Analytical articles | Page 30

01.20.2023

By Fawzia Koofi

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

The New York Times

20 Jan 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

01.18.2023

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

USIP’s Andrew Watkins, Kate Bateman, Belquis Ahmadi and Scott Worden explain what may be motivating the Taliban’s misogyny and what are the prospects for moderating it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What impact will these bans have within Afghanistan?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is there a way out?

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

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

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

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

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

Jan. 14, 2023

The New York Times

Jan. 14, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That the refugee crisis is manageable, not insoluble.

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

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

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

What are some concrete steps that can be taken?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any final thoughts for the Davos conferees?

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

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

A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 17, 2023

01.10.2023

Anatol Lieven

Responsible Statecraft

DECEMBER 27, 2022

Both have intractable governing problems, but that doesn’t mean the West should keep intervening to save them.

Recent months have seen escalating clashes along Pakistan’s disputed border with Afghanistan. In the latest, on December 11 and 15, civilians on both sides were killed when Taliban forces fired into Pakistan and Pakistani troops retaliated.

These clashes have their origins in three factors: the presence in Afghanistan of Pakistani Islamist rebels who launch attacks across the border into Pakistan, Pakistani attempts to fence off the border to limit militant attacks, smuggling, and illegal mass migration (more than 250,000 Afghans have fled near-famine conditions in Afghanistan since the Taliban took control last year), and the radical reduction in Western aid.

The Taliban, like every previous Afghan government, has also refused to accept the legality of the frontier that was established by the British Empire. The border fence has caused violent resentment among Afghans living along the border, as well as some of their neighboring Pakistani Pashtun fellow-tribesmen.

Clashes between the Taliban and Pakistan are on the face of it surprising. Pakistani support was instrumental in helping the Taliban take over Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, and during the U.S. and Western intervention in Afghanistan, Pakistani shelter of the Taliban played an important part in allowing them to continue their struggle. Some Western and Afghan government propagandists even accused the Taliban (quite falsely) of being mere Pakistani puppets. The problems that Pakistan has faced since the Taliban victory last year have therefore led to a measure of Schadenfreude in the West.

This is misplaced. For what Afghanistan exemplifies is a wider problem that may reach terrifying dimensions in the years to come: that of societies that while ferociously determined to resist intervention and even influence from outside, are themselves incapable of generating or accepting effective modern state institutions. At the time of writing, another extreme case of this is developing on America’s own doorstep, in Haiti.

The modern history of Afghanistan is not only the history of the defeat of successive attempts at outside intervention — whether British, Soviet, or American. More importantly, it has been the history of the failure of successive Afghan regimes to create an effective modern state.

Thus in the 1920s, the attempt of King Amanullah to bring accelerated modernization led to a revolt of the tribes under the banner of conservative religious reaction. Following his overthrow, a more limited and cautious royal regime was established. In the decades after the Second World War, with the help of U.S. and Soviet aid and modern weaponry, this state expanded its power; but it proved incapable of meeting the increased expectations that it had generated in sections of society.

The collapse of dynastic rule in the 1970s led to the catastrophic Communist attempt at accelerated modernization, resulting in another conservative revolt and the eventual victory of the Taliban. Their overthrow by the United States after 9/11 led to yet another attempt at modernization (this time coupled with an attempt at “democracy”), with the results that we now see before us.

The Taliban have certain advantages denied to previous state-builders: their deep rootedness in the conservative Pashtun rural society of eastern and southern Afghanistan; and the tremendous prestige that accrues from their defeat of an infidel superpower. Their ambitions when it comes to state-building are also limited, which given Afghan realities may also be an advantage. Essentially they want to create a state with basic internal peace, which in cultural terms adheres strictly to their version of conservative Islam.

They are however completely incapable of developing Afghanistan economically. As the population surges and public misery grows, this is bound to undermine their rule. Moreover, their limited form of rule allows other armed militant groups to exist, like the Pakistani Taliban and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which are tolerated by the Taliban because they do not threaten their rule, they do threaten all Afghanistan’s neighbors. For very obvious reasons, however, none of these neighbors is likely to think of intervening directly in Afghanistan to deal with these threats.

The American establishment clearly wishes to forget that Afghanistan ever existed, and since Kabul is 7,000 miles from the United States this could be possible. Americans will however find it more difficult to ignore state collapse in their own backyard. Haiti is in many ways very different from Afghanistan, but the underlying problem is the same: the perennial failure of attempts at modern state-building, both domestic and through outside intervention. And while Haiti, unlike Afghanistan, has not incubated a terrorist threat to its neighbors, like Afghanistan it has generated huge numbers of migrants and great problems of criminality. Haiti over the past 40 years has seen repeated coups and rebellions.

A brief U.S. military intervention in 1994-95 (until 2000 continued as part of a UN mission) failed to solve or even seriously mitigate any of Haiti’s underlying problems . Given its extremely limited numbers, funding, mandate, and timeframe, there was never any serious prospect that it would. Haiti today lacks an effective government and is dominated by criminal gangs whose warfare and crimes are a nightmare for most of the population.

Haiti might on the surface seem a much more suitable area for U.S. military intervention than Afghanistan. There is no terrorist threat from Haiti, so American forces would not face anything like the fanatically determined resistance of the Taliban. Nor would Haitian gangs receive support and protection from outside powers.

But to do any good, a U.S. intervention would have to be in effect permanent, and involve a government that would for the foreseeable future be staffed by Americans. Every short-term effort followed by a “restoration of democracy” has failed and will go on failing.

In principle, the fact that Haiti is a neighbor of the United States should make this possible. The United States cannot simply walk away from Haiti, any more than Pakistan can walk away from Afghanistan. In practice, however, such a long-term U.S. intervention however looks highly improbable, barring a radical transformation in American attitudes and priorities. Especially after the miserable experiences of Afghanistan and Iraq, the American public and Congress are extremely unlikely to accept such an open-ended commitment.

Moreover, the creation of what would in effect be a permanent colonial government would not only challenge contemporary ideas of national sovereignty, it would radically contradict the present largely bipartisan U.S. doctrine of a world divided between democracies and hostile autocracies.

And that is indeed a key point about the examples of Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and elsewhere: the complete irrelevance of U.S. (as previously Soviet) ideological nostrums to these societies. Both democratic and authoritarian regimes have failed to create effective states in these countries, and on the record so far will continue to fail.

As climate change, coupled with population growth poverty and water shortages, undermines more and more vulnerable states around the world, this problem of failed states in recalcitrant societies is likely to grow, until it becomes a dire threat to all organized and developed societies — once again, irrespective of whether these states are democracies or autocracies.

Above all, such failed or failing states are likely to generate immense waves of migration — as we see already in western Africa and Central America. As the example of Afghan migration to Pakistan indicates, this is not simply a problem for the West, but for every state around the world. The most ferocious anti-immigrant (as opposed to security) border in the world is probably that created by India to stop migrants from Bangladesh, more than 1,200 of whom have been killed by Indian security forces over the past 20 years. Once again, this is a problem that transcends ideological systems, to which neither democracies nor autocracies have found answers that manage to be both effective and reasonably humane, and which demands the combined attention of the international community.

Judging by U.S. behavior during the Cold War, American administrations will be tempted to meddle in these failed states for geopolitical reasons, picking one tribe or gang as anti-Chinese or anti-Russian and then blessing them as “democratic,” as President Reagan notoriously blessed the Afghan Mujahedin. This will make local conflicts even worse. Instead, we should recognize that effective statehood is a fragile thing, and that all countries that have achieved it have a common interest in defending it. In the future, this will also mean finding ways to cooperate in managing the problems emanating from places like Haiti and Afghanistan.

01.09.2023

Jamil Jan Kochai

The New York Times

8 Jan 2023

Last September, 13 months after the Taliban takeover, my family and I flew into Kabul one morning as many of our relatives were on the cusp of fleeing the city. We hoped to see them before they parted.

My uncle Fawad and cousin Hashmat picked me up from the airport parking lot. The dire state of the economy became evident almost as soon as we entered the city. Groups of children rushed our car, begging for money or food. Poverty in Kabul has been severe for decades. The billions of dollars that flooded into the country during the American occupation rarely reached impoverished Afghans, as income inequality grew throughout the years. And yet, at least in Kabul, I had never witnessed such wanton desperation on the streets.

Children waited at bakeries for a single loaf of bread. There were makeshift markets filled with desperate, newly impoverished families, selling mattresses and furniture and their own clothing. Fawad and Hashmat — both young and unmarried — bemoaned the collapse of the economy, wondering why America had cut a deal with the Taliban only to punish everyday Afghans with their brutal economic sanctions. “We used to say, ‘Deny us bread but give us peace,’ but now that we have peace, we realize that we need the bread, too,” Hashmat remarked and laughed.

Four years had passed since my last visit to Afghanistan, and so much had changed. I had 100 questions about the American sanctions, the fighting in Panjshir, the restrictions on women and the future of the country. My family members in Kabul felt hopeless. Suicide bombings continued to maim and kill in the cities. Children were dying of malnutrition in underfunded hospitals. The Taliban had shut down high schools for girls — even though Islamic scholars across Afghanistan have criticized the decision — and many of my young female relatives felt despondent about their futures. The occupation had ended, but the aftereffects of the long, American war were still ravaging the country.

For many Afghans, life has become untenable. There is little work. The costs of food, gas and everyday goods have skyrocketed. The countryside suffers from flood or drought — side effects of global warming caused by large industrial nations. And groups affiliated with the so-called Islamic State continue to carry out attacks on vulnerable communities. Although many Afghans choose to struggle through these incredible adversities, others have been forced to flee.

In 1982, during the Soviet-Afghan war, my parents escaped Soviet bombings in Logar Province, south of Kabul, and fled across the border into Pakistan. A decade later, I was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, as civil war raged in Afghanistan. Shortly thereafter, my family and I immigrated to the United States, integrating ourselves into one of the largest refugee communities in the world.

More than 40 years have passed since the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, leading to the deaths of as many as two million Afghans. And yet, to this day, the Afghan people have been seemingly condemned to perpetual displacement. War after war, invasion after invasion, Afghans are still seeking asylum.

Fawad dreams of escaping Afghanistan. He has been unemployed for years, living off odd jobs and funds sent to him by relatives in America. He was planning a trip to Brazil, where he would begin an arduous journey through South and Central America to eventually reach the United States.

According to a report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more than six million Afghans have been driven out of their homes or their country by conflict, violence and poverty. Legal routes into safer countries like the United States have dried up as the international community continues to isolate and disengage with the Taliban government. Many Afghans, including my own family members, feel compelled to take dangerous pathways through South American jungles, Eastern European woods or deadly waterways.

Journeying through the Darién Gap between North and South America has become an increasingly popular pathway for Afghan migrants unable to attain a visa for America. My mother warned Fawad about the dangers of the Darién Gap, but he wasn’t dissuaded. “There’s nothing for me here,” he said. “I have to leave.”

In our rented apartment in Kart-e-Char, a neighborhood in western Kabul, we were met by my mother’s sisters: Nafeesa, who lived nearby, and Marijan, who had traveled from our home village in Logar. My aunt Nafeesa is tall and stout and quick-witted. From a young age, I learned not to tease her because her jokes packed a wallop. Nafeesa and her husband, Qayoum, a slim bureaucrat from Logar, lived in the Kart-e-Naw neighborhood of Kabul with four brilliant daughters, all of whom were in danger of losing out on an education.

Her eldest daughter, a 14-year-old, could no longer attend her classes because the Taliban had barred girls from high school. As of Dec. 20, the Taliban banned Afghan women from all higher educational institutions as well.

Nafeesa and Qayoum refused to give up on their daughter’s education. They paid for online English courses and signed her up at the local madrasa. Qayoum supported his daughter’s dreams of one day enrolling at a university. Now he contemplated fleeing the country.

“Let me tell you,” he said. “You never know what God has planned.”

The night before the fall of the Afghan government in August 2021, Qayoum spent hours at his office, filling out biometric forms for last-minute passports — though he hadn’t been paid in months. By 2 in the morning, he had completed about 150 passports.

With the Taliban conquering provinces throughout Afghanistan, Qayoum was dubious about the late-night assignment, but he couldn’t imagine that the entire Afghan government was about to abandon Kabul. In the morning, unemployed for the first time in a decade, he saw the streets filled with Afghans. “The Taliban are coming,” some of them screamed. President Ashraf Ghani had fled, and the Taliban were entering Kabul.

Afghans were so panicked, Qayoum recalled, that their vehicles veered left and right and drove directly into oncoming traffic. Several accidents jammed the roads and families were abandoning their cars to run on foot. Everyone was headed to the airport. Qayoum, too, was struck by panic. He thought he might be shot in the streets.

Fortunately, the Taliban didn’t come for Qayoum. There were no public executions in Kabul — as had occurred in Kabul during the Afghan civil wars in the 1990s — and Qayoum’s fear of total urban warfare didn’t come to fruition. The Taliban carried out raids to search for weapons all throughout the city. When they arrived at Qayoum’s home, they scoured his rooms, found nothing suspicious, and left his family alone. “In the beginning, the Taliban seemed different,” Qayoum said. “They didn’t bother people. They promised to forgive their enemies. They promised not to close schools. I thought things might work out.”

The promises, however, didn’t last.

During my last days in Kabul, my 30-year-old uncle Fawad, the former bodyguard, was on the cusp of fleeing Afghanistan. He sat before me one evening, quieter than ever, rising up every few minutes to go outside and smoke a cigarette. He seemed anxious. Fawad wasn’t in the best shape. He had knee problems and hip pain and weak lungs and a terrible temper that often got him into trouble. But the worst part might have been that he was traveling alone. You could see it in his face. He didn’t want to leave home.

My 24-year-old cousin Hashmat felt compelled to stay and help his parents on their farm in Logar, a largely rural province in eastern Afghanistan. He currently worked as a taxi driver, a farmer, a carpenter, a mechanic and a merchant selling homegrown produce. His two older brothers, Jawed and Nadeem, studied at universities in Kabul but never found employment in their respective fields. Jawed sold produce in Logar and Nadeem worked illegally in Istanbul. When Hashmat finished high school, he decided not to attend college and started working to support his family. For him, a college education just wasn’t practical. He needed income, and he needed it fast.

Throughout my time in Logar, Hashmat drove me around and told stories about the war. He pointed out crumbling bases and locations of recent battles. It felt surreal to return to my family’s village after so many years. The last time I had visited Logar in 2017, firefights and bombings were so constant, I only had a few minutes to visit the graves of my relatives. The local village market and all of the roads had been eerily empty. But Hashmat assured me that Logar had become peaceful again. The roads and the market were packed, and everywhere I walked, I met old relatives and friends.

Hashmat was happy about the tenuous peace in Logar. Over the last several years, he had lived through the brunt of the American occupation, dodging bullets in fields, avoiding corpses on roads, all while attempting to appease the Afghan government forces that haunted his village. His house had been scarred with bullets and severely damaged by Afghan commandos. He faced harassment at checkpoints and was once severely beaten by militiamen. He used to watch the sky, wondering if an American bomb might fall on his head. But now he could walk in his own fields again. The constant firefights had all but ceased. He was no longer afraid of driving produce from Logar to Kabul, a trip that had once been a death wish.

While Hashmat seemed cautiously optimistic about the condition of his country, his older brother, Nadeem, was determined not to return. He had fled Afghanistan in 2020, at what my family recalls as the height of the violence in Logar, and had been living illegally in Istanbul since. It was an arduous and suffocating existence. He worked all day in a factory and then spent his evenings cooped up in a small apartment with several other Afghan refugees. The Turkish police were targeting Afghans for deportation. Nadeem was planning to smuggle himself into Europe again.

The last time Nadeem had made the attempt, he was captured at the Bulgarian border by Turkish police officers. They brutally beat him, tortured him and stole his possessions. In a few days he intended to take a new route with a new smuggler, and he assured his family he was going to make it. His mother, Marijan, wasn’t so certain. She had lived almost her entire life in Logar and had survived two occupations, three wars and the collapse of six different governments. And yet, she could never imagine leaving Logar. “I just want him home,” she said. “It’s where he belongs.”

My aunt Nafeesa and her husband Qayoum had their hearts set on England. They had recently received good news from the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy program in Britain. There seemed to be a real possibility of relocation.

By the time I touched back down in Sacramento, Fawad was on his way to Iran, Nadeem was crossing the Turkish border, Qayoum was waiting for a call in Pakistan and Marijan had returned to Logar.

Scattered across the world, my mother’s family waits for visas and court dates and smugglers. They trek through woods and rush past borders in a desperate attempt to escape the violence and poverty generated by the same countries they hope will accept them. For now, my mother sits by her phone and prays for word of their arrival.

Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of the novel, “99 Nights in Logar,” and the short story collection, “The Haunting of Hajji Hotak,” a finalist for the National Book Award.

01.02.2023

Murtaza Hussain

The Intercept
January 1 2023

IN THE EARLY days of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, alleviating the plight of Afghan women under the Taliban was a major part of the campaign to sell the conflict to the American public — and eventually to justify an open-ended military occupation. Whether the United States did much to help Afghan women is a debatable point, largely dependent on which women you ask.

Yet there is no question that today, under the Taliban, a young, educated, and urbanized generation of Afghan women who enjoyed a period of opportunity over the past 20 years is experiencing a catastrophic attack on their basic rights.

The Taliban’s recent decision to ban girls’ education past the sixth grade is only the latest outrage to be inflicted on Afghan women, and another step in a campaign to drag Afghan society back to the climate of medieval repression that reigned during the last Taliban government of the 1990s.

There is one thing that could easily be done to ease the suffering of Afghans under Taliban rule: giving a home to Afghan refugees.

This unhappy situation was not inevitable. There are ideological divisions inside the Taliban, particularly between its leaders who spent the war years abroad mingling in foreign capitals, and those who spent it fighting a grueling insurgency inside the country.

While the Taliban government showed initial hints of pragmatism upon coming to power, today it has become clear that the extremist faction of its leadership is in control and willing to sacrifice the well-being of Afghans and the goodwill of the international community to fulfill its ideological mission.

The United States has scant leverage left to change the calculus of an organization so dead set on its goals. If the words about human rights and women’s empowerment that justified the war for 20 years had any meaning at all, there is one thing that could easily be done to ease the suffering of Afghans under Taliban rule, without risking more harm in the process: giving a home to Afghan refugees.

Last week, Congress failed to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, a measure that would have given the tens of thousands of Afghans who escaped to the U.S. after the fall of Kabul a path to permanent legal residency. The measure had been supported by everyone from former senior U.S. military officials, who issued a letter calling protection of the refugees a “moral imperative,” to human rights organizations. The Afghan Adjustment Act, however, was left out of the omnibus spending bill passed at the end of the year, reportedly due to opposition from 89-year-old Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley.

These Afghans arrived in the U.S. on flights hastily arranged by the U.S. military as the Taliban marched on Kabul last summer. They remain in the U.S. on a precarious legal status known as temporary humanitarian parole that places them at risk of deportation.

Many of these refugee families include those who fought with the U.S. during the war or supported the U.S.-backed government — making them and their families prime targets of the new Taliban regime.

The failure to pass the law also leaves Afghans who worked with the U.S. military but remain trapped in Afghanistan today out in the cold, denying them eligibility for Special Immigrant Visas that could provide a legal hope of immigrating to the U.S. if they escape the country.

If they are not provided a path to permanent status and are thus left to their fate, the ex-U.S. military officials warned in their letter, in future conflicts, “potential allies will remember what happens now with our Afghan allies.”

THE TALIBAN’S RECENT decision to kick women out of school has been met with outrage by the international community and international Muslim religious figures, but most of all from ordinary Afghans. Many Afghans, including many men, have staged inspiring walkout protests from their classes to denounce the measure.

Having done more than anyone to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the U.S. presence in their country, these are the people who deserve whatever support can be provided to them and their families. In the absence of that support, their future is likely to be grim.

Donald Trump’s recent anti-immigrant presidency and the general tenor of Republican politics means that any effort to resettle refugees — those here today and those who may arrive in the future — is inevitably going to be a political fight. That said, a Democratic president will be in office for at least the next two years and will have an opportunity to use their political capital to right an obvious wrong that was done to Afghans by the U.S. — particularly if, as seems likely, the Taliban continue down a course of provocative repression against Afghan women and minorities.

Amid the terrible events now unfolding, it is worth remembering that, for a few months last year, when they appeared to send the world’s most powerful military into a scrambling retreat, the Afghan Taliban enjoyed a strange kind of recognition — maybe even popularity — around the world. Everyone loves a winner, and the triumphant march of the Taliban into Kabul was greeted warmly by everyone from former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, who said that the group was “breaking the shackles of slavery,” to the American alt-right who projected their own idealized vision of hypermasculinity onto the new social-media-savvy militants.

Even mainstream conservative politicians like Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., claimed at the time that the Taliban was “more legitimate than the last government in Afghanistan or the current government here” — a statement made with apparent relish at the humiliation of a sitting Democratic president who presided over the final defeat.

The U.S. has done a great deal of harm to the Afghan people, using their country as a proxy battlefield, subjecting them to sanctions, and killing them in huge numbers during the war. The least it can do today is give safe haven to those, particularly women, fleeing the collapse of the shoddy government in Kabul that the U.S. government had propped up, and who are now suffering a harrowing attack on their basic freedoms by a Taliban regime that grows more draconian with each passing day.

Murtaza Hussain is a reporter at The Intercept who focuses on national security and foreign policy. He has appeared on CNN, BBC, MSNBC, and other news outlets.

01.02.2023

The Guardian

Editorial

2 Jan 2023

Families are in desperate straits, the security situation is worsening – but the Taliban’s priority is punishing half the population

The Taliban’s relentless campaign against women is not only a matter of rights, but of survival. It is not only cruel and oppressive, but deadly. In a country already on its knees, where 97% of the population live in poverty, two-thirds need humanitarian assistance, 20 million face acute hunger and parents sell kidneys to feed their families, it has made life still more desperate. By banning women from working for NGOs, they are denying essential, life-saving services to women and children. Almost all the large aid agencies have suspended operations and the United Nations has paused some “time-critical” programmes. Major world powers have urged the Taliban to immediately reverse their “reckless and dangerous” decision, while UN agency chiefs described female staff as key to every aspect of the humanitarian response.

In many cases, these staff – who number in the tens of thousands – are also the only breadwinners in their households. Denying them their salaries ensures that women, children (and, incidentally, men too) will starve. The Taliban’s earlier decision to bar women from universities – and reportedly even primary education – means that no more female doctors or teachers will be trained. Teenage girls have already been kept out of school for almost a year and a half.

The Taliban strove to create the impression of a more moderate “Taliban 2.0” before their return to power, promising not to repeat the cruelties of the 1990s regime. But the new Taliban look more and more like the old one. If there are more moderate figures in the ranks, they are unable to prevail. Last month, there was the first public execution since their return to power. Women have been among those punished in public floggings. If the Taliban’s priorities were not so horrific, they would be bizarre: this viciousness appears to be all they care about, despite the country’s parlous state in every possible regard.

Relations with Islamabad are breaking down as cross-border attacks by the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) increase. In December, members of the TTP – separate to but allied with the Afghan Taliban – overpowered guards at a counter-terrorism facility in Pakistan and seized control. As the security situation deteriorates, Islamic State has claimed responsibility for attacks on the Pakistani and Russian embassies in Kabul. The Chinese ambassador ordered all nationals to leave the country after gunmen attacked a hotel used by Chinese businessmen. These developments are not merely a diplomatic problem for the Taliban; hopes of income to help replace the vanished foreign aid that shored up the country for so long have disappeared. Now the last props are being removed as aid operations halt, at terrible cost.

In these grim times, women have demonstrated extraordinary courage and resilience in challenging the Taliban’s harsh rule. Men have taken a stand beside them. They deserve not only admiration, but support. The UK did extremely poorly at evacuating Afghans before Kabul fell last year. As of early December, not one person had been accepted and evacuated under the Home Office’s Afghan citizens resettlement scheme, which was launched in January for those at risk because they had worked for or were affiliated with the British government. Afghans, and especially those brave enough to challenge this regime, need more than words from the British government.

Roxanna Shapour · 28 Dec 2022

Roxanna Shapour • Rama Mirzada

Afghanistan Analysts Network

28 Dec 2022

Sixteen months since its takeover of Afghanistan, the Emirate has imposed sweeping new restrictions on women’s lives, kicking female students out of universities and education centres, and banning women from working for Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs). The bans have come on top of the continuing closure of girls’ high schools, the banning of female civil servants from offices, curbs on women’s independent travel and what they can wear, and denying them access to parks, gyms and public bath houses. In this second report in a three-part series exploring how Afghan women’s lives have changed since the Taleban takeover, Roxanna Shapour and Rama Mirzada consider the responses of Afghan women and their male relatives to the Taleban’s cataclysmic encroachment on their rights: How do you keep going when you have no hope?

The first report in this series, How Can a Bird Fly On Only One Wing? Afghan women speak about life under the Islamic Emirate, published in November, surveyed the consequences of Taleban policies which marginalise women and erase them from public life – on household economies, women’s dreams of education and personal and professional growth, and on the power dynamics within families. Many women described how their independence had been undermined, along with their sense of self-worth and self-confidence, and how they were now struggling to maintain a sense of personhood. For a timeline of the main restrictions on the lives of women and girls since the Taleban came back to power, see footnote 1.

This second report focuses on how women are responding to the onslaughts on their rights and freedoms. We spoke to 19 women living in 15 provinces, all of whom were working or had been working before the takeover. The interviews were conducted in June and July 2022. Their voices have only become more pertinent as Taleban restrictions have tightened through the autumn and into winter, affecting more and more areas of their lives. The interviewees provide significant insights into how women are trying to navigate this ever more difficult landscape, where they often feel no hope, and for some, receive little support from their families. The interviews have been edited for clarity and flow. The names used aren’t their real names.

Where there is no hope

In the summer of 2021, we asked our interviewees how they were coping with the constraints placed on their lives since the Taleban came to power and how they felt about their future prospects as women in Afghanistan. What resonated most was an overwhelming sense of hopelessness and dejection, a feeling of being strangers in their own country, and a lack of options reaching into the lives of generations of Afghan women to come.

The Taleban say they have fought for 20 years to free Afghanistan. When they say this, I feel like we aren’t from Afghanistan, that we are strangers who have come from another place. I am deeply saddened when I think about these things, I try to give hope to other people, but it is impossible for me to remain strong; I always cry because I have no other options.

Nilab, 24-year-old single Baluch school principal, Nimruz province

People are disappointed because the Taleban don’t compromise, and their government is not recognised yet. The girls are hopeless and weary. They’re very talented, hardworking and don’t want to waste even a day of their lives, but now they’re staying at home and thinking that the school gates might never reopen to them.

Ghuncha, 39-year-old married Tajik former civil servant, Ghor province

I have no hope that men and women in Afghanistan will be able to go to work freely. I don’t think this group [Taleban] will ever stop condemning us and I can’t imagine a time when we’ll be able to walk in Kabul freely.

Khwaga, 32-year-old single Pashtun protestor and former civil servant, Kabul City

I am disillusioned about living in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, giving birth to a girl is a big mistake because there are so many problems for them here.

Kamala, 29-year-old married Pashtun, Kunar province

Increasingly rigorous enforcement

We asked the interviewees if there had been any changes in how the Taleban enforced restrictions on women. While most reported that enforcement had increased, their experiences varied according to where they live, but also what had been ‘normal’ social practice before the Taleban takeover. The NGO worker in Nuristan said not much had changed because women in her area covered their faces and going out with a mahram even before the fall of the Islamic Republic and therefore there was no need for vigorous enforcement.

One point to note here is that, unlike other parts of the Muslim world, when Afghans refer to ‘hijab’, it is a reference to clothing that is bulky and covers both head and body and possibly face, either the chadori (burqa), which covers the face, or the abaya, with or without a niqab, or in some areas, an Iranian-style chador. When our interviewees speak of having to wear ‘hijab’, therefore, they are referring to garments which cover the head, the shape of the body and possibly the face. In Afghanistan, all women and even very young girls always wear headscarves.

In many areas of the country, the picture that emerged is a gradual hardening of enforcement, such as in Kunarwhere Kamala lives:

In the beginning, there weren’t many restrictions for women going shopping. Now they warn women when they don’t have a mahram or because of their hijab.^[3] They also warn women who work with NGOs to have a mahram when they travel to other areas. Amr bil Maruf (the virtue and vice police) is active here and claim they’re defending women’s rights, but actually, they cannot because in the past, women could visit [government] offices to solve their problems.

According to 28-year-old married Uzbek former teacher, Sima, who lives in Samangan, it was still possible in summer 2022 to move around without a mahram in Mazar-e Sharif where her mother lives:

During the first six months, there was little enforcement [of rules], but now it’s very strict. I was going [from Samangan] to Mazar without a chadori [burqa] or mahram and no one told me anything, but in the past two months, we haven’t been able to go anywhere without a chadori, or abaya, and a mahram. Today [in Mazar], I went to the hospital with my mother in a taxi. No one told us anything, but it is impossible to do this where I live.

38-year-old former civil servant Khalida recounted her experiences in Kabul:

The enforcement of the restrictions has increased. The Taleban tell me to cover my face and hair whenever I go out. A few days ago, in front of Gulbahar Centre, a Taleb told me that God would not forgive me. I asked why? He said that, because my face was not covered, all non-mahram men could see it. Another time. I was waiting for my friend at Haji Yaqoob Square so we could go to a book fair together. The Taleban came several times to ask me why I was standing there, who I was, and who else was with me. Life is strict for women here. The Taleban try to show the world that nothing [bad] is happening in Afghanistan. The Taleban said that women [government] employees must introduce their husbands or brothers to work in their place. They know this is impossible because everyone’s field of study and work experience is different. They just want to marginalise women and trick people.

For most women we interviewed, fear was a powerful motivator for compliance, and rumours fuelled anxieties. 28-year-old Tamana, a married Tajik primary school principal told us that while they had not witnessed strict enforcement in her area in Takhar province, news reports and rumours were causing women to restrict themselves:

I don’t wear short clothing at school, even though only my [female] colleagues are there because we are afraid of spies. Three months ago, my baby got sick and my husband, mother-in-law and I went to Taloqan. We passed through three checkpoints. The Taleban asked about our mahram and our relationships with each other. One of my friends told me that on the way to Taloqan, the driver lied to the Taleban at a checkpoint and told them that [the woman in his taxi] was his wife and that the Talebs asked him to kiss her [to prove it].

The Taleban have not restricted us in my area from going to the bazaar, but the fear lies in our hearts. We hear that the Taleban have beaten women in other places, but it hasn’t happened here yet. That’s why we are afraid. Yesterday one of my friends went to Khwaja Bahawuddin. She says the Taleban have banned black abayas and ordered all women there to wear the chadori. There is a change in my clothing too. I now wear a very long chapan [coat] and a chadori. I used to wear a shorter chapan because I don’t feel comfortable wearing long clothes. My previous clothes were also modest, but this year we were ordered to wear long chapans.

28-year-old Najia, a married Pashtun NGO director living in Nangrahar province, told us that while not much had changed for women in her area since the Taleban takeover, she had started to place restrictions on her own movements:

I used to go places in a rickshaw, but now I don’t because I’m afraid, even though no one has said anything about it. I now have a mahram with me because of my own fear, not because it is enforced. The women here can go shopping as before. Women were already wearing the chadori, so there hasn’t been much change in what we wear. I still wear an abaya and niqab now as [I did] in the past.

24-year-old Nilab recounted how the Taleban in Nimruz stop wedding ceremonies where music is being played:

Women must wear hijab and men must grow beards. People obey these restrictions because they’re afraid of being arrested and punished. The restrictions have increased. They can’t bear even the sounds of people’s happiness. When there is a [wedding] ceremony, the Taleban arrive suddenly and order people to turn the music off or they arrest the men of the family.

The interviews also provide insights into enforcement tactics. In many areas, the Taleban use mosques as a platform to deliver messages about restrictions on women to their menfolk, urging them to ensure the women in their families comply or prepare to face reprisals. Nilab also told us that enforcement had become less visible in her area in Nimruzand that the Taleban were delivering messages in mosques and verbal cautions to men:

They’ve been enforcing the restrictions from the beginning, but now there is Amr bil Maruf – they monitor the clothing of the students and teachers near schools. A month ago, they stopped us going shopping without a niqab and mahram. They told the shopkeepers not to let women without a mahram into their shops. Now [visible] enforcement has decreased, but they still monitor us from afar. Women can go shopping without a mahram, but if they’re not wearing a niqab and a big chador or if they’re wearing makeup, the Taleban find out where they live and threaten their guardians.^[4] The Taleban have advised men at the mosques that they should not permit their women to go out of the house, go shopping or go to any public place without them. They said at the mosque that if they see a woman alone and without [proper] hijab, it will be a problem for her guardian. The Taleban also warned taxi drivers not to allow women without a mahram into their cars.

At least in some areas, there do not seem to be serious consequences for violators. For example, 20-year-old unmarried Pashtun midwife Usha who lives in Uruzgan province said no one in her area was following the rules, and she herself was carrying on very much as before:

The Taleban don’t stop women to advise them because they make their announcements in the mosques when men go for prayers, or in the offices where they tell the managers about the orders. For instance, in the hospital there were some rooms used by both males and females, and the Taleban told the director to separate them. It was announced in two or three mosques that women must not go out alone or even with two or three other women, but no one obeys, and the Taleban have not enforced it. I’ve gone to the bazaar, my friend’s home, and taught classes; the Taleban have not said anything to me yet.

Parvana, 26-year-old unmarried Tajik schoolteacher from Panjshir province said that restrictions had increased, but went on the talk about how restrictions were being driven by the ongoing conflict in the province:

I think the enforcement of the restrictions on women has increased and girls cannot go to school or university and women cannot go to work. The Taleban say the situation is normal and there’s peace here, but actually there isn’t. There is fighting in Panjshir, so families are afraid to send their daughters to university for fear of the fighting, car explosions and rape on the way. The university is almost two hours away, so families don’t send their girls – or their boys – because the situation is unstable.

Some interviewees, such as the 35-year-old Hazara NGO worker, Manija, who lives in Mazar-e Sharif city,reported a scaling back of enforcement since the early days of the takeover:

In the beginning, the enforcement of the restrictions was very serious; now they’re not too strict on women. I don’t know the reason. In the early days, they were rude; for instance, they stopped cars by pounding on them and shouting impolitely. They asked why the women were sitting in the car’s front seats. I don’t know why they’re more polite now. They used a wooden baton to show women to cover their hair and faces. They didn’t look women in the eye when they told them this, but now they look us in the eye and I feel that slowly they too like to see women [outside]. I wear a chadori or an abaya and a mask or no mask and I go out without a mahram. No one has said anything to me yet.

However, 25-year-old protestor, Kowkab, reported a different story from her sister who was at university in Mazar:

In Mazar, girls who live in the [university] hostel cannot go home because the Taleban don’t allow them to travel without a mahram. In the past, female students did everything by themselves, including travel. I know the majority of the female students have no mahram.

There does appear to be some room for negotiation, at least in some areas or workplaces, such as for Usha the midwife we interviewed in Uruzgan province:

I can move freely and have no problem, though there are a few restrictions on women’s clothing; for instance, the Taleban ordered us to observe hijab inside the hospital and offices; no one is following these orders yet, and no one has been forced to obey them. When the Taleban ordered female staff to observe hijab in the hospital, we told them we can’t wear an abaya inside the hospital because cleaners wash the floors with chlorine and an abaya would get dirty on the wet floor. Now, we’re wearing the clothes we wore in the past, such as shalwar kamiz and our white lab coats.

The Taleban also ordered the female staff to come to work with a mahram. The hospital told the Taleban that female staff work separately from the men, so there is no need for a mahram, and they’re not necessary because the hospital does not allow them to enter the women’s ward. Female staff aren’t allowed to come to the hospital in a taxi, rickshaw or on foot, even if another woman accompanies them. They must either come with a mahram or use the hospital transport. Female patients aren’t allowed in the hospital without a mahram. The hospital announced this order, but no one follows it and there has been no serious enforcement. For me, there’s no change. I use the hospital transport. I wear the clothes I wore during the Republic in the hospital, and a chadori outside.

Are men in the family supportive?

When we turned to how the men in their families viewed Taleban restrictions on women, nearly all respondents said their close male relatives were generally opposed to the restrictions. This was particularly the case when it came to the closure of girls’ schools, to which most male family members appeared to be unanimously opposed. Many interviewees, however, said their extended families viewed the Taleban’s restrictions positively. The interviewees, themselves, often broadened the conversation to include the socio-cultural dynamics at play when it comes to women’s rights.

Former civil servant Ghuncha, who lives with her disabled husband and two of her seven children in Ghor province, said that men, particularly in rural areas, were happy about the new restrictions on women:

They say it’s good for women to observe the hijab and good that women are forbidden to move around. In the first years [of the Republic], no one liked women being present at meetings, but [gradually] there was a big positive change in women’s roles. So, now, men are very happy again with these restrictions because they like a government that doesn’t give any authority to women, that makes women observe the hijab, and keeps them at home to do housework and not talk loudly. This is what men want, especially the ones in the villages. My husband thinks otherwise. He thinks educated women should serve society and help other women. He says that having a mahram is not bad, but what about those women who don’t have one? My husband is against school closures because he thinks society needs women to work in different sectors such as education, the military, and health.

The 28-year-old former teacher, Sima, from Samangan province, told us that while her husband was opposed to the restrictions, her own parents’ family were in favour of them:

All men like their wives to observe hijab and stay at home [but] my husband didn’t oppose me, he had no problem when I was going out without a mahram. He’s not happy with the new restrictions, but [the men in] my parents’ family are happy. My husband and I always worry about our children’s education. He says they should be able to study and become independent in the future. My husband wishes for me to have a job so I can help him manage our expenses.

Tamana lives in Takhar province with her husband’s family, who are in favour of the rules on the hijab and mahram, but would like to see older girls in education:

My husband’s family agrees with the hijab and mahram rules for women, but they’re not in favour of closing schools and keeping girls out of education. Families have different mindsets. For example, my father’s family was not too restricted when it came to the hijab and mahram. I had permission to participate in all programmes, but my husband’s family is not like that and now I am 25 per cent more restricted than I was before [I got married].

24-year-old single Nilab lives with her family in Nimruz province she believes that even those, like her father, who disapprove of the restrictions stay quiet about it for fear of Taleban reprisals and peer pressure from the neighbours and family members:

In general, Afghan society is traditional, the education rate is low, especially in my area where the majority of men support these restrictions. Those who are educated and know these restrictions are no good have no right to speak. If they speak, Taleban intelligence will arrest them for speaking against the Emirate. My father doesn’t support these restrictions, but he keeps silent to save himself from public embarrassment. He says the hijab we had before was perfect and if the Taleban’s government is Islamic then they should ensure women’s security, instead of restricting them.

The insurmountable challenge of finding a mahram

Making mahrams obligatory was particularly controversial among our interviewees; for them and their male relatives, it has proved an intractable logistics challenge, as 20-year-old Usha, who lives in Uruzgan province with her parents, eight sisters and a younger brother, explained:

My father agrees with the hijab rules and is happy about them. He says girls must study as much as they want, but use the hijab everywhere they go, even if they go abroad, because it is in Islam and in the Quran. My father is against the obligatory mahram. He says he cannot be in two places at the same time.

I was in Kabul when I learned about the obligatory mahram from my colleagues at the hospital. There were female patients who didn’t have a mahram, so they were asking other women with a mahram to tell the hospital they were from the same family. I don’t think the Taleban can enforce this restriction because there are so many patients and I don’t think all of them can bring a mahram. Most bring their small sons with them. Sometimes, when I have something to do and want to go two or three hours late to the hospital, it’s a big hassle. I have to first find out if my father is free to come with me. It would be difficult for me to obey the Taleban’s order that women must be accompanied by a mahram, even if I wanted to. In my family, my mother and I both have jobs. If my father comes with me, then who should go with my mother?

Taking a mahram along to work was also an added a financial burden for Manija in Mazar-e Sharif, given her already strained household economy:

It’s difficult for me to work because of the mahram [rule]. I must take my husband or my son with me to work, but this is so difficult to manage financially. The office doesn’t pay the travel cost of my mahram so I have to pay for it myself and if I don’t have a mahram, they stop me on the way.

Even Tamana who was able to go to work without a mahram because the school she taught at was so close to her home, reported that the requirement was limiting her professional options and the employment prospects and education of other women:

There’s a big change in women’s education and employment. In the past, the offices were recruiting women, but they don’t hire us anymore and women who work for most NGOs must have a mahram in the office. I don’t go to work with a mahram because the school is near home. My colleagues don’t come to work with a mahram either, but we can’t travel to [the provincial capital] Taloqan [for work] without a mahram. There are many checkpoints on the way and they check each woman’s mahram. I’ve worked in many offices in the past. I was going to the districts and provinces to participate in seminars and conferences without any problems. Now, that is impossible.

Finding ways to cope

In the end, after the initial shock of the takeover abated, uncertainty over the new rules gave way to resignation that they were there to stay and would, if anything increase. Still, most of our interviewees have devised at least some coping mechanisms to at least be seen to stay within the rules and minimise risk.

24-year-old unmarried Tajik, Pakiza, from Paktika province recounted how she and her colleagues complied with the rules at the NGO where she works:

In the beginning, no one was going out for fear of being beaten by the Taleban. After a month, the women started going out. The Taleban here aren’t very serious about hijab but are serious about mahrams. In the beginning, the Taleban warned women to observe hijab and take a mahram. They warned me three times to always observe hijab and have a mahram. Now, when I have a [work] meeting with them, I wear an abaya and niqab and go with a mahram, but otherwise, when I travel to another province or to the districts, I wear my own clothes and a chadori. In the first meeting, the Taleban said that men and women in our office could work together in the same room, but there had to be a distance of one metre [between them]. When we have a meeting with them, there is a one metre distance between men and woman and our mahrams wait outside.

Similarly, Nilab told us how the Taleban in Nimruz had first demanded she send a male colleague to the Department of Education to file her paperwork, but finally relented:

The Taleban’s restrictions on women have affected my mental health. I can’t bear them. We have been ordered to wear a niqab or chadori, but the weather in Nimruz is so hot, when my face is covered, it feels like fire is falling on me like rain. In the past, I could go to [government] offices freely, but when I first went to the education department, they didn’t let me in. They told me I must send a man to process my work, so I sent a male school employee, but he couldn’t process the work properly or accurately. Now, we have permission to enter the office, but we have to call the Head of Education in advance. The Taleban guards let us enter after checking our hijab.

The latest edicts

As Khadija, a 42-year-old married midwife from Kandahar, explained, women have experienced the new restrictions to their lives not in a vacuum, but when they were struggling as well, with the calamitous crash to the economy, fear of worsening poverty and in a climate of uncertainty.

The situation is unacceptable, prices are very high, the fighting might start again and there are no jobs. People are anxious and everyone is waiting for what might happen next.

42-year-old married Pashtun midwife Khadija, Kandahar province

Khadija’s fears of what might happen next were not unfounded. This month two more blows have come in quick succession – to women’s potential to earn money and to any hope that education could be a way forward for some. On 20 December 2022, the Taleban barred female students from universities and on 24 December, they banned women from working for NGOs.

The decree denying Afghan women a university education was signed by Taleban amir Hibatullah Akhundzada, “with immediate effect.” As so many times since the Taleban takeover in August 2021, women in several cities across the country took to the streets to demand their rights (see here and here). The protests were forcefully quashed by the Taleban (see for example this video in Herat where the Taleban used water canon to disperse the protestors and this report from Kabul). This time, however, the girls were joined by some male students, who walked out of classrooms and exams in solidarity with their female counterparts (see for example here and here). At Nangrahar University, male students joined women protesters and at Kandahar’s Mirwais Nika University, they were beaten and fired upon by the Taleban for protesting. More than 60 university professors and lecturers have resigned in protest. The ban was strongly condemned by the United Nations, Western capitals (see here), Muslim-majority countries (see here) and even the Grand Imam of Egypt’s Al-Azhar, the Sunni Muslim world’s leading centre of learning and jurisprudence, Ahmed El-Tayeb who slammed the move as contravening sharia. He urged the Taleban to reverse their decision (see here).

Afghan women were still trying to come to terms with this devastating blow when, four days later, the Emirate announced it was barring women from working for national and international NGOs (see here and here). For many Afghan families, the salaries of mothers and daughters working for NGOs has been a lifeline, keeping the household economy afloat and putting food on the table. For Afghan women, this ban was also a mortal blow to their hopes that the situation might improve over time. It looks to be a decisive move by the Taleban to demonstrate their resolve in removing women from the public sphere altogether. Many of the major international NGOs have called the ban a red line and suspended operations (see, for example, press releases by the International Rescue Commission, and Save the Children, Care International and the Norwegian Refugee Council). They have said that banning their female employees from working is not only a breach of humanitarian principles, but also makes their work, in practice, impossible.

The response to these last two edicts restricting women’s lives has already been greater than to all previous ones. Some Afghan men, students and university professors, have acted publicly in solidarity with female students, while the suspension of assistance in response to actions by the Afghan state that humanitarians find intolerable is a rare move, possibly unprecedented. That suspension of aid, at the start of winter when much of the population is already at breaking point, has the potential to touch off wider discontent across geographies and demographics. The Emirate may find itself under greater pressure than ever before.

Edited by Kate Clark and Martine van Bijlert

References

References
↑1	Almost immediately after they took power, the Taleban started the campaign of repression against women. Below is a timeline of restrictions on women’s lives since the fall of the Republic on 15 August 2021: 1. First incident of violence against women protestors 5 September 2021 2. Abolished Ministry of Women’s Affairs 17 September 2021 3. Girls’ high schools not re-opened when all others were 17 September 2021 4. Female civil servants told to stay at home until further notice 19 September 2021 5. Women barred from parks and amusement parks without a mahram, a close male relative acting as a chaperone, 11 November 6. Women barred from travelling more than 72 kilometres without a mahram 26 December 2021 7. Amr bil maruf imposes strict hijab rules, including either the Chadori or black Iranian-style chador as the preferred attire 10 January 2022 8.. Universities become gender segregated 26 February 2022 9. Reversal of promise to reopen girls’ high schools 23 March 2022 10. Parks must be gender-segregated 28 March 2022 11. Women barred from driving 3 May 2022 12. Women must cover their faces in public 7 May 2022 13. Abolished Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) 17 May 2022 14. Female TV presenters told to cover their faces on air 21 May 2022 15. Female students barred from selecting civil engineering, journalism, veterinary, agriculture and geology in the annual university entry exams 14 October 2022 16. Women barred from parks, gyms and public baths 13 November 2022 17. First official flogging of three women for moral crimes 18 November 2022 (after Amir issued decree for full implementation of sharia law on 14 November). 18. Women barred from universities and education centres 20 December 2022 19. Women banned from working for NGOs 24 December 2022
↑2	Research for this report was conducted in June and July 2022 – semi-structured phone interviews with 19 women between the ages of 20 to 42. They were from 15 provinces, Daikundi, Ghazni, Ghor, Helmand, Kandahar, Kunar, Mazar-e Sharif, Nangrahar, Nimruz, Nuristan, Paktika, Panjshir, Samangan, Takhar and Uruzgan, eight living in provincial capitals and seven in rural districts, with four other interviewees from Kabul city. Our interviewees came from diverse communities and ethnicities across Afghanistan – one Baluch, four Hazaras, one Nuristani, five Pashtuns, seven Tajiks and one Uzbek. All interviewees were either currently employed or had been working until the Taleban takeover. This was by design as we sought to find out how the changes and restrictions had affected the lives of women who had previously been active in public life. Two of the interviewees were university students and several had had plans to continue their education, but these plans were derailed by the economic problems they encountered after the fall of the Republic. Four of the interviewees were protestors. The interviews were conducted through open-ended questions in a free-flowing conversation that roughly followed the outline of the following questionnaire. Our intention was to allow interviewees to speak about the one or many significant changes in their lives without being prompted. This approach allowed us to first get a sense how they ranked the significance of these changes before exploring the nuances of their experience in greater detail. The semi-structured questionnaire consisted of nine open-ended questions: 1. What has changed in your day-to-day life since the Taleban came to power? 2. Which of the changes has had the most impact, or do you think is the most important effect? 3. How are these changes affecting you personally and your family in general? 4. How are they affecting other women in your extended family and community? 5. What changes are there in the enforcement of the orders/restrictions regarding women since the Taleban came to power? 6. What do your male relatives think of the recent restrictions? 7. How do you feel about the changes? 8. In what ways would you like the current situation to be different? 9. How do you think this can happen?
↑3	According to officials rules, women should wear a burqa/chadori or an abaya with face veil when outside the home, which they should leave as little as possible and only with good reason. See this earlier AAN report, “We need to breathe too”: Women across Afghanistan navigate the Taleban’s hijab ruling.
↑4	Taleban view a woman’s husband, father or brother, or even son as her guardian, ie legally responsible for her.

12.29.2022

Sultan Barakat

Al Jazeera

28 December 2022

The Taliban’s anti-education edicts stand against the very foundations of Islam and will harm Afghan society as a whole.

The recent edict to ban women from higher education in Afghanistan is not only a blow to those directly affected but to all of Afghan society because it further erodes the little hope for progress remaining in the country. The order was issued at a time when people were hoping for a reversal of another Ministry of Education edict issued in March that stopped girls from attending state-run secondary schools.

Such an indispensable, fundamental right as the right to education being put on hold for half the population exemplifies how much the internal tug of war between competing Taliban factions can harm Afghanistan. Indeed, these most recent limitations on women’s participation in Afghan society are just the latest consequences of the regrettable competition between those in the Taliban who know “where the shoe pinches” and have reflected on the complexities of 20 years of conflict and those who are removed from the realities of the people and cannot see past perceived ideological gains.

For now, members of the latter group appear to be winning. But keeping the country on their chosen path will lead not to a prosperous and strong Afghanistan but to increasing internal strife, continued isolation and eventual collapse of the state.

Afghanistan’s minister of higher education, Nida Mohammad Nadim, tried to defend the edict banning women from universities by pointing to supposed logistical issues, such as limitations to gender segregation on campuses and claims that women do not adhere to the Taliban’s desired dress code while attending classes. The excuses he presented were similar to those offered for the March edict closing down girls secondary schools, but this time he also managed to insult Afghan women and their families across the country by suggesting they are acting “improperly” when seeking education and employment outside their homes.

In March, the authorities had said the secondary schools will remain closed only until “a plan was drawn up in accordance with Islamic law and Afghan culture”. Almost a year later, there is still no sign that there are any policies being put in place to address the issue. This apparent lack of interest in finding a way to reopen secondary schools, coupled with the most recent edict putting further limits on opportunities for female education, has caused people around the country to start questioning the sincerity of the Taliban’s stated concerns and considerations over women’s education.

It is not only Afghans affected by these policies who are starting to question the government’s stance on women’s education. There is also discontent among some high-ranking Taliban officials as those working in relevant ministries found themselves unable to offer anything to people demanding answers and solutions. As these excuses, delays and disappointments continue, an entire generation of children have already been deprived of a whole year of education. This is a loss very difficult, if not impossible, to make up. Excuses could have been made if the Taliban leadership had closed schools but was actively working towards a solution. But putting these bans in place without even attempting to circumvent any – real or imagined – obstacles to women’s education is indefensible.

Taliban leaders in Kandahar and Kabul should reflect on the following three points as they judge the value of girls education and determine the role women can play in making Afghanistan a safe, stable and prosperous nation.

First, contrary to claims that it is part of a “Western agenda” imposed on Afghanistan, women’s right to an education is enshrined in Islam.

The first verse of the Quran that angel Gabriel revealed to Prophet Muhammad PBUH began with the word “read”:

“Read! In the name of your Lord who created: He created man from a clinging form. Read! Your Lord is the Most Bountiful One who taught by [means of] the pen, who taught man what he did not know.”

It is paradoxical for the Taliban government to say it is working towards fulfilling the divine call and building a truly Islamic country while simultaneously institutionalising the shackles of illiteracy and ignorance across the nation.

Second, education of women and their participation in the economy is a prerequisite to successful societal development. Those behind the edicts against women’s education should reflect on the impact their decisions will have on the achievement of the broader objective of nation building following 40 years of war. The Taliban’s leaders appear to view complete gender segregation as the recipe for a well-functioning and truly Islamic system. But can they build such a society without educating women? How are they planning to ensure women are cared for by female doctors, for example, if they do not allow girls to go to school and receive a proper education? If women are best served by women, how will they receive quality service from undereducated women, if they are served at all?

Without educated women in the workforce, all 40 million Afghans will have to rely on the male labour force for their development and prosperity, and it does not exceed 8 to 9 percent of the population. Can this minority successfully sustain and develop an entire country devastated by years of war on its own? The Taliban’s myopic attempt to build a gender-segregated society without building the needed labour force to sustain it is equivalent to throwing Afghanistan into the hands of “external” forces because eventually the government will be left with no option other than to import all kinds of workers from abroad merely to keep the country’s head above water.

Third, making a political football out of women’s education will have political, diplomatic and economic consequences well beyond what the government appears to be anticipating. It will further hinder the Taliban government’s already limited prospects for gaining recognition from the international community and working with other nations to better the living conditions of the Afghan people. These anti-education edicts, which are not fully supported by either the people or by the Taliban leadership, undermine and overshadow everything the government achieved in its first year in power and present to the world an image of confused governance and split authority.

These edicts also undermine the efforts of those working towards more constructive and open dialogue between the Taliban and the international community and ensure that Afghanistan will remain isolated and in crisis for the foreseeable future. This is an outcome that should be anathema to the Taliban government because it means Afghanistan will remain dependent on the goodwill and aid of its neighbours and other global powers.

It is imperative for Taliban leaders to rethink their decisions that will undoubtedly harm Afghan women and thus the Afghan nation. Women not only constitute an indispensable part of the Afghan workforce, but they are also the hands that rock the cradle in which the future of Afghanistan rests.

Sultan Barakat is a professor in Conflict and Humanitarian Studies at Qatar Foundation’s Hamad Bin Khalifa University and an Honorary Professor of the University of York

12.22.2022

Global Opinions contributing columnist

The Washington Post

December 22, 2022

In the autumn of 2020, during the pandemic’s bleakest days, one of my students at the School of Leadership, Afghanistan drew a picture.

It depicts a tent in a field ringed by mountains. The tent is blue fabric, staked to the ground at its corners with a mesh opening in one of its walls. Behind the mesh, obscured, stands a woman. She holds strings of colorful balloons, the strings extending out through the mesh, and she is releasing them, one by one, and letting them rise into the air.

The girl who drew the picture, this young Afghan artist, explained it this way: The blue tent is the blue burqa. The woman inside is every Afghan woman forced to erase herself beneath that blue fabric or behind the walls of her home. She stands for every woman who is alone and quarantined not just by covid-19 but by elements of society that claim ultimate jurisdiction over her life and future, and who fights back by sending her daughters to school. Daughters like the artist herself.

The woman in the blue tent opens her hand and her colorful balloons float away.

*The picture drawn by a student of the author, Shabana Basij-Rasikh, at the School of Leadership, Afghanistan in the fall of 2020. (Courtesy of Shabana Basij-Rasikh)*

Two years later, in the midst of days bleaker than any I could have ever imagined for my country, the men of the Taliban sit comfortably in Kabul and take aim with their weapons and casually blast the balloons of our hopes out of the sky, one by one.

The latest shot came on Tuesday, when the Taliban decreed that women are now barred from attending universities in Afghanistan, effective immediately and indefinitely. It’s a project that began in March, when it banned girls from attending school past sixth grade yet kept universities open.

That’s over now. What remains in my country is this: Girls can attend school through sixth grade — or, said another way, more or less until they enter puberty. And then nothing.

In the Taliban’s Afghanistan, there is no need for adolescent girls to study. There is no need for young women to learn. Women have their purpose. The relentless codification of control over their futures, their ambitions, and their bodies has unfolded across 2022 with slow brutality.

Almost since the day the Taliban seized power last summer, I have asked the world not to look away from Afghanistan. I have asked you not to look away from Afghan women and girls, and from the men who are the judges, juries and executioners of dreams.

I ask this for the same reason that Rina Amiri, the U.S. special envoy for Afghan women, girls and human rights, wrote on Twitter last month: “Those who fear a radicalized Afghanistan should be alarmed by the Taliban’s policies against women & girls, denying them education, work in most sectors, even small joys such as the right to go to a park. This extremism will lead to instability, poverty & more population flight.”

Yes. It absolutely will. It already has. So look, and see, and act.

Act to boldly support and publicly advocate for Afghan women — women who are beaten and shot at, and whose bodies appear cast away at roadsides and in dumpsters and who still call even now for freedom and the right to work and to learn. To Muslim-majority nations I say: Act and speak out in the strongest terms against the Taliban’s utterly un-Islamic decrees.

I personally benefited from the bravery of Afghan women in the 1990s under the Taliban’s first regime. I am who I am because they did what they did for girls like me, risking their lives to teach us in secret. It’s in their honor that I continue our fight for dignity and justice, now and forever.

A new generation of Afghan women is being pushed off the pathway toward education and independence. The bright balloons that once filled our sky are punctured and falling to earth.

These women and their hopes are allies against extremism that the world can’t afford to lose. See them, hear them, honor them. Don’t look away.

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

What impact will these bans have within Afghanistan?

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

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

What impact will these bans have within Afghanistan?

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