WHAT AFGHANS WANT THE REST OF THE WORLD TO KNOW

October 15, 2022

By Bushra Seddique

The Atlantic
The country is, once again, the worst place in the world to be a woman.

Hajera gave birth to her daughter, Sarah, in Kabul two weeks after the Taliban took over Afghanistan last summer. Hajera is 35 and worked as a government economist. She and her husband already had two sons and were happy to be welcoming a daughter. But they soon lost their jobs, and the Taliban erased the rights women had gained over the previous two decades.

An Afghan women’s-rights activist had connected me with Hajera, who was too afraid to share her last name. “We had a job,” she told me. “We had money. We had a home. We had a country. We had a family.” Now, she said, “we have nothing.”

Afghanistan is, once again, the worst place in the world to be a woman.

I asked her: What did she hope would happen now? “Hich omid nist,” she said. There is no hope.

I was born in 1999, two years before the September 11 attacks and the subsequent invasion of my country. For Afghan women, the overthrow of the Taliban marked the beginning of a luckier time. Schools were opened to girls. Women were no longer imprisoned at home—they were allowed to work, and would no longer be beaten if they chose not to wear the burqa.

Freedom came too late for my mother and her generation. They had prayed and protested for these rights. But many were married off as children. My mother was married at 16. Our mothers and grandmothers refer to these times as the “unblessed years.”

Now that the time of unblessing has returned, it has become clear that as we grew up, my generation was witnessing not the beginning of a new future, but an anomalous moment in our country’s sad history. We had been enthusiastic, energetic, happy, and hopeful. On August 15, 2021, Afghanistan returned to zero. Or even less than zero, because the path to freedom feels even longer and more dangerous now, and Afghan women are so very tired.

I am a refugee in the United States now, but I have been talking with my family and friends, with former teachers and colleagues, to understand what they have been going through and what they want the rest of the world to know.

Faryal is a 14-year-old girl in Kabul. As with many of the women I spoke with for this story, I’m using only her first name to protect her privacy. She should be in ninth grade this year at Hussain Khail High School, where she loved her classes, even though the students had no chairs or tables and studied in hot, overcrowded tents. She used to wake up every morning and leave for school with her 12-year-old brother, but now she watches from the window as he boards the bus. She stays home all day, doing nothing, looking at her old books.

Soon after returning to power last year, the Taliban banned secondary school for girls. The Ministry of Education indicated that these schools would reopen once the Taliban settled on a dress code for female students and teachers “in accordance with Islamic law and Afghan culture and traditions.” But everyone knows it was a lie.

Faryal told me she misses her friends and the playground, where they would braid one another’s hair. She asked me with a crying voice questions I couldn’t  answer. Why have they only closed our schools, not the boys’ schools? Are the Taliban at war with women?

Not everyone is waiting for the Taliban to open the schools. Some people are running secret schools for girls out of their homes. One person told me that she knew of at least two such schools in Kabul and three or four elsewhere in the country, but there may be many more.

Recently, I spoke with a teacher at one of these secret schools. Ayesha Farhat Safi, 22, teaches roughly 80 teenage girls in the basement of her family’s house in Kabul. She doesn’t make any money doing it, and she could be arrested or beaten. She told me, “A lot of students are reaching out to us, but we don’t have enough space to have them all participate, and it hurts me.”

NPR and other news organizations have reported on female students’ attempts to get around the ban. Some schools that teach young girls legally are secretly instructing teenagers as well. When Taliban inspectors visit the schools, the older girls scatter and hide.

None of these secret schools is close enough to where Faryal lives for her to attend. But she knows of them, and dreams about going to one someday. She told me she doesn’t care if the Taliban catch her.

Ispoke with a 26-year-old woman who, until the government fell, had worked for the Ministry of Education, analyzing national enrollment data. She loved her job and the difference she was making in the country. Now she has no job, and many of the schools she watched open have been closed. She told me she feels small and weak, an “observer of the miseries of women.”

Her former colleagues at the ministry have told her that many teachers who taught in girls’ schools have been reassigned to teach boys. Others have left the country. She has had many opportunities to leave, but she doesn’t want to go. She teaches English classes for girls and women, as well as classes in computer coding and other technical skills. Some are streamed online, but others are in person. She told me that her girls gather in a secret location where they pretend to be studying the Quran and Sharia. She believes that the only way we can help Afghan women is to empower them through education. She told me, “I want to stay until it becomes impossible for me to stay.”

Saira Saba, 42, is a former teacher too. She helped organize a protest in August in front of the Ministry of Education, in Kabul, and held a sign reading bread, work, freedom. News reports said about 40 women participated in the protest, though Saba told me there were even more: mothers and daughters, women who’d never learned to read and women who’d worked as professors at universities.

Saba participated despite knowing that the Taliban were arresting and beating female protesters. She said, “We want a country where we have our rights. We want a country where we will be able to work. We want a country where we know who our president is and who our leaders are. And where we have the right to choose our own leaders.”

Of course, it’s not only women who are suffering in Afghanistan. The Taliban are also targeting religious and ethnic minority groups. The economy is paralyzed; the health-care system has broken down; people are starving.

Recently my mother told me that she was walking back from the bakery with three loaves of bread when she decided to share the food with some beggars she passed by. But there were far more hungry people than there were loaves of bread. She says there are more beggars now than she can ever remember seeing in Kabul, and more kids on the streets than in schools.

We lost our freedom of speech the same day we lost our country. There is no constitution, and Taliban commanders set up their own courts to judge individuals on whatever charges they want, whenever they want. Terrorists are finding a haven in Afghanistan, and deadly bombings of civilians in mosques and markets have increased.

But the fear and oppression are worse for Afghan women, because they can’t fight back; they’ve been systematically removed from society, imprisoned in their homes once again. My conversations with the friends I grew up with get shorter and less cheerful each time we speak. They have stopped planning for their futures—they can see that there is no future. Some of them have accepted the first marriage proposal that came their way, no matter who it came from, because they think their only escape from their current circumstances is to find a husband.

My sister’s closet is filled with colorful clothing. But when she goes out she can only wear black; she says it’s like the whole nation is in mourning, and the people in the streets look like zombies. She used to wear lipstick and eyeliner; she no longer bothers, because she knows no one will look her in the eyes. She says that, covering her face wherever she goes, she has forgotten what she even looks like.

It would be nice to think that, in the privacy of their own homes, women have remained free; that they could turn their back on an oppressive government that doesn’t see them as fully human, and continue, at least in their own personal relationships, to be who they’ve always been. But that’s not the case. By removing women from the public sphere, the government has also reestablished the patriarchy within the home, where men are once again judge and jury.

I want to believe that there’s something to be done—that foreign governments or institutions or refugees like myself could somehow help the women back home. The United Nations has restricted the travel of some Taliban leaders. The United States has imposed sanctions on Afghanistan to pressure the Taliban to create a democratic government in which women and other minorities have equal rights. It has also frozen $7 billion of Afghan money in U.S. banks, and announced that it will use about half of that for a fund to support the Afghan economy, in ways that will help the people without enriching the government.

But human-rights activists are calling for more penalties. The UN could ban all Taliban leaders from traveling; Twitter could cut off access (as Facebook has done already) to the official Taliban accounts as well as those operated by anyone lobbying on the Taliban’s behalf. Additional humanitarian aid could be provided on the condition that women are allowed to work, go to secondary school, and participate in politics. Governments and nonprofit groups could help women’s-rights activists by providing financial support and political backing. They could also set up and fund online education and more secret in-person schools.

Afghanistan is not far from becoming the country we were in the Taliban’s first regime. But some things are different now. Few in rural communities have access to the internet, but those who do can organize and resist in new ways. In secret, behind closed doors, Afghanistan is still breathing.

Hajera told me there was no hope. I want to believe that there is a little.

Bushra Seddique is an editorial fellow at The Atlantic.
WHAT AFGHANS WANT THE REST OF THE WORLD TO KNOW
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Iran’s Protests … and the Afghan Sisters Next Door

October 14, 2022

Belquis Ahmadi;  Palwasha L. Kakar

United States Institute of Peace

Thursday, October 13, 2022

Afghan and Iranian women’s movements share a struggle, a language—and an opportunity.

Iran’s women are seizing worldwide admiration with 26 days of courageous defiance against their authoritarian government’s violent confinement of females as second-class citizens who may not freely work, marry, divorce, travel or even be seen with their heads uncovered. Less noted are this audacious movement’s existing, and potential, connections to the tenacious, 14-month campaign by Afghan women resisting the even tighter oppression of the Taliban. Street protest slogans, social media posts and other links illustrate a synergy between the movements that both should use in the difficult task of converting their inspiring courage into real change.

Afghan women protest Taliban rule in Kabul in August before gunmen dispersed them with gunfire into the air. Women have continued to resist a gradually tightening Taliban crackdown against them. (Kiana Hayeri/The New York Times)
Afghan women protest Taliban rule in Kabul in August before gunmen dispersed them with gunfire into the air. Women have continued to resist a gradually tightening Taliban crackdown against them. (Kiana Hayeri/The New York Times)

Iran’s Unprecedented Uprising

Iran’s widened protests this week, including workers’ strikes and Iran’s vital oil sector, underscore that its women are now leading the most potent challenge in years to the authoritarian rule by clerics and their allied security forces. The uprising began as a protest against the death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, in the hands of Iran’s morality police, who arrested her on a Tehran street for allowing some of her hair to stray from beneath the head scarf that her government requires all women to wear in public.

“Protest chants about her death quickly evolved into calls to oust the regime,” USIP fellow and Iran specialist Robin Wright wrote this week. They began chanting “‘Death to the Dictator,’ and ‘Our disgrace is our incompetent leader,’ and ‘We don’t want the Islamic Republic.’” In a default response, Iran’s security forces, such as the Basij militia, have attacked protesters, multiplying popular anger. As of Tuesday, those attacks have killed 185 protesters, including 19 children, reports the monitoring group Iran Human Rights.

Iranian women have protested Iran’s narrow, discriminatory theocracy since the 1979 revolution that erected it in place of the ruling monarchy. Indeed, Wright notes, “The first protest after the ouster of the shah was a women’s rally demonstrating against the imposition of conservative Islamic dress. … Women led much of the 2009 Green Movement protests against an allegedly fraudulent presidential election, chanting ‘Where’s my vote?’ and ‘Death to the Dictator!’”

Iranians’ demands for reform have grown stronger in recent years and news accounts, tracked by USIP’s Iran Primer, reflect how the current uprising has won unprecedented support from a broad swath of Iranian society.

Afghanistan, Iran: Sisters’ Synergy

Like other nonviolent protest movements of the past decade, in Sudan, Tunisia, Libya, Myanmar and elsewhere, the Afghan and Iranian women’s campaigns are using social media as vital amplifiers. Despite their governments’ obstructions of the internet, the two movements can share ideas more quickly because both can discuss them in the Persian language. Women demonstrators in both countries have been using the same Persian-language slogan — “Zan, Zindagi, Azadi” (“Women, Life, Liberty!”) — against their governments’ efforts to control their bodies and choices.

An Iranian protest group called Khiaban Tribune, which is painting street graffiti as part of the protests, last week posted its support for Afghan women, who have defied arrests, beatings and other violence by the restored Taliban regime. The Iranian group declared, “we are both fighting … against a Taliban.” Activist writer Masih Alinejad and other Iranian women campaigners have echoed the comparison between the two countries’ regimes and women’s responses.

Over the 20 years in which a U.S.-led international intervention held Afghanistan’s Taliban out of power, millions of Afghan women won greater freedoms to study, pursue careers and hold public roles in society. Women served as judges and provincial or district governors, headed four national government ministries, held between 20 and 30 percent of parliament seats (compared to about 6 percent in Iran), and ran for president and vice president. A generation of Afghan women built a foundation of experience and skills that they are now using to resist the re-imposition of misogynist oppression by the new Taliban regime, winning local-level concessions from officials in various provinces who are relaxing enforcement against women’s activities to avoid drawing public protest.

A throng of countries offered years of support for Afghan women’s struggles via government aid programs, civil society campaigns, TV talk shows, parliament sessions and national and international conferences. Many Iranian women’s rights activists lament that their own movement has had vastly less international support. But with the Taliban’s return and Iran’s crisis, the two women’s movements are sharing — and can increase — much-needed support for each other.

Afghans’ Continued Resistance

Retaking power in August 2021, the Taliban quickly replaced Afghanistan’s women’s affairs ministry with a “Ministry of the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice,” an organ that was highly oppressive during the Taliban’s 1990s rule. Taliban spokesmen protest to the international community that their regime intends to moderate past oppressions and respect women’s basic rights, but Taliban actions have steadily tightened restrictions. In the past six months, the regime has:

  • Dissolved the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, for years the nation’s most prominent human rights authority and long directed by women.
  • Ordered women to cover their faces in public.
  • Halted the issuance of driving licenses to women and banned women from using public transportation unless accompanied by a close male relative, called a mahram. The Taliban’s restored Ministry of Vice and Virtue ordered bus drivers to install curtains to close off the designated seats for women in buses.
  • Ordered schoolgirls in the fourth to sixth grades in Ghazni province to cover their faces while walking to or from school, or to face expulsion.
  • Banned women from going to public parks where authorities cannot ensure segregation between men and women.
  • Instructed women employees of the Finance Ministry, in phone calls to each one personally, to send male relatives to their offices to replace them.

Afghan women began a wave of protests in the days after the Taliban seizure of power, rallying in the capital, Kabul, and in towns across many provinces, including Balkh, Herat, Kunduz, Baghlan, Takhar, Kapisa, Panjshir and Bamyan. Taliban enforcers beat protesters with batons and arrested them, both women and men. They also arrested protesters’ family members. Under this assault, women this year began holding smaller protests. Fourteen months on, women are gathering in offices or homes to produce photos and videos in which, masked for security, they present speeches and signs with their demands for justice and then share them via text messages, WhatsApp, Twitter or Facebook.

Still, Afghan women also continue to defy the Taliban with periodic public rallies, including street protests this month against an increase under Taliban rule of attacks and hate speech against Afghanistan’s ethnic Hazara minority, who are adherents of Islam’s Shia sect, which also is a minority in a country dominated by Sunni Islam. These latest rallies condemned a horrific September 30 bombing in Kabul that killed more than 35 ethnic Hazara girls and women at a school. The women activists in Iran, a Shia-majority country, have joined Afghan women in specifically condemning the attacks on the Hazaras. As both the Iranian and Afghan authoritarian regimes suppress ethnic and religious minorities as well as women, the two women’s movements should strengthen efforts at building coalitions with other marginalized communities to more powerfully press for real democratic change.

In both countries, some religious clerics have supported the demands of women that authorities stop using force to require women to adhere to government requirements that they cover their hair or faces. In Iran, these include former president Mohammad Khatami. In Afghanistan a group of 15 religious scholars published a statement via social media that called such coverings a moral choice rather than a subject of criminal law.

In the past month, Afghan women have drawn their own inspiration from Iranians’ protests. On September 29, about 25 Afghan women activists protested outside Iran’s embassy in Kabul, waving signs declaring, “Iran has risen, now it’s our turn!” and “From Kabul to Iran, say no to dictatorship!” the AFP news agency reported. Taliban gunmen soon arrived and unleashed volleys of automatic rifle fire to disperse the group.

Building a Sisterhood

One lesson that Afghan women may be drawing from Iran’s protest movement is the need to bolster the support they receive from men in their communities. Afghan men — district-level officials and elders in Kandahar, Paktia, Parwan and Baghlan provinces, for example — have joined women in pushing for the resumption of girls’ schooling that has been halted by the Taliban. But Afghan women have noted the much greater prominence of men publicly with women in Iran’s protests and have said the same is needed in Afghanistan.

Alongside mutual encouragement, the Afghan and Iranian women’s rights campaigns can offer each other complementary elements of support. Afghans provide an example and experience of managing a longer, lower-profile resistance movement under the extremely harsh repression of the Taliban. And with the reduced global attention to Afghanistan following last year’s withdrawal of international troops and most government and non-government assistance programs, it is the Iranians who are galvanizing world attention right now for the goals that the two movements share.

It is only natural that two communities tied by language, culture and their oppression by authoritarianism masquerading as religious faith, are finding synergies. With women in both Iran and Afghanistan facing crisis and opportunity, it is time to strengthen their connections. Whether in person, or on the cellphone screens that feed millions of women and girls in these neighboring countries with emotional support, organizational ideas and clearer visions for their future, Afghan and Iranian women must now all the more strengthen each other as sisters.

Iran’s Protests … and the Afghan Sisters Next Door
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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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