Biden to Drip-Feed Afghanistan Its $3.5 Billion in Frozen Reserves

September 29, 2022 Analytical articles

By Lynne O’Donnell
Foreign Policy
SEPTEMBER 20, 2022

The decision by the United States to release $3.5 billion of Afghanistan’s central bank reserves has sparked fears that the money will hand a jackpot to the Taliban, which have presided over the country’s slide into dire economic crisis since they took over more than a year ago. The money is to be transferred to an international financial institution based in Switzerland and administered by a group including former Afghan central bankers.

After months of back-and-forth conversations over whether—and how—to disburse at least a portion of the funds belonging to the former Afghan government that were frozen in the United States after the Taliban took over last year, the Biden administration has hit on a solution that pleases no one.

The United States has set up the Afghan Fund at the Bank for International Settlements in an effort to kick-start the economy before the winter exacerbates alarming levels of hunger and poverty. The U.S. Treasury said the money will help pay Afghanistan’s debts and bills, keeping the economy afloat, while critics said it will simply transfer liability for payments from the Taliban to the Afghan Fund.

Omar Joya, an economist formerly with the World Bank and Afghanistan’s central bank, described the Afghan Fund as a “windfall” for the Taliban, saying it effectively pays their bills while relieving them of responsibility for managing an economy suffering from the political shock of the republic’s fall as well as natural disasters that have disrupted agricultural production and supply chains.

“Transferring part of the reserves to a fund to finance humanitarian projects and reduce the fiscal pressures from the Taliban will not help much with the ongoing economic recession and crisis,” Joya said. “On the contrary, it will further support the Taliban leaders by easing fiscal pressures and providing them with windfall gains. Nothing will change for the poor. They will continue to cope with lack of jobs, no source of income, deprivation, soaring food prices.”

The Taliban, too, oppose the Afghan Fund, saying all central bank reserves—$7 billion held in the United States and $2 billion held in Europe and the Middle East—should be transferred to the central bank under their management.

“Foreign currency reserves belong to the people of Afghanistan and have been used for many years in light of the law for monetary stability, strengthening the financial system, and facilitating trade with the world,” said Habiburahman Habib, the Taliban’s economy ministry spokesperson. “Any action of the United States regarding the allocation, use, and transfer of the country’s foreign currency reserves is unacceptable, and we want to reconsider this matter.”

But the Taliban’s earlier brutality and their proven inability to govern since they took power ensured that the United States would not release the funds into the hands of a group run by terrorists. The Afghan government previously relied on international aid for around 80 percent of its revenue, but that has largely evaporated. Without income, people cannot buy staples, leading to documented reports of people selling children and body parts to feed their families. But the Taliban refused to comply with U.S. conditions for the release of the funds, including international anti-money laundering and counterterrorism financing measures, as well as independent oversight and auditing.

The Biden administration views the Afghan Fund as a sort of shock-absorber meant to keep the lights on and the credit rating passable. “The Afghan Fund will protect, preserve, and make targeted disbursements of that $3.5 billion to help provide greater stability to the Afghan economy. The Taliban are not a part of the Afghan Fund, and robust safeguards have been put in place to prevent the funds from being used for illicit activity,” the U.S. Treasury and State Departments said. “Disbursements from the Afghan Fund could include keeping Afghanistan current on its debt payments to international financial institutions, which would preserve their eligibility for development assistance, and paying for critical imports, such as electricity.”

But that still frees up funds for the Taliban, Joya argued. Under the current arrangement, the national electricity bill will be paid directly from the fund, meaning the Taliban can keep the money collected from customers by the state power company.

“The newly transferred $3.5 billion to the Afghan Fund must be recalled back and must remain with the frozen assets. They are supposed to function as foreign exchange reserves to facilitate payments for international transactions, not to fund or finance fiscal obligations or humanitarian operations,” Joya said.

The central bank’s assets were frozen when the Taliban took control on Aug. 15, 2021: As the country came under the control of sanctioned terrorists, business as usual was not an option. Ordinary people have not been able to access their own bank accounts, though some private banks have continued to operate payrolls and other functions. The World Bank has projected a decline in real GDP by one-third between the end of 2020 and the end of this year, saying around 70 percent of households cannot meet basic needs, including food.

The yearlong saga over the release of the funds has been controversial. Some Afghans accused the Biden administration of stealing from Afghanistan’s people. Many more were concerned the Taliban would find a way to seize the money, as they have seized much of the aid that has been funneled to the country since they took control. “It will be smoked inside a year, and then where will we be?” asked the head of a local charity, speaking anonymously, who described the Taliban pilfering international food and other aid over the past year.

The big debate is whether the fund is meant to fulfill traditional tasks of central bank reserves or act as a rainy day fund. Shah Mehrabi, a long-term member of the Supreme Council of Afghanistan’s central bank, said its priorities are inflation reduction and stabilizing the currency. Mehrabi is one of two Afghan economists on the four-strong board of the Afghan Fund; the other two are Swiss and American.

He said he wants to do auctions of U.S. dollars to the tune of $150 million a month to inject hard currency into the economy and take out afghanis, which are driving up prices. Aid salaries have injected some dollars into the economy, which have helped stabilize the currency, but they haven’t taken any local currency out, which is why inflation is still above 50 percent. But he has some conditions.

“Funds will only be released if conditions are met,” including halting a “brain drain” with the employment of competent technocrats to run the financial institutions, currency auctions, and independent monitoring, he said. “We will look at this as we go, and once we have access to economic data collected by the current regime, we will have a better idea.”

Abdullah Khenjani, a journalist and Afghanistan’s former deputy minister for peace, said the “unilateral” U.S. decision to set up the Afghan Fund “means that there is no common ground to seek and reach a rational decision with the Taliban regime,” which has not been held accountable for excesses like extrajudicial killings and banning education for girls.

Reserves are meant to backstop the banking system and the national currency, Khenjani said, not to pay power bills. “In the long term, it will be a disaster, another ingredient in the recipe of the failing Afghanistan economy,” he added.

Lynne O’Donnell is a columnist at Foreign Policy and an Australian journalist and author. She was the Afghanistan bureau chief for Agence France-Presse and the Associated Press between 2009 and 2017.

Taxing the Afghan Nation: What the Taleban’s pursuit of domestic revenues means for citizens, the economy and the state

September 29, 2022 Analytical articles

Kate Clark

Afghanistan Analysts Network

28 Sep 2022 print sharing button

On 15 August 2021, much in Afghanistan was overturned or radically altered. The insurgents became the rulers and the old elites fled. Afghanistan’s relationship with the rest of the world ruptured and the country became poorer overnight. It also went from being a state where the administration was reliant on foreign donors and military support to one where the government depends for funding on the domestic economy and its taxpaying citizens. AAN’s new special report is a first attempt at making sense of one of the most fundamental of these changes – the Emirate’s need to tax its citizens. Kate Clark, with research support from the AAN team, explores the ramifications of the Taleban’s serious-minded pursuit of taxation, the consequences to citizens across the country, to state power and the dilemmas it has created for donors.

Read “Taxing the Afghan Nation: What the Taleban’s pursuit of domestic revenues means for citizens, the economy and the state” here.

At the core of the new report are interviews with more than 100 Afghans from across the country who were asked first about their experiences of the Taleban takeover, and subsequently how the economic collapse was affecting their household economy. Taxation emerged as a significant theme. These interviews gave a good view of what was happening on the ground. They also ensured that Taleban fiscal policy was viewed first of all through a human lens.

From the interviews, a picture emerges of a new administration moving swiftly and seriously to collect revenue of all types and with far less corruption than the old regime. Not everyone we heard from felt their tax bill had been fair or drawn up according to the rules. Some described Taleban tax collectors as menacing and implacable, demanding money they could not afford. Others said negotiation was possible. Just one interviewee reported that tax collectors in his district were demanding bribes. The Taleban have also rolled out new taxes, in particular, on agricultural production. This represents a massive transfer of resources from the rural economy to the state. In some districts, they have demanded taxes that fall outside the rules, whether Ministry of Finance regulations or Islamic practice, and look to be extortionate.

The Taleban’s diligence in taxing the nation is driven by the very different position they are in compared to the Republic. It had no need to prioritise tax collection. For 20 years, much – possibly most – of the money paid out by taxpayers and traders importing goods was diverted into the pockets of corrupt officials and politicians and, to a lesser extent, the insurgency. Even so, there was always enough foreign money coming into the country that citizens scarcely felt the deficit. Public services continued. Meanwhile, the Taleban used the taxes they collected to run the insurgency while foreign money and, increasingly in the latter days of the Republic, taxpayers in government-controlled areas kept funding public services.

The Republic was dependent on foreign funding. That, in turn, made the Hamed Karzai and Ashraf Ghani administrations financially autonomous from the people. Indeed, often, they appeared more answerable to donors than their own citizens. In contrast, the Emirate needs to tax and, as our report shows, they are managing to raise large amounts of domestic revenue despite the massive contraction of the economy. In this, the Taleban could be said to be ‘doing well’. However, that is a slippery concept when it comes to taxation. If taxes pay for what a population wants – education, healthcare, better roads, a competent administration – they are usually seen as a public good. If people consider their rulers are taking their money without seeing the benefits, ‘unfair’ taxation can plant enmity towards the state.

One of the problems facing Afghan citizens today is that they do not know how the government is spending their money. The Taleban have released the barest details of their budget. Moreover, some types of taxation appear not to be included in official revenue figures.

Both citizens and donors need greater financial transparency from the Emirate. For donors, this is especially the case this year as they gear up to again provide funding for basic services, albeit in parallel systems that seek to avoid money going directly to the Taleban administration. Increased donor funding will inevitably free up money that the Emirate was spending on healthcare, support to farmers or other services, enabling it to be spent elsewhere – on security, intelligence or other sectors donors are least inclined to bolster.

Transparency is also important for the Taleban’s reputation. Until now, they have appeared far less corrupt than the Republic, largely because of their relatively clean revenue collection. However, collecting revenues is just one part of the cycle of public finance where corruption can manifest. Without openness on expenditure that better reputation cannot go unquestioned.

This new special report also asks what the Taleban’s tough approach to taxation means for households, given how poor, vulnerable and hungry so many Afghans are. In AAN’s previous work on household economies, we have seen again and again how even the poorest seek to help those in even worse need than themselves. Charity is embedded in the Afghan psyche and social fabric, but how well can people carry on helping others if the state is taking their marginal income?

Read the full report here.

Want more accountability for the Taliban? Give more money for human rights monitoring.

September 29, 2022 Analytical articles

Protecting human rights in Afghanistan should be both a policy priority and a national security priority for the United States.

Ahead of the U.N. General Assembly last week, U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Afghanistan Richard Bennett released his first report grading the Taliban’s treatment of Afghans’ rights. It was an F. In the past year, the Taliban have engaged in a full-scale assault on Afghan’s human rights, denying women access to public life, dismantling human rights institutions, corrupting independent judicial processes, and engaging in extralegal measures to maintain control or to exact revenge for opposition to their rule. That is one of the main reasons — along with their continued support of al-Qaida and a refusal to form a more inclusive government — that Afghanistan has no representation at the U.N.

A Resource Gap

The grave human rights violations documented by the U.N. and brave Afghan human rights monitors are not being met with appropriate resources for investigations that could put pressure on the Taliban to reduce human rights violations or ultimately hold them accountable. Bennett’s team is strong but small, relying on limited trips to Afghanistan to investigate allegations of atrocities and lacking resources for translation of their work into Afghan languages. The special rapporteur can identify whether the Taliban are upholding their legal human rights obligations but not fully assess the scale and scope of violations or conduct detailed fact finding on specific cases.

The special rapporteur’s report also highlights a gap in U.S. resources. While the United States has taken some promising steps, including appointing Special Envoy for Afghanistan Women, Girls, and Human Rights, Rina Amiri, the diplomatic attention has not been matched by funding that could be used to shore up U.N. monitoring efforts and to maintain an Afghan civil society capable of documenting and reporting on the Taliban’s human rights practices. Amiri has no programming budget and the bureaus that normally fund local human rights monitors have seen their Afghanistan budgets slashed.

Protecting human rights in Afghanistan is both a policy priority and a national security priority for the United States. Taliban atrocities in the 1990s accelerated the involvement of neighboring countries that supported proxies in the Afghan civil war, which in turn created safe havens for al-Qaida to plan the 9/11 attacks. One of the few ways the current situation in Afghanistan could get worse is for there to be a civil war fueled by resentment over widespread human rights abuses.

The index of Bennett’s report reads like a textbook of all categories of human rights that are recognized and protected in U.N. treaties. Most notable, Bennett writes, “In no other country … are they [women and girls] as disadvantaged in every aspect of their lives.” The Taliban claim to be protecting women’s rights under their interpretation of Sharia, but that has meant “suspending girls’ secondary education, enforcing mandatory hijab wearing, stipulating that women must stay home unless necessary, banning women from undertaking certain types of travel without a close male family member (mahram) …” This list could go on and on.

Bennett also states that there are credible reports of retaliatory killings, torture, and arbitrary arrests in areas of ethno-political resistance to the Taliban. In two predominantly Tajik provinces north of Kabul, Bennet cited reports of “civilians being subjected to arbitrary arrest, extrajudicial killings and torture … some amounting to what appears to be collective punishment.”

Protecting Rights, Preventing Impunity

There is a natural tendency to read Bennett’s report and throw one’s hands up in despair. The Taliban haven’t changed; we have little leverage over them. Now what? The pursuit and protection of human rights in Afghanistan is a long game, however, and there is a human rights toolkit that should be applied in Afghanistan. It is also important to prevent impunity for atrocities from becoming entrenched, which increases the chances for more widespread and systematic violence.

First, Bennett has demonstrated that the scope and scale of the human rights violations warrants increased resources to conduct more detailed fact-finding on specific incidents, including forensic investigations as necessary to pursue accountability for violations, not just reporting on them. Bennet’s office also performs a vital public outreach function, including among Afghans that speak in local languages. More money for translation, strategic communications and dissemination of the reports would enhance the impact of his work.

Second, the profound implications of the Bennett report should trigger an increase in funding for U.S. government agencies that support human rights monitoring and advocacy in Afghanistan. Beyond Amiri’s policy mandate, the State Department and USAID should be funded to support Afghan human rights monitors on the ground or in the diaspora. Notably, the United States provided Afghanistan’s previous democratic government with millions in grants and technical support to Afghan human rights organizations. Yet now that violations are occurring at even greater orders of magnitude, the funding has dried up.

While it is manifestly more difficult for Afghan organizations to publicly discuss human rights under Taliban rule, there are brave civil society actors who are gathering evidence of abuses and pushing the Taliban to practice the Islamic ideals of justice they espouse. Combining quiet documentation work by Afghans in the country with secure evidence storage and more public advocacy by diaspora groups is one way to mitigate risk and apply more pressure on the Taliban — a model that has been used in Syria and by the Uyghur community.

Finally, the U.S. should support the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is considering a request by its prosecutor, Karim Khan, to renew its investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan. Following the Taliban takeover, Khan proposed to focus particularly on alleged crimes by the Taliban and ISIS in Afghanistan because “the gravity, scale and continuing nature of [their] alleged crimes … demand focus and proper resources.” Providing support to human rights defenders who can give evidence to the ICC will put further pressure on the Taliban and will not involve any investigation of U.S. forces — as some ICC critics fear.

The human rights situation in Afghanistan is getting worse and, unfortunately change is likely to be incremental. But the Taliban’s woeful scorecard over its first year is an urgent warning that more must be done to slow the rate of decline and hold the Taliban accountable. The good news is that this is a problem more resources can help to solve.

U.S. to Move Afghanistan’s Frozen Central Bank Reserves to New Swiss Fund

September 29, 2022 Analytical articles

For almost seven months, Afghan central bank reserves frozen by the United States and set aside to somehow help the Afghan people, have sat, immobilized. Now those funds — $3.5 billion — are at long last on the move. On September 14, the U.S. and Swiss governments unveiled the “Fund for the Afghan People” as a Geneva-based foundation with its account at the Bank for International Settlements. The Fund will preserve, protect and selectively disburse this money. With this major policy step accomplished, new questions arise: What do these developments mean, what are realistic expectations for the reserves, and what needs to happen next?

The establishment of the Fund marks important progress in implementing the Biden administration’s plan for this half of Afghanistan’s more than $7 billion of foreign exchange reserves frozen over a year ago. First and foremost, moving them to the Fund will physically remove the money from U.S. jurisdiction and away from any vulnerability that they might at some point be subjected to civil proceedings related to suits by 9/11 victims’ families and others. And from a positive perspective, the move makes it possible to utilize this portion of the reserves for specific purposes involving banking, finance and economic stabilization, but not going through the Taliban administration.

Possible uses of the reserves include, according to the Fund’s governing bylaws and the U.S. announcement:

Provide Afghan banking sector liquidity.
Keep Afghanistan current on its debt service obligations (an aim critical to maintaining the country’s eligibility for new funding from international financial institutions).
Support exchange rate stability.
Transfer funds, as appropriate, to public Afghan financial institutions, or for any other purpose that benefits the Afghan people approved by the Fund’s Board of Trustees.
Pay for critical imports like electricity.
Pay for essential central banking services like SWIFT payments.

The bylaws lay out the basic structure of the Fund. The Board of Trustees, its decision-making body, consists of two U.S.-based Afghan professionals with extensive experience including working for Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB — Afghanistan’s central bank) in the past, plus the U.S. ambassador to Switzerland and an official representing the Swiss government. The accounting firm Deloitte based in Geneva serves as the review body for the Fund, and the Fund will be subject to external audit as per Swiss law. The Fund can make disbursements from the interest income earned by the reserves or by using a portion of the reserves themselves.

A Promising Step Forward

While the Fund’s establishment is a significant accomplishment, it is just the beginning. The devil will be in specifics yet to be worked out.

Under the bylaws, the founding Board of Trustees has full flexibility and discretion to take the Fund forward as it sees fit. Board decisions have to be unanimous, and on that basis it has the ability inter alia to:

Appoint or remove board members and add new board members.
Change the location of the Fund.
Set disbursement policies.
Set compensation and expense reimbursement policies (though board members do not earn salaries).
Delegate management of assets and management more generally.
Set up bodies such as a secretariat or advisory committee for the Fund.
Amend and adopt by-laws.

This flexibility is necessary, but it means that decisions made by the founding board will be critical for the success of the Fund moving forward.

In the meantime, on August 26 a federal magistrate judge in New York issued a carefully reasoned and extensively documented recommendation that based on relevant U.S. laws, the remaining half of Afghanistan’s central bank reserves cannot be turned over to 9/11 plaintiffs.

Generally in line with and elaborating on the Department of Justice’s February 11 Statement of Interest regarding the reserves, the recommendation provides some grounds for hope that this portion of the reserves also will at some point become available for Afghanistan. The ultimate outcome cannot be firmly predicted, of course. The judicial process will entail several more stages — motions by the parties, District Court judge’s ruling, possible appeals to higher courts — probably taking years, before a final decision.

Don’t Expect Too Much — And What to Do Next

Expectations for the Fund need to be modest. Though freezing the reserves exacerbated Afghanistan’s economic problems, the main cause of the economic collapse was the sudden cut-off of some $8 billion a year in civilian aid and security assistance when the Taliban took over, along with the loss of billions of dollars of international military expenditures in-country as the last U.S. and other foreign troops left. Clearly, releasing half or even all of the frozen central bank reserves would not by itself resolve the country’s economic crisis.

A few recommendations for the short run:

Be very cautious about expanding the size of the board beyond the current four members. The requirement of unanimity in decision-making is understandable, but the larger the board the greater the risk of crippling gridlock. A representative from an international financial institution could be considered, or perhaps the European Union (possibly with a view toward consolidating the $2 billion of Afghan central bank reserves held in Europe into the Fund), but adding more than one or two members with a requirement for unanimity in decisions most likely would turn out be unwieldy.

Lean but effective management will be key. The quality of the Fund’s manager will make the difference between success and failure, based on experience with other, more complex trust fund arrangements such as the relatively successful Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund. Making the right selection may be one of the board’s most important — and earliest — decisions.

The decision-making process for Fund actions needs to be clear and well-documented. It can be simple, given the likely limited number of discrete disbursements that will occur, but it should include a short description of the action being taken, its expected results, and an ex-post assessment by the Fund of what was achieved and any lessons learned.

An advisory committee may be needed to offer the board practical experience and expertise. It is important, however, that this body does not become an arena to debate political viewpoints.

A credible, outside entity should be hired to evaluate the Fund’s actions and results. Financial audits are already required by Swiss law, but a broader assessment by an independent party would strengthen accountability and boost the Fund’s credibility.

The Fund must operate with the maximum possible transparency. Given the highly unusual nature of the Fund, making its decisions, main processes and results available to the public will be essential to its credibility and success.

Once the Fund is on a sound footing and operational, beyond small, targeted disbursements, it could explore the possibility of leveraging its size and status to support trade financing and cooperative arrangements with state-owned banks of Afghanistan’s neighboring countries. Such agreements would promote smooth cross-country commercial banking transactions, without necessarily using significant amounts of the reserves for these purposes.

Looking Forward, the Taliban Need to Step Up

Over the longer term, the objective according to both the U.S. and Swiss announcements, is to preserve most of the reserves for their eventual return to DAB. However, the United States said that it will not support return of these funds until DAB demonstrates its independence from political influence and interference, and that it has instituted adequate anti-money laundering and countering-the-financing-of-terrorism (AML/CFT) controls, as well as completing a third-party needs assessment and taking on board a reputable third-party monitor.

During the final years of the pre-August 2021 Ghani administration, DAB was gravely weakened by politicized personnel changes and micromanagement, triggering a flight of managers and professionals that accelerated after the Taliban takeover. As a result, DAB currently has very limited capacity and its top leadership team consists of senior Taliban figures, one of whom is under U.S., U.N. and EU counterterrorism sanctions. Given the lack of external monitoring and the end of the IMF program, which had provided support and oversight to DAB before August 2021, the institution would face serious challenges in managing and making productive use of any reserves it receives.

Moreover, rapidly dissipating the reserves for short-term needs would squander this important buffer and leave Afghanistan no better off. A proper use of Afghanistan’s central bank reserves — or those of any country — is to cushion and manage macroeconomic adjustment. In Afghanistan, for example, running down reserves gradually would give the economy precious time to adjust to the loss of aid. Reserves also provide a backstop for the commercial banking system, which requires they be maintained at a decent level.

What is needed to strengthen DAB is clear enough: reaffirming its legal autonomy, which is enshrined in current Afghan law; appointing a well-qualified, non-political leadership; bringing back as much of its veteran professional, technical and managerial staff as possible; and drawing on external technical support and oversight as needed.

The eventual return of the reserves to the DAB, and to a large degree Afghanistan’s economic stability and revival overall, will depend on seeing those reforms implemented. Only the Taliban can decide whether it will go ahead and do what needs to be done.

My Childhood, My Country: 20 Years in Afghanistan review – desperately sad study of a boy’s life

September 20, 2022 Analytical articles

This documentary following one boy’s life in Afghanistan feels like a brutal, desperately sad companion piece to Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. Its co-directors, the British documentary-maker Phil Grabsky and Shoaib Sharifi, first started filming Mir Hussein aged seven in 2002, and they haven’t stopped. They have already made two previous films – The Boy Who Plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan (2004) and The Boy Mir: Ten Years in Afghanistan (2011) – and this third gives us the complete picture: Mir pulled along by time’s current from boyhood to the present day, married with three kids in Kabul. To be honest, it’s the opposite of life-affirming.

The story begins in 2002, a year after 9/11. US troops have landed in Afghanistan. Seven-year-old Mir is living with his family in a cave in Bamiyan, having fled their village. They are grindingly poor, but little Mir giggles as he shows the film-makers his “bedroom” in the cave. He grins as a fighter jet roars overhead. “We thought that the Americans would rebuild our country,” Mir remembers on the voiceover, without a trace of bitterness.

He is a little older in 2004, back in his home town, attending school. Mir says he wants to be the president or a headteacher when he grows up. But then his father gets sick, so he has to work: first in the fields and then in a death-trap coalmine. Mir is resourceful, resilient and always hopefully optimistic about the future of his country, often in the face of the reality before his eyes.

It’s an intimate, painful documentary. “I have never experienced a happy life, because of war and the Taliban,” Mir says in 2020, living with wife and children in Kabul, training as a news cameraman. He is made redundant from that job during lockdown. Mir has lived most of his life through the failed Nato mission in Afghanistan. This film ends before the dire crisis that has engulfed the country following the withdrawal of troops and the Taliban re-taking control. What will a film about Mir in five years find? It’s a grim thought.

Phil Grabsky and Shoaib Sharifi have followed Mir for two decades in what is almost a brutal companion piece to Richard Linklater’s Boyhood

Mir Hussein in My Childhood, My Country – 20 Years in Afghanistan — *Mir Hussein in My Childhood, My Country: 20 Years in Afghanistan. Photograph: ITV*

Some Hope for Afghans in Need

September 14, 2022 Analytical articles

By Steve Coll

The New Yorker

September 14, 2022

The Biden Administration has agreed to release $3.5 billion in frozen funds, but will they reach a desperate population?

Embargoes imposed to coerce dictators also punish suffering populations. For years, lawyers, economists, and policy wonks have searched for technocratic solutions to this dilemma—for example, by designing “targeted” economic and travel sanctions against individual leaders and their cronies. As America’s use of sanctions grows, such efforts have become a booming field of public-policy design and, occasionally, bold experiments.

The Biden Administration’s announcement this week that it will release $3.5 billion in frozen Afghan-central-bank funds to a new Swiss foundation—the Afghan Fund, whose mission will be “to benefit the people of Afghanistan”—is such an experiment. The foundation’s bespoke rules will increase Afghan participation in deliberations over the money’s fate and broaden international responsibility, yet allow the Biden Administration to wield a veto over any disbursements. The Taliban are not a party to the project.

Unfortunately, it seems doubtful that the Afghan Fund will achieve the Administration’s stated purpose—“to help provide greater stability to the Afghan economy,” as a joint Treasury and State Departments announcement this week put it—anytime soon. The Afghan economy is in desperate condition, and hunger is spreading. Quickly deploying the $3.5 billion in reserves to recapitalize the Afghan central bank, known as Da Afghanistan Bank or D.A.B., could help revive the country’s moribund commercial-banking system and fund needed imports, among other things. Yet the Taliban have not been willing or able to change their management of the central bank to meet Washington’s requirements—for example, to remove one of the bank’s deputy governors, who is a listed by the U.S. as a terrorist. The Biden Administration went public this week with demands that the Taliban demonstrate that D.A.B. will be free from political interference, and that the regime adopt money-laundering-prevention measures and accept outside monitoring.

In political Washington, perhaps the greatest obstacle to releasing the reserves remains the Taliban’s support for Al Qaeda and other legally designated terrorist groups. The Taliban’s hubristic willingness to provide haven to Ayman al-Zawahiri, a direct author of 9/11, who was discovered hiding in downtown Kabul and killed by an American drone in late July, has cemented the already formidable bipartisan resistance in Congress to doing business with the restored Islamic Emirate, as the Taliban regime calls itself. Taliban spokesmen have denied knowing that Zawahiri was hiding in Kabul. But, according to a briefing by the Biden Administration, senior members of the regime’s Haqqani faction knew of his presence. The family network’s most powerful figure, Sirajuddin Haqqani, is the acting interior minister.

The Afghan Fund’s plan to empower Afghan leadership might improve the odds, long though they may be, that the Taliban will eventually implement the reforms that Washington and European allies require. (Other countries besides the U.S. have frozen Afghan deposits.) The Administration has named two Afghan-born finance experts, Anwar-ul Haq Ahady and Shah Mehrabi, as “co-founders” of the Afghan Fund. They are to appoint a diverse committee of Afghan advisers.

The fund’s creation is “a very positive first step,” Mehrabi told me. D.A.B. “was the envy of our neighbors” during much of the life of the Islamic Republic, the nato-backed government that collapsed in August, 2021. During the past year, Afghanistan “has suffered a brain drain,” he added. “We need to rebuild.”

In the short run, the Afghan Fund might also be able to obtain Taliban coöperation and American acquiescence for relatively small disbursements to benefit civilians, such as the manufacture of bank notes. But the over-all record of technocratic innovations like the Afghan Fund is not encouraging. One problem is complexity. The foundation’s decision-making board so far has four members—Mehrabi, Ahady, a U.S.-government representative to be named, and a Swiss-government representative to be named—and can make decisions only unanimously. That is potentially a recipe for gridlock. The board may expand to include a European Union member. Suggestions that an apolitical member of the current D.A.B. staff be appointed have so far been turned aside. “The devil is in the details,” William Byrd, a development economist who worked for years in Kabul for the World Bank and is now a senior expert at the United States Institute of Peace, told me. Byrd had not examined the Afghan Fund’s design when we spoke this week, but, from past experience, he said, “the nuts and bolts of the arrangement are going to be quite important and could very well determine its success or failure.”

At the World Bank, Byrd was involved in the early development of the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund, a mechanism that regulated large flows of international-donor funds to the fledgling government led by Hamid Karzai. That fund’s relative success, Byrd argued, came from “simple management arrangements with clear responsibilities, along with sound financial engineering, governance, and accountability.” As the new Afghan Fund operates, “the last thing you would want is for the U.S. to be heavily involved.”

By sending the money to Switzerland, the Biden Administration has made plain that the funds are not U.S. property but, rather, are part of the sovereign wealth of Afghanistan. Yet the Administration’s decision to award itself a veto over disbursements reflects a reality that it would be reckless on counterterrorism grounds—not to mention politically untenable in Washington—to simply hand the money over to the Taliban, given the restored emirate’s record. The Taliban’s closure of secondary schools to girls and failure to protect Hazara minorities targeted by the Islamic State make a decision to release funds even more unlikely.

In the end, Washington’s veto, like the imposition of economic sanctions, is best understood as power politics. And the ineluctable fact that nations battle hard over resources such as multibillion-dollar piles of cash is one reason that clever technocratic designs like the Afghan Fund have failed in the past. Rich countries generally don’t hesitate to leverage their financial advantages, and dictators and extremists generally don’t care what international lawyers or policy wonks want them to do.

The oil-for-food program, conceived by the Clinton Administration to relieve Iraqi civilian suffering under Saddam Hussein, is one case study. During the program’s life, between 1996 and 2003, Hussein skimmed off hundreds of millions of dollars in kickbacks to shore up his police state, while the U.S. used its U.N. veto to play hardball, slowing and blocking exports to Iraq in ways that exacerbated Iraq’s humanitarian crisis, as recounted in the ethicist Joy Gordon’s book, “Invisible War.”

The Afghan Fund may turn out to be just a Swiss bank account for funds that will remain blocked for years. Yet the initiative offers at the least the possibility that Afghans themselves will play a leading role in deciding what to do next. Mehrabi said that reforms to prevent money laundering at the Taliban-controlled central bank, which are among the Biden Administration’s requirements, should be achievable and could allow for confidence-building in Kabul and Washington alike.

“Look, people are dying of hunger,” Mehrabi said. “State and Treasury deserve to be commended; they’ve brought a lot of attention to relieving the hardship. But we need to be concerned about the structure of the economy. We need to be able to go ahead and rebuild these institutions.” As for the Taliban, he added, “I cannot answer the question of whether they will coöperate.”

Is Afghanistan’s Long Civil War Really Over?

September 14, 2022 Analytical articles

By Carter Malkasian

Foreign Affairs

September 13, 2022

The Forces That Could Threaten the Taliban’s Control

One year ago, the democratic government of Afghanistan collapsed. The humiliating evacuation of U.S. military forces and civilians as well as roughly 100,000 Afghans remains a sore spot for Washington and its allies. The Taliban regime has ruled the country ever since. Levels of violence throughout the country have been dramatically reduced—but so, too, have the rights of women, the freedom of the media, and the safety of those who supported the overthrown democratic government. Questions about the new state of affairs abound. Should the international community recognize the Taliban? Will the Taliban moderate themselves? Can diplomacy or sanctions compel them to do so? Is a new international terrorist threat forming under the Taliban’s watch?

And an even more pressing question looms over the country: Is the Afghan civil war that started in 1978 finally over? For four decades, Afghanistan tore itself apart. Mujahideen fought communists. Warlords fought warlords. The Taliban fought the Northern Alliance. The democratic republic’s army fought the Taliban. In the process, more than two million Afghans were killed or wounded and more than five million became refugees. Last year’s withdrawal of foreign forces from the country put an end to that cycle and allowed the Taliban to consolidate its control—at least for the time being. Pockets of resistance to Taliban rule, the Taliban’s continued embrace of the tactics of terrorism, and foreign intervention could all potentially rekindle the civil war in ways that are not apparent right now. What today appears to be a new period of peace may turn out to be just a pause in Afghanistan’s long trauma. Washington’s ability to do much about this is limited. The most important thing is to be cognizant of how previous interventions prevented the civil war from ending. Getting involved in Afghanistan again in order to mitigate risks to U.S. national security would pose an even greater risk: worsening the tragedy for the Afghan people.

STABLE INSTABILITY

Afghanistan has never been entirely peaceful. Tribal feuds, government repression, border skirmishes, and dynastic plots have been part of Afghan life for centuries. It is a hard place to govern. Tribal norms place a high value on the individuality of every member of a tribe, and no government—including the monarchy that ruled the country from 1747 to 1973—has ever been able to control the country’s hundreds of tribes, subtribes, and clans. Religious leaders—village mullahs and Islamic scholars and judges—also play an important role in society. They, too, have posed checks on the power of state authorities, and have sometimes called for jihad against not just foreign invaders but Afghan rulers, as well.

But there was a kind of stability to the instability. Tribes were too divided to pose an existential threat to the country or society. The monarchy’s own plotting and short bursts of violence were too brief to prevent leadership transitions. Attempts by the monarchy to oppress Afghans were largely deterred by the tribes and religious leaders. And for nearly a century after the British invasion and occupation of 1878–81, no major foreign invasions upset the equilibrium.

Forces of modernization began to tip that balance in the late twentieth century. But the event that sparked 40 years of civil war was the Saur Revolution, in 1978. Communists overthrew the regime of Daoud Khan, the cousin and successor of the former king. Yet the communists enjoyed only a small base of popular support, and their education, land, and marriage reforms prompted a backlash among tribes, religious leaders, and the rural population. In 1979, an insurgency formed and advanced rapidly. In December of that year, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to prevent the defeat of the incipient communist regime.

The Soviet invasion brought modern industrial war to Afghanistan and led to a decade of bloodshed. The majority of Afghan casualties and refugees from the past 40 years took place during this period. Soviet tanks, aircraft, and artillery smashed into villages, which militarized in response. Resistance to the occupation united once disparate tribes, ethnic communities, and religious leaders. Declaring themselves holy warriors, the people rose up, armed with assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, and sophisticated communications gear supplied by the United States, Saudi Arabia, and other countries.

The Soviet defeat and departure in 1989 left the mujahideen without a common enemy, especially after the communist regime finally fell in 1992. They turned to fighting each other. War entered Kabul itself. Many Afghans remember this as the worst part of the past 40 years. The different sides razed neighborhoods and victimized communities. The tribal and ethnic community leaders that had been mujahideen became warlords.

TALIBAN RISE AND FALL

The Taliban emerged out of the chaos of the early 1990s. In his 2010 book, My Life with the Taliban, Abdul Salam Zaeef, who served as Taliban ambassador to Pakistan at the time of 2001 U.S. invasion, argued that “the Taliban were different” than what had come before. “A group of religious scholars and students with different backgrounds, they transcended the normal coalitions and factions,” Zaeef wrote. “They were fighting out of their deep religious belief in jihad and their faith in God. Allah was their only reason for being there, unlike many other mujahedeen who fought for money or land.” Although combat persisted in the north, the Taliban were able to reduce violence in much of the country, slowly gaining ground such that by 2001 their rivals were fairly contained. Their rule appeared stable, if harsh.

The U.S.-led intervention in 2001 toppled the Taliban regime and briefly created greater peace and freedom than Afghans had experienced since at least 1978. In the years that followed, however, it became clear that the more consequential effect of the invasion was the rekindling of Afghanistan’s civil war. The challenges of governing were not going away easily. Nor were the Taliban. Taking advantage of mistakes in U.S. policy, misrule by the government in Kabul, and support from Pakistan, the Taliban movement turned into a capable insurgency. Violence and instability persisted to August 2021.

The war between Western forces and the Taliban changed Afghan society dramatically. That can most easily be seen in the casualties from bombs, mines, night raids, and drones. War also disrupted the economy; many Afghans became dependent on poppy cultivation for income. Afghans experienced their first legitimate elections. Parliament had real power for the first time. Yet, in the end, democracy lost out.

RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM

The source of Afghan political power that has proved most enduring is religion. In the anarchy following the Soviet withdrawal, it was the traditional Islam of the villages that retained credibility among the people. As the anthropologist David Edwards has written, “Islam migrates better than honor or nationality. As a transportable system of belief and practice whose locus is personal faith and worship, it can be adapted to a variety of contexts and situations, but estranged from the familiar settings in which it arose, is it not also more resistant to the mundane negotiations and compromises that everyday life requires?” Through the Taliban, a religious movement ruled Afghanistan for the first time in the modern era. That was no flash in the pan. The movement survived 20 years of war and rules once again, making the Taliban the most significant religious force in Afghanistan’s modern history.

The civil war and its foreign interventions have a yet darker side. They bred extremism. As Edwards charts in his 2017 book, Caravan of Martyrs, the Soviet invasion and U.S. and Pakistani support for the mujahideen pushed martyrdom to the forefront. Foreigners—the Palestinian Abdullah Azzam and the Saudi Osama bin Laden foremost—brought with them ideas of terrorism and suicide bombing. Throughout the U.S. intervention, the Taliban were unable to divorce themselves from either. Siding against foreign terrorism risked criticism from internal supporters, and suicide bombing was an invaluable weapon against U.S. and government forces. In 2019, Amir Khan Muttaqi, a chief assistant to the Taliban emir Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzada and now the Taliban government’s foreign minister, told me: “Suicide bombers are very cheap for us. Just a few suicide bombers thwart all the forces, expenses, and technology of the United States.”

As leader of the Taliban from 2016 onward, Mawlawi Haibatullah has endorsed the use of terrorism. In 2008, Haibatullah advised the Taliban founder and leader Mullah Omar that Islam justified a wider use of suicide bombings. Haibatullah’s own 23-year-old adopted son blew himself up in a car bomb during an attack in Helmand in 2017, recording a video before setting off on the mission. Until that point, no other Afghan leader had ever martyred a son, adopted or otherwise, signifying how values were changing. Traditionally, sons were to be cherished, not cast aside needlessly. An embrace of martyrdom and an indifference to the lives of civilians had become part of what it meant to belong to the Taliban. One can only hope that the trend fades with the departure of foreign powers and becomes an aberration in Afghan history.

WHERE TO GO FROM HERE?

A year after the U.S. withdrawal, it remains uncertain whether a new form of stability has taken hold in Afghanistan. The war may have truly been a transformational process for Afghan society. It is possible that the Taliban’s Islamic government may be able to keep violence at bay, enjoy a base level of legitimacy among the people, and deter foreign intervention. It is also possible, however, that the civil war is not yet over. It previously paused at times—for parts of the country during Taliban rule in the 1990s and during the first years of the U.S. intervention from 2001 to 2005. With that historical precedent in mind, a new unstable balance may not be apparent for another five years or so.

Peering ahead, a renewed civil war could take many forms. One is the resumption of decades-long fighting between the Taliban, which is composed primarily of Pashtuns, and resistance groups based in the country’s north that tend to draw from Afghanistan’s Hazara, Tajik, and Uzbek minorities. So far, the Taliban has faced little more than sporadic attacks from these groups and fiery statements from their exiled leaders—a far cry from an effective insurgency. But that could change with time if the groups can build up their cohesion and resilience and win over popular support. Resistance groups could also wind up receiving support from Iran or Russia, which might decide to aid them because of historical relationships, cultural ties, opposition to the Islamic State, and competition with Pakistan.

In a different scenario, a conglomeration of Afghans in cities around the country could rise up. With sufficiently poor governance, even certain Pashtun tribes could revolt. The Taliban could also be challenged by land disputes. Tribal and villager dissatisfaction with access to land and water have traditionally caused strife. The Taliban received support for 25 years from poor farmers to whom they gave or promised land. For the Taliban to make good on those promises, other Afghans, including landed tribes with title, must lose land, and they may resist. How well the Taliban can balance these competing demands matters. So far, the regime has not been too oppressive, taking a little from the landed without taking it all. Yet land issues can fester and are notoriously difficult for any government to manage.

The Taliban could also fuel their own undoing. The tactics of terrorism feed violence, and the Taliban may be unable to control extremist trends. Young men could continue to look to martyrdom for meaning, grow restive, and look for new targets. Those targets are as likely to be within Afghanistan as abroad. In late 2021, there were rumors that Mawlawi Haibatullah and Sirajuddin Haqqani, deputy leader of the Taliban government, had declared an end to suicide bombings. But the presence of the al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul, where he was killed in a U.S. drone strike in July, bodes poorly. A wider acceptance of extremism could create more recruits for the Islamic State, which maintains a faction in the country and could adapt its terrorist campaign into an anti-Taliban insurgency.

Perhaps nothing is more likely to revive the civil war than foreign interventions. Russian and Iranian efforts to support ethnic and sectarian proxies in Afghanistan and ill-judged Pakistani moves to tame the Taliban, protect Islamabad’s perceived interests, or more clearly define an Afghan-Pakistan border could stoke new violence. U.S. military actions to counter terrorism could also do the same. Precision strikes on Afghan soil could trigger a backlash among Afghans and increase support for terrorist groups. Over-the-horizon strikes may be essential to U.S. national security, but they are also likely to encourage radicalization in Afghanistan. Worst of all, in today’s environment of great-power competition, intervention or influence by one great power could compel others to intervene, backing their own proxies or the Taliban government and producing an escalatory spiral of violence. That would be a recipe for renewed civil war and a tragedy for the Afghan people.

THE U.S. ROLE (OR LACK THEREOF)

The United States and its allies may want to be more than passive observers and try to do something to stabilize the country. There is little harm in providing humanitarian assistance or even stepping aside if other countries want to assist the Taliban regime. Such activities—in contrast to supporting the anti-Taliban resistance and conducting counterterrorism activities inside Afghanistan—would not raise the risk of restarting the Afghan civil war. But the amount the United States and its allies can do is limited. The Taliban regime is unlikely to heed incentives or sanctions to modify its behavior. Moreover, substantial U.S. financial assistance to the Taliban regime would likely draw reactions from China, Iran, and Russia, which would would back Afghans to oppose any U.S. influence. The same is even more true if the United States attempts to back proxies to supplant the Taliban regime. The best policy for Washington may be to monitor the situation closely rather than to inadvertently cause harm by trying to help one side or another.

The United States and other powerful outsiders should not forget the roles they played in prolonging Afghanistan’s suffering during the past four decades. If they do, they may very well repeat the mistakes of the past.

CARTER MALKASIAN is the author of The American War in Afghanistan: A History. He is Chair of the Defense Analysis Department at the Naval Postgraduate School. The ideas expressed herein are his own.

UN Human Rights warns of Afghanistan’s descent into authoritarianism

September 11, 2022 Analytical articles

Kate Clark

Afghanistan Analysts Network

10 Sep 2022 print sharing button

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of Human Rights in Afghanistan has released his first report to the UN’s Human Rights Council. The situation in the country has deteriorated, Richard Bennett said, “to the point where the human rights crisis matches Afghanistan’s humanitarian and financial crises.” He holds the Taleban responsible for the worsening of Afghans’ civil, political and cultural rights, including “widespread gross violations” and is concerned that the country shows “strong signs of descending into authoritarianism.” On economic and social rights, however, he says that “all parties bear degrees of responsibility,” not only the Taleban but also the ‘international community’. AAN’s Kate Clark has been reading the report and brings her thoughts.

Introduction

In this his first report, UN Special Rapporteur Richard Bennett writes that the Taleban have “effective control over the country” and so, even though they are not recognised by the countries of the world, are “responsible for fulfilling the obligations arising out of the various international human rights and humanitarian treaties to which Afghanistan is a party.”^[1] He reports that in his meetings with the Taleban they said they were committed to Afghanistan’s international obligations and also that the great majority of international human rights norms were compatible with sharia. Even so, Bennett finds much to say about breaches of these obligations.

What is in the report

Most significant – presented first in his report – is what the Special Rapporteur calls “the staggering regression in women and girls’ enjoyment of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights since the Taliban took power.” In no other country, he says, “have women and girls so rapidly disappeared from all spheres of public life, nor are they as disadvantaged in every aspect of their lives.”

He writes about the sending home of most civil servants and the “numerous evolving rules” affecting women and girls: the suspension of secondary education for girls, the stipulation that women should stay at home unless necessary, the ban on certain travel without a mahram (a close male relative) and mandatory dress codes. The closure of specialist courts for women, and the sacking of female judges, he said, has also “adversely affecting women’s access to justice,” while an order that the “male family members are punishable for women’s conduct,” is “effectively erasing women’s agency and prompting increased domestic abuse.” He points out that

With the exception of one decree issued on 28 December 2021 (forbidding forced marriage, declaring widows have inheritance rights and the right to a dowry in a new marriage, and asserting the de facto courts will consider applications involving women), these directives violate the rights of women and girls.

He stresses that Afghan women “have faced severe discrimination throughout history.” Even so, his comments paint a picture of women not only being stripped of many of their rights and freedoms by the Emirate but also the creation of an environment which facilitates abuse within the home. There has been a “collapse of mechanisms,” he said, “for victims to seek protection, support, and accountability.”

The second area of concern for the Special Rapporteur is Afghans’ “increasingly precarious” access to food and livelihoods which he puts down to “drought, rising commodities prices, reduced incomes, supply chain disruptions, decreased supplies caused by conflicts, including the war in Ukraine, and lack of donor support.” He notes that the government is “responsible for the realization of economic, social and cultural rights to the maximum of their available resources, including through domestic and international cooperation, under the ICCPR [International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights]. He calls for more transparency from the Emirate over its revenues and spending and “notes with concern” that “reportedly a lower proportion of budget is allocated to basic services compared to the proportion allocated for military and security purposes.”

However, Bennett also raises “serious questions” over how “the relevant international actors” are applying the humanitarian exemption to UN Security Council sanctions (signed off in December 2021) and how this “appears to contribute to the humanitarian crisis.” One of Bennett’s recommendations is that UN member states should “continue to provide assistance and cooperation to ensure adequate resources are made available to realise human rights, particularly rights to adequate food, safe drinking water, sanitation, health and education without discrimination.”

This wide-ranging first report also covers conflict-related human rights violations – the arbitrary arrest, extrajudicial killing and torture of civilians, some amounting to collective punishment – and reprisal killings of former government officials and members of the security forces, and people the government associates with the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) or the National Resistance Front (NRF).

In a section on ethnic and religious minorities, Bennett looks at the situation facing Hazaras and other ethnic and religious monitories in Afghanistan. Hazaras, who are largely Shia Muslims, he says, have been subjected to continuing sectarian attacks by the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) as well as what he calls “multiple forms of discrimination, affecting a broad-spectrum of human rights, including economic, social and cultural rights” by the state.

The Taliban have appointed Pashtuns to senior positions in government structures in Hazara dominated provinces, forcibly evicted Hazaras without adequate prior notice from their homes and imposed religious taxation contrary to Shia principles. There are reports of arbitrary arrests, torture and other ill-treatment, summary executions and enforced disappearances. In addition, an increase in inflammatory speech is being reported, both online and in some mosques during Friday prayers, including calling for Hazaras to be killed.

Some of these allegations apply far more widely: it is not just Hazaras who feel excluded from an administration made up overwhelmingly of male, Pashtun clerics and, as Bennett’s report makes clear elsewhere, Afghan citizens of all stripes have been subject to arbitrary arrest, torture, enforced disappearances and other violent abuses. At the same time, the Sunni Muslim nature of the Emirate makes it inherently exclusionary for Shia Muslims and non-Muslims, and any discrimination or abuses they suffer are felt against the background of what Bennett calls the “historical persecution of Hazaras and other minorities.”

Fundamental freedoms and access to justice

Towards the end of the report, Bennett assesses the threats to what he calls the ‘fundamental freedoms’ – the right to free speech and assembly, and notes the shrinking space for human rights defenders and civil society activists to operate in. He also points to serious flaws in the Taleban’s administration of justice. There is “uncertainty of the applicable laws and process,” he says, with cases “handled idiosyncratically across jurisdictions and venues.” Cases may be heard in the provincial and district courts, with all judges now having a religious rather than secular training, but in the provinces, officials who are not judges are also “empowered to administer justice.” Crimes such as theft or assault, he says, are often “dealt with by security forces without involving prosecutors or judges. In some provinces, more serious crimes may be tried without the assistance of either a prosecutor or a defence lawyer.”

Confusion over the law and who administers it facilitates wider abuses of human rights – as does curbing the freedom to speak and protest. For this reason maybe, Bennett’s first recommendations to the Taleban authorities are to do with the legal framework: restore the constitutional order; review the rules and directives issued since the takeover bringing them in line with international human rights standards; restore clarity and certainty of applicable laws, judicial independence and capacity; protect judges and lawyers, especially women, from reprisals.

What happens next?

Bennett is due to present his report at a session of the UN Human Rights Council on 12 September. While much of the report is addressed to the Taleban, he also has strong words for the international powers that supported the Republic for twenty years and which will be among those addressed at the Council:

The international community must acknowledge its own role and responsibility for the situation unfolding in Afghanistan today. While much was done in the past 20 years to strengthen institutions designed to promote and protect human rights and to ensure the enjoyment of those rights by the people of Afghanistan, reflection is needed on what more could have been done to prevent the human rights crisis and what should be done now to resolve it.

As to what happens next, Bennett says his first responsibility is “to report on the developing situation of human rights and to make recommendations to improve it” and this is the principal objective of his first report. He envisages undertaking research on thematic issues, working closely with other institutions, so that “the situation of Afghanistan continues to be kept high on political and human rights agendas.”

The UN does already have another entity on the ground working for human rights, UNAMA’s Human rights office (read its first report on human rights in Afghanistan after the Taleban capture of power here published in July 2022; AAN analysis here). It was established as part of UNAMA’s mandate from the UN Security Council and reports to the UN Secretary General and the Office of the High Commission for Human Rights (OHCHR). The Special Rapporteur position was created by the UN Human Rights Council and while it also has the support of OHCHR, it is independent. Bennett says he plans to “work with and complement other UN mechanisms, including UNAMA and UN agencies present in Afghanistan” and urges a strengthening of international support to UNAMA, “in particular its human rights service.”

Having two UN entities pushing for human rights in Afghanistan undoubtedly strengthens the cause. Additionally, Special Rapporteurs serve in a personal capacity, and do not receive salaries or any other financial compensation for their work. That means that Bennett with his independent voice can speak more freely.

He has also used his report to sow a seed for the idea that his mandate should be strengthened. In recommendation 99b he calls on UN member states to:

Take necessary measures to strengthen accountability for human rights violations and abuses, including through this mandate and others, including potential mechanisms to address impunity, provide redress for survivors and victims, and bring perpetrators to justice.

Behind the scenes in Geneva, there have been discussions about whether to strengthen the Rapporteur’s mandate, or create an additional mechanism with accountability powers. A group of NGOs released a joint letter on 9 September calling for the renewal of the Rapporteur’s mandate, agreeing that it should be strengthened, as well as calling for the creation of a stronger accountability mechanism, which would be able to investigate and gather evidence of crimes and perpetrators. What Bennett suggests here is that his mandate could be given similar powers, not least because, in his words, his mandate already has “an important accountability component” and that he “plans to take this forward.” At the same time, he says he is not opposing additional mechanisms, which he also makes reference to. It will be interesting to see how far the Human Rights Council is prepared to move. Clearly, given the scale of human rights violations, many human rights defenders argue that while the Rapporteur mechanism is a welcome addition, it is not sufficient, at least in its present form.

So far at least, the Taleban have facilitated Bennett’s work, meeting him at a senior level and providing him with access to some places of detention, education and medical treatment during his visit to Afghanistan in May. He was also able to meet representatives from civil society and minority communities in Afghanistan, as well as people with disabilities, children and members of women’s groups. Bennett believes there must be fundamental changes to the Taleban’s approach if Afghanistan is to stop “descending into authoritarianism.”

The Taliban still has an opportunity to redeem the situation, which requires a substantial change of approach. The Taliban must be more inclusive, respect women’s rights, accept diversity and differences of perspective, protect the population, renounce violence, acknowledge and address human rights abuses and violations, rebuild the rule of law including oversight institutions, and accept, demand and provide accountability. They must close the gap between their words and their deeds and will continue to be judged on the latter.

Thus far, the Taleban have proved fairly immune for calls to change what they see as their basic principles, for example policies on women and girls, or to address abuses they deny exist, for example extra-judicial killings and discrimination against ethnic or religious groups. Nevertheless, this is an administration conscious of how it is perceived by the wider world. It will be interesting to see if Bennett can get any more traction than donors, Afghanistan’s neighbours or Afghan civilians in pushing for change.

Finally, Bennett appears to see his role as looking to the past as well as the future, for example in this call:

The international community should pay particular attention to the calls from Afghans across all walks of life for accountability and justice, for concrete and effective challenges to the impunity pervasive in the country and to remedying the wrongs of the past to prevent their recurrence in the future.

Edited by Rachel Reid

References

References
↑1	They include: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR); International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR); Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination; Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment; Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW); Convention of the Rights of the Child; and Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and; the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

Afghanistan withdrawal remains the correct choice one year later

September 11, 2022 Analytical articles

By Adam Smith

Fox News

August 26, 2022

President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump both reached the same conclusion about U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan — it no longer made sense.

Twenty years into our effort, it had become clear that no amount of money or U.S. and coalition troops could get the Afghan government to the point where it could provide for its own security and stability. We could no longer justify placing more American lives at risk and spending billions of additional taxpayer dollars on the effort. One year ago, Biden took the final step in the process started by the previous administration of ending our involvement in Afghanistan by ordering the withdrawal of the last few thousand American troops from Afghanistan.

Many lessons can be learned from this 20-year campaign. Last year, in the annual defense bill, Congress created a bipartisan commission to examine this very important issue. But the biggest lesson seems obvious. We could not remake Afghanistan, a country on the other side of the world with a vastly different history and culture than ours, through the sheer might of U.S. military power.

Taliban fighters escort women march in support of the Taliban government outside Kabul University, Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)

Some disagree with this point and insist that if the United States had simply kept trying and put more resources into the effort, then we could have built a stable government in Afghanistan that would have been a strong partner of the United States. Twenty years of effort by four different presidents and more generals and diplomats than most of us can now remember make it clear that this is not the case. If we had stayed, we would have simply lost more American lives and spent more money — only to wind up in the same place five, 10, or 20 years from now.

Others argue that we should have kept a smaller military force in the country, not in an effort to remake the government or build up Afghan security forces, but to fight and contain terrorist groups in the country. But this approach does not make sense, either. Who would have secured this small force from the Taliban insurgency rising in Afghanistan? This small force would have been under constant threat, spending the majority of their time on force protection and not adequately conducting their counterterrorism mission. It would have become apparent that this force would either have to be withdrawn or tens of thousands of more troops would need to be deployed to provide force protection for this counterterrorism mission, placing more Americans at risk and costing billions of more dollars.

Lastly, a large number of people focus their criticism on the details of the peace agreement agreed to by Trump, and on the way Biden and his team executed the final withdrawal from Afghanistan last year.

Ending the war in Afghanistan was never going to be easy or without risk. We stayed as long as we did precisely because U.S. government leaders understood this. Analysts knew that without the support of the United States and our coalition partners, the Afghan government would not be able to stand against the Taliban. And the takeover by the Taliban would mean a return to their violent, brutally repressive rule.

Trump bought some time for U.S. and allied forces with the peace agreement he reached with the Taliban in February 2019. This agreement did nothing to stop the Taliban’s war against the Afghan government, but it did stop the Taliban from attacking U.S. and coalition forces. This agreement, however, ended in May 2021. Only Biden’s decision right before that deadline to begin withdrawing remaining U.S. troops stopped the Taliban from again targeting our service members and the coalition forces.

The end was tragic. We lost 13 more brave U.S. service members during the last efforts to evacuate as many Americans and Afghan allies as possible, and the Afghan people have suffered horribly under the return of the Taliban-led government. But the United States and our coalition partners made the decision to leave precisely because we realized that, after 20 years, a large military force was not going to be able to prevent this outcome. More lost American lives and spent U.S. dollars were not going to change that.

The evacuation was chaotic, but it was the inevitable outcome of the Afghan government proving unable to provide for its own security and stability. While we clearly need to examine the details of the evacuation to learn what could have been done better, we also need to look at the 20 years of decisions that came before it.

Removing our military forces from Afghanistan, however, was the right decision.

Congressman Adam Smith, D-Wash., represents Washington’s 9th congressional district, serving parts of King and Pierce counties including Seattle, Bellevue, and Tacoma. As a senior member of Democratic leadership in the House, Congressman Smith also serves as Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

Afghanistan’s Women Are on Their Own

September 9, 2022 Analytical articles

By Shaharzad Akbar

Foreign Affairs

August 30, 2022

How the International Community Turned Its Back

Life under the Taliban is the worst women’s rights crisis on the planet. When the Taliban returned to power last August, they imposed immediate and brutal restrictions, the harshest of which were reserved for women. They quickly imposed a ban on girls’ secondary education, which remains in place despite domestic and international demands to lift it. They also placed restrictions on women’s movement, requiring women to be accompanied by a male family member while traveling, and women’s dress, ordering women to cover their faces in public. Girls and women are also no longer allowed to play sports.

Afghan women working for the government, with the exception of those doing jobs in the education and health sectors, were told to stay home and not report to work. The Taliban have also dissolved the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, an institution that I led until January. These moves have left female victims of domestic violence with no legal remedy or support at a time when there are reports of increased forced marriages, including child marriages. The Taliban have excluded women from appointments in government and participation in major national events, including a large political gathering in June to discuss the country’s future. When a reporter asked Abdul Salam Hanafi, the Taliban’s deputy prime minister, about the lack of women’s participation, Hanafi said that women would be participating, in a way, because their sons would be attending. This kind of rhetoric, along with the new rules, promotes a demeaning narrative about women and their place in society and nullifies two decades’ worth of positive changes in public attitudes about the social and political roles that should be available to women.

The international community’s response to these events has been pitifully insufficient. Members of the UN Human Rights Council, as well as countries that have explicitly feminist foreign policies, such as Canada, France, Germany, and Sweden, have done little more than make statements of condemnation. The same is true for leaders in the Islamic world. Even imposing a travel ban on Taliban leaders has been a struggle, because Russia and China have blocked it at the UN Security Council. The UN Human Rights Council has yet to establish a strong, well-resourced accountability mechanism for Afghanistan despite repeated calls from the human rights community. Diplomats, including those from the United States, continue to engage with Taliban leaders at international conferences and in bilateral talks that exclude Afghan women and members of Afghan civil society. As a result, for the Afghan women at the forefront of the nonviolent resistance to the Taliban, a disturbing truth has sunk in: they are mostly on their own.

This total abandonment requires those working for women’s rights in Afghanistan to question their assumptions about the will and influence of the international community to help. Understanding that foreign partners are not going to show up requires changing the approach of those working in diaspora and on the ground. The focus for the Afghan women’s rights movement should be to strengthen its cohesion and prevent any divisiveness between the diaspora and activists inside the country. The Afghan women’s rights movement also needs to cultivate new allies inside the country and in the region. These should include Afghan writers, cultural activists, and moderate religious thinkers. Afghan women’s rights organizations need to strengthen their partnerships with organizations in Iran, Pakistan, Qatar, and other countries in the region to increase their engagement beyond the Western world. The women’s rights movement should invest in long-term social and cultural change in Afghan society through producing and disseminating content about women’s rights in local languages, strategic engagement with the Afghan media, and finding resources for educational and cultural exchanges for Afghan youth. Although the women’s movement needs to maintain a degree of engagement with Western countries and international human rights bodies, expectations for the international community should be based on a clear-eyed assessment of its near-nonexistent response over the past year.

IMMEDIATE CRACKDOWN

After the Taliban takeover last summer, Afghan women’s lives changed dramatically. For young women across the country, the situation presents a complete absence of hope. I know teenage girls who are suffering severe depression due to the closure of secondary schools. Although universities have not been closed to women, the classes have been separated for women and men and women’s clothing is policed. These restrictions have caused some female university students to abandon their studies. They have also lost their motivation to attend school because there are no employment opportunities waiting for them when they graduate. Households where the woman was the top earner now struggle as women have been sent home from their jobs or have had to shut down their businesses. Although the restrictions on women’s clothing and movement are not always enforced, they have created an environment of intimidation and fear where the act of leaving one’s house now requires immense courage.

As women confront this new reality, they are also reckoning with the severe humanitarian and economic crises that are threatening Afghanistan. An estimated 97 percent of households are unable to meet their basic needs. Tens of thousands of children are suffering malnutrition and being admitted to hospitals every month. Women and girls have been hit the hardest by the humanitarian crisis and lack of access to income, food, and health-care services as most women in the public sector have lost their jobs, and there has been an increase in reports of families selling their daughters into marriage.

Despite their anger, frustration, and loss, women are the only group inside Afghanistan consistently protesting the Taliban’s policies. Female activists have marched in the streets in Kabul and other cities, demanding the restoration of their basic rights. They have organized public events and spoken about the right to education and the need to reopen schools. Just as they did in the 1990s, when the Taliban were last in power, Afghan women have set up secret schools for girls so that they can continue to learn. The Taliban’s response to this civic activism has been a brutal crackdown. Female protesters have been violently dispersed, abducted, and held in illegal detention. They have also been subject to forced confessions. The Taliban have further tried to delegitimize female activists by claiming that they have staged their own abductions to seek asylum. Following the Taliban’s crackdown, the protests have become less frequent and now mostly take place in Kabul—and only if participants can ensure that some international media will be present, in the hope that it will offer greater protection. On some occasions, women gather inside their homes and release protest videos from there.

Women are the only group inside Afghanistan consistently protesting the Taliban’s policies.

Women in the Afghan diaspora have also mobilized, writing and speaking to shed light on the situation in Afghanistan and pressing Western officials and diplomats to take a variety of actions, including setting up independent monitoring mechanisms to make sure that humanitarian aid reaches Afghan girls and women, increasing political pressure on the Taliban to ensure girls’ access to education and women’s right to employment, and keeping in place targeted travel bans on Taliban leaders. Sanctions placed on the Taliban by the UN Security Council in 2011 banned 135 members of the group from traveling outside the country. But 13 Taliban leaders were granted an exemption so that they could meet officials abroad and travel to talks with the United States in Doha during the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump. That exemption was renewed regularly until it finally expired in early August. Now, no Taliban leaders are allowed to travel outside the country. China and Russia are pushing to change this, but Western countries have argued that the number of leaders allowed to travel should be smaller and the approved destinations fewer.

Western support for the travel bans is heartening, but too often the international response to the plight of women in Afghanistan has been hollow condemnations. Although officials from the United States, the EU, and the UN have held many meetings with women activists, there has been little if any concrete follow-up. Women’s rights activists have called for the UN Human Rights Council to establish an Afghanistan fact-finding mission, which would investigate human rights violations, but they have received only partial support from the council members. In October 2021, the council appointed Richard Bennett, a longtime human rights official at the UN, as a special rapporteur to monitor and report on the human rights situation in Afghanistan. Bennett traveled to Afghanistan in May and visited women’s rights activists, families of victims of various attacks, and members of Afghan civil society. He has said that the Taliban “is unparalleled globally in its misogyny and oppression.” His report is expected to be released in September. The work of a rapporteur is important, but Bennett is not paid for his work and his team members are not UN staff. Given the ongoing and widespread violations of human rights in Afghanistan, much more is needed. A more robust response would require a fully mandated and resourced investigative mechanism, such as a fact-finding mission or a commission of inquiry, both of which would require mandates from the UN Human Rights Council.

YOU’RE ON YOUR OWN

This is not the first time that the demands of Afghan women are falling on deaf ears. Throughout the U.S.-initiated talks with the Taliban, which began under the Trump administration and lasted from 2018 until February 2020, Afghan women campaigned, wrote, and organized mass gatherings to demand an inclusive peace process. But their appeals went unheeded. I attended a round of talks with the Taliban in Doha and heard firsthand their worryingly vague and general statements on women’s rights “within Islam.” Following this, in many interactions with U.S. officials, including Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. envoy who negotiated the Doha deal, I raised concerns about the lack of participation of women and victims of war in the talks and the emptiness of the Taliban’s reassurances. None of these concerns or warnings were taken seriously. Instead, I and others in the women’s movement were constantly told that the Taliban have changed.

Additionally, a convenient counternarrative took hold, pushed by male diplomats and male commentators, who claimed that the demands of Afghan women’s rights activists were not representative of rural Afghan women, and instead represented a Western imposition and were therefore not legitimate. In the end, the Doha agreement excluded any references to women’s rights, human rights, or civilian protection, key areas of concern for all Afghan people. Even while the United States and its allies made proclamations committing to protect the women of Afghanistan, they let the Taliban set the conditions of the talks. They participated in a process that would decide the fate of millions of Afghan women but that included zero Afghan women at the negotiating table.

This has meant that in addition to standing up to the Taliban and battling patriarchy inside Afghanistan, advocates for the rights of Afghan women have also had to contend with condescension, gaslighting, and marginalization at the hands of Western officials and alleged experts on Afghanistan. Women activists who fled Afghanistan after the Taliban took control last summer have had to endure this while also navigating the bureaucracies of various Western countries as they try to gain legal asylum. Although Western leaders have talked for the last two decades about supporting Afghan women, at critical junctures, where women’s rights activists’ rights and lives are on the line, Western countries have provided limited support for them or their cause, exposing a deep hypocrisy.

None of this is to say that the situation in Afghanistan is an easy challenge to solve. The Taliban won the war, and nobody wants to stand by and watch Afghans starve in a humanitarian crisis. So outside powers and organizations must deal with the Taliban regime in at least a limited way.

Yet Western officials have exercised poor judgment in picking their Taliban interlocutors and in setting the public tone of their engagement. Consider, for example, how Western governments and even the UN continue to deal with Sirajuddin Haqqani, Afghanistan’s acting interior minister and the leader of the Haqqani network, who remains on the FBI’s most wanted list because of his involvement in some of the bloodiest terrorist attacks in Afghanistan over the last 20 years. The world was reminded of his ties to al Qaeda earlier this summer when a U.S. drone strike killed al Qaeda’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was living in Kabul in a house owned by a top aide to Haqqani, according to U.S. intelligence.

Western officials may have to meet with Haqqani, but they should be mindful of how their interactions further normalize him and whitewash his deeply problematic background. In June, in a tweet noting a “farewell meeting” between Haqqani and Deborah Lyons, the outgoing Afghanistan representative for the UN Secretary-General, the UN used the honorific term “al hajj” in referring to Haqqani, which is typically reserved for people who have completed a pilgrimage to Mecca and connotes a level of respect. The tweet referred to discussions between him and Lyons on issues including counterterrorism, which infuriated Afghan human rights activists who have worked with victims of the Haqqani network’s terrorist attacks for years.

It is possible to deliver foreign aid through Afghan and international nongovernmental organizations without having to cozy up to some of the world’s most wanted terrorists. The EU is one of the biggest contributors of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, and EU Special Envoy Tomas Niklasson has continued to be outspoken about the human rights issues and violations by the Taliban. He also engages with Afghan women and men outside the Taliban’s leadership.

PAINFUL TRUTHS

What has become excruciatingly clear is that Afghan women’s rights activists should not assume that the leaders of the democratic world will stand with them; such leaders and the institutions they represent no longer have much ability to protect Afghan women, nor much interest in doing so. Afghan women’s rights activists should also not assume that the leaders in Muslim-majority countries will pressure the Taliban into protecting even the most basic rights, such as girls’ access to education. It has been a year since the Taliban’s return to power, and not a single government leader from the Islamic world has issued a strong condemnation of the Taliban’s oppression of women, let alone applied any meaningful political pressure. Pakistani leaders, for instance, have continued engaging with the Taliban as if it is business as usual, while women in Afghanistan are imprisoned in their homes by the Taliban’s misogynistic and un-Islamic policies.

These are difficult realizations for the Afghan women’s movement. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, many American politicians spoke about the protection of Afghan women as part of the “war on terror,” and a great deal of the progress that Afghan women experienced in the two decades that followed depended on the United States. Afghan women leaders learned to put pressure on foreign embassies and Western politicians to push the Afghan government to improve legal protections for women and to enhance its own performance on gender equality. In some cases, Afghan women invested more time cultivating relationships with donors and allies in the West than in the communities they intended to serve. This is one of the dynamics that needs to change to ensure the movement’s continued effectiveness and relevance on the ground.

The weak international response to the plight of Afghan women also reflects the ineffectiveness of the global human rights system. Afghanistan is a signatory to many treaties, including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, but none of these commitments are serving the needs of Afghan women and girls under the Taliban regime. International agreements on human rights often rely on naming and shaming wrongdoers. But the current situation in Afghanistan exposes the limits of that approach, as the Taliban themselves admit to widespread violations of women’s rights. They have no shame. Unless there are concrete punishments on them, such as banning their travel or excluding their leaders from regional and international platforms, naming them will do nothing.

Western officials have exercised poor judgment in picking their Taliban interlocutors.

Coming to grips with the international community’s limited commitment to human rights should not deter Afghan women’s rights activists from carrying on with their struggle. They must continue to demand the world’s attention, seek increased humanitarian aid, and push for a sense of urgency in responding to the economic crisis. And they should continue to call out foreign leaders and countries who normalize the Taliban’s oppression of women’s rights.

They must also remember, however, that this is only half the battle, and that little can be achieved without increasing regional and domestic pressure on the Taliban. Afghan women in the diaspora should align with and support the civil society in Afghanistan in that effort. Creating a broader domestic alliance in support of women’s rights will require creativity and patience. Afghan women should mobilize civil society in the region and in Islamic countries to more forcefully stand in support of Afghan women’s rights. This can be achieved by Afghan women leaders in the diaspora investing more time and resources in regional engagements and building strategic partnerships in the region. Women in the Afghan diaspora should act in solidarity with their sisters on the ground, amplifying their demands by providing platforms to activists in Afghanistan and facilitating their access to the networks and resources outside the country. The long-term strategic goal of the movement should be broader cultural and social change in support of women’s rights among Afghans, not just exerting external pressure on the Taliban.

The Taliban’s systematic oppression of women will have devastating implications for generations to come. To change the situation in Afghanistan, activists must go beyond knocking on the same doors and hearing only the same halfhearted statements of support. Meanwhile, if the international community continues its desultory approach to women’s rights in Afghanistan, it will lose its credibility on the issue across the globe.

SHAHARZAD AKBAR is the former Chair of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. She was previously Deputy on the Afghan National Security Council for Peace and Civilian Protection and served as Country Director for Open Society Afghanistan from 2014 to 2017. She is currently an Academy Fellow on Human Rights at Chatham House.

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