal by the Security Council next month. If a U.N. envoy is appointed, there will also be a need to clarify the relationship and modalities between the envoy and UNAMA.

What to Expect from the Doha Conference on Afghanistan
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Home at Last: After more than 20 years, two former inmates of Guantanamo reach Afghanistan

February 14, 2024

Kate Clark

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Two more Afghan former inmates of the United States’ Guantanamo detention camp have finally returned home after more than two decades incarcerated or in exile. Abdul Zahir from Logar was detained by US forces and rendered to Guantanamo in July 2002, while Bostan Karim from Paktia was arrested by Pakistan a month later and handed over to the US, which took him to Guantanamo in March 2003. In 2017, after the US deemed the two men not to be a risk to its national security, it transferred them, not to Afghanistan, but to Oman. Finally, they are now back on home soil. As Kate Clark reports, the cases against them were among the flimsiest she has looked into of the Afghans who were rendered to Guantanamo.

As they stepped off a plane from Oman at Kabul International Airport on 12 February 2024, Abdul Zahir and Bostan Karim were given a hero’s welcome.[1] There were garlands and flowers, hugs from officials and uniformed members of the security forces kissed their hands. See this video released by the Ministry of Interior, with its celebratory nashid (Islamic anthem) soundtrack, which praises those who defend Afghanistan, the ghazis (fighters of jihad). Billboards showing the two men had been put up at the airport and all along the main route towards the city centre.

A statement from the Emirate’s interior ministry on X said the two men’s return had come about as a “result of the continuous efforts [made by] the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” while another post by Ministry of Foreign Affairs Spokesperson, Abdul Qahar Balkhi, expressed the Emirate’s gratitude and appreciation to the fraternal Sultanate of Oman for hosting and taking care of the two individuals.”

Abdul Zahir and Bostan Karim both featured in an in-depth study by the author into the cases of the last eight Afghans held in Guantanamo, which was published in 2016, ‘Kafka in Cuba: The Afghan Experience in Guantanamo’.[2] Each had been caught up in the wave of mass arrests carried out by the US as it sought information about the whereabouts of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and to hunt down what it referred to at the time as ‘Taleban remnants’. There was little or no actual Taleban resistance at this time – most in the ranks had melted back to their villages, while senior figures who had slipped across the border to Pakistan were often trying to get security guarantees to come home. Even so, the US was determined to detain those ‘remnants’ and its willingness to accept tip-offs and pay for intelligence led to many Afghans being falsely accused by their personal enemies or informed on for money, either by individuals or by the Pakistani state. [3] Zahir appears to have been one such person, as well as Karim.

The cases of Zahir and Karim

Abdul Zahir’s official Guantanamo photo taken from his Joint Task Force Guantanamo Detainee Assessment, dated 19 November 2008, and subsequently published by Wikileaks, available here https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/ISN_00753%2C_Abdul_Sahir%27s_Guantanamo_detainee_assessment.pdf.
Abdul Zahir’s official Guantanamo photo taken from his Joint Task Force Guantanamo Detainee Assessment, dated 19 November 2008, and subsequently published by Wikileaks, available here https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/ISN_00753%2C_Abdul_Sahir%27s_Guantanamo_detainee_assessment.pdf.

Abdul Zahir, born in Hesarak district of Logar province in 1972, was detained by US forces in a house raid after an anonymous tip-off that he had chemical weapons stored at his house. This turned out to be untrue: the suspicious substances found at his house turned out to be salt, sugar, and petroleum jelly[4] However, during his interrogation, he told his captors that, before 9/11, he had worked as a choki dar (doorman) and occasional translator for an Arab commander, Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi (real name Nashwan al-Tamir), who was also taken to Guantanamo. During the first emirate, this would have been an uncontroversial job – times were hard, work was scarce and working either for the Taleban’s ‘Arab guests’ or their ‘foreign guests’ (in NGOs) was no indication in itself of ideological persuasion. Even so, the US military accused Zahir of having been a “trusted member” of al-Qaeda.

Years later, in 2016, the body set up by President Barak Obama to assess the threat posed by Guantanamo detainees, the Periodic Review Board, ruled that Zahir had “probably [been] misidentified as the individual who had ties to al-Qaeda weapons facilitation” and had had only “a limited role in Taliban structure and activities.” It deemed him safe to transfer out of Guantanamo.

Bostan Karim’s official Guantanamo photo taken from his Joint Task Force Guantanamo Detainee Assessment, dated 5 June 2008, and subsequently published by Wikileaks, available here https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/82387-isn-975-bostan-karim-jtf-gtmo-detainee-assessment/2944f0abe6fdb320/full.pdf.
Bostan Karim’s official Guantanamo photo taken from his Joint Task Force Guantanamo Detainee Assessment, dated 5 June 2008, and subsequently published by Wikileaks, available here https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/82387-isn-975-bostan-karim-jtf-gtmo-detainee-assessment/2944f0abe6fdb320/full.pdf.

The other Afghan who has returned home from Oman, Bostan Karim, was a businessman who had been born in Paktia in 1970. He had a shop in Khost selling plastic flowers and was arrested by Pakistan as he crossed the border by bus in August 2002 and handed over to the US in February 2003. He alleged he was tortured with sleep deprivation at Bagram before being rendered to Guantanamo on 6 March 2003. Of all the eight cases of Afghans which the author has looked into, Karim’s file contains some of the most glaring mistakes and muddled accusations.[5]

The evidence handed over to the Americans by Pakistan alleging he was a terrorist consisted of him possessing a satellite phone and some US dollars. Yet both were normal for a trader from Khost province to carry at that time. Unfortunately for Karim, his former business partner (with whom he had fallen out), Obaidullah, had also been detained in Afghanistan a month earlier after an anonymous tip-off accusing him of being an al-Qaeda bomb-maker. During his interrogation, Obaidullah named a ‘Karim’ as his co-conspirator; the US assumed this was Bostan Karim, even though Karim is a common name and that Obaidullah had a brother called Faizal Karim. Moreover, it looks likely that the name had been revealed under torture – at least, evidence for Obaidullah’s having been tortured was presented to the US courts as part of his habeas petition and the government chose to drop allegations based on his ‘confession’ rather than contest his claims of torture. The US decided Karim was the leader of Obaidullah’s bomb-making cell.

Problematic for Karim as well is that he was an active member of the quietist, apolitical missionary organisation, Jamat al-Tabligh, along with millions of other South Asians. US intelligence had decided it was a front for al-Qaeda and that a detainee’s membership automatically pointed to terrorist involvement. Jamat al-Tabligh was not on the US government’s list of terrorist organisations. Indeed, during the first Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as Karim testified, he had been targeted by the authorities because of his membership of Jamat al-Tabligh and indeed, the group has regularly come under fire from violent jihadists because of its quietist approach to politics.

Such gross misunderstandings, outlandish errors and fantastical assertions litter the classified intelligence files of the Afghan detainees; they came to light after they were published by Wikileaks in 2011.[6] As evidence of Karim being “a veteran extremist,” for example, one file said he had an uncle who had fought in the “Afghan-Russian war” with Hezb-e Islami, which it described as “one of the seven Al Qaida terrorist groups operating in Pakistan.” Hezb-e Islami was, of course, one of the seven Afghan mujahedin groups, which the US had supported and helped fund, and which was fighting the Soviet army, seven years before al-Qaeda was even established. More examples of the US’ general dearth of knowledge about Afghanistan or apparent ability to find out even basic information can be read about in the author’s 2016 report.

Karim’s perplexity at being in Guantanamo and at the accusations against him was revealed in his statement to an early review body, the Combatant Status Review Tribunal, in 2004:

First of all, I am not a member of the Taleban and I’m not a member of al-Qaida. I’m a business man. I have two stores. In one store, I sell plastic flowers. In the other store, I rent furniture and dishes for special occasions. I am a missionary; I go house-to-house, village-to village, spreading my religion.

Also concerning was how the US courts treated Karim in his long-running petition for habeas corpus. There was some evidence that his supposed ‘co-conspirator’, Obaidullah, may have been a low-level insurgent, although most of the US government’s contentions against him were found to be false during his petition. However, there was no evidence that Karim had been involved in the insurgency. Nevertheless, the judge in each case used the assumed guilt of the other petitioner to incriminate the man whose case they were examining. The judge in Obaidullah’s case said his “long-standing personal and business relationship with at least one al Qaida operative [ie Boston Karim]” was one reason why he must also have been an al-Qaeda member. The judge in Karim’s case quoted that fellow judge, saying that Obaidullah was more likely than not “a member of an al Qaeda bomb cell committed to the destruction of [US] and Allied forces” as evidence against Karim.

In June 2016, his Periodic Review Board, while still believing he presented “some level of threat in light of his past activities and associations,” decided to transfer him anyway, noting that he had been “highly compliant while in detention, has not expressed any intent to reengage in extremist activity or espoused any anti-US sentiment that would indicate he views the US as an enemy.” These were the last months of Barak Obama’s presidency, and after he had failed on his campaign promise to close the camp, his administration did strive to clear as many detainees out of Guantanamo as possible before the end of his second and final term. However, escaping Guantanamo did not mean getting home.

Leaving Guantanamo … but only eventually reaching Afghanistan

In 2017, the US organised for Zahir and Karim to be sent to Oman and for four other Afghans, who had also been cleared for transfer, to the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The Republican-controlled Congress had blocked any Afghan returning home (despite not blocking more than 200 transfers during President Bush’s time in office). The four men sent to the UAE were immediately detained and only finally brought home during President Ashraf Ghani’s tenure; one was from a prominent Hezb-e Islami family and a Hezbi minister had pushed for his repatriation. (For more on their incarceration in the UAE and final homecoming, see the author’s December 2019 report, Freed at Last: Three Afghans sent to Guantanamo in 2002 and 2003 are finally home.) Zahir and Karim, sent to Oman, were treated far better, allowed to settle in the country and for their families to join them. (For more on this, see pages 19-20 of the author’s 2021 report.) Only now, however, have they been allowed to come back to Afghanistan.

On the day of his homecoming, Karim said in a short video tweeted by Hurriyat Radio that returning home meant he felt “I have not travelled at all, nor spent any time in any prison.” Zahir said his joy was such that he had not “the words for expressing my happiness.” Both men thanked God and the ‘mujahedin’ (the Emirate) for getting them home.

Those like Zaher and Karim who have experienced such long-term arbitrary detention, and often torture as well, and the people who have supported former inmates of Guantanamo all say the road to full recovery after such trauma is long and uncertain. Symptoms, wrote Katie Taylor and Polly Rossdale, who have both worked on Reprieve’s programme to help former detainees adjust to life outside Guantanamo typically include persistent insomnia, memory loss, inability to concentrate, confusion, anger, fear and an inability to trust. The particular harm done by conditions in Guantanamo, they say, goes even further:

In Guantánamo mistrust and paranoia have also arisen as a result of specific circumstances: sensory deprivation, isolation, inhumane treatment, humiliation and attacks to identity, the indefinite nature of the detention, administrative and legal practices that exert psychological control, a profound sense of personal injustice, opacity and deception. A lack of confidence is especially noteworthy. According to Reprieve clients, interrogators often pretended to be a doctor or the Red Cross (ICRC) or a detainee’s defence lawyer. … Paranoia and mistrust after many years of experiencing such practices are logical responses to illogical events.[7]

Taylor told the author that three factors could help ex-detainees recover from Guantanamo.

Family support is huge…. Secondly, time. It really is a matter of time and that has to be safe time – not under threat of prison, deportation or other arbitrary things…It takes time for men to recover. [I’ve seen men that] when they first got out, I honestly felt quite pessimistic about their prospects, but after three to four years, such a transformation can happen, it’s really heartening. Thirdly, adaptability or capabilities. This is to do with them as individuals. All of us have our own pockets of resiliency.

These two men, who were wrenched from their homes more than twenty years ago, will find much has changed in their absence. There will be personal losses. Abul Zahir’s mother, for example, died just a year before his transfer to Oman. “She was very anxious,” his brother told AAN in 2018, “and she had a heart problem because of the grief [over her son’s absence].” At least the US army is no longer in Afghanistan. That was a source of dread for earlier released detainees.

Zahir and Karim are almost the last of the 225 Afghans rendered by the US to Guantanamo who are able to come home. Three Afghans died in the camp, but one remains: Muhammad Rahim from Nangrahar, was detained by Pakistan in 2007, rendered first to Afghanistan where he was tortured by the CIA and then to Guantanamo, where he has spent much of the last almost two decades in solitary confinement. As AAN reported in December 2023, the US continues to insist he would be a threat to its national security if released. The “horrors and harms” of Guantanamo[8] for that one Afghan continue, even as his two newly-returned compatriots try to restart their lives back in their homeland.

References

References
↑1 The Islamic Emirate released their names as Mullah Abdul Zahir Saber and Haji Abdul Karim, for example, here.
↑2 AAN’s reports and special reports about the Afghan experience in Guantanamo (the first from 2012) were gathered together in a dossier published in October 2023.
↑3 The mass arbitrary detentions, often accompanied by forced nudity, use of dogs in people’s homes and torture, during this period, were one driver of the insurgency. For more, see the author’s 2013 report, ‘Talking to the Taliban: A British perspective’.
↑4 This was according to Zahir’s Guantanamo Detainee Profile released by the Periodic Review Board from 3 February 2015, the link to which no longer works. However, more details about this and Zahir’s case in general can be read in the author’s 2016 report, pp30-33.
↑5 For more on Karim, see pages 42-45 of the author’s 2016 report. The closely linked case of Obaidullah can be read about on pages 32-42.
↑6 The Joint Task Force Guantanamo Detainee Assessments came to light after they were published by Wikileaks in 2011. The assessments contained background information on the detainees and something of their version of events, as well as allegations against them and the threat they were deemed to pose. There is information about each person’s capture and the reasons for his transfer to Guantanamo and continuing detention. Detainees’ behaviour at Guantanamo and mental and physical health are also detailed. The allegations made are usually very serious, but the Assessments are littered with factual errors, gross misunderstandings and hearsay. 

Much of the sourcing is raw intelligence, defined by the FBI as “unevaluated intelligence information, generally from a single source, that has not fully been… integrated with other information, or interpreted and analysed.” An analysis of the sourcing by Tom Lasseter and Carol Rosenberg also revealed dependence on a handful of ‘supergrasses’, eight detainees whose testimony formed the basis of accusations against 225 other detainees, roughly a third of the camp’s population. The reporters noted that such testimony found its way into government evidence presented in court. Because the Assessments were unlawfully disclosed, they cannot be cited in court by defendants or habeas petitioners.
↑7 See Polly Rossdale and Katie Taylor, ‘An Account of ‘Life after Guantánamo’: a rehabilitation project for former Guantánamo detainees across continents’, in Torture, vol 37, no 3, 2017, 44-58.
↑8 The quote is from the now former Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin. In 2023, she became the first independent United Nations investigator to visit the camp. Read her report here, and AAN analysis here.

Home at Last: After more than 20 years, two former inmates of Guantanamo reach Afghanistan
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The positive stories Afghanistan needs

February 10, 2024 ,

Hujjatullah Zia

A Kabul-based journalist
Al Jazeera
Published On 10 Feb 2024
Amid the hard times my country is going through, I have left behind despair and embraced hope.

These days, Afghanistan makes international headlines more and more rarely and when it does, it is always about yet another tragedy. A humanitarian crisis, an earthquake, a deadly attack, a drought, expelled and suffering refugees.

I used to work for Daily Outlook Afghanistan, the first English-language media outlet in the country. In our small newsroom, we recognised the negative psychological impact that the constant stream of bad news had. So we set out to look for positive stories to print side-by-side with our regular coverage and try to counter this decades-old tendency to paint Afghanistan in all-dark colours.

Daily Outlook Afghanistan is no more. The newspaper, like many other media outlets, had to shut down shortly after the Taliban takeover of Kabul in 2021. Most of my colleagues fled to neighbouring Iran and Pakistan; one of them, Alireza Ahmadi, tragically died in the bombing of Kabul airport on August 26 that year. So now there are even fewer journalists in the world looking for the positive Afghan story.

I, myself, fell into the dark trap of fatalism. From a writer, who always viewed and analysed political issues from the positive side and tried to give hope to the readers amid two decades of war and violence, I turned into a man full of chagrin. Life became extremely hard overnight. I was unemployed, struggling to provide for my family. Everything seemed meaningless to me.

I often heard complaints from female relatives about their struggles under the Taliban regime and the ban on secondary and university education. This saddened me and just added to my anguish.

As the months passed, I slowly started to realise that I could offer a lot more than words of consolation. As a Chinese proverb goes: “It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness”.

I found like-minded people who had also decided to start playing a positive role for the younger generation in these hard times. Together, we founded a private academy to teach English in Dasht-e-Barchi, a western neighbourhood of Kabul.

None of us had any extra money, so we had to borrow from friends to cover the expenses of renting a space and equipping it with chairs and desks, whiteboards, solar panels, MP3 players and screens. We put together a syllabus ourselves and passed the registration process with the Ministry of Education.

Despite the ban on secondary and university education, girls are still allowed to study in private education centres. So we have welcomed them as our students, along with boys.

We abide by the legal requirements and keep the girls and boys in separate rooms; we also ensure all female students wear the Islamic hijab in the class as prescribed by the authorities.

We have set a low tuition fee that is relatively affordable and we also offer waivers. Of the 200 students currently studying with us, 15 are not paying and 40 are paying half of the fee. The payments we collect are just about enough to cover the rent.

We teach for free, but we are still rewarded. The daily encounter with so many young girls and boys who want to study and achieve is inspiring.

We have one male student, for example, who recently got into a road accident. A rickshaw hit his motorbike and hurt his fingers seriously. He sent us a message, saying, “I had an accident and going to have a surgical operation. Please pray for me so that my fingers do not be chopped off.” To our surprise, he showed up for class right after he had the surgery.

Another student who inspires us with her determination is a 16-year-old girl who works at a tailor shop where she receives little pay to support her family. She is highly keen on learning English but cannot afford to study, so we gave her the opportunity to join our academy without payment. To cover the cost of books and stationery, she sets aside 10 Afghanis ($0.14) every day from her pay.

I look back at the past few months in which the academy has been open and I feel regret for losing the previous two years to depression and hopelessness. If we had started earlier, we would have helped many boys and girls pursue their education dreams.

But I am also happy that I have left behind the paralysis of despair and embraced hope. I try to help my students fight depression and despair, as well. I try to inspire enthusiasm and optimism and motivate them to be active in their communities and create the positive stories Afghanistan so dearly needs.

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

Hujjatullah Zia is a journalist and senior writer in Daily Outlook Afghanistan Newspaper
The positive stories Afghanistan needs
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The Daily Hustle: Mission impossible – the quest for passports and visas in Afghanistan

February 5, 2024

AAN Team • Roxanna Shapour

Afghanistan Analysts Network

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Afghans who got onto evacuation lists may have the chance to go to Europe or North America, if they can get passports and visas for Pakistan. Their first dilemma is whether to go; it is not easy leaving one’s homeland. But there is a second dilemma – whether to spend savings or go into debt to get the necessary travel documents. Many families have faced repeated disappointments and staggering costs trying to get those documents. In this instalment of the Daily Hustle, AAN hears from one Afghan about his painful decision to emigrate and then his, so far unsuccessful, efforts to get passports and visas for all the family. 
I’m 46 years old. My wife and I have four children – three sons, aged 16, 14 and 11, and a five-year-old daughter, who’s the apple of my eye. I’ve been working for an international NGO for about 13 years, working my way up the ranks until I was a programme manager. My family and I had a good life. I had a good job and a steady income, which allowed me to provide for my family, put the kids in private school and lend a helping hand to our extended family and people back in our village when they needed it. The future looked bright.
But in spring 2021, as the Taleban were capturing district after district across Afghanistan, everything changed. In the weeks and days before the Taleban took over, the atmosphere in Kabul was tense. All over the city, people who were worried about the coming changes were making preparations to leave Afghanistan. Families were selling up everything they owned to pay for their move abroad. The shops that traded in used goods were bursting with household goods – furniture, appliances, kitchen utensils, clothes – their wares spilling onto sidewalks. Driving through the city, you could see people rummaging through what was on offer, looking to pick up bargains. Traffickers were doing a booming business smuggling people to Pakistan, Iran and further afield to Turkey and on to Europe.

Finally, on 15 August 2021, the Republic fell and the Taleban took over the country. They would soon re-establish the second Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. I was concerned about the future. I’m old enough to remember what it was like during the first Islamic Emirate and I didn’t want that life for my children. I considered leaving the country, but I didn’t think my family and I were at any particular risk. I’d never worked for the government or the Afghan security forces. I still had a job and was earning a good income. I thought my NGO job would also offer me a measure of protection from any ill effects that the change in government might bring. The Taleban fighters who were now everywhere in the city were nice enough, even helpful and, at times, good-humoured. So, I thought we should wait and see what happens. After all, Afghanistan was home.

The decision to leave 

Things, however, were not looking great. The economy went into freefall almost immediately after the takeover. For a time, my NGO had trouble paying salaries because of the banking crisis and the cost of basic goods was rising at a dizzying rate. Luckily, we had some savings that helped us through the difficult days and enough money to help our siblings and parents, who were in dire financial circumstances.

The announcement of a general amnesty by Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada that offered protection to members of the former government and security forces gave me hope. And, to be honest, the security situation was much better. The conflict had ended and people were travelling around the country. They were going back to their villages, some of them for the first time in years, or to places they had always wanted to visit. I thought maybe this time it would be different. Maybe the new Emirate would have space for all Afghans to live in peace and prosperity.

Meanwhile, the NGO I worked for had submitted the names of all staff members to a European country for evacuation. My managers weren’t sure if they could continue operating in the new environment and were very concerned about the safety of the people working here. They asked if I wanted my family to be put forward for evacuation. I said that I did, thinking that I could make a final decision later when the time came. Things were still uncertain both on the ground and in my head and heart. I kept having conversations in my head weighing up the pros and cons of staying versus leaving.

The pull of home was strong, and the idea of leaving my parents and siblings behind was unbearable. There were days when I felt the need to leave and secure a future for my family with a sense of urgency. On other days, I thought I should stay home in Afghanistan. It’s true things were getting more difficult and so many things were uncertain, but the boys could go to school and, as for my daughter, she’s only five years old. She could still go to primary school in Afghanistan and maybe by the time she was ready to go to high school, the Emirate would have re-opened them for girls. And I still had a job.

Finally, the NGO I worked for told me that we had been accepted for evacuation by a European country. A few days later, I received an email from that country asking me to resubmit all our identity documents and start preparing to be evacuated. We had to settle our affairs, obtain passports and gather all the documents we would need in our new home in Europe.

It was time to make a decision. I talked things over with a friend and told him that I was thinking of staying in Afghanistan. He said I was being short-sighted. This, he said, was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to secure a good future for my family. If I passed it up, I might never have the chance to immigrate again and I owed it to my children, especially my daughter, to take it.

That evening, as I watched my daughter play with her doll in the living room, I thought about her future in the new Afghanistan. One of the first things the Emirate had done was to close girls’ high schools, and while they had been promising that this was only temporary, there had been no movement on this front. Eventually, they would bar women from attending university.

Would the Emirate make good on its promise to reopen girls’ high schools and allow women back into universities? Or would she be sentenced to a life of illiteracy and dependence? There was too much at stake. My friend was right. I owed it to my little girl to give her every chance at a better future.

The trials and tribulations of getting a passport in Afghanistan

Getting passports for myself and my family proved to be a difficult task. I tried unsuccessfully for more than six months to get them using the official process. The lines at the passport office were long and the process arduous. When we didn’t hear back, I went to the passport office several times and queued up on the street overnight, but the answer was always the same: We are very busy, there are a large number of passport requests to process and you must wait your turn. Finally, after several months of waiting, I gave up on the idea of getting a passport through the normal channels and started looking for a wasetaI (contact) at the passport office. My friend told me he knew someone who worked there and arranged for a meeting at a teahouse in central Kabul. The wasetal asked for 500 USD for each passport. It was a lot of money, 3,000 USD for six passports, but it seemed to be the only way for us to get them. I agreed to pay and he delivered the passports, as promised, two weeks later.

Time to get visas

Once we had our passports, I contacted the EU country which had agreed to take us for further instructions. They told me to apply for visas to Pakistan, which I did at the Pakistani embassy in Kabul. The visa applications were affordable (180 USD for the six of us or 30 USD per person), but our applications were denied. I then went to a travel agency which acts as a broker for visas to Pakistan and charges 300 USD per visa after it has successfully obtained them. But the visa broker was only able to get one visa. I had to find a way to get the other five visas. I contacted another person who said he could get the visas, again for 300 USD per person. We agreed that I would pay him 300 USD in advance and the remaining 1,200 USD when the visas were secured. This man never came through with the visas. I waited for a month for him to contact me, but he never did, nor would he answer my many phone calls. In the end, I lost the 300 USD I had given him.

Finally, I emailed the European country and explained my difficulties in getting a Pakistani visa. They wrote back quickly and told me that I should get an Iranian visa. It took three weeks to get our visas from the Iranian embassy, which cost 300 USD per person (1,800 USD for my family of six). After that, I was instructed to proceed to Iran’s capital, Tehran, but as we were making the final preparations to leave, they emailed me to say that they were having some issues with processing evacuation applications at their embassy in Tehran. They told me to wait for further instructions. About two weeks later, they wrote again to tell me that the only option was for us to travel to Pakistan.

We were back where we started. I applied again for Pakistani visas for the five of us. I decided to try my luck with the embassy again rather than pay the hefty fees of a visa broker. I paid 30 USD per visa and waited. It took three months for the embassy to issue only two visas, which are valid for 90 days, but the other four applications were rejected. The race is on now. I have no choice but to pay a visa broker 1,050 USD per visa (4,020 USD in total) and hope against hope that these visas arrive before the other ones expire.

Today, the future seems as uncertain as it did that fateful night when I made the decision to leave Afghanistan. Over the months, I’ve spent nearly 10,000 USD from our savings to get passports and visas for us to leave. I try to manage my expectations; we’ve had so many setbacks, and things could still go wrong. But still, I’m hopeful that this time everything will work out. If the Pakistani visas come through, and if the European country is still willing to take us, then hopefully we will soon be on our way to Islamabad and then onwards to our new home in Europe – hopefully.

Edited by Roxanna Shapour 

 

The Daily Hustle: Mission impossible – the quest for passports and visas in Afghanistan
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ICG report: The Taliban’s Neighbourhood: Regional Diplomacy with Afghanistan

January 30, 2024
International Crisis Group report

The Taliban’s Neighbourhood: Regional Diplomacy with Afghanistan

Even as many diplomats shun the Taliban regime, protesting its treatment of women and girls, emissaries of countries near Afghanistan have sought dealings with Kabul in areas like security and commerce. It is a worthwhile endeavour, and the West should not stand in the way

What’s new? The Taliban, mostly isolated by Western powers, are looking to build ties with foreign capitals closer by. These countries cannot simply say no: they must deal with the Taliban on security and economic issues. Regional engagement remains limited, however, due to both mistrust and hurdles raised by Western sanctions. 

Why does it matter? Dysfunction in the relationships between Afghanistan and its neighbours affects lives and livelihoods across South and Central Asia. Kabul and its regional partners should explore ways of expanding trade, managing disputes over water and other shared resources, and combating transnational militancy. Failure could spell instability in a vast area.

What should be done? Instead of retreating from the many challenges of dealing with the stubborn Taliban, regional capitals should continue to develop a clearly defined format for broad-based security cooperation and economic integration. Western countries should support such efforts – or, at a minimum, refrain from blocking them.

Executive Summary

As most of the world shuns the Taliban due to their violations of women’s and girls’ rights, countries in the region around Afghanistan are dealing with the regime to address their needs for security and economic stability. This region, as the Taliban broadly define it, spans the “Eurasian continents”, from China in the east to Türkiye in the west and from Russia in the north to India and the Gulf monarchies in the south. It encompasses countries closer in, such as the Central Asian states, Iran and Pakistan. The Taliban, like previous Afghan rulers, view Afghanistan as a bridge connecting all these places. Regional countries’ policies toward the Taliban vary enormously, though all believe contacts with the regime to be necessary, but so far, their engagement is limited. Kabul and its regional partners are struggling to develop a modus vivendi as regards issues of mutual concern, which range from boosting trade to managing disputes over water and halting transnational militancy. It is a fraught endeavour, but a worthwhile one, and Western capitals should not stand in the way. 

The Taliban’s denial of basic rights to Afghan women and girls and their imposition of draconian social rules since returning to power in August 2021 has sabotaged, at least for now, the chances that the UN and other international bodies might recognise their regime. Yet even as Western diplomats cancelled meetings with the Taliban, regional actors sought more dealings with Kabul. Some have condemned the Taliban’s treatment of women and girls, particularly bans on girls’ secondary and higher education, but overall regional officials tend not to put emphasis on women’s and girls’ rights. At the same time, they are convinced that the best way to secure their countries’ interests and moderate the Taliban’s behaviour in the long term is patient deliberation with Kabul, rather than ostracism. Channels between Kabul and regional capitals appear to offer the Taliban their best hopes for diplomatic engagement in the coming years.

Still, regional collaboration has fallen short of what some of Afghanistan’s neighbours wanted. Some were aspiring to a “grand bargain” that would have traded diplomatic recognition for Taliban action to form a more inclusive government, particularly by empowering Afghan politicians whom they had sponsored in opposition to the Taliban in the past and with whom they remain friendly. The Taliban, however, rebuffed all attempts to coax them into including former enemies in the cabinet. Most regional players have therefore settled for piecemeal engagement with Kabul that addresses specific issues on a case-by-case basis. More by necessity than design, this approach aligns with the Taliban’s own preference for transactional relationships that avoid the prospect of what they perceive as foreign meddling in Afghan affairs. Taliban talking points about respect for diverse cultural values and alternatives to the “Western-imposed” global order also chime with the interests of those regional powers. 

After the Taliban takeover, Afghanistan’s neighbours feared that violence would spill across their borders.

At the top of the regional agenda are matters related to security. Regional officials have observed Kabul’s novel methods of controlling Islamist militant groups with varying degrees of scepticism and anxiety. After the Taliban takeover, Afghanistan’s neighbours feared that violence would spill across their borders to hotspots like Indian-administered Kashmir or the Fergana Valley in Central Asia. Those concerns proved to be exaggerated; as the Taliban firmed up their hold on the country, militancy did not spread. The major exception is Pakistan, where attacks by the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) climbed during the Taliban’s first two years in power, significantly raising tensions with Islamabad. The Taliban have used a standard playbook for answering regional concerns about nearly all militant groups: Kabul refuses to kill or capture suspected militants. Instead, it relocates them, helping them establish new lives in an effort to curb their ambitions and break down their command structures. 

The first step toward better regional security cooperation could be cooling down the rhetoric on all sides and getting actors to agree on a set of facts, even if they have different priorities. Taliban forces have got better at corralling the most dangerous jihadists, those loyal to Islamic State Khorasan Province (IS-KP), but even in that case the Taliban have not built enough confidence with regional partners to share information freely. Part of the problem is the gap between how Kabul prefers to deal with most of the Islamist militant groups in Afghanistan and how the region would like Kabul to deal with them. Overcoming this divide requires building a common platform for discussing regional security concerns and a common approach to addressing challenges. All sides would benefit from improved border management, customs integration and demarcation of Afghanistan’s rugged frontiers. 

The other main area of regional cooperation is economics. Decades of war in Afghanistan shelved ideas of multiplying trade corridors to rival the Silk Routes of old, but these began to regain currency as the Taliban’s military victory brought greater stability and the de facto authorities started tackling corruption. Regional capitals are now seeing glimmers of commercial opportunity. They are dusting off plans to get trucks, railcars, gas and electricity moving across borders. The Taliban are impatient to start work on such projects, though some of the barriers will be insurmountable in the short term. 

The logic for better regional economic connectivity is overwhelming, especially in the energy sector where Central Asian countries are in search of new markets while South Asia needs new supplies of oil, gas and electricity. Equally importantly, the region has strategic reasons to encourage ventures in Afghanistan as part of long-term planning for economic integration, which in turn would help with regional stability. Some regional actors think building Afghanistan into the regional economic architecture could increase regional influence, placate detractors of diplomacy among the Taliban and make the de facto authority a more predictable entity. Many among the Taliban, for their part, see such integration as a path to greater prosperity for Afghanistan and greater longevity for their regime.

Still, a multitude of factors inhibit economic cooperation between Kabul and the region. Economic restrictions and sanctions continue to stifle private investment. The desire of some donor states to limit aid to humanitarian assistance, and attempts by some to block development aid altogether, also contribute. The limited resources of some regional countries, coupled with inability to attract external financing, also impede serious economic collaboration between Afghanistan and the region. Equally importantly, the lack of a legal framework in Afghanistan continues to undermine private-sector confidence in the country, particularly as the Taliban embark on a cryptic ad hoc overhaul of laws they inherited from the government they overthrew. 

Some of the Taliban’s actions, including building water infrastructure without coordination with downstream countries, have also engendered tensions with Afghanistan’s neighbours, particularly Iran and Uzbekistan. Disputes have occasionally contributed to skirmishes between the Taliban and neighbouring countries’ forces. In such a febrile atmosphere, regional states might be tempted to scale back their ambitions for engagement with the Taliban. Doing so, however, would likely make it still harder to resolve such problems and put solutions to other challenges neighbours face in Afghanistan further out of reach. 

Many steps toward regional cooperation do not involve Western donors, but those countries have a stake in the results. Europeans, especially, would benefit from a stable, self-sufficient region that is not a major source of illegal drugs, migrants or terrorism. Yet sanctions and other measures originating in the West that aim to signal disapproval of the Taliban are obstacles on the road to more functional relations between Kabul and regional capitals. Whether it is a vote at the World Bank on a water project, or permission to send equipment to Taliban border guards despite sanctions, much progress depends on Western support – or at least, acquiescence. While such practical steps should not imply recognising the Taliban regime, they would contribute to regional peace and security.

Kabul/Brussels, 30 January 2024

I.Introduction

The Taliban takeover in 2021 transformed Afghanistan but not the circumstances arising from its geographical location.1 Like many past governments in Kabul, the Taliban regime has advanced a foreign policy of neutrality and promoted Afghanistan as a profit-making link between nearby states. The Taliban authorities have pursued ambitious plans for cross-border railways, pipelines and electricity corridors.2 But the country’s neighbours remain wary, in keeping with a long tradition of treating it as, at best, a buffer protecting them from other regional powers and, at worst, a haven for militants and smugglers. Since the Taliban have a bad reputation of their own, they face major challenges in securing a role for Afghanistan in the region’s security architecture and economic future. 

This report examines the Taliban’s regional diplomacy to date. “The region” is defined as the Taliban themselves understand the term, looking out from Kabul at adjacent states and others farther away, with Afghanistan as the middle ground between what the Taliban call the “Eurasian continents”.3 Neighbouring countries, such as Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, regard engagement with the Taliban authorities as a necessary evil if they are to address core concerns. Regional powers like China, India and Russia have also explored engagement as a means of addressing concerns and of supporting their allies in containing any spillover from Afghanistan. More distant countries such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and the United Arab Emirates have also entered the diplomatic fray, partly to challenge the Taliban’s Islamic exceptionalism but also spurred by the need to balance their own regional rivalries. Appendix B provides an outline of each of these countries’ approach to Afghanistan following the Taliban’s takeover.

To illuminate its discussion of specific issues, the report explores the Taliban’s way of interacting with the world – with limited transactions rather than strategic pacts – and assesses what regional actors want from their dealings with Kabul. Beyond top-level diplomacy, it also delves into practical aspects of cooperation in security and economic affairs, including how countries in Afghanistan’s neighbourhood work together – or compete – in managing transboundary waterways. Its conclusions might apply to other foreign actors searching for strategies of political engagement with the Taliban. 

Research included dozens of conversations conducted over the course of 2022 and 2023 with government officials and various experts from Afghanistan and regional countries, in Kabul, Dushanbe, Istanbul, Ankara, Doha, Dubai, Brussels, London, New York and Washington, as well as others contacted remotely. Fieldwork was also carried out at border crossings in Afghanistan at Takhar, Kunduz, Herat, Kandahar, Khost and Nangarhar. 

II.Regional Diplomacy after the Taliban Takeover

The collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Kabul sent tremors through regional capitals, where officials have spent the last two years grappling with how to deal with the new Taliban regime. Different governments have engaged with Kabul in different ways, but common themes have emerged in regional policy toward the Taliban, and, conversely, in the Taliban’s approaches to the region. This section sums up Kabul’s relations with the neighbourhood, while the individual approaches of regional actors are profiled in Appendix B. 

A.The Quest for Recognition

In their first months after seizing power, Taliban officials were hopeful that their government would obtain international recognition.4 But not a single foreign government or multilateral organisation would formally acknowledge the Taliban-controlled government without concessions on women’s rights and other matters.5 The uniform refusal angered the Taliban’s more conservative elements, splitting the movement into two camps: one, centred in the Kabul-based interim government, sought a thaw with the West; the other, gathered around the Kandahar headquarters of the hardline emir, Hibatullah Akhundzada, rejected this notion.6 The emir’s camp, convinced that the U.S. would block any attempt at rapprochement, argued that the Taliban should bolster their movement’s cohesion and their government’s prospects for survival by reintroducing strict policies their earlier regime had decreed in the 1990s.7 Rolling out a series of draconian edicts on women’s rights in 2022 and 2023, the emir showed his defiance of the West and reassured his followers that the Taliban regime would not compromise.8

The Taliban’s intransigence, particularly on gender policies, has fuelled a cycle of worsening relations with the West.

The Taliban’s intransigence, particularly on gender policies, has fuelled a cycle of worsening relations with the West. Additional restrictions by the Taliban on the rights of Afghan women and girls prompted repeated condemnations by Western countries – to which the Taliban responded with further measures, in part because of constituents who praised them for rebuffing the demands of countries that had invaded Afghanistan. The space for diplomacy shrank ever further. While the Taliban maintained that they would not change domestic policy for the sake of outside acquiescence to their rule, public opinion in the West urged Western governments not to “normalise” a regime that may be guilty of “gender apartheid”.9 Pressure mounted on Western states to keep up the sanctions, asset freezes and other forms of isolation they had imposed on the Taliban. 

B.The Taliban Turn to the Region

The standoff between the Taliban and Western countries placed the region in a bind. Several of Afghanistan’s neighbours had opposed the group when it ruled in the 1990s, with only three of them – Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – recognising its government at the time. Others, including India, Iran, Russia and Tajikistan, had backed armed opposition to the first Taliban regime.10 At the start of the Taliban’s second administration in 2021, many of the same anti-Taliban groups in northern Afghanistan reached out to regional actors in hopes of renewed support. As a result, the first question for neighbouring countries after the Taliban’s return to power was deciding whether to fight the regime or talk to it.11 

Although regional actors also condemned the Taliban’s discrimination against women, they decided to engage with Kabul over the following months. The extent of cooperation varied, and each actor was motivated by different considerations, but a common denominator was a tilt toward working with the Taliban rather than isolating them. Although the U.S.-led coalition had failed to bring peace to Afghanistan, it was widely perceived as having policed the country and its departure imparted a feeling of urgency in the region, especially regarding security threats.12 As one diplomat put it, “the West is leaving the problem to regional countries”.13 Since March 2022, when Taliban restrictions on women and girls got more severe, a pattern has emerged of increasing interaction between Kabul and regional capitals, even as engagement with the West has dwindled.14 

The region’s overtures toward the Taliban appear in part to reflect that some countries … have their own reasons to seek alternatives to a U.S.-led unipolar order.

As the Taliban gave up hope of winning over the West and shifted toward the region, they also adapted their rhetoric. The emir insisted that he would seek positive relations with the region and beyond.15 Yet such statements were often paired with assertions that, as the Taliban do not interfere in foreign countries’ internal affairs, others should not meddle in Afghanistan’s.16 Taliban officials also became more vocal about their dissatisfaction with Washington, a sentiment sometimes echoed by regional actors.17 The region’s overtures toward the Taliban appear in part to reflect that some countries (for instance, China, Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia) have their own reasons to seek alternatives to a U.S.-led unipolar order that dictates which regimes are acceptable and which are not. 

Still, the neighbourhood’s cautious embrace of Kabul appears to be based not primarily on anti-U.S. sentiment but on an assessment of what will yield the tangible results they seek. Regional governments concluded that talking with the de facto authorities was the best way to nudge them toward responsiveness to their agendas. Security and economic concerns came before those related to women’s and girls’ rights. “The world will not stop and wait for Western sentiment to shift in favour of the Taliban”, a regional diplomat said. “We are here on the front lines”.18 

Having themselves maintained or re-established a diplomatic presence in Kabul, many regional countries have welcomed the appointment of Taliban envoys in their capitals, claiming that such representation does not amount to implicit or explicit recognition but is a “technical” prerequisite for managing co-existence with Afghanistan.19 These working-level relationships are likely to proliferate.20 It is even possible that, in the future, some countries could break with the Western-led consensus and officially recognise the regime.21

C.A Limited Partnership

The Taliban’s military dominance has convinced regional capitals that a more stable Afghanistan, albeit one ruled by a somewhat unpredictable regime, is a lesser evil than a return to civil war. The regional consensus is fragile, however, underpinned by the premise that Taliban rule will not devolve into the kind of factional chaos that plagued the country in the past. Should regional countries feel that the government cannot impose order inside Afghanistan’s borders and contain transnational threats, this consensus may well unravel. If that happens, countries in the region could be tempted to pick sides in another intra-Afghan conflict, repeating the destructive pattern of past decades.22 

The region’s diplomatic posture should also not be mistaken for full recognition; even calling it “normalisation” may be going too far. The level of engagement is, for now, far from the ambitious goal sometimes discussed among Afghanistan’s neighbours: a strategic pact, or “grand bargain”, between themselves and the Taliban. Most versions of the idea, which thus far is informal, raise the prospect of recognition in exchange for the Taliban forming an “inclusive” government. Others see the Taliban as exclusionary, and not just in gender terms, pointing to the fact that their administration is made up almost entirely of their own members and not many non-Pashtuns. Nearby countries are pressing for a cabinet in Kabul encompassing other political and ethnic factions with which they enjoy historical ties.23 The Taliban bluntly reject such proposals, their vision for maintaining control of the country being based on keeping a monopoly on the state machinery, with loyalists in all key positions. They have shot down the region’s ideas about including politicians from the previous republican order. They promise to “broaden” their government in the future without providing details.24

Some regional actors are growing disillusioned with the Taliban and appear to have halted attempts at reaching an overarching agreement with them.

Some regional actors are growing disillusioned with the Taliban and appear to have halted attempts at reaching an overarching agreement with them, instead limiting themselves to piecemeal negotiations over narrow areas of mutual concern. There has been little or no coordination among regional actors on these micro-engagements, but they are learning from one another about how best to deal with the de facto authorities. For example, diplomats have noticed that the Taliban’s officials based in Kabul use conciliatory language but seem hamstrung in terms of what they can offer, as they are often undermined by their superiors in Kandahar. At the same time, attempts at bypassing Kabul to negotiate directly with Kandahar have borne no fruit, partly because the emir spurns most diplomatic overtures.25 Some neighbouring countries are still investing time and energy in opening channels with the emir, but their experience so far has been that Kandahar prefers to stay aloof.26

What remains, then, is a small cadre of regional diplomats posted to embassies in Kabul – often with modest staffing and tiny budgets – trying to deal with Taliban officials who are often constrained by their own organisational and political wrangling. These interactions are also limited by security considerations: Russian and Chinese diplomats, for example, have scaled back their movements in the Afghan capital due to jihadist attacks on their compatriots.27 These difficulties aside, most regional diplomats have continued dogged efforts at engagement. On topic after topic – security concerns, including Islamist militancy, border clashes, weapons proliferation and counter-narcotics; and economic issues, such as trade, foreign investment, water management and climate change – they continue to reach out to the Taliban.

III.Regional Security

Given Afghanistan’s turbulent history, it is not surprising that regional governments see the country mostly as a security problem to be contained. Before the Taliban takeover, the task of containment fell to U.S. forces, whose counter-terrorism operations, for all their flaws, gave the country’s neighbours a degree of comfort.28 Al­though the UN reported numbers of transnational jihadist fighters in Afghanistan during those years dwindling to a few dozen, the Taliban’s return to power left regional actors feeling exposed.29 They worried about the potential for a return to civil war and expressed fears about militant groups, questioning the Taliban’s willingness or ability to rein them in. They also harboured concerns that the rise of an Islamist government in their neighbourhood could galvanise Islamists within their own borders. 

A.Islamic State-Khorasan Province

The security threat that Afghanistan’s neighbours most frequently raise is that emanating from the local branch of the Islamic State, known as Islamic State-Khorasan Province (IS-KP).30 In some ways, the growing concerns about IS-KP are paradoxical, as in reality, overall levels of violence related to the group have fallen over the past two years. As the Taliban improved their counter-insurgency efforts, IS-KP has launched fewer attacks and killed fewer people.

Click to compare IS-KP incidents and fatalities data from 2018 to 2024. CRISIS GROUP

Still, regional actors are worried about IS-KP’s continued capacity, and particularly its new emphasis on attacking citizens of neighbouring countries, both inside Afghanistan and outside.31 The attacks on foreigners undermine the Taliban’s claims to be security guarantors, disrupt their fragile international relations and help IS-KP recruit. Such incidents, though rare, have attracted significant attention. In April 2022, IS-KP fired a barrage of Katyusha rockets at Termez, a city on Uzbekistan’s border with Afghanistan.32 The next month, it launched a similar attack in Tajikistan. Neither appeared to cause casualties or major damage.33 A more serious incident occurred that October, when IS-KP struck a Shia shrine in Iran, killing scores of worshippers.34 In addition, the group has targeted foreigners in Afghanistan several times, including bombing the Russian and Pakistani embassies in September and December 2022, as well as a hotel that same December many of whose guests were Chinese nationals.35 

As part of its efforts to boost recruitment, IS-KP has published propaganda in all major regional languages. It has tapped the grievances of non-Pashtun ethnic groups, not just those concentrated in Afghanistan’s north, but also those in neighbouring Central Asian states.36 IS-KP also maintains strong connections to Pakistan, where many of its founding members were born.37 The group’s leadership regularly calls on its supporters abroad to carry out attacks inside their home countries.38 This incitement is tied to a surge of violence in Pakistan, where incidents related to IS-KP became more frequent after 2021.39

Rather than fostering international security cooperation, concerns about [Islamic-State-Khosaran Province] have had the opposite effect in recent years.

Rather than fostering international security cooperation, concerns about IS-KP have had the opposite effect in recent years, as foreign governments blame each other. In particular, Russian and Iranian officials claimed, absurdly, that the U.S. supports IS-KP.40 Such allegations fuelled Kabul’s paranoia, with Taliban officials at times echoing these claims, while in other instances accusing regional intelligence agencies of backing the group.41 For example, some Taliban officials charge, perhaps equally risibly, that Pakistan provides a haven to IS-KP militants.42 These statements have added to rising tensions between Kabul and Islamabad, as the latter accuses its neighbour of harbouring the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), an insurgency that has mounted numerous attacks on the Pakistani army and police (see Section III.C). Taliban officials also frequently mention their suspicions that Tajikistan is a source of IS-KP recruits.43

The public discord may mask a degree of behind-the-scenes intelligence cooperation. While information is scant, Iran has hinted that it is working with the Taliban in counter-terrorism, while other countries, such as the U.S., hold regular bilateral talks with Kabul on security issues.44 Whatever the source of the Taliban’s intelligence, their strikes on IS-KP have become much more effective and precise. Since mid-2022, the Taliban have carried out a series of raids that killed prominent figures in IS-KP, such as its alleged deputy leader, former interim leader, intelligence chief and head of judiciary. Possibly due to this crackdown, the number of IS-KP attacks has declined.45 There are also indications that Taliban efforts to curb IS-KP recruitment, particularly on university campuses, might be enjoying success.46

Whether IS-KP could, in the future, become a more potent transnational threat remains an open question. So far, its operations beyond its original territory near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border have been limited. The Taliban reportedly eliminated the group’s cells that targeted Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in late 2022, and the group has not launched further cross-border attacks since then.47 On the other hand, IS-KP still attracts recruits from disparate parts of Central and South Asia and encourages attacks outside Afghanistan, arguably making it the most dangerous armed group in the region.48

B.Militants in Northern Afghanistan

Regional countries are also concerned about a plethora of other transnational jihadist groups operating from Afghanistan. Central Asian states understandably focus on militants in the country’s north, near their borders, who have longstanding ambitions to foment rebellion in their home countries.49 Many of these smaller groups consist of no more than a few dozen fighters, but however tiny, they remain a key priority for China, Russia and the Central Asian states because the militants in question often belong to Uyghur, Uzbek, Tajik and other ethnic groups with links to constituencies in their countries.50 It is partly for this reason that Afghanistan’s neighbours have pushed the Taliban to form a government that reflects the country’s ethnic diversity: they fear the lack of inclusion could stir unrest with these ethnic-based armed groups that might, in theory, spill across borders.51

Of course, most regional engagement with the Taliban on security issues does not involve pushing for an overhaul of government; day to day, diplomats are making requests for Taliban action against particular bands of gunmen. These entreaties sometimes get results: the acting defence minister personally answered a call from a neighbouring country to disband a militant group in a border province.52 The Taliban are unwilling to eliminate these groups, however, eliciting frustration and bewilderment from the region.53 For example, in this instance, the Taliban, instead of imprisoning the jihadists, reportedly split the 75 fighters into three contingents, relocating each to a separate location on the other side of the country. Allegedly, the Taliban integrated some of these militants into the security forces to keep a close eye on them and provide them with a source of income.54

The Taliban actively seek diplomatic relations with regional countries.

Such gambits are risky. The Taliban actively seek diplomatic relations with regional countries, while harbouring groups that want to overthrow the same governments. As a regional diplomat put it: “Afghanistan continues to remain a safe haven for terror groups; now, it is just not as blatant as in the 1990s”.55 The risks are even greater when all sides are not forthright about security concerns. The most notorious case of Taliban secrecy involved al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, whose death in a Kabul house controlled by the acting interior minister raised questions among neighbours about whether the Taliban could be trusted. After U.S. forces killed Zawahiri, the region grew more vigilant about the Taliban providing other militants with safe havens – even accusing them of giving foreign fighters Afghan residency and citizenship documents.56 Prompted by this newfound distrust, a number of regional actors issued warnings that likely exaggerated the number of foreign fighters in Afghanistan.57

Despite their neighbours’ misgivings, the Taliban seem determined to experiment with their own way of controlling militant groups: weakening them, relocating their fighters and curbing their independence. As a rule, Kabul seeks to integrate jihadists into civilian life rather than cracking down on them or extraditing them.58 At the same time, the mistrustful region is exploring ways to fortify its rugged borders with Afghanistan to avoid infiltration. Tajikistan, in particular, has been lobbying nearby states to create a “security belt” around the country, strengthening patrols along the frontier.59 China, which feels confident about having secured its own short border with Afghanistan, is also assisting Dushanbe to guard against militants crossing into China via Tajikistan.60

C.Militants in Eastern Afghanistan

While militants in northern Afghanistan are mostly a dormant threat to neighbouring countries, more serious transnational risks have emerged in the country’s east. New Delhi is concerned about the alleged continued presence in Afghanistan of Laskhar-e Tayyiba and Jaish-e Muhammad, two pan-Islamist groups that have conducted attacks on Indian soil for decades.61 

Islamabad, for its part, has reason to worry about the TTP, an umbrella group of tribal factions also known as the Pakistani Taliban, which has gained strength under the tenure of its current chief, Noor Wali Mehsud, intensifying its attacks within Pakistan.62 The TTP was already becoming more aggressive before 2021, but the Taliban’s takeover appears to have emboldened the group. Jailbreaks during the Taliban’s sweep to power set free many TTP prisoners, allowing fighters to leave Afghanistan and resume their war to topple the Pakistani state.63 Since then, the group has conducted a series of spectacular attacks in Pakistan, whose security forces struggle to seal the porous border.64 In response, Islamabad, which claims that the TTP operates from Afghan soil, has pushed hard for Kabul to crack down on the group – but with little success as the Taliban, at least publicly, deny the TTP’s very presence in Afghanistan.

Islamabad has tried several tactics: pausing diplomatic efforts to advocate for international engagement with the Taliban; accusing Kabul of violating the 2020 agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban, which included counter-terrorism provisions; temporarily closing border crossings; and seeking to complete fences and other barriers along a border that the Taliban, like earlier Afghan governments, do not recognise.65 Faced with the Taliban’s refusal of repeated requests for action against the TTP, Pakistan even conducted air and artillery strikes inside Afghanistan, which along with Pakistani Taliban commanders also allegedly killed dozens of civilians.66 More recently, Islamabad has resorted to drastic measures that fall short of military action. In October 2023, Islamabad started mass repatriation of Afghan refugees and asylum seekers, also introducing restrictions on transit goods bound for Afghanistan.67 None of these methods have delivered results, however, and the Taliban’s unwillingness to crack down on the TTP could further strain relations between the neighbours.

Indeed, as with the northern groups, the Taliban have returned to their standard playbook for reining in foreign militants. Even as they deny the TTP’s presence in Afghanistan, they have quietly forbidden the group from carrying out external operations, removed its fighters from border regions, housed TTP groups in “refugee” camps, separated fighters from their units and embedded them in Taliban units to break the chain of command.68 The TTP is, however, much larger than the northern militant groups, and the Taliban said their plan for curbing the group would involve relocating “thousands” of people.69 

The Taliban’s reluctance to clamp down on the TTP is partly motivated by reluctance to act against a longstanding ideological ally.70 They may also feel their clout with the TTP is limited, given that many of the group’s former members played a key role in founding IS-KP, and if pushed, might defect to their enemies. So far, it remains unclear to what extent the Taliban’s approach has moderated the TTP’s behaviour, if at all. While some experts believe that Taliban pressure has induced the TTP to agree to negotiations and stick to small-scale attacks on Pakistani troops, such claims are difficult to verify.71 Whatever the case, one thing is certain: the Taliban are far from satisfying Islamabad’s demands vis-à-vis the group. 

The [Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan] has also sought to counter the Taliban’s pressures by rallying supporters among the Pashtun tribes and clans in Afghan regions next to Pakistan.

The TTP has also sought to counter the Taliban’s pressures by rallying supporters among the Pashtun tribes and clans in Afghan regions next to Pakistan. While the group’s standing on the Pakistani side of the border has diminished in recent months, as evidenced by mass demonstrations against its revived insurgency, the group remains popular on the Afghan side, allowing it to continue to operate, while exploiting differences between Islamabad and Kabul.72 The TTP also appears to enjoy some local Taliban support.73 Grievances that lead Afghans to back the TTP include Afghan refugees’ allegations of mistreatment by Pakistani security forces; Kabul’s claims that Pakistan has annexed Afghan territory; and years of sporadic cross-border shelling by the Pakistani army. Though Islamabad denies many of these charges, anti-Pakistan sentiment, sometimes fuelled by Pashtun nationalism, is widespread in the borderlands.74

For now, the TTP’s presence in Afghanistan poses the single deadliest threat emanating from the country. Islamabad has reacted by stepping up mass deportation of Afghans and tightening trade restrictions, while also threatening to escalate cross-border strikes unless Kabul takes immediate action.75 Friction between the neighbours has broader ramifications, including for China, which has extensive economic interests in Pakistan.76 Any further spread of violence into Pakistan might also erode the fragile consensus among other regional states that, unlike in previous decades of civil war, they will not pick sides among Afghan factions. After all, much of the region’s political calculus in favour of working with the Taliban rests on the assumption that the former insurgents can maintain stability. As a top diplomat put it: “Should transnational [militancy] thrive, it would make the Taliban unacceptable to the region”.77

D.Fears of “Contagion”

Besides fearing that militancy may spill across Afghan borders, the region also worries that the Islamists’ success in overthrowing the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan might inspire their own restive Islamists, heating up simmering insurgencies in places such as the Indian-administered part of Jammu and Kashmir and Central Asia’s Fergana Valley.

These “contagion” scenarios arise in part from recent history in other parts of the world, such as Libya, where the 2011 uprising threw open stockpiles of weapons that made their way into nearby countries.78 In 2021, Afghanistan looked like a similar proliferation risk because the U.S. and its allies left behind military equipment worth billions of dollars when they departed.79 In the confusion of the Taliban’s takeover, fleeing Afghan government forces took numerous armaments into neighbouring countries and smugglers brought other materiel into Pakistan.80 At the same time, weapons fell into private hands inside Afghanistan as government stores were looted.81 The Taliban tried to address this problem by going door to door, collecting guns for safekeeping in government depots, and they continue to raid hidden arms caches across the country.82 These actions have slightly eased regional countries’ concerns, even if not all Taliban local commanders followed rules for securing the weapons.83

Another export from Afghanistan would seem to be harder to control: revolutionary ideas.

Another export from Afghanistan would seem to be harder to control: revolutionary ideas. Diplomats from countries across the region express anxiety that the Taliban’s triumph over a superpower will galvanise Islamists opposing their own governments. To some degree, the Taliban has allayed these concerns as well by expressing little sympathy for Muslim rebellions in nearby countries. With rare exceptions, the new authorities in Kabul have refrained from public comment on militant groups in China, India and Central Asian states. Still, they are putting out propaganda in several of the languages spoken in the region, and some of the policies they advertise – for example, on battling corruption and respecting religious values – are troubling to nearby governments that view such messages as implicit criticism of their own rule.84

So far, at least, the fears of contagion seem exaggerated. Except for Pakistan, places in the region previously beset with Islamist militancy have witnessed lower levels of violence since the Taliban takeover. From the start of 2018 to August 2021, Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir saw 44 fatalities in violent incidents on average per month; since the Taliban returned to power, that number has fallen to 21 per month.85 Central Asia’s Fergana Valley, where Uzbekistan has regularly put down Islamist uprisings in previous decades, has remained almost entirely peaceful since 2021.86 These developments obviously have local explanations, and probably little, if any, connection to Afghanistan, but the trend does indicate that the initial worries about guns, fighters and jihadist ideology spilling across borders in the aftermath of Taliban victory were overblown. 

IV.Economic Dynamics

A.New Impetus for Regional Trade and Connectivity

From the days of the Silk Routes, prosperity in Afghanistan’s neighbourhood has depended on trade – with much of it passing through the country. In the last few decades, warfare turned Afghanistan into a roadblock to regional development. Since 2021, however, stability under the Taliban has revived regional actors’ dreams of trade corridors spanning South and Central Asia, giving new life to old plans for easing the flow of freight, gas and electricity.87 The Taliban and officials of neighbouring governments express interest in such economic cooperation, all for their own reasons. The region is trying to insulate itself from Western sanctions on Russia, Iran and Afghanistan, as well as the prospect of further economic restrictions on China. Central Asian countries, in particular, worry they will end up surrounded by pariah states and cut off from global markets.88 For their part, Moscow and Beijing are keen to foster the regional economy as a buffer against pressure from the West.89 The region wants business with Kabul mostly for the sake of diversifying trade routes – while also, perhaps, tempering the Taliban’s erratic tendencies with incentives for good behaviour. 

Kabul’s motivations are stronger. After the Taliban took over, the West froze central bank assets and cut aid that previously had covered 75 per cent of state spending, while offering only partial sanctions relief.90 Afghan GDP contracted by 21 per cent in 2021.91The Taliban scrambled to halt the economic freefall, focusing on self-sufficiency and regional connectivity, not just as a way of paying the bills, but also as a defensive measure: by holding out the prospect that stable rule in Afghanistan would pay dividends in the form of economic opportunities, they made the former a matter of self-interest for regional actors.92 Customs duties emerged as the biggest source of revenue for the new regime, as it tackled widespread corruption and removed predatory checkpoints that had proliferated during the war, hampering trade.93 The Taliban also invited foreign companies back to the country, but the few investors willing to take the risk were mostly from the region: for instance, the largest mining concessions to date have been awarded to local firms backed by Chinese, Iranian or Turkish partners.94

Millions of Afghans suffer extreme poverty at a time when Western donors, put off by the Taliban’s discrimination against women, are turning away.

A degree of economic stability returned, as Kabul’s revenues picked up, exports grew, inflation fell, the currency recovered and the proportion of food-insecure households declined from 70 per cent in late 2021 to 59 per cent in early 2023.95 Still, millions of Afghans suffer extreme poverty at a time when Western donors, put off by the Taliban’s discrimination against women, are turning away, resulting in billions of dollars cut from humanitarian budgets for 2023.96 The Taliban had found ways to pay hundreds of thousands of civil servants, but their burden grew in 2023 as humanitarian agencies stopped covering salaries for some medical staff.97 Pressures on the central bank, still deprived of its assets, are expected to mount in 2024 as aid dwindles, clouding the macro-economic picture.98

The Taliban, who know they need economic growth to stay afloat, have pushed for Afghanistan’s inclusion in regional development plans.99 Their main priority appears to be constructing a trans-Afghan railway that would link Uzbekistan with Pakistan, which could shorten delivery times by up to five days, thereby reducing transport costs.100 It would also connect to the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan rail system, which started running trains into the Afghan border town of Hairatan in 2022.101 But no country involved appears to want to spend the billions of dollars required to build the railway, and international development agencies backed away after the Taliban takeover.102 Doubts persist about Kabul’s technical capacity to undertake such an ambitious project.103 The deterioration of Afghanistan-Pakistan relations over the TTP has dulled appetites as well. Similar concerns have delayed longstanding efforts to link the region’s electricity and gas supply networks.104

B.Modest Investments, So Far

With mega-projects on hold, Kabul appears to be exploring more modest efforts. The Ministry of Water and Energy has, for example, proposed small-scale projects for energy generation, such as wind farms.105 Before investing in railways, the Taliban are also spending their meagre development budget on improving the roads connecting Afghanistan with its neighbours, upgrading infrastructure at border crossings and regularising trade practices.106 

Kabul has also been promoting regional investments in extractive industries, but most of these projects remain at exploratory stages. For example, in September 2022, an Iranian company signed an agreement for the extraction of lead and zinc in Ghor province.107 In January 2023, Kabul inked a deal for development of the Amu Darya oilfields with a Chinese company, Xinjiang Central Asia Petroleum and Gas, which later unveiled further investments in Afghanistan.108 Despite the grand announcements, work has been slow getting started. The exceptions have been low-key projects such as Perozi Park, an industrial complex near Kabul, with construction co-sponsored by Beijing. At the time of the ribbon-cutting ceremony, the area was still a wasteland.109

Much of the investment by regional actors is extremely cautious at best, and performative at worst.

For now, much of the investment by regional actors is extremely cautious at best, and performative at worst, geared toward boosting relations with Kabul without risking much capital.110 Investors may simply lack confidence in the Taliban’s ability to manage the economy, but some have also had bad experiences in Afghanistan. Missteps by Chinese entrepreneurs best illustrate the volatility of economic adventurism in the country since 2021. The departure of U.S. forces sparked a “gold rush” among Chinese speculators, many of whom arrived from prospecting in Africa to seek precious metals, gems, rare earths and other mineral wealth.111 Some of these entrepreneurs told Crisis Group that the early efforts faltered, with the would-be investors going home “after having discovered that this frontier market might be more ‘frontier’ than expected”.112 Some businessmen tried to bribe their way past Taliban regulations and, allegedly, set up alcohol distilleries and prostitution rings, getting themselves arrested.113

There appears to have been a misunderstanding between the Taliban and this wave of entrepreneurs, with the former hoping for investments by Chinese state-backed firms and instead getting small-time chancers. So far, bigger Chinese companies seem content to purchase exploration rights to Afghan mines, even if they are not developing them yet, perhaps as a means of seeking control of what is found underground and influencing commodity prices.114

C.Tensions over Water

Water management has emerged as a point of contention between the new government in Kabul and neighbouring states. Tensions over water had simmered for decades, but grew in recent years, to the point of reportedly triggering border clashes with Iran. The most important reason is the impact of climate change: with 80 per cent of its water coming from snowmelt and glaciers, Afghanistan is among the countries most vulnerable to global warming.115 About 60 per cent of the country’s households now suffer water shortages, while hotter winters and precipitous spring seasons are respectively causing droughts and floods.116 Making things worse is the fact that Afghanistan lags behind its neighbours in developing water infrastructure. Meanwhile, other countries have built agricultural sectors that depend on an unhindered supply of water from Afghanistan. 

These factors drive the Taliban to seek ways of catching up, pursuing ambitious water projects that are raising hackles in the region. Afghanistan is mostly upstream from countries next door, which means they often view Afghan dams and irrigation systems as threats.117 A complication is that among Afghanistan’s many transboundary rivers, only one is subject to a water-sharing agreement. The rest are governed only by international customary law, which calls for “equitable and reasonable” use of water, without clarifying what that phrase entails.118The fact that previous Afghan governments drummed up nationalist fervour for water projects, giving the issue populist appeal, has not helped the Taliban in managing relations with their neighbours. The Taliban have also seized upon water infrastructure not only for its practical value but also as a propaganda piece meant to portray their efficient governance, filling their media outlets with footage shot from drones showing construction in several provinces.119 Among these, works in two places – a canal in the north and a dam in the south – are most contentious.

1.Concerns from Central Asia

In the north, the Taliban inaugurated the Qush Tepa Canal in March 2022, making swift progress on what ranks as their largest infrastructure project.120 When finished, the canal will divert water from the Amu Darya, a river that separates Afghanistan from its Central Asian neighbours. The canal will traverse 285km of northern Afghanistan before reconnecting with the river, irrigating up to 550,000 acres of farmland.121 Kabul funded the project from the national budget, at times awarding mining rights to contractors in lieu of payment to spare the cash-strapped treasury.122 More than 100 companies are reportedly involved, with over 7,000 workers.123 By October 2023, phase one of the project was complete and the second under way.124 

The imminent prospect of the canal diverting part of the Amu Darya revived old fears in the region: Crisis Group has been reporting about the potential for water conflicts between Afghanistan and Central Asian states for over twenty years.125 Afghanistan appears to be joining Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan as upstream countries that, struggling economically, are trying to keep more water even as neighbours downstream – namely, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan – need more for their growing agricultural sectors.126 The five Central Asian countries already squabble over water, despite a 1992 agreement among them on allocating it, to which Afghanistan is not a party.127 Still, Kabul is bound by international law, including the obligations to notify affected states of waterworks and to abide by a no-harm principle.128 Central Asian states say they were never informed, let alone consulted, about the Taliban’s plans for the canal.129

Downstream countries want further discussion of the canal to find ways of mitigating its impact on transboundary water flows. In an attempt to reduce wastage caused by the Taliban’s rudimentary construction methods, Uzbekistan has even offered technical support for the project.130 But the Taliban are wary, arguing that the project is in line with provisions in international customary law about “reasonable and equitable” use of water and that previous Afghan governments, having been planning the canal since the 1970s, already satisfied the notification requirement. The Taliban sometimes view foreigners’ efforts to talk about the canal or offer assistance as delaying tactics.131 Given how important the project has become to the Taliban’s self-portrayal domestically, and the money involved, Kabul will not want to adjust the schedule – even as delegations keep visiting from nearby countries to persuade them otherwise.132 

2.Conflict with Iran

On the country’s southern borders, a similar conflict over water has often sparked public accusations by both sides. Iran and Afghanistan are feuding over the Helmand river, Afghanistan’s longest waterway, which provides more than 40 per cent of the country’s surface water and is critical for irrigation in its arid southern provinces. The main point of contention is Kamal Khan dam, inaugurated in 2021 by the previous Afghan government. Downstream, the river is vital to the wellbeing of the volatile Iranian province of Sistan-Baluchestan, where wetlands are drying up and scientists predict that planned Afghan dams could threaten 70 per cent of wheat production.133 Disagreements over rights to the river may have contributed to deadly clashes between Taliban and Iranian forces in May 2023, though both sides deny it played a role.134

The longstanding tensions with Iran could ideally be mitigated by an existing deal on water sharing.

Unlike the dispute with Afghanistan’s northern neighbours, the longstanding tensions with Iran could ideally be mitigated by an existing deal on water sharing. A 1973 bilateral agreement stipulated that Tehran would be entitled to fixed amounts of water, which were to be determined after construction of a hydrometric station and three testing stations in Afghanistan.135 With the political upheavals both countries lived through in the following years, the deal was never ratified or put into practice.136 But it remains a point of reference, with both sides invoking its provisions during their recent spats over water sharing.137 

Mirroring their behaviour in other water disputes, the Taliban have signalled that regional concerns will not slow down their infrastructure plans near the Iranian frontier. Soon after the border clash, and even as bilateral talks continued about the Helmand river in May 2023, senior Taliban officials announced fresh construction on the Bakhshabad dam, located on the Farah Rud, another river flowing into Iran. The fact that this dam was inaugurated in the middle of the diplomatic tussle over the Helmand suggested that Kabul will keep building water infrastructure, even when neighbours vehemently disagree.138

The Taliban’s high tolerance for conflict over water arises in part from their hopes that hydroelectric projects could make Afghanistan, which currently imports 80 per cent of its electricity, self-sufficient in energy. More urgently, Kabul also faces rising demand for water from farmers, especially in the Taliban heartlands of southern Afghanistan. The need for irrigation in those regions rose sharply in 2023, after the Taliban banned opium cultivation and farmers switched to growing cotton and other more water-intensive crops.139

V.Better Regional Dialogue

The lack of trust between the Taliban and their neighbours is evident, and tensions on some of Afghanistan’s borders appear to be growing. This wariness prompts countries in the region to cherry-pick issues they want to engage on, focusing on matters of highest priority in their respective capitals. While such a pragmatic approach is logical from a diplomatic standpoint, it misses opportunities for solving interrelated sets of problems. For their part, the Taliban need to set aside concerns about falling under foreign influence if they wish to achieve better collaboration with their neighbours. Broad-based security cooperation could address regional states’ concerns about militant groups inside Afghanistan, while also easing Taliban worries about insurgents getting help from outside the country. Similarly, better integration of regional economic development plans could lead to forging shared economic interests, building incentives for cooperation instead of destructive rivalries. 

A.Security Cooperation

The first step toward better regional security cooperation will be cooling down the rhetoric on all sides and getting regional actors on the same page about security issues, agreeing on a set of facts even if they have different priorities. Taliban forces have got better at targeting IS-KP leaders, but information sharing remains limited, since the Taliban have not built confidence with regional partners.140 Part of the problem is that the Taliban lack credibility due to their blanket denials regarding certain threats – particularly the TTP – while regional countries offer inflated estimates of the number of militants allegedly based in Afghanistan. There is also a schism between how the Taliban prefer to deal with many of the Islamist militant groups inside Afghanistan and how the region would like Kabul to deal with them. 

It does not help that UN monitoring teams, which used to visit Afghanistan to provide independent assessments of terrorist threats, have not returned since 2021. The UN accepts information only from member states, meaning that the Taliban cannot assist the monitoring because they lack a UN seat. Member states should continue to encourage the UN to send the monitors back to the country or at least to seek feedback from Afghan forces on militant groups, which would represent a step toward refocusing global counter-terrorism institutions on transnational threats rather than groups with local agendas like the Taliban.141

Regional forums such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization could also play a greater role in addressing the plethora of emerging challenges at the regional level.142 In fact, there are conversations within the organisation about reactivating the Afghanistan contact group, first established in 2005, with a view to fostering a regional platform for engagement with Kabul.143 Regardless of the format, regional players need to discuss the legitimate security needs of all actors around the table. Simply comparing notes might lead to tangible cooperation: some regional countries have expressed a desire for greater information sharing – and, possibly, even training and equipping Taliban forces – even if that remains controversial with their own populations.144 

If regional security cooperation is to become a viable option, it must be based on reciprocal transparency.

If regional security cooperation is to become a viable option, it must be based on reciprocal transparency. While Afghanistan’s neighbours complain about the Taliban’s lack of decisive action against groups that threaten their security, they themselves have only provided limited information in response to Kabul’s requests for lists of the weapons and ammunition they received from fleeing members of the previous government’s armed forces.145 The Taliban also express frustration at getting no answers from neighbours (especially Pakistan) to their queries about alleged sightings of drones in Afghanistan’s airspace.146 Finally, the de facto authorities in Kabul want to know how anti-Taliban fighters are slipping into the country, but they receive little response from their neighbours.147 

Such cooperation might be easiest, at first, along Afghanistan’s rugged borders, where neighbouring countries seek to staunch the flows of migrants, drugs, guns and jihadists coming from the country. Skirmishes on the frontiers fell off in the second year of Taliban rule, but the persistence of such incidents point to the lack of cooperation between Taliban patrols and their counterparts.148Central Asian countries have placed restrictions on some border crossings, allowing only representatives of local businesses to pass, which improves security but hurts trade. Another major problem is that the Taliban do not recognise the Durand Line as an official border, and have, at times, sent troops to impede Pakistan’s fencing of the boundary.149 Given that all past Afghan governments have refused to recognise this border, inherited from colonial times, it is hard to imagine the Taliban doing so, but that should not prevent them from cooperating on practical steps that improve security for both Afghanistan and the neighbourhood.

At best, the Taliban would accept help with the professionalisation of Afghan border guards, andall neighbours would agree on installing new technology at border crossings. Given the need to build trust, a starting point might be for Kabul to satisfy the neighbours’ requests to keep Taliban fighters away from their borders unless they belong to the uniformed Afghan border units. If the region wants the Taliban to improve the professionalism and efficiency of their security forces, however, they could support it in doing so. While they may understandably feel uncomfortable handing over military equipment abandoned on their territory by the armed forces of the previous Afghan government, countries across the region could also benefit from supplying equipment for border screening and customs integration. Neighbouring states welcomed Tajikistan’s proposal for establishing a “security belt” around Afghanistan in early 2023.150 This “belt”, which aims to provide a buffer against militants operating from inside Afghanistan, could also be extended to address the Taliban’s concerns about infiltration across the border in the other direction.151 

Of all the risks that threaten to spill over into the region, the TTP is the deadliest. Kabul should constrain the TTP by curtailing the group’s capacity to recruit, train and raise funds on Afghan soil. Stronger action by the Taliban, including jailing individuals assisting the TTP in attacks on Pakistani targets or putting TTP leaders in Afghanistan under house arrest, would allow Pakistani forces to counter cross-border threats more effectively. But Islamabad will also have to address the root causes of the militancy in Pakistan itself if counter-insurgency operations are to stand a chance of success.152

B.Economic Integration

The Taliban takeover has resulted in widespread poverty, from which the only escape is economic development that surpasses the high rate of population growth and overcomes hurdles such as insecurity and climate change.153 Many neighbouring countries also need strong growth to keep up with swelling labour forces.154 Against this backdrop, the case for better regional economic connectivity is overwhelming, especially in the energy sector, where Central Asian countries are in search of new markets while South Asia needs new supplies of oil, gas and electricity.155 Government planners across the region have been drafting schemes for such integration for decades, but now that Afghanistan is finally peaceful, allowing for their rollout, the Taliban have made themselves into global pariahs. 

Investments in the frontier market are no doubt risky, as the bruising experience of Chinese investors has shown, but the region has strategic reasons to encourage ventures in Afghanistan as part of long-term planning for economic integration, which in turn would help with regional stability. The Taliban are frustrated that regional partners are slow to move ahead with projects such as railways, mines, electricity lines and trade corridors, and while some of the blame falls on the Taliban (see below), the region as a whole would clearly benefit from more alacrity with bringing Afghanistan into its development plans. China and Pakistan have already expressed support for including Afghanistan in the Belt and Road Initiative.156 More such efforts are needed, however, to fully integrate Afghanistan into the regional economic infrastructure and insulate it from potential breakdowns in bilateral relations.157 

That said, development plans require a reliable partner in Kabul, and the Taliban have not yet shown they are fully open for business. They have succeeded in tamping down violence across the country and have, for now, quelled the minor insurgencies against them. Corruption levels plunged after they took over and have remained much lower than under the previous government.158 While it may not be evident to much of the world, their government has shown a degree of administrative authority that is on par with that of most regional countries, with Taliban decisions enforced – for good and ill – in every Afghan province.

The Taliban’s internal dynamics … continue to give external actors cause for concern.

Yet the Taliban’s internal dynamics, with centres of power in Kabul and Kandahar vying for influence, as well as their opaque and, often, erratic policies, continue to give external actors cause for concern. Their government’s discrimination against women has tarred the Taliban’s name around the world, and some firms will steer away from the ethical and reputational risks of business with the regime. State revenues seem healthy, but no outsider can feel certain that the fiscal situation is solid because the government does not publish detailed budgets. The nature of opportunities also remains a matter of speculation: Afghanistan’s natural resources, for example, have never been properly mapped.159 Nor do the Taliban have the regulatory frameworks needed for large investments. They need to give investors greater predictability, including by ensuring clarity over applicable laws and establishing mechanisms for arbitration of commercial disputes.160

For the sake of regional stability, economic integration must make progress most urgently on water issues. Iran, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan cannot afford to let their rivers dry up, but landlocked Afghanistan also cannot grow if water disputes interrupt trade, including its access to ports such as Iran’s Chabahar. The basis of an agreement between Iran and Afghanistan over the Helmand river may exist in the 1973 treaty: as discussed earlier, the two sides never established the hydrometric station and testing stations imagined as part of the agreement to determine river levels. Provided the two countries can pull together the required budget, building this infrastructure could reduce tensions between them and would offer agricultural returns on the investment for both. Similar collaboration may be feasible on the northern border where, as mentioned, Uzbekistan is offering technical support for the Qush Tepa canal. The Taliban have resisted what they see as foreign meddling in their flagship project but would have a lot to gain by allowing international expertise into the process. Including such support as part of a broader package of economic ties could bring them to compromise.161

Beyond the cases of Iran and Uzbekistan, some kind of wider agreement, or at least a tacit understanding, will be necessary to move ahead on regional cooperation. Afghanistan is not party to water-sharing treaties with Central Asian states, and a concern for many of them might be whether they can conclude binding international agreements with the de facto authorities without bestowing recognition on their government. Yet many seem to believe that important issues could be addressed without first having decided the issue of recognition. The Taliban and their neighbours thus have an opportunity to reach broad agreements, perhaps in multilateral discussions, on watershed management and climate adaptation. In that regard, the Taliban should be allowed to join the Conference of the Parties climate summits, or similar international events, to discuss not only what to build but also how to finance it. Afghanistan is one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change, but its access to climate financing – the Global Environment Facility, Green Climate Fund and Adaptation Fund – has been suspended since the Taliban takeover.162 

Whatever gets achieved in international forums, be it on climate funding or other issues, it will almost certainly be less than the Taliban expect. Hundreds of billions of dollars flooded Afghanistan when Western donors considered it the main front in the war on terrorism, leading to outlandish ideas among Afghans about how much foreigners are willing to spend in their country. Recent efforts at economic projects have reportedly broken down because Kabul’s new bosses had unreasonable expectations. A regional diplomat sardonically accused the Taliban of employing a strategy that he called “pul bakhshish”, or “money gifts”, meaning that Kabul seeks more and more concessions as it negotiates an agreement, eventually making the deal a burden on the other party. Too often, Kabul expects support that matches the grants given the U.S.-backed government when it was battling the Taliban. In other words, besides the technical hurdles in attracting foreign investments – mapping resources and establishing legal frameworks – the Taliban also require more exposure to the workings of global markets.163

C.Western Support or Acquiescence

Diplomats from the region are trying to address security and economic issues through cautious engagement with the Taliban, but an official at a tiny embassy in Kabul admitted that the “to do” list feels daunting, as regional aspirations are often stymied by wider constraints. Only a handful of Western diplomats remain in the Afghan capital, and much of the day-to-day work with the Taliban falls to regional actors with budgets that do not match the size of the problems. Western sanctions have been eased by U.S. exemptions, but many sanctions remain in force, and, in any case, it is hard to get loans for infrastructure in an impoverished, pariah state.164 Many issues facing Afghanistan are development challenges, but Western donors have cut off development assistance and offer only fast-shrinking humanitarian aid. “If your engagement is mostly based on humanitarian assistance, and that assistance is declining, then your engagement strategy is really a disengagement strategy”, as a Western official in Kabul summed it up.165

Policymakers in the countries that battled the Taliban in previous years might see this state of affairs as painful but necessary to achieve a range of desired outcomes. There are more than a few Western leaders who would prefer to forget Afghanistan; for some of them, shunning the country allows them to avoid the topic of a lost war. Prominent voices are calling for pressure on the Taliban, and even active support for anti-Taliban forces, hoping for regime change, but the Taliban show no sign of collapse and subjecting Afghans to more years of war seems particularly cruel.166 Others may hope that undermining the regime will leave a mess on the doorsteps of China, Russia and Iran, which some might see as a geopolitical win.167 Still others, including Western diplomats who want to negotiate a better future for ordinary Afghans – women and girls, especially – may believe that their leverage with the Taliban is higher if they hold back security and economic support, using the promise thereof to get concessions in future negotiations over recognition.

How best to make progress on human rights requires careful consideration and will almost certainly entail trade-offs, but Afghanistan’s security and economic challenges cannot be ignored in the meantime – not least because the people who suffer the most from instability and deprivation are usually women and girls.168 Two years after the Taliban returned to power, it is worth giving weight to the concerns of regional countries that spend the most time talking to the new leadership in Kabul and have the most at stake. The countries surrounding Afghanistan are warning that the world cannot afford to have a failed state in the region and that isolation would only make the Taliban more intransigent. They need international backing for the modest steps required to live next door to such a challenging neighbour.

Western donors discussing development policy options for Afghanistan should … involve governments from the region in their deliberations.

Those needs will vary according to countries and projects, but in many ways Western countries remain gatekeepers, whether for attaining voting rights at the World Bank board or granting exemptions from sanctions and export controls to send equipment for Taliban border guards. Progress will be impossible in many cases without Western support or, at least, acquiescence. For example, regional airlines want to resume flights to Kabul but have not done so because the radar system at the airport is deemed unsafe. Regional diplomats complain that new equipment has been purchased but remains stuck in Europe due to sanctions.169 Another chokepoint is Western banking regulations: regional banks want to facilitate transactions with Afghanistan, but U.S. banks often forbid them from doing so.170 Western donors discussing development policy options for Afghanistan should also involve governments from the region in their deliberations – even if regional actors are not donors themselves, decisions made in such meetings can bear directly on their economic wellbeing as well.171

Some solutions will need to move ahead without any, or much, Western funding. It is, for example, hard to imagine international donors paying for large-scale water infrastructure on the Helmand river to assist the outcast regimes in Kabul and Tehran. But it would not cost international agencies much to offer technical assistance for better management of shared waters. For the moment, Afghanistan and Iran prefer to talk about their dispute bilaterally, but their 1973 agreement allows them to “use the good offices of a third party” and contains additional protocols for arbitration of disputes.172 It might be desirable to involve the World Bank or a similar institution that could offer expertise and, possibly, help with small-scale funding to map and monitor water flows.173 Similar technical assistance could aid Afghanistan in better regulating migrant labour, offering skills certification for Afghans seeking work in the Gulf and elsewhere. Solutions proposed for the Afghan banking sector might also require only a few experts and a green light from the U.S. government, rather than a major investment.174

The UN Security Council received a blueprint for moving ahead with such ideas in mid-November 2023, when Special Coordinator Feridun Sinirlioğlu concluded his much-anticipated review of international efforts in Afghanistan. Among other proposals, Sinirlioğlu called for greater international support for security cooperation with the Taliban-controlled government, including provision of assistance related to addressing “key security and regional stability issues” such as terrorism and border controls. On economic matters, Sinirlioğlu’s report called for expanding international cooperation in the fields of climate adaptation and transboundary natural resource management; completion of near-finished infrastructure projects abandoned in 2021; and measures to promote transit, trade, and connectivity between Afghans with the world. The Council should adopt these and other recommendations from the Sinirlioğlu report as part of its mandate to maintain international peace and security.175

More fundamentally, Western countries must decide whether the Taliban are a threat to be contained or unavoidable (if frustrating and, in their gender policies, odious) interlocutors on regional stability and development. Some Western intelligence officials want more cooperation with the Taliban on counter-terrorism, but others among their colleagues still talk privately about backing anti-Taliban rebels.176 This policy schizophrenia has persisted for too long. Regional states do not need the West’s blessing to engage with the Taliban on matters of national security or economic integration, but getting it would, in many instances, simplify their efforts in that regard.

VI.Conclusion

A Taliban regime that respects human rights might be welcomed into the club of nations, someday. But that will not happen in the foreseeable future, if ever, which means that Afghanistan is likely to be ruled by an unrecognised pariah regime for years to come. Its people should not be held hostage to this reality. For the sake of destitute millions both in Afghanistan and across the region, efforts must continue to make the world’s relationship with Kabul more functional, even if on a piecemeal basis. Afghanistan and its neighbours have urgent needs – among them, security and economic recovery – that cannot be placed on hold. 

With Western influence in Afghanistan fading, most of the responsibility for improving regional cooperation falls on the shoulders of the country’s neighbours and the Taliban themselves. They must clear a path for greater flows of goods across borders and work together to keep one another safe. All sides know from history the nightmarish consequences of failure. While Western countries are unlikely to be enthusiastic about such cooperation on account of the Taliban’s attacks on women’s rights, they should at the very least refrain from blocking practical steps to do such things as improve trade and counter militants, which will lessen poverty among the Afghan people – including women – in the long term. 

Kabul/Brussels, 30 January 2024

ICG report: The Taliban’s Neighbourhood: Regional Diplomacy with Afghanistan
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Sending Money Home: The impact of remittances on workers, families and villages

January 25, 2024

Sabawoon Samim

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For a country where jobs are scarce and, for many, livelihoods unreliable, sending men from the family abroad to work is an option tried by many families. Remittances, the money those workers send home, are hugely important for the national economy, individual families and communities. In this report, guest author Sabawoon Samim delves into the experiences of Afghan men working in the Gulf and how the money they send home is a lifeline for their families and communities. He also scrutinises the social and cultural impact of this migration – how greater earning power and exposure to life in the Gulf has affected their thinking and the power dynamics within families and inside local communities.

The most common destinations for Afghan migrants over recent decades have been Iran and Pakistan. This study focuses on those going to the Gulf countries: the differences between the destinations and the reasons for going are telling. Afghans first arrived in Iran and Pakistan en masse as refugees fleeing war rather than as workers seeking jobs, and they travelled together with their families and clans. Later, some did start travelling to Iran and Pakistan for work, but mostly illegally. These two neighbours are also themselves economically fragile and Afghan migrants have a tough time finding decent work.

Afghans travelling to the Gulf, on the other hand, have been almost solely motivated by the need to work and the vast majority are lone men who leave their families behind. The numbers are also far smaller – in the hundreds of thousands, rather than millions. The orientation of the migrants towards their home country persists; they not only visit as often as they can but also send far more money home than if they had wives and children living with them. Their migration is also mostly legal; Afghan workers need to have papers, including a work permit, to go to the Gulf, but then, once there, enjoy a legal status in the host countries. Compared to Iran and Pakistan, the difference in the money to be made in the oil-rich Gulf very much marks it out.

Those differences mean that the attractiveness of the Gulf as a destination is very particular, as is the effect of that migration on the local and household economies back home. This report offers a local-level view of both aspects of this migration. It also looks at its effect on family dynamics as young men gain earning power and a greater say in economic and cultural matters. It focuses on migration from rural communities in Afghanistan’s south and southeast, regions which have supplied many migrant workers to the Gulf. The report touches on some of the wider, national-level implications of this particular migration, for example, the importance of remittances to the national economy, but its primary focus is the local level and the individual experience.

The report draws on 11 in-depth interviews with migrants and was also enriched by the author’s multiple conversations with different people during previous travels and fieldwork. The interviewees came from the provinces of Khost, Paktia, Paktika, Ghazni and Kandahar. Residents from these provinces have supplied a large number of migrants to the Gulf. Interviewees included both the migrants themselves and their male relatives. (Unfortunately, the author was not able to speak to any women in the families).

The report begins by looking at the history of migration to the Gulf and then explores what Afghan migrants do there. It delves into the effects of remittance money on households as well as the social implications it has had on Afghan society. The report concludes by arguing that migration patterns, which serve as a key source of livelihood for many families, do carry risks, as the ability to travel and work abroad is prone to changes in the policies of host countries.

The history of migration to the Gulf

Like many others, Afghans have long sought to migrate to areas where employment and labour opportunities were better than at home. As an initial step, migration for work typically comes inside the country, chiefly from rural to urban areas, where prospects for paid labour are relatively better, but then also, potentially, on to foreign countries.

The history of migration to the Gulf in modern times dates back to the earlier part of King Zaher Shah’s reign (1933-73). At the time, Afghans used to migrate to British India and some would then go onto Gulf countries,[1] which one interviewee, quoting his grandfather who had migrated there in search of labour in the 1940s, referred to as “mere deserts.” However, he found labour opportunities scarce and like many others returned to India.

The trend to migrate to the Gulf for work only really gained traction during the presidency of Daud Khan in the 1970s when the Gulf states started to discover large-scale oil deposits and underwent rapid development. As these states needed cheap labour to work in their fast-developing economies, travel there for work became an option for Afghans, among many others. According to the accounts of at least three men who migrated to the Gulf in the 1970s, Daud Khan’s government was asked to supply Afghan labourers to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (the UAE) and, to a lesser extent, Kuwait. According to these three men, coupled with the account of a later migrant who knew about the event, Daud Khan rejected the UAE’s offer. The reason given by all of the interviewees was Daud Khan’s personal pride, as he considered supplying Afghans as labourers a national disgrace. He did issue passports, though, allowing Afghans to travel to the Gulf as tourists. When they arrived, however, according to the interviewees, most then found labouring jobs.

Later on, the Soviet invasion of 1979 and subsequent war spurred mass emigration from Afghanistan for the first time. The violence forced hundreds of thousands of Afghans to flee to Pakistan and Iran as refugees, where they faced troubles in camps and had a hard time earning a livelihood. Some among them tried to move beyond Pakistan and Iran to other countries, including to the Gulf, and were helped by Afghans who had travelled there earlier, during the reigns of Zaher and Daud, and had already established a footprint.

Even after the Soviets withdrew in 1989, and the communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) government fell and the mujahedin gained power in 1992, Afghanistan was not at peace. Out-migration persisted and even increased as poverty and bitter civil war pushed new waves of people out of the country to seek work and safety abroad. The same was true during the Taleban’s first Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) from 1996 to 2001.

However, it was the post-2001 events in Afghanistan that most drastically transformed the nature of migration vis-à-vis the Gulf. With the fall of the first IEA and the formation of a new US-backed government in 2001, Afghanistan’s status as a pariah state ended and it was exposed to the outside world for the first time in many years; diplomatic relations with countries, including the Gulf states, evolved and Afghan migrants were welcomed to the labour market there.[2]

Why go to the Gulf?

The factors that had pushed Afghans to migrate before 2001 remained in and even increased. Several factors were at play, including spreading insecurity all over the rural areas of southern and southeastern Afghanistan as the insurgency gradually but inexorably took root. In some places, the insecurity hampered trade and economic growth. The Taleban, particularly during the initial years of their insurgency, blocked development projects, banned locals from working for the government or NGOs and threatened and even killed individuals associated with the government. That, and the reluctance of some NGOs to work in insecure areas, worsened economic prospects. Many in the rural areas, including our interviewees, felt they could not find a place in the new setup as they lacked the right skills and/or could not read and write well or at all. Agriculture could not support the growing population, and the labour market was struggling to afford jobs for everyone.

Families might also want their sons out of the country so they would remain safe and not fall victim to recruitment campaigns by the government, or the Taleban or local militias. The author came across several cases of this push factor. In Paktika’s Mushkhil area, a family requested their fellow villager, who had migrated to the UAE, to provide a visa for their young son; he had joined the insurgency and they wanted to coax him out of the movement. In another instance in Ghazni province, when the older brother of a migrant to the UEA called Mirza found out about his younger brother’s increasing interactions with the Taleban, he immediately provided him with a visa to cut him off from the insurgents.

In these circumstances, migration looked like a good option. The post-2001 government facilitated issuing passports, foreign work permits, travel and other related matters. However, the question of who could get to an attractive destination like the UAE or Saudi Arabia depended on an individual having connections with Afghans already there. Businessmen with a footprint in the Gulf who needed cheap labour would seek out young men from their own communities, providing them with visas and work opportunities, covering all their expenses and then recouping the outlay from their salary once they started working, as one interviewee described.

When I went to Dubai [around 2015], I was 18 years old. One of my fellow villagers had a shop there and needed a worker and my father asked him to get visa for me. He agreed and I started working for him, initially for 1,000 dirhams [367 USD], a month.[3] My salary was 1,300 but he took a cut of 300 dirhams [roughly 95 USD] to make good the cost of my visa. 

I worked for him for three years and then got a share in a [new] shop, established by a friend who also worked for the same fellow villager. Our shop steadily grew. Now, I have two shops and have hired more than ten workers, all from my village, and relatives. Initially, I came here with empty hands, having no more than 500 afghanis [roughly seven USD] in my pocket, but now, after seven years of musafari [migration], I have built a new house, bought a car and have a good life. 

Within the Gulf, the destinations for most Afghans have been the UAE and Saudi Arabia – the latter has turned into a major hub for Afghan migrants despite not providing visas. According to the World Bank, 360,000 Afghans were living there in 2015 (see footnote 1). Many Afghans, after arriving in Pakistan as refugees in the 1980s, had procured Pakistani ID cards and passports and some at least have used these to get to Saudi Arabia This was the case with one of our interviewees, while three others got there by bribing Pakistani officials and/or using personal connections to get a passport, which they used to get visas to Saudi Arabia, something easily available to Pakistani nationals. Once they arrived in Saudi Arabia, our four interviewees, like many others, changed the passports they were using to their Afghan ones. Interviewees described Saudi moves to allow Afghans to change their Pakistani passport to Afghan ones as a special “treatment” and exceptional “favours”.

When it comes to the UAE, it provided visas to Afghans until 2020 and Afghans travelled there in large numbers. Other Gulf states, such as Kuwait and Qatar, also host a small number of Afghans who live there and do business. Migration to these two, and other, Gulf countries has been sporadic throughout the last two decades as they have also denied visas to Afghans. More recently, Afghans began to migrate to Oman, which started issuing visas in the last couple of years. In Oman, many have established businesses, whilst others use it as a gateway to other countries (mainly the UAE).

Nearly all the migrants whom the author interviewed or otherwise came across have been less-educated men,[4] and according to our interviewees, Afghans working in the Gulf predominantly come from rural southeastern and southern Afghanistan.[5] The reasons they gave for this was that residents of these areas had had a footprint there since Daud’s tenure; one interviewee said that when Daud Khan was asked to supply labourers to the Gulf, he mostly sent men (as ‘tourists’) from southeastern provinces. Ever since, men from those areas, already working in the Gulf, have brought over their relatives or fellow villages, keeping and expanding their presence.

In general, employment opportunities are scarcer in rural areas than in urban centres, so there is a greater incentive for men in rural areas to leave home in search of a job, whether to Pakistan, Iran or, if they have a chance, the Gulf. Many first migrate to urban centres inside Afghanistan. However, with the urban market for unskilled labour often saturated, those who lack enough education and working skills often find it difficult to get a job. This was the case with at least one of our interviewees, who hails from Paktia and now works in the UAE. He first tried to establish a business or find a well-paid job in Kabul, but his business never flourished, and he failed to find a job with good wages – hence, he migrated to the Gulf.

Once they arrive in the Gulf, Afghans initially start as labourers, but many establish their own businesses after mastering a certain profession. In the Gulf, where the prospects of successful businesses are much more realistic, Afghans have proven resilient by building different businesses and providing labour opportunities not only for Afghans but also for Pakistanis and Bengalis.

What jobs do Afghans do in the Gulf?

Unlike migrants from countries such as India, Afghan migrants do not hold administrative roles in either governments or the private sector. A number have small businesses and others are employed by their fellow Afghans, or Arabs, or others.

As for Afghan businesses in the Gulf, they vary. Afghans from certain regions, or provinces, dominate particular sectors. One interviewee from Khost, who has spent 15 years in the UAE, described these patterns:

When you go there [to the UAE], you’ll see that every Afghan working in construction is from Khost. When you go to [an Afghan] bakery, you will surely find out the owner is from Ghazni or Paktia. It’s the pattern that was established years ago and is followed till today.

Migrants from other parts of the country such as the north, for example, are famous for dominating auto part retail. Interviewees from Paktika said their people focus on furniture and carpet shops, a sector in which Ghazni natives have also flourished. An interviewee from Paktika, in his 40s, also remarked on this pattern:

For years, when Afghans from certain provinces came and worked in certain sectors, they’d also then bring their fellow villagers and relatives to the same business. And as the chances of businesses flourishing are high, and people of all sectors make good profits, they’ve continued and grown the speciality that was handed down to them. For example, I’m from Paktika and have a mafrushat [furniture shop]. When I need a worker, I bring one from among my relatives. He works for me, gets familiar with my business and after a few years, he builds one for himself also. This pattern repeats and repeats and that’s why every province has a certain occupation. 

The majority of Afghans do not own businesses, but work for others. Interviewees said that those employed by Afghan businesses are paid set wages and their employer gets them a visa. Those working for Arabs, typically as drivers, gardeners or guards, get visas through other channels.

Estimates suggest that, by the end of 2021, nearly six million Afghans were living abroad. Among these, only 2.7 million were registered as refugees (see this UNHCR report). The number of Afghans living as economic migrants was estimated by the World Bank in 2015 to be 2.25 million. However, the real figures are undoubtedly much higher, particularly when it comes to migrants in the Gulf, given that Afghans working there often arrive on Pakistani passports. As to how many Afghans are working in the Gulf, the numbers are not robust, but most put the population there in the hundreds of thousands.[6]

Sending money home

Migrating for work is clearly important for individuals, families and the nation, given the money migrants send home, but how much they send is impossible to say. Robert Holzmann warned in 2018 that “No reliable data exist on remittances in Afghanistan” and that is still the case. Long years of conflict, he said, have weakened and limited the development of the formal financial sector and so:

[A] significant share of remittances in Afghanistan are transferred through a well-developed network of informal brokers, called “hawala” dealers, that are not monitored and included in official statistics. Furthermore, responses in household surveys with regard to money are typically biased downward as mistrust leads people to underreport their money transactions. As a result, official data … understate the real magnitude of remittances to and from the country. 

Obscuring the statistics further is the fact that Afghans returning, at least, from the Gulf usually carry large sums of cash. Those who have major businesses frequently travel back to Afghanistan, transferring their profits as cash in their luggage. While it is legally outlawed in many countries to take large sums of money out, Afghan migrants have still managed to bypass monitoring systems at airports. One interviewee claimed that he once brought over 100,000 US dollars into Afghanistan after he “placed it inside [the baby’s] nappies,” making it undetectable to the electronic checking system at airports.

Nevertheless, attempts to estimate or extrapolate give a sense of the scale of the money involved. The World Bank estimated total remittances in 2022 to be 1 to 1.2 billion USD and that this was a doubling of the money sent home in 2019. As a means of comparison, in 2022, UN shipments of dollars used to pay for humanitarian aid were 1.8 billion USD (according to the same World Bank report). ACAPS reported that in 2020, 10 per cent of Afghan households received remittances and that this comprised, on average, almost 59 per cent of the household budget for those who received them. Quoting 2016-17 research by the Afghanistan Living Conditions Survey, it said that poverty rates among ‘receiving’ families were substantially lower than the norm, something the next section of this report will illustrate. First, though, the author wanted to give a sense of how much Afghans can earn in the Gulf. Their descriptions give an idea of the remittances they send home and the money they invest back in their villages.

Several Afghan business owners in the UAE said the general wage they pay for newcomers starts at around 1,000 dirhams (367 USD). One interviewee who owns a furniture business in Saudi Arabia said the initial wages for new labourers start at 1,800 riyals [480 USD] a month. Take-home pay increases after the individual has paid back his visa costs and acquired skills in his profession. One interviewee claimed he had received or at least knew of workers who get wages of up to 4,000 dirhams (1,090 USD) per month in the UAE and 5,000 riyals (1,330 USD) in Saudi Arabia.

The smallest amount Afghan workers make is twice what they can earn from the same job inside Afghanistan. One interviewee gave this example: “If you work as a waiter in a restaurant, you make 7-10,000 afghanis (roughly 100 to 120 USD) per month, but if you work as a waiter in Dubai, the least you make is more than 25,000 and the most 35,000 afghanis.” He said that a taxi driver in the UAE “can make over 40,000 afghanis [roughly 600 USD] in a month” whereas taxi drivers in Afghan cities “struggle to make even 15,000 (roughly 200 USD),” a month.

After spending some years and becoming experts in their field of employment, the salary migrants receive increases, sometimes by as much as two-fold. One interviewee said he initially started on a salary of 1,200 dirhams (380 USD) as an assistant cook, and after three years, his salary had increased to 2,500 dirhams (700 USD). One cost they do face is accommodation and food.

The second category of Afghan migrants is the businessmen. From owning construction and transport firms to restaurants, bakeries, auto part dealerships, car showrooms, and hawalas, Afghans have invested in different fields. Some, as our interviewees said, have even established joint businesses with locals. One stated that he worked with an Arab to obtain visas from the Gulf states, which they then sold on to both Afghans and non-Afghans at a much higher price. Another interviewee described his situation:

Our people have great businesses in Dubai and Saudi. We own two shops of mafrushat (furniture) and carpets. We can make 20,000 riyals [5,300 USD] to 40000 riyals [10,600 USD] in a month. Our [business] has now declined due to huge taxes and other problems. I remember, in the past, in the three months of saifia [the summer holidays], we made 50,000 [US] dollars. 

An interviewee from Kandahar, who has businesses in the UAE with his brother and cousins, also described the profits his family and friends make:

My cousin is in the UAE and has two shops selling auto parts. In three years, he bought a house worth 200,000 [USD] in Kabul. Another of our villagers has an abaya business. When he first went to Dubai, he didn’t even have a rickshaw. But now, he has two [Toyota] Fielders, has built a new qala [villa] and got his three brothers married. 

The impact of remittances money for households

For those households that have someone working abroad, remittances may be the main source of income. In rural areas, while agriculture and livestock cover basic needs, remittances can then be used to cover other substantial needs, as one interviewee explained:

Many things we eat, including flour, come from our lands and livestock. But there are too many other necessary things that can only be bought by money. When you take even one step, you should pay money. Agriculture and livestock can only cover the substantial needs, and nothing remains for the other needs. People in cities have jobs and salaries. But for people of the countryside, it’s foreign [remittances] money that covers the additional costs of life. If there were no remittances, people would be as poor as they were 20 years ago. 

Another interviewee, aged 34, from Paktia, also explained how remittances are used:

If you don’t have money, you have nothing these days. And money can’t be earned in farming because the market [for selling the harvest] isn’t good, the drought is heavy, and land is scarce. So basically, you can’t do anything – because everything requires money. For example, unlike in the past, you need to eat different things – it’s become a tradition – not just beans and potatoes. And for that, you need to buy stuff, which needs money. You have to follow dozens of new traditions established in the villages, so you’re not out of the race, and that all needs money. I told you this to give you the picture that everything requires money and there is no money inside Afghanistan. Except flour, beans and potato and milk and yogurt, everything else comes from the bazaar and requires money. And people still afford all these needs and live an improved life, not because they’ve earned money here [in Afghanistan] but because all this [money] comes from Arab countries. 

One of two brothers who work in Sharjah in the UAE said they send home 1,300 dirhams (390 USD) each month, able to save so much because their employer pays for most of their food and accommodation costs. All the unskilled workers do the same, he said: “We spend very little money there and send most of it here [to Afghanistan].” A third interviewee living in Ghazni province has two sons in Dubai, each earning 1,800 dirhams a month.

They send their wages every month. I use a portion of that to purchase necessary goods from the bazaar. The remaining money is spent in several ways such as getting the two [boys] married, digging a well, buying solar panels and a motorcycle. I save some of the money for medical treatment and other emergency costs. 

Most Afghan migrants in the Gulf live as individuals with their families staying in Afghanistan, coming back and forth between their host country and home. This means that the vast majority of what they earn is sent to Afghanistan. Even the small number that have their families with them, also send money back to Afghanistan, as one interviewee explained:

My family lives with me in Saudi Arabia. But my brothers and uncles live here [in Afghanistan]. I send them money on a monthly basis. In addition, except for family expenses, I invest all my money in Afghanistan because we have a saying in Pashto that ‘Someone else’s bed is only yours till midnight’ [ie if something does not belong to you, don’t expect to be able to use it forever].[7] Foreign countries never become home, so it’s always safe to invest in your own country and when you are forced to go back, you’ll also have something there. 

To a great extent, our interviewees said, remittances had helped their communities remain independent of government and fluctuating political developments within the country. Money sent home has meant not having to look to the state for a job or rely on it for services, thereby maintaining these communities’ autonomy. Especially in the southeast, where many of our interviewees are from, such autonomy was much prized historically and is still valued today. Also, when Afghanistan’s economy encounters occasional contractions, such as following the Taleban takeover of 2021, which resulted in an overnight cut in foreign aid, and sanctions suddenly applied to the whole country rather than an armed opposition group, those with access to remittances were better able to ride the disaster. One interviewee, owner of two markets in Kabul, who also has an active business in the UAE explained the dynamics:

I remember there were a lot of rumours in 2014 that the Americans [military forces] were withdrawing and ending their aid to Afghanistan. They didn’t [fully] withdraw, but the money did shrink and many people working for them lost their jobs. I had a friend who was responsible for logistics in a few of the bases and when the Americans withdrew, he and his entire workforce lost their jobs. My friend then asked me to get him a visa for Dubai. For us, it didn’t matter whether aid was shrinking or the Americans were withdrawing. Our businesses don’t have a connection with such things and continue in the same way to this day.

Another interviewee from Paktia said something similar:

When the Taleban came [to power], a lot of people lost their jobs. Just in our village alone, more than ten youths who’d worked in the Republic became jobless. Even those who didn’t lose their jobs had their salaries decreased significantly. I know a lot of people who saw their businesses collapse. But praise be to Allah, those who are abroad haven’t faced such challenges and continue their businesses as normal. 

When the afghani lost its value against foreign currencies in late 2021 and prices shot up as a result, interviewees said those households with access to remittances were the least affected. One interviewee, a migrant in the UAE, said when the price of five litres of oil jumped from 500 to 800 afghanis (roughly 80 to 110 USD), he still had no problem with that, given that he exchanged dirhams for afghanis at a higher rate: one dirham for 20 afghanis (roughly three USD) before and for 28 (roughly five USD) after the increase in prices. Furthermore, informal channels for transferring money have kept working. In 2021, when sanctions struck banks and money transfer companies, hawalas still functioned normally. Afghans abroad could still send their money home with little or no trouble.

Apart from allowing households to stay standing in the face of political and economic disaster, remittance money also protects households from natural disasters, such as drought or floods or sudden costs, such as for medical treatment. It would be fair to say that it is remittances that keep agriculture alive in many parts of southern and southeastern Afghanistan. As the level of groundwater declines, farmers find it difficult to irrigate their fields as wells dry up. In most of southeastern Afghanistan, farmers rely on irrigation water and as drought persists, it becomes difficult to continue farming. However, families who have someone abroad use remittance money to dig deeper wells, buy fuel for water pumps or install solar panels. This happened to one of our interviewees:

Last year, the level of water declined to 35 metres. It’s gone down by seven metres. The well we’d dug dried up. To irrigate the fields, I had to dig a new one. I called my brothers who were in Dubai to send money. They sent 15,000 afghanis [roughly 200 USD] and I spent it all on [digging a new] well, and buying pipes and other tools. 

Of course, eventually, given the climate crisis, the aquifers will drop further if they are not replenished by rain. It could be argued that those with resources are enabled to take an unfair share of what water there is, with their poorer neighbours falling even further behind.

Similarly, in times of natural disasters such as floods, it is again remittance money that assists households. When Andar district in Ghazni province was hit hard by floods in 2022, for example, many farmers lost their harvest. One interviewee from the district, who was cultivating wheat and beans on a little over 20 jeribs [one hectare] of land, lost almost everything to the flood: “I didn’t have flour to eat for the year ahead,” he said. However, two of his brothers were in the UAE and sent money to buy flour.

Remittances also have significantly larger geographic effects: a community elder from Khost described its role in keeping the province’s economy afloat as “oxygen.” He said that several of Khost’s districts rely solely on remittances as their main source of income and that without “Arab money,” they would be in the same dire economic situation that Afghanistan was in decades ago, or would have collapsed because of successive economic shocks.

The cultural impact of remittances

Migration has not only had an economic impact on Afghans but has also had a sociopolitical effect. Interviewees felt that Afghan society, particularly in rural areas, had been isolated – protected or cut off – from urban trends and global developments. Their communities, they said, had persisted with the same norms and traditions they had had for decades, possibly centuries. They felt that migration to the Gulf, especially during the last two decades, had spurred change in their areas.[8] Returning or visiting migrants have become familiar with a life far different from what is conventional in their own communities. They have seen a richer economy and living standards, and different ways of living which are still very much Muslim. They may challenge the established norms and old traditions at the family and community level, want education for their children, including their daughters and sisters, want to ‘improve life’ in their villages and have the money to spend, whether on schooling for younger siblings or installing internet connections in their villages.

Historically, it was the head of the family, the father or grandfather, who was in charge of decision-making both within the family and together with other elders in the village. But with migration, this dominance can be dented, as one interviewee, who has two brothers as migrants, explained:

In the past, it was the head of the family that had control over everything because they had the money in their control. But nowadays, it’s the young men that make money and thus control the family. When an elder tells them: Don’t do a particular work, they do it! If he [the elder of the family] resists, the [son] then doesn’t send money. And the elders become toothless. 

Another interviewee described what happened when his Dubai-based friend came home and wanted to buy a car.

His father didn’t allow him, telling him there were other important things to buy first. But as he had no control over the money his son earned, his son bought a car. For a few days, his father didn’t talk to my friend. Then, one day, he needed some money and asked for it from his son. My friend gave him enough money and then their problem was solved. 

In another instance, an interviewee described how the young men in his village decided to repair the old village mosque. However, the older people resisted the idea, saying the old mosque was fine. As the young men had their money collected both in the village and from their fellow villagers in the Gulf, they started repairing the mosque regardless of what the elders were saying.

In another example, a group of younger men in Khost’s Tanai district decided to have dinner in every house in the village during Eid. They had excluded the village elders from their plan. In response, the elders threatened to cancel the programme. However, the young men argued that, in the words of one interviewee, “It’s us who earn and it’s us who decide how we spend the money.” Another man in his 40s described the effects of migration on social norms:

In the past, when someone was getting married, he wouldn’t know his spouse unless they were wed. No one consulted them about their choice, nor did they themselves dare to talk about their future wife. But nowadays, they call their parents from Dubai and tell them to go and ask for a [particular] girl’s hand for them. Many parents are obliged to ask their sons whether he wants to marry a particular person or not.

This does not necessarily mean that elders in the home or village have entirely lost control over these young men, but it is true that their power has significantly waned when it comes to many decisions.

Exposure to other societies has also led migrants, in the words of one interviewee, “to comprehend the value of education.” Many Afghan migrants in the Gulf, interviewees said, are poorly educated or illiterate and struggle to cope with everything that needs reading and writing. One, for example, said he had difficulty activating a bank account, reading bills or finding his way when doing business. He claimed he lost a lot of money because he could not read or understand the rules. He regretted his lack of an education, saying he could have earned much more money as a literate man. One head of a family who had migrated to Saudi Arabia described education as akin to eyes and ears in this modern age.

If you don’t have it, you’re deaf and blind. I myself work outside my country just because I don’t have an education and can’t find a good job in Afghanistan. Even in Saudi, I can’t do anything other than labouring and business because I have no education. There are Pakistanis with us there that have good education and they’re hired by companies, have much higher salaries and easy work. But our labourers need to work mightily, day and night. Personally, I didn’t know how important it was before coming here and now I sometimes feel huge grief for why we’re unable to have an education and a comfortable life in our own country. 

Another man, also the head of a family, who has his younger brothers in the UAE, similarly described how migration had influenced their thinking towards education:

My younger brothers didn’t go to school here. They didn’t like it. So, I sent them to Dubai to work. After spending some years there, they repeatedly regret that they didn’t go to school. One of them said that: “Our time has passed, but let’s not allow the children to remain illiterate.” At their insistence, we rented a house in Gardez for the children and sent the boys there to study. Now, one of them has finished university and got a job with an NGO. 

Migration has not merely influenced attitudes towards boys’ education. Several migrants also expressed a desire to get the girls in their families educated. Though the dominant thinking in these parts of rural Afghanistan has not changed much and still impedes greater progress in girls’ education, there are growing incidents that indicate attitudes towards education, including for girls, are now quickly changing. The contribution of migration to this, and the exposure to other ways of living in other Muslim countries, cannot be underestimated.

More recently, one interviewee, who has eight brothers and one nephew in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, described how they gathered their whole village together and spoke to them about establishing a ‘community-based class’, run by an NGO, in their village. “In the beginning,” he said, “they didn’t like it. But after some time, they became content with the idea. We all went to the educational department in the province and requested them to ask an NGO to establish a class in our village.” The interviewee succeeded after several attempts to secure the establishment of the class. Now, he said, girls from all over his village study up to the sixth grade. Another interviewee, who has migrated to the UAE, said he encouraged girls in his family to take part in a radio-run education programme.

A friend of mine told me that a [local] radio station had several [educational] programmes for girls. They have [specific] books and one should go to places they have [authorised] to register. The [girls] even take exams. So I told all my [female] family [members] to take part. I bought them books and notebooks. And it’s now almost a year they are following the programme. They can now read and write. 

Conclusion 

For Afghans, getting to the Gulf is proving increasingly difficult. Currently, no state, except Oman, gives out visas. Those Afghans who already have visas and work permits also report problems. Saudi Arabia, for instance, has placed multiple strict regulations on non-Arab businessmen. Our interviewees also said they have increased taxes and the price of residence permits. Acquiring a Pakistani passport and migrating to Saudi Arabia has also become difficult, if not impossible. In October 2023, the Saudi Arabian authorities reportedly retrieved more than 12,000 Pakistani passports from Afghan nationals and informed Pakistani authorities about the scam (see this Express Tribune report). Pakistan’s Ministry of Interior constituted a committee to investigate this issue. This could potentially affect the status of Afghan migrants in Saudi Arabia.

The UAE, for its part, stopped giving visas to Afghans and the nationals of 13 other Muslim majority countries four years ago, reportedly for ‘security concerns’ (see media reporting here and here). Our interviewees also concurred that a key reason for Afghan nationals being included in the list is, in fact, security concerns because some Afghan nationals were said to have contacts with the Taleban, including fundraising for them, and were sharing jihadi and ‘extremist’ content on social media. They described hundreds of Afghan migrants being deported or blocked from entering the UAE. The ban has also negatively affected traders who could not renew their expired visas and are stuck in Afghanistan. (See media reporting on a protest Afghan traders staged against the ban and its effect on businesses here). That denial of visas to Afghans has endured even after the re-establishment of the IEA in 2021; the UAE has an ambassador in Kabul and the Islamic Emirate has a consular presence in Dubai (see media reporting here and here). Currently, with the exception of Oman, the migration of new Afghans to the Gulf has stopped entirely. Only those who already have visas can travel back and forth between their host countries and Afghanistan.[9]

The fear also remains that, as one of our interviewees warned, Afghans cannot rely on foreign hosts being friendly forever. The most glaring example of foreign countries only providing ‘beds till midnight’ is the mass forced ‘return’ of Afghans living in Pakistan, up to half a million, according to the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR (as of early January 2024).

The need to migrate for work is stronger than ever, given the dire state of Afghanistan’s economy and the need for ‘oxygen’ – the remittances that are a lifeline for households, communities and, indeed, the national economy. As legal means of travel shrivel up, Afghans have turned to illegal migration. It is next to impossible, or at least very expensive, to go to the Gulf. However, many are still trying to take the difficult option of getting to Iran and Pakistan, despite the threat of forced return, and the West. The long and perilous journey to Europe is not undertaken lightly, given the threat of arrest and even torture and other violence (one example of media reporting, out of many, by the BBC here) and of push-backs along the way (see recent reporting from AAN here). Even so, many feel they still have to try to go elsewhere: “When you stay here [in Afghanistan],” one interviewee said, “you can’t find a job, so if you want to stay alive, the only option is to go abroad.”

Edited by Kate Clark

References

References
↑1 To read about the wider migration trend from British India to work in the early oil industry in the Gulf, see Gennaro Errichiello’s ‘Foreign Workforce in the Arab Gulf States (1930—1950): Migration Patterns and Nationality Clause’, published in The International Migration Review, Vol 46, No 2 (Summer 2012).
↑2 Saudi Arabia and the UAE had been, along with Pakistan, the only countries to recognise the first Islamic Emirate, before cutting relations following al-Qaeda’s attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001.
↑3 The exchange rate of currencies to USD used throughout this report is from early January 2024.
↑4  The national literacy rate in Afghanistan was 31 per cent in 2011 and 37 per cent in 2021 (see this World Bank data chart), but much lower in rural areas as they are affected by conflict, poverty and lack of resources and access. Per a study in 1997 (see here), the literacy rate in rural areas was only 8.8 per cent compared to 25.9 per cent in urban settings.
↑5  The author has not been able to find written sources for this, although regional bases for migration are referred to in some of the literature, for example, the ACAPS report: “In some rural districts of Afghanistan, labour migration to Gulf Arab countries has traditionally been very high even before 2021.”
↑6 ACAPS, in a 2023 report, ‘Afghanistan – Remittances: the scale and role of private financial transfers’ quoted UN figures from 2020: “An estimated 617,110 Afghans lived and worked in countries such as Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, including labour migrants and permanent but foreign-born residents.” Robert Holzmann’s 2018 report for the World Bank, ‘Managed Labor Migration in Afghanistan: Exploring Employment and Growth Opportunities for Afghanistan’, quoted numbers from 2015: 

The number of Afghan migrants abroad was estimated at around 4.8 million in 2015. By country of destination, indicative data from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA 2015) suggest that neighboring Iran (2.35 million) and Pakistan (1.6 million) host more than 80 percent of the total Afghan population abroad, while the rest currently reside in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries (460,000) and Saudi Arabia (360,000). Finally, some 50,000 Afghans live in other countries, mainly in India and Central Asian countries.

It can be concluded that even though ACAPS and Holzmann were quoting migrant numbers overall, certainly those for the Gulf would be predominantly migrant labour and male. In a 2013 study, ‘Labour migration for decent work in Afghanistan: Issues and challenges’, written for the International Labour Organisation (ILO), Piyasiri Wickramasekara and Nilim Baruah focussing on migrant labour specifically found that two-thirds of Afghan labour migration was to or returning from Iran, while 12 per cent was to or from the Arabian Peninsula.
↑7 The interviewee suggested with this Pashto proverb that foreign countries do not belong to Afghans and therefore can afford only a temporary home.
↑8  Returning refugees from Iran and Pakistan have also brought back different attitudes, for example, often a greater desire for school education for their children. Such an influence has included members of the Taleban who have lived in Pakistan’s cities or the Gulf, as the author explored in an earlier report.
↑9 There is almost no way to travel to the Gulf illegally for work, except, as was the case in the past, by pretending to be Pakistani. In the last couple of years, some Afghans have gone to Saudi Arabia for umra, performing the pilgrimage, and then tried to stay on illegally. They were, anyhow, few in number and those who travel to Saudi for umra are required to leave a monetary guarantee to ensure they will return to Afghanistan.

Sending Money Home: The impact of remittances on workers, families and villages
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In the new Afghanistan, it’s sell your daughter or starve

January 15, 2024 ,

By Stephanie Sinclair

The Washington Post
January 15, 2024 

Stephanie Sinclair, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, is the founder and president of Too Young To Wed.

Their names are Khoshbakht, Saliha, Fawzia, Benazir, Farzana and Nazia — Afghan girls ages 8 to 10 who have been sold into marriage. Desperation forced their parents to thrust them into brutal adulthood. In Shahrak-e-Sabz, a settlement of makeshift mud-brick homes and tents for the displaced in Herat province that we visited last month, our researchers counted 118 girls who had been sold as child brides, and 116 families with girls waiting for buyers. This amounts to 40 percent of families surveyed, even though the Taliban decreed in late 2021 that women should not be considered “property” and must consent to marriage.

Conditions in the settlement are hellish. Shahrak-e-Sabz is set in a vast desert with no shade trees in sight; scant protection from sandstorms and harsh weather; no running water, electricity, heat or work; and only a trickle of aid from the outside world. Most families living here left behind decent lives to escape climate change and conflict. They subsist on stale bread and black tea; many are close to starving.

Across Afghanistan, child marriages have skyrocketed, and not only because of economic collapse. Families once hoped that their daughters, when educated, might find good work and contribute to the family income. Today, under the Taliban’s ever-increasing restrictions, school is prohibited for girls after the sixth grade, and work options for women are few. Sequestered at home, a girl becomes just another mouth to feed. But as a bride, she’s a valuable commodity. A $2,000 bride price is enough to feed a family for a year. For the girls, of course, this is a nightmare. In their new in-laws’ homes, they are saddled with housework and often subject to verbal, physical and sexual abuse — slavery under the guise of matrimony. It’s no wonder suicide and depression are rising among Afghan teenage girls.

To address the root causes of the child-bride phenomenon, my organization, Too Young to Wed, works to alleviate the hunger that stalks almost 90 percent of Afghans today. We provide parents with livelihood training so they can support their families rather than choose between starving or selling their children. In some cases, sensitive social workers can work with local authorities to annul marriages. Meanwhile, it is essential to educate community elders about the detrimental effects of child marriage, its harm to girls’ physical and emotional well-being and to the broader societal fabric. Girls under age 15 are five times more likely than women to die in childbirth, and their babies are often born premature.

In the midst of our fieldwork in Afghanistan, we worked with photographers to document the lives of several families who have faced the prospect of child marriage. Here are six of their stories.

Khoshbakht, 10
(Too Young to Wed)

Khoshbakht is one of five children living with their mother, Nazdana. Their father died a year ago, and Nazdana now works as a tailor by day and does embroidery at night. Her two daughters gather meager money by begging. Since the family’s house was destroyed in an October earthquake, they have been living in a tent. In two months, Khoshbakht is to join the family to which she was sold two years ago for 150,000 Afghanis (about $2,100). “I want to be with my mother,” she said. She also wants to stay in school with her friends. Nazdana has been offered money for her 8-year-old daughter, Razia, too. “In the future,” she fears, ‘I won’t have a choice.”

Saliha, 10
(Too Young to Wed)

Saliha was sold into marriage at age 7. “I sold my daughter due to poverty and hunger to save the life of the others,” said her father, Mohammad Khan. “I feel guilty but I had no other choice.” Too Young to Wed worked with the families and faith leaders to annul the marriage. Saliha, now 10 and enrolled in school, looks at her homework with her father, who is delighted by her education. “When we go in the city,” he said, “my daughter tells me: here, it is written ‘clinic.’ Here it is written this name or that name. Me? I can’t read these things. I will not marry my daughter before she finishes her studies. It’s too important.”

Fawzia, 6
(Too Young to Wed)

Fawzia, standing here with Ghulam Hazrat, 8; Amina, 5; and her mother, Shirin Gul, loves playing with her rabbit and wants to go to school like other girls. But Shirin Gul says she will have to sell Fawzia into marriage. The family has too little money, and she sees no other option. Three of her eight children are disabled, and she earns just 25 Afghanis (about 36 cents) a day spinning wool.

Benazir, 10
(Too Young to Wed)

Benazir, seen here making bread, was sold into marriage at age 7, when her father, Murad Khan, found he could no longer feed his eight children. Too Young to Wed negotiated with the families and faith leaders to annul the marriage, and helped Khan with the start-up capital needed to open a shop and become self-sufficient. Benazir is now enrolled in robotics school, and one of her sisters, Khomari, has completed Too Young to Wed’s sewing program. Khan says, “Even if someone put a knife on my neck, I won’t marry off my daughter.”

Farzana, 9
(Too Young to Wed)

Farzana’s mother, Mariam, has seven children, ranging in age from 1 to 15. Farzana is at the top of this photo, with her mother and four of her siblings: Halima, 13; Fatima, 2; Gul Ahmad, 5; and Yunus, 7. After Mariam’s husband died in a car accident last year, she had to borrow money to survive. As her debts increased, she was forced to sell Farzana for 300,000 Afghanis (about $4,300). The buyer insists he’s entitled to take Farzana now because there’s no man in Mariam’s house, but Mariam is fighting through the legal system to keep Farzana until she turns 18.

Nazia, 9
(Too Young to Wed)

Nazia was sold one year ago instead of her 12-year-old sister Pashtana, who insisted on staying in school. Their mother, Nazgul, and her husband have struggled to feed their six children and decided they had no other choice but to sell one of their daughters to a relative’s family for 200,000 Afghanis (about $2,800). At the time, Nazia had no idea what marriage would mean, so she didn’t protest. Now she knows, and the boy’s family wants to take her already. Nazia said she wants to play and be with her family. “I like school. I like learning the alphabet. The whole class is friends with me.” Nazgul regrets her decision but said, “We didn’t have anything, not even a mattress. I was forced to sell my daughter.” She is trying to persuade the boy’s family to let Nazia stay home for three more years.

In the new Afghanistan, it’s sell your daughter or starve
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