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How Western Errors Let the Taliban Win in Afghanistan

October 3, 2022

Foreign Policy

NATO’s last man in Kabul helped facilitate the airlift and had a front-row seat to the Taliban takeover of the capital.

At 6:21 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 27, 2021, NATO’s Afghan adventure formally ended. At that moment, the Italian C-130 on which I was flying as the last representative of the Atlantic Alliance to leave the country crossed the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. For the first time in 20 years, Afghanistan was without a NATO presence.

We had left behind just under 7,000 U.S. and British soldiers, under national command, who would soon withdraw after having destroyed all the sensitive material left at Kabul’s airport, following the chaotic evacuation of Afghan personnel. We left the country and left it badly—in the hands of the same Taliban we had thrown out of power in just a few weeks 20 years earlier. And we left a country that had believed in us, condemning Afghans once again to a very different future from the one we had given them a glimpse of.

The U.S. and NATO exit from Afghanistan may seem simply an episodic defeat. In a broader context, however, the Afghan withdrawal adds to a series of U.S. failures, from Lebanon to the Arab Spring, Iraq, Somalia, Syria—all these adventures ended badly, and the situation left behind was worse. We find ourselves today with the same security problems we had 20 years ago.

The collapse began well before the tragic events of July and August 2021. The Afghan state and its economic and social fabric were progressively disintegrating under the weight of endemic corruption, weak democratic institutions, and political mistakes the West had committed and allowed others to commit.

The constant calls for an early withdrawal from Afghanistan made by successive U.S. presidents and European leaders over the past 20 years convinced the Taliban and their supporters, but above all the Afghan people, that the West did not collectively have the determination necessary to carry out the task.

The signing, on Feb. 29, 2020, of the Doha Agreement between the United States and the Taliban, which sanctioned the withdrawal of foreign forces from the country, was the beginning of the end for the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

The Doha Agreement, controversial since its negotiation, had the explosive effect for Afghanistan of formalizing a precise date for the end of the international military presence in the country, which was the only element capable of keeping the system in that condition of unstable equilibrium to which the authorities and the population had become accustomed and which had held in check the growing Taliban activity that the Afghan security forces were unable to defeat on their own.

This article is adapted from L’ultimo aereo da Kabul: Cronaca di una missione impossibile (The Last Plane From Kabul: Chronicle of an Impossible Mission) by Stefano Pontecorvo (Piemme, 320 pp., €18.50, June 2022).This article is adapted from L’ultimo aereo da Kabul: Cronaca di una missione impossibile (The Last Plane From Kabul: Chronicle of an Impossible Mission) by Stefano Pontecorvo (Piemme, 320 pp., €18.50, June 2022).

This article is adapted from L’ultimo aereo da Kabul: Cronaca di una missione impossibile (The Last Plane From Kabul: Chronicle of an Impossible Mission) by Stefano Pontecorvo (Piemme, 320 pp., €18.50, June 2022).

The deal was presented as a peace agreement, but it was always clearly aimed at allowing the withdrawal of U.S. (and international) forces by securing them against Taliban attacks.

Contrary to the wise practice of negotiating from a position of strength, the United States entered the negotiations from a position of relative weakness, given the imperative to find a way to safely leave the country within a relatively short time frame.

The effect of the agreement was profoundly disruptive as it definitively broke the balance of power in Afghanistan in favor of the Taliban, from whom nothing was asked except the safety of U.S. and allied troops and anti-terrorism guarantees that were more cosmetic than real.

The agreement also signaled to the Taliban and to the Afghan population that the United States and the West did not have the determination and strategic patience to finish the work that had started with the 2001 invasion and carry out the plan for a peaceful Afghanistan.

In this environment, the announcement on April 14, 2021, that U.S. President Joe Biden had decided to go ahead with the U.S. withdrawal kneecapped the Doha talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government, which continued for a short time before being suspended altogether.

Between the initial announcement of the U.S. withdrawal in February 2020 and the confirmation of its date by the new U.S. administration in April 2021, there had been an evolution in the sentiment of the Afghan population toward the United States and NATO—and our Afghan colleagues were no exception. Rather than friends and benefactors, we were now portrayed as untrustworthy and, more and more openly, as traitors.

By July 2021, the Taliban were confident and on the offensive. The pace of the Taliban conquest of the country was impressive. On June 25, the Taliban controlled 99 of the 412 districts in the country; by July 14, they controlled 218. Taliban fighters stopped on the outskirts of Kabul for a couple of days, not only to wait for the finalization of the agreement that was emerging but also because of the instructions given by the Taliban’s senior leadership council, the Quetta Shura, which wanted the Taliban leaders of Kandahar and of the South to take possession of Kabul.

Still, Western officials did not expect the Afghan government to flee or for Kabul to fall so quickly. Indeed, a memorandum marked “For Official Use Only”—drawn up following a coordination meeting of the U.S. National Security Council on the afternoon of Aug. 14 and later leaked to the press—gives a snapshot of the dramatic lack of preparedness with which Washington faced the evacuation.

As Taliban forces entered Kabul and approached the presidential palace on Aug. 15, President Ashraf Ghani abruptly fled the capital in a helicopter bound for Uzbekistan. The news of the president’s flight, which spread like wildfire, immediately led to the few remaining Afghan guards abandoning their posts together with the staff of the civilian airport, which by the afternoon was completely unguarded. Eight Taliban arrived a few hours later, apparently out of curiosity—but then stayed and took possession of it—settling down to drink tea and Coca-Cola in the VIP room on the ground floor.

On the evening of Aug. 16, given the lack of a U.S. guarantee to secure the capital, former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, in agreement with Abdullah Abdullah, the head of the High Council for National Reconciliation, invited the Taliban to enter Kabul to “protect the population and prevent the country and the city falling into chaos.”

To say that the evacuation took place in a surreal atmosphere is an understatement. The planning that the various countries, starting with the United States, had belatedly put in place collided with a reality that no one had imagined, the disappearance of the Republic already in mid-August, putting us in a situation for which, consequently, no one was ready.

As often happens, there was a discrepancy between the realism of the intelligence services and the military and the picture that is painted at the political level. As late as July 8, 2021, Biden was publicly declaring that the Afghan government was unlikely to fall, whereas the coalition military did not hide that the Afghan state was shaky and the armed forces were not in a position to fight. These signals were clearly provided to the U.S. leadership and to the other members of the coalition, who reacted in opposite ways: Washington insisting on the withdrawal and the others calling for a revision of conditions and dates.

Meanwhile, the crowd had grown around the airport and became unmanageable in the absence of any control. The few government guards had vanished, and the Taliban had not yet ventured to the military part of the airport. When they arrived, we noticed it, not because the crowd became more orderly but because the only way the Taliban knew to keep people at bay was to shoot rounds upon rounds of bullets in the air.

The unease was increased by the fact that we had no knowledge of what was happening outside the walls and of the developments regarding the timing of operations, which largely depended on the decisions that would be made in Washington. In Kabul, the Americans were grappling with the sheer size of the problem they had on their hands and struggling to reorganize the evacuation and the consular functions at the airport that they could no longer perform in the city.

Planes of various nationalities, scattered in the region among the Gulf, Pakistan, and neighboring countries, waited for passengers who could not get through the airport gates. The troops did their best, but the planes, including the U.S. ones, took off empty or nearly empty.

The U.S. bases in the Gulf became refugee camps, set up quickly, in which those who were evacuated were herded for weeks in makeshift facilities with temperatures of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

I did the seemingly simpler thing. On the basis of the needs expressed, I organized a coordination meeting, inviting the ambassadors and the heads of the military contingents of all the countries involved, for 4 p.m. on Aug. 15. Everyone came, including the United Nations, the European Union, the United States, and all delegations present in the airport.

From that point, it was a continuous negotiation among the Americans, British, and others. I spent my days and often nights in contact with colleagues and military representatives of the various contingents to smooth out any misunderstanding that could risk disturbing the cooperation I was trying to foster and without which we would have risked leaving most of our Afghan colleagues behind. The atmosphere improved as the hours passed, the numbers of people leaving began to rise, and we soon started to see results as planes filled and took off.

The images of the thousands of desperate Afghans crowding around the airport gates trying to get in to board a plane to a different life will remain etched in our collective memory for a long time.

Was it supposed to end like this? Not necessarily. The epilogue of the Afghan intervention constitutes the final stage of a series of other Western misadventures that ended in almost the same way, starting from Vietnam onward, in which the common threads are always the same.

Stefano Pontecorvo was NATO’s last senior civilian representative for Afghanistan. In his last days in Kabul, he helped coordinate the airlift through which more than 124,000 Afghans who worked with NATO allies and partner countries were evacuated. In his 40-year diplomatic career, he has served as Italian ambassador to Pakistan and as deputy head of mission at the Italian embassies in Moscow and London.

How Western Errors Let the Taliban Win in Afghanistan
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Afghan Resistance Leaders See ‘No Option’ but War

October 1, 2022
By
Foreign Policy
But first they must present a united front to win the support they need to dislodge the Taliban.

Afghanistan is now perhaps the most dangerous country in the world, controlled by Taliban terrorists who are sheltering dozens of anti-Western jihadi groups while torturing, raping, starving, and killing their Afghan opponents. Yet the one person who could make a credible claim to be the leader of an opposition group to overthrow the Taliban has been unable to draw international support or unite fellow Afghans behind him.

Ahmad Massoud, the 33-year-old son of an anti-Taliban war hero, leads the National Resistance Front (NRF), which is concentrated in the Panjshir Valley, a lush and mountainous province close to the capital, Kabul, where the Taliban have been struggling to dislodge them in the year since they took control of Afghanistan. The NRF is one of at least 22 resistance groups the United Nations says have emerged since the Taliban’s takeover last year. A few thousand men are fighting in disparate groups, taking and holding territory in a dozen provinces mainly across the north, where anti-Taliban sentiment is strongest. But they’ve yet to form a cohesive opposition to the Taliban, who have an increasingly tenuous hold on power as factional feuds emerge and international legitimacy remains elusive.

Not that the Afghan resistance is getting any help from Washington. The Biden administration has insisted it will not support an armed opposition and seems to regard the Taliban—led by dozens of sanctioned terrorists—as partners in counterterrorism rather than part of the problem.

Despite repeated warnings of the Taliban’s long-standing relationship with al Qaeda and its affiliates, the world only just awoke to the danger, Massoud said, when a U.S. drone killed al Qaeda’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in a Kabul villa associated with Taliban deputy leader and interior minister Sirajuddin Haqqani.

“Now the world is paying attention,” Massoud told Foreign Policy during a recent trip to Europe. “Afghanistan is turning into a hub for terrorism. And the goal of this terrorism is not to only have Afghanistan; the idea is to spread worldwide.” Afghanistan is a recruitment and training center, he said, where terrorist groups teach skills like bomb-making “in the languages of Central Asia.” The killing of Zawahiri, he said, brought home to countries like Qatar, Pakistan, Russia, China, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan that “the export of terrorism has already started.”

Like many Afghans, Massoud finds it difficult to understand U.S. policy toward the Taliban. “It’s very confusing and will leave a very bad stain on the reputation of the United States as a great country which always stands for great values,” he said. “I believe it is happening because it is cheaper [than an armed presence], but it is a catastrophic mistake.” He pointed to the consequences from the last time Washington ignored a Taliban power grab in the 1990s: A few years later, the Taliban’s guest, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, launched the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.

“We had the experience in the ’90s of not paying attention to the situation. And it can be catastrophic again,” he said.

Massoud’s inability to forge a united opposition in the year since the Taliban’s takeover isn’t due to a lack of name recognition. Massoud regularly invokes the name of his late father, Ahmad Shah Massoud, who led the Northern Alliance in its fight to keep substantial swaths of territory out of Taliban hands the last time they ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. The elder Massoud was assassinated by al Qaeda two days before the huge attacks on the United States that sparked the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan and the ousting of the Taliban.

After the fall of the Afghan republic, he said he tried and failed to negotiate his inclusion into Afghanistan’s government with Taliban leaders. He is now based, alongside other NRF figures, in neighboring Tajikistan, from where he travels widely to drum up support, arms, and money. But he has assumed a Ernesto “Che” Guevara air rather than becoming the fulcrum of an effective anti-Taliban opposition.

And there are blocks to build on. In many regions of the country, the NRF fights alongside the Afghanistan Freedom Front (AFF), which is led by Lt. Gen. Yasin Zia, a former Afghan deputy defense minister and chief of the general staff. Like Massoud, he travels widely, pleading the case for support to dislodge the Taliban. But he describes a Catch-22: Without victories, the resistance cannot attract arms and funding; without arms and funding, victory over the Taliban will be difficult.

Demonstrating the fundamental problem of the anti-Taliban resistance, Zia said he and Massoud have not met. Massoud and Zia stand out as patriotic democrats, but neither have grabbed the imagination of Afghanistan’s war-weary people or governments whose support they need to win a war both say is now the only option.

“We could win a big uprising, but only if we come together,” Zia said. “Brother Massoud” has the ability, charisma, and recognition inside and outside Afghanistan to build a team. “Anti-Taliban groups say they are working for the good of the people. We all say that we want democracy; there is no difference between us and our aims. But if we work individually and independently, it will take too long. Only by bringing our resources together will we be able to bring changes on the ground.” Along with others who claim to have the best interest of their country at heart, it seems they’re just too busy pursuing their own interests to pool resources—an enduring condition of Afghan leadership that arguably led to the fall of the republic.

Despite the Biden administration’s hands-off approach, both NRF and AFF leaders say they are getting some support. Both are attracting former members of the U.S.- and NATO-trained Afghan army, special forces, and police, as well as financial support from diaspora Afghans. And on Capitol Hill, there has been a smattering of support for the Afghan resistance among top lawmakers, including Sen. Lindsey Graham, who has advocated for both Massoud and his NRF colleague, former Afghan Vice President Amrullah Saleh.

But Massoud and Saleh recently met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in an effort to build a regional support base, according to a source who accompanied them, in a move that could lead to a backlash for the resistance in Europe and on Capitol Hill, as Russia’s war in Ukraine deepens economic hardship for hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

Still, the Taliban’s support for terror is wiping off any lingering smiles among countries that cheered the Taliban’s rise and America’s ignominious departure. Pakistan supported the Taliban’s insurgency, but it is now a target of their terrorist partner Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, which seeks the overthrow of the Pakistani state and enjoys safe haven in Afghanistan. China’s demand that the Taliban eliminate the anti-Beijing Turkistan Islamic Party (formerly the East Turkestan Islamic Movement) has gone unheeded. Central Asia fears a variety of Taliban allies, including the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and Jamaat Ansarullah, which targets Tajikistan. But none of this has stopped China, Russia, and Pakistan from pursuing economic opportunities with the Taliban, their lack of legitimacy notwithstanding. Russia just inked a provisional deal on oil, gas, and wheat supplies; China is keen on minerals, including gold, uranium, and lithium; and Pakistan is getting cheap coal.

Even as he struggles to win international support and unify the resistance, Massoud said the Taliban “leave us with no option” but war.

“I believe that even with the slightest support of the world, we will be able to liberate some portion of our country because the people are not happy. The people are not with the Taliban,” Massoud said. “By establishing a fair, just, democratic system that will be a role model for the rest of the country and attract internal migration so people do not have to leave Afghanistan, this will encourage more people to rise against the Taliban’s tyranny and authoritarianism. Then resistance will continue and will grow stronger.”

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

Afghan Resistance Leaders See ‘No Option’ but War
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Biden to Drip-Feed Afghanistan Its $3.5 Billion in Frozen Reserves

September 29, 2022
By
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.

Biden to Drip-Feed Afghanistan Its $3.5 Billion in Frozen Reserves
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Taxing the Afghan Nation: What the Taleban’s pursuit of domestic revenues means for citizens, the economy and the state

September 29, 2022

Kate Clark 

Afghanistan Analysts Network

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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.

Taxing the Afghan Nation: What the Taleban’s pursuit of domestic revenues means for citizens, the economy and the state
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Want more accountability for the Taliban? Give more money for human rights monitoring.

September 29, 2022

Belquis Ahmadi;  Scott Worden

United States Institute of Peace

29 September 2022

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.

Want more accountability for the Taliban? Give more money for human rights monitoring.
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U.S. to Move Afghanistan’s Frozen Central Bank Reserves to New Swiss Fund

September 29, 2022

William Byrd, Ph.D.

United States Institute of Peace

28 September 2022

Money deployed by the Geneva-based foundation may help the country’s lagging economy but won’t reverse its earlier collapse.

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.

U.S. to Move Afghanistan’s Frozen Central Bank Reserves to New Swiss Fund
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My Childhood, My Country: 20 Years in Afghanistan review – desperately sad study of a boy’s life

September 20, 2022

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
 My Childhood, My Country: 20 Years in Afghanistan is released on 20 September in cinemas.

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

September 14, 2022

By Steve Coll

The New Yorker

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.”

Some Hope for Afghans in Need
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Is Afghanistan’s Long Civil War Really Over?

September 14, 2022

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.

Is Afghanistan’s Long Civil War Really Over?
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UN Human Rights warns of Afghanistan’s descent into authoritarianism

September 11, 2022

Kate Clark

Afghanistan Analysts Network

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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.

 

UN Human Rights warns of Afghanistan’s descent into authoritarianism
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