August 30, 2022, marks the one-year anniversary of the last US troops leaving Afghanistan. During America’s 20-year military intervention, there were several opportunities to negotiate peace among the Taliban, the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, and the United States—but these opportunities were missed, went unrecognized, or were deliberately spurned by one or more of the parties. In this important history, Steve Brooking, the first British official sent into Afghanistan after 9/11, examines why the three parties were unable or unwilling to reach a negotiated settlement.
Summary
Peace efforts in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021 required the willingness of three main parties to negotiate: the Taliban, the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (“the Republic”), and the United States. But as political and military advantages shifted, each party’s perceived and relative interests differed over time, preventing the alignment that was necessary for a genuine peace process to take root.
In the early years of the war, with the Taliban on the run, the United States and its Afghan allies chose not to include the Taliban in discussions on the country’s political future or in the new Afghan government. While the United States prioritized military operations against terrorists over statebuilding, abusive warlords and corruption undermined the authority of the fledgling Republic. The US military surge in 2010 arguably led to the kind of mutually hurting stalemate that might have encouraged negotiation, but the US policy machine was slow to acknowledge that a negotiated settlement was likely needed to end the war. By the time the US view had changed, the Taliban could see a path to military victory unobstructed by the need for serious political negotiations with the Republic.
A decisive shift occurred in 2018, when the United States appointed a special envoy to negotiate with the Taliban and enable a withdrawal. But President Donald Trump’s clear intention to leave without any real conditions weakened the United States’ and Republic’s hands in negotiations. Moreover, the Republic leadership distrusted the envoy, was concerned chiefly about its own positions, underestimated US intentions to withdraw, and overestimated the Republic’s own strength—and consequently made no concessions that could advance talks.
The United States negotiated its own deal with the Taliban, excluding the Republic. But the decision to de-link the US-Taliban deal from results in an overall peace process precipitated the speed of the Taliban victory. So, too, did President Joe Biden’s announcement of a complete US military withdrawal by September 2021. By midsummer 2021, Taliban advances across the country demonstrated that victory was within their grasp. The option of a political settlement thus became moot, and in August 2021, as President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, the Taliban took full control.
Ultimately, the three parties, as well as Pakistan, put their own short-term interests above those of the Afghan people, eliminating hopes for a negotiated, inclusive, and durable peace in Afghanistan.
About the Report
This report examines why negotiations involving the United States, the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, and the Taliban between 2001 and 2021 failed to produce a political settlement of the conflict. The report, which was commissioned by the United States Institute of Peace, draws on primary and secondary sources, interviews with participants, and the author’s firsthand experience in Afghanistan as a diplomat and adviser.
About the Author
Steve Brooking was the first British official sent into Afghanistan after 9/11; he attended the Bonn Conference in 2001 and was political counsellor and chargé d’affaires ad interim at the British Embassy in Kabul from 2001 to 2004, before working in the private sector and as a senior adviser in the Afghan government. From 2015 until October 2021, he was the United Nations’ special adviser on peace and reconciliation, leading UN efforts in engagements with the Taliban.
The Taliban’s disturbing rollback of economic and educational opportunities show they haven’t changed since the 1990’s.
Despite prior assurances that they had moderated their positions, the past year of Taliban rule has been marred by a disturbing rollback of women’s and girl’s basic rights as 20 years of advancements have nearly evaporated. Meanwhile, the current economic crisis has forced young Afghans out of the workforce and left them in dire financial and humanitarian straits. USIP’s Belquis Ahmadi and Matthew Parkes examine how the Taliban’s oppressive policies have affected Afghan women, girls and youth over the last 12 months and offer ways for the United States and international community to support Afghanistan’s next generation.
How have women’s lives changed since the Taliban takeover?
Ahmadi: Since returning to power last year, the Taliban have enforced restrictions on women’s access to education, employment and other economic resources, and severely limited women’s mobility generally. These restrictions have been introduced through official edicts, orders and letters at both the national and local levels.
While the landscape prior to the Taliban takeover was problematic, the World Economic Forum’s 2022 Global Gender Gap Report ranked Afghanistan 146 out of 146 for women’s education attainment and economic participation and opportunity.
The Taliban’s methods of enforcement include direct warnings, intimidation, detention and, as applicable, dismissal from government positions. According to a U.N. Women report: “In practice, restrictions on women’s freedom of movement often go beyond what is prescribed in decrees,” due to the culture of fear and intimidation associated with the Taliban.
Almost immediately after taking control of the country, the Taliban ordered women employees of government to stay home. Universities remained closed for several months, and girls in most areas remain unable to attend school beyond sixth grade.
The Taliban’s governmental reorganization included abolishing the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and replacing it with the Ministry of the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, which was an infamously oppressive ministry during the Taliban’s previous rule in the 1990’s.
The ministry soon ushered in further restrictions on mobility — and access to services like health care — by requiring women to be accompanied by a male blood relative when leaving their home. Women can no longer be issued a driver’s license. And in a development that demonstrates both the Taliban’s ignorance on women’s issues and their inability to effectively govern a modern state, the Taliban ordered women employees at the Ministry of Finance to send a male family member to replace them, regardless of the man’s qualification or education level. Taliban decisions and orders make clear the group sees women as second-class human beings, and they are very willing to try and erase women’s presence in the public square.
What are the social and psychological impacts of the erosion of women’s rights in Afghanistan?
Ahmadi: The Taliban’s behavior and subsequent policies toward women have dire consequences for women’s social status and their lifelong psychological wellbeing. Treatment of women as less of a human being or as a second-class citizen affects how society as a whole — particularly young men and boys — views and treats women at home and in public.
Coupled with Afghanistan’s already patriarchal society, it validates efforts to exert ever-increasing control over women’s mobility, education and professional choices — even their choice of what to wear, access to everyday services and their ability to exercise their fundamental rights.
It harms women’s self-worth, confidence and agency. Enforcers from the Ministry of Vice and Virtue often go in communities, gather people in markets and use radio and television platforms or mosque loudspeakers to call for the public to be their eyes and ears in ensuring women abide by the Taliban’s rules of behavior.
In terms of justice, what mechanisms are there through which women can access justice?
Ahmadi: Prior to August 15, 2021, there were laws, special commissions and family dispute resolution mechanisms that provided some level of protection and support to women. Institutions such as the Ministry of Women’s Affairs (which had a presence in every province), the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, and an ever-growing list of women’s rights groups, special commissions and NGOs have been shut down or banned.
Under the Taliban, women have also been barred from practicing law or serving as a judge, prosecutor or defense lawyer. Of the roughly 300 women judges in Afghanistan prior to the takeover, 244 of them have been evacuated from the country entirely.
The Taliban have eroded mechanisms and services that were in place to provide protection and legal counselling to women. The Taliban made the Afghanistan Independent Bar Association (AIBA) part of the Ministry of Justice. By merging AIBA with the ministry, the Taliban have deprived Afghans, particularly women, of a previously robust mechanism to access independent defense attorneys.
Predictably, the Taliban have replaced experienced judges with their own members — most of whom have no formal legal education. Courts have stopped taking cases that relate to divorce, separation or domestic violence. Many women who had pending divorce cases prior to the Taliban takeover cannot proceed with their cases. In rural areas, most family and property related cases are heard and decided by male elders and Taliban. Unsurprisingly, cases involving women are decided in favor of the male party.
All of this is forcing women victims of domestic violence to suffer their abuse in silence and often isolation. In the absence of female justice actors, combined with the Taliban’s policies that embolden patriarchal norms, women are left with no support and options for navigating the justice sector.
Afghanistan has a very young population, with over 60 percent of its citizens under the age of 25. How has life changed for them over the past year?
Parkes: The rise of a new generation of Afghan scholars, activists and civil servants was one of the greatest achievements of the past 20 years. There was hope that a new era would be ushered in as the old guard of powerbrokers were replaced with educated and reform-minded men and women.
But thousands of Afghans from this generation fled the country due to fear of Taliban persecution and decreasing opportunities. Many of those that remain struggle to find employment and keep a low profile to avoid the Taliban’s oppressive ire. Many from this new generation are experiencing immense trauma, grief and fear — a tragic consequence of the Afghan republic’s rapid collapse and an inherited legacy of long and brutal conflict.
And while there rightfully is significant international media attention on the challenges facing Afghan women and girls, young men have also faced persecution and a decrease in their livelihoods. Many young people of all genders have not had the opportunity to attend school and lack basic literacy, which can leave them more vulnerable to recruitment by the Taliban and other extremist groups due to lack of other viable economic opportunities.
In addition to the ban on secondary education for girls, the ongoing economic crisis has left many Afghan families unable to pay the modest entrance expenses to send any of their kids to school. And while girls are not prohibited from taking university courses, officials warn that the lack of a new generation of high school graduates, coupled with the economic barriers, will soon create a “de facto ban.”
The Taliban have also announced their intentions to reform school curricula at all public schools and universities to promote their interpretation of Sharia and national propaganda, which may decrease the overall quality of the education while possibly indoctrinating impressionable youth with the Taliban’s extremist beliefs. In some areas, they have already begun replacing certain lessons and faculty.
The continued decrease in employment and education opportunities for Afghan youth, coupled with the economic and humanitarian crises, will undoubtedly have drastic negative consequences on the long-term stability of Afghanistan. Some families have resorted to child marriage and labor to keep food on the table.
Given the restrictions on women’s employment and movement, the burden of feeding the family can fall on male children and adolescents. This in turn leads to lost opportunities for them to pursue their education, extracurricular activities and develop their potential.
Extreme malnourishment, which experts predict may remain endemic for the foreseeable future, will cost countless lives, and stunt the physical and mental development of countless more, putting the post-takeover generation at an even greater disadvantage while fueling further displacement throughout the region.
How can the U.S and international community continue to support the next generation of Afghans?
Parkes: The U.S and international community must continue to support educational opportunities in Afghanistan to prevent further deterioration and collapse, as well as try to persuade the Taliban and the region that an educated society is crucial to the long-term stability and prosperity of the country.
Donors should think creatively on ways to safely support and elevate young Afghan activists still in Afghanistan, giving them the tools to foster reform at both the community and national level. Providing resources through online education and community-based education initiatives can help youth close the gap caused by school closures and lack of access. Numerous universities and learning centers have already adopted online learning platforms and practices that were developed during the pandemic to ensure education can safely continue. They also should consider online courses and campaigns to advise youth activists both inside and outside the country on how to safely engage politically with authoritarian regimes.
And should the formal education system continue to deteriorate, ensuring that these initiatives can expand and sustain themselves over time will be even more critical. Additional donor funding for the formal education system should be used as an incentive for allowing all girls to return to school, and to mitigate against interference in curriculum development. Increased support for agricultural development and vocational programs can boost employment while improving community livelihoods.
Alleviating the humanitarian and economic crisis is of paramount importance to child development, preventing further youth displacement and ensuring Afghans can go back to school.
Donors should also consider funding trauma healing and psychosocial support programs for Afghans both in-country and throughout the diaspora. This will not only help improve livelihoods but will lay the groundwork for reconciliation through addressing the shared legacies of war.
Matthew Parkes is a senior program specialist for USIP’s Afghanistan and Central Asia teams.
After a Year of Taliban Rule, Advances for Afghan Women and Youth Have All but Evaporated
A year on, the situation in Afghanistan is “looking really grim” as women and girls have lost the gains made over the past two decades and the country’s humanitarian crisis continues to spiral, says USIP’s Belquis Ahmadi. “The Taliban are trying to erase women from society.”
U.S. Institute of Peace experts discuss the latest foreign policy issues from around the world in On Peace, a brief weekly collaboration with SiriusXM’s POTUS Channel 124.
Transcript
Julie Mason: Belquis Ahmadi is senior program officer for the United States Institute of Peace. Here to discuss women’s rights in Afghanistan, and hopefully her own experiences there. Belquis, welcome back.
Belquis Ahmadi: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Julie Mason: Really good to have you. I know that you were in Afghanistan from 2006 to 2009. Seems to me that was a time of some great improvements for women.
Belquis Ahmadi: Indeed, yes. I was just talking to someone the other day; those were the days that we could just walk around in this city and go shopping and do stuff like normal people.
Julie Mason: Right, sit in a café, go to school, have a job, normal stuff.
Belquis Ahmadi: Those are considered normal stuff and very distant right now.
Julie Mason: It’s terrible to think of the advances and then the terrible setback for Afghan women.
Belquis Ahmadi: Don’t get me started on that. I can go on for hours on that.
Julie Mason: I mean, what the Taliban is doing, and of course, part of the shame of it is that the U.S. promise is unfulfilled, and well, and world promises to Afghanistan, really, unfulfilled.
Belquis Ahmadi: Yes, yes. What [the] Taliban [is] doing [is] basically trying to erase women from the society. I have been on your shows before and we have talked about the gains of Afghan women in the past 20 years, or even more, longer than 20 years. The legal rights, the fact that the constitution of the country recognized women as equal citizens of the country. So, right now, that’s gone. Family laws that provided some level of protection to women, gone. [The] elimination of violence against women law that was put in place to support and protect women, gone. That does not exist. The national action plan for the implementation of the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security does not exist anymore.
Julie Mason: Meanwhile though, the people are starving.
Belquis Ahmadi: The people are starving. Especially women because they don’t have opportunities to earn an income, do the jobs that they have prepared for so many years. If you recall, in one of the previous programs I was in, I talked about the number of judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, and police and army. Six thousand women serve in these entities, one thousand journalists – I’m talking about women alone – and more than one thousand women owned small and medium businesses that created 80,000 jobs for men and women, invested their own money, $70 million. None of those exist right now. Women served as ministers, as ambassadors, as legislators.
Julie Mason: Yeah, we were speaking on the show recently with an Afghan journalist about how perhaps the greatest metaphor for this is how in Kabul, there was like a Ministry of Women or Department of Women’s Rights, it was an agency devoted to the advancement of women in Afghanistan and achieving that, and that has been emptied, you know, stripped of all meaning, and is now the Ministry of Vice and Virtue, which enforces these terrible laws against women, even riding in a taxi with a man not a family member.
Belquis Ahmadi: That was in fact one of the first decisions [the] Taliban made to replace the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, and all their departments throughout the country, with their Ministry of Vice and Virtue. By the way, the Taliban are the only creatures on the face of the Earth who believe that there has to be a ministry dedicated to vice and virtue.
Julie Mason: And yet they can’t govern and, you know, I think what U.S. policymakers are struggling with is obviously the U.S. does have a responsibility to Afghanistan, but how do you help the people without helping the Taliban?
Belquis Ahmadi: I believe there are different ways to do that. We just have to be creative and think out of the box. And there are certain decisions that require, how should I put it in a more diplomatic way, decisive decision, such as targeted sanctions on Taliban leaders. This current sanction hurts Afghan people more than the Taliban. [The] Taliban make money. They have revenue. They are not hurt. So, my suggestion would be strongly, of course, to target sanctions on Taliban leaders. They have businesses outside the country, they have bank accounts everywhere. Freeze their bank accounts, so they feel the pinch, not the people.
Julie Mason: That’s so interesting because, you know, they seem so primitive. You never think of those guys as having foreign investments.
Belquis Ahmadi: They like to be perceived that way. But they are, at the end of the day, they are human beings. They also have needs to fulfill and they have lived, the leaders have lived outside the country for years and years. I mean, how do you survive in a place like Pakistan if you don’t have an income, and if you don’t have a bank account? They own houses. They own properties in different countries.
Julie Mason: So, there’s ways to go after them that are meaningful.
Belquis Ahmadi: That would be one of the and then reinstate [a] travel ban. Because we live in the twenty-first century, you don’t have to meet face-to-face. You don’t have to meet or travel thousands of miles – by the way, in private jets and business class – in order to go and meet with an official in Qatar or Uzbekistan or somewhere else. During the pandemic, we have been meeting, we continued living, conducted businesses through Zoom and so many other tools. Why can’t the Taliban do that? And if there is an argument that, “Oh well, certain things have to be discussed in person, and so…” Yes, do that for that specific meeting. Bring them out and then let them go back and let them travel, like, economy class. Who in their right mind would decide to send a private jet to pick up Taliban from Kabul and take them to Norway, to Qatar and other places?
Julie Mason: Okay, so where do you think the situation is heading in Afghanistan?
Belquis Ahmadi: Not well. Let’s start with the humanitarian crisis. Both man-created – by “man,” I mean Taliban-created and also by natural disasters. You heard about the earthquake a few months ago and now flash floods everywhere displaced thousands and thousands of people. It’s looking really grim. It requires out-of-the-box thinking and decisions, and Taliban sympathizers and supporters in Afghanistan [and] outside Afghanistan, they have to be pressurized. I can think of Pakistan to begin with and other countries.
Julie Mason: Of course, the return of al-Qaida, or the resumption of al-Qaida, activities in Afghanistan is worrisome as well.
Belquis Ahmadi: [This is] something that [the] Taliban denied for years and years. And there you go, an al-Qaida leader shows up under their nose. And they still deny his existence. I mean, how do you deal with people with so many lies? They are governing based on lies, basically. While in fact, I take it back, they are ruling, they are not governing because to govern, you have to have certain skills and resources. [The] Taliban have replaced every single judge in Afghanistan with their own mullahs. The majority of them have no legal background. They don’t even know the constitution of the country, which is, by the way, suspended. The Minister of Health is a mullah, the Minister of Technology is a mullah. How do you govern?
Julie Mason: You don’t. I mean, as you say, it’s not governance. It is merely rule. For governance, you have to have values. You have to have…right. There has to be more to it than just authority. But that’s all they have is authority. Belquis Ahmadi, thank you so much for joining me this morning.
Belquis Ahmadi: Thank you for having me.
Julie Mason: Good to have you.
Belquis Ahmadi on Afghanistan a Year After the Taliban Takeover
Tomorrow marks the first anniversary of America’s messy and chaotic withdrawal from the 20-year war in Afghanistan. Many observers are evaluating today whether President Joe Biden’s decision to end the war was the right one. While there is no question that America’s exit could have been handled better, the bigger question is whether Biden was right to leave.
The answer is a resounding yes. In fact, he should have done so earlier.
That view is not universal, however. Some of the most famous advocates of the two-decade war in Afghanistan have been just as outspoken in claiming Biden’s order to end it was a mistake. In The Atlantic, former U.S. commander, retired Gen. David H. Petraeus, wrote that the real problems were America’s lack of commitment and strategic resolve.
John Nagl, who famously penned the military’s counterinsurgency strategy, claimed, “The failure to build a sufficient dedicated advisory force structure is among the most critical failures of the military” in Afghanistan and “contributed significantly to American defeat” in that war.
Former Army Deputy Chief of Staff, retired Gen. Jack Keane, went so far as to blame the president’s withdrawal for the Taliban’s return to Kabul. Keane claims that American withdrawal put the Taliban in charge again, allowing them to provide sanctuary to al Qaeda. What we should have done, Keane says, is maintain an acceptable stalemate.
What all of these men essentially argue is that the U.S. did not try hard enough, did not stay long enough, and did not provide enough support.
Yet as I can personally attest from having served two combat tours in Afghanistan (the last during 2010-2011, at the height of Petraeus’s Afghan surge), these proponents of continued U.S. military engagement in Afghanistan are ignoring a whole herd of elephants in the room.
The reality is that Petraeus, Keane, and Nagl were three leading voices among a broad cohort of foreign policy elite in the United States that constantly argued for more troops, more time, and more engagement. Any talk of ending the war, of withdrawing, was summarily rejected. The rejections were always accompanied by stark warnings of unspecific threats that would materialize if the U.S. military left.
But over the final 13 years of the war, there were a handful of highly qualified voices that tried to inject reality into the conversation. Matthew Hoh was the first.
In September 2009, Hoh was a senior civilian officer for the State Department, working in Afghanistan’s Zabul province. A former Marine who led a combat engineer company during the Iraq war, he resigned his post in protest. The Afghan people who were fighting against the U.S. coalition, he told ABC News, weren’t doing so “for any ideological reasons, not because of any links to al Qaeda,” but simply “because we are occupying them.”
The Afghan government, Hoh wrote in his resignation letter, demonstrated a “glaring corruption and unabashed graft; a president whose confidants and chief advisors comprise drug lords and war crimes villains, who mock our own rule of law.” The regional officials were just as corrupt, he claimed. “Our support for this kind of government,” Hoh concluded, “coupled with a misunderstanding of the insurgency’s true nature, reminds me horribly of our involvement with South Vietnam.”
One of the most consistent and accurate voices warning that our war was failing throughout was Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In a 2010 assessment, Cordesman wrote, “The lack of transparency, unity of effort, and effective (action) in each of the six areas (of President Obama’s Afghan war strategy) is now losing the war. No amount of spin, optimism, and wishful thinking can deal with any one of these challenges.”
During my second combat deployment to Afghanistan, I found that nearly everything Hoh and Cordesman had written was accurate, and in some cases understated. I lamented in a 2012 Armed Forces Journal essay that senior U.S. civilian and military leaders were systematically deceiving the American public about the war, claiming progress where there was none.
“How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding,” I rhetorically asked. The most responsible action then-President Obama could have taken would been to have ended the war in 2012, not let five more years of pointless war and sacrifice pass before handing the morass off to his successor. Trump could have ended the war during his Administration, but at least he established an end date for the war before he left office.
Despite the warnings shared by many who had direct knowledge of the failures of the war, the pro-war advocates won out for another full decade after I wrote the above. During that time, thousands more Americans were killed and wounded – hundreds of thousands would eventually suffer traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder – for a war that was militarily unwinnable.
Biden was right to end the war and stop the bleeding. Without question, the withdrawal could have been executed better, but the truth is that the rot of two full decades spent trying to cover military failure could no longer be hidden, resulting in the complete collapse of the Afghan state in mere months. To stay longer would have increased the number of U.S. casualties and delayed the inevitable.
Expert Biography: Now a 1945 Contributing Editor, Daniel L. Davis is a Senior Fellow for Defense Priorities and a former Lt. Col. in the U.S. Army who deployed into combat zones four times. He is the author of “The Eleventh Hour in 2020 America.” Follow him @DanielLDavis.
The Real Problem With Biden’s Afghanistan Withdrawal: It Came 10 Years Too Late
On the morning of August 15, 2021, Samira was lying in bed, drifting in and out of sleep, in a room she shared with several other people. They were in a shelter in Kabul run by Women for Afghan Women (waw), a U.S.-headquartered N.G.O. dedicated to protecting vulnerable women in Afghanistan. Samira and her roommates had found refuge there from abusive brothers, fathers, husbands. Suddenly, she was jolted awake by the voice of the shelter manager giving urgent orders: the Taliban had taken control of Kabul and they all had to get out. waw could no longer guarantee their safety. Around Samira, women started to cry. Staff scrambled to determine who could go to relatives’ homes, and handed out forms stating that clients were leaving the shelter of their own accord.
Samira panicked. She had been there for only two weeks and couldn’t return to her family. Her stepmother and half brothers hit her often, and for little reason. Once, they beat her when she cooked a meal they didn’t like. In fact, this was her second stay at waw. Two years earlier, she had lived there for nearly seven months. waw had mediated between Samira and her family members, who agreed to stop the violence, and she returned home. But, Samira told me, the beatings got worse. Sometimes her family refused to let her eat for days. Recently, the brothers—struggling farmers in Laghman Province—announced that she would be married to an elderly man, who was offering a hefty sum. Samira realized that she was being sold. She snuck out in the middle of the night and huddled at a bus terminal. When dawn broke, she took a taxi to Kabul and eventually arrived at waw.
By the time the shelter manager ordered the women to leave, the city was already transforming. Taliban fighters had entered the capital on pickup trucks and Humvees, brandishing machine guns. Local police abandoned their posts, and embassies evacuated their staff. President Ashraf Ghani and his wife, Rula, left on a plane. Some Afghans, remembering the Taliban rule of the nineteen-nineties, took precautionary measures, painting over photos of women on advertisements. waw’s leaders were convinced that the Taliban would not allow them to continue operating shelters. In the confusion, Samira made a quick decision. She signed the form, gathered her few belongings, and stepped out of the shelter’s gates and into the midafternoon sun.
Samira started walking toward the northern part of the city. U.S. military planes circled overhead, and sporadic gunfire sounded in the distance. She came to a cemetery where tents of cloth and rope had been erected. The area had been a gathering place for heroin addicts and, more recently, Afghans fleeing conflict in other parts of the country. If Samira stayed on the main streets, people would ask who she was, what she was doing. At least in a cemetery, she reasoned, there would be the safety of seclusion. Night fell, and more people arrived. Samira found two women who reluctantly allowed her to sleep near them and settled in.
Like thousands of other Afghan women, Samira thought that waw would save her from a life of abuse. However, soon after the government’s stunning collapse, and the chaotic U.S. pullout, waw, the largest women’s organization in the country, would make the decision to shutter its shelters permanently, leading many of its clients to feel abandoned, and dividing staff members over how to proceed. Several of its leaders would quietly flee Afghanistan; its founders say that the institution betrayed its own mission. As the world rushed to evacuate tens of thousands of people from the country, a daunting question hung in the air: What would happen to the millions who were not able to leave?
Waw was conceived in early 2001 by Sunita Viswanath, who was then a thirty-four-year-old human-rights activist working at the Sister Fund, a charity based in New York. She had been shocked by what she read in newspapers about Taliban rule—people stoned in football stadiums, music outlawed, women banned from public spaces—and how little attention it was getting. She and a group of other women, including Masuda Sultan, an Afghan American entrepreneur and human-rights activist, formed waw to try to help.
In the beginning, their programs mainly served Afghan communities living in the U.S. But after the American invasion toppled the Taliban government following the 9/11 attacks, waw turned its operational focus to women in Afghanistan. Gloria Steinem helped plan their first conference, in New York. In 2003, waw gathered women from across Afghanistan in Kandahar, the Taliban’s former stronghold. The attendees produced an “Afghan Women’s Bill of Rights” that they wanted to include in the country’s new constitution: access to reproductive health care, the right to marry and divorce, rights of inheritance. The constitution ultimately didn’t incorporate any of these demands, but it did recognize that men and women have “equal rights and duties before the law.”
Still, the new, Western-backed government failed to reach some of the most vulnerable populations. When waw staff visited women’s prisons, they found that many detainees were languishing there after fleeing abusive homes. (Women were incarcerated for “moral crimes,” such as eloping or having extramarital sex, even in cases of rape.) waw launched a shelter program and built support centers that cared for children who had been jailed alongside their mothers. In Afghan society, it’s unusual for women to live alone, and waw led mediations to reunite clients with their families. If a woman returned home, staffers would visit unannounced to confirm her safety. If she didn’t want to go back, waw could help her secure a divorce and find a new husband, or a job with the organization. Lawyers and counsellors were trained to root waw’s work in Islamic law and traditions.
waw’s programs and budget in Afghanistan outgrew those in the U.S. Eventually, it was operating in twelve provinces and serving more than three thousand clients annually. But, as its work became more public, it drew scrutiny and criticism. In 2010, Noorin TV in Kabul ran an “investigative series” that falsely accused shelters of being fronts for prostitution. That same year, Manizha Naderi, then waw’s executive director, brought Bibi Aisha, an eighteen-year-old girl, to the U.S. for reconstructive surgery. Bibi Aisha had run away from her in-laws; after she was found, her husband, a Talib, and his family, cut off her nose and ears. Time featured her picture on its cover with the headline “What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan.” Some felt that waw had used Bibi Aisha to justify the U.S. occupation. (Viswanath recalled a State Department official expressing the opposite concern—they thought that publicizing Bibi Aisha’s case highlighted the U.S.’s inability to keep Afghans safe.)
At times, waw struggled with the Afghan government, too. In 2011, President Hamid Karzai tried to take control of all women’s shelters in the country, nominally to quell rumors of corruption and prostitution. (The plan failed.) But, after Ghani came to power, in 2014, waw developed closer ties with Kabul. Rula, Ghani’s wife, became particularly invested in the organization, once remarking that few had been able to tackle problems facing women “with the understanding and dedication, the wisdom, and the patience” of waw. Leslie Cunningham, a member of the board and the wife of a former U.S. Ambassador, was friends with Rula, and it sometimes seemed to Viswanath that waw had to seek permission from the government to do its work. By 2018, there were new concerns. The government, rife with corruption and dependent on the U.S., was unable to hold territory—or popular support—in the peripheries of the country. The Taliban was making gains, and the U.S. had started engaging the group in peace talks. “Things are looking really bad,” Sultan told Viswanath.
In 2019, the two approached waw’s board about following the U.S.’s lead. If the Taliban was capturing large swaths of territory, they reasoned, waw would need to work with them. With help from Islamic scholars, Sultan and Viswanath put together a document that outlined religious justifications for women’s shelters. They met with academics, experts, and N.G.O.s who advised them on how to open lines of communication with Taliban leadership so that they could continue their operations. waw didn’t stop these efforts, but it didn’t support them, either. Viswanath and Sultan felt sidelined by their own organization.
According to Viswanath and Sultan, several board members, including Cunningham, worried about legitimizing the Taliban. There also seemed to be a strong desire to maintain a relationship with the Ghani administration, which had been left out of the U.S.-Taliban peace negotiations. Meanwhile, Najia Nasim—waw’s Afghanistan-based executive director—and a few other staff members simply believed that the group couldn’t be trusted. To the founders, getting stalled by these concerns amounted to a failing strategy.
waw staff declined my requests for individual interviews; Annie Pforzheimer, a board member who briefly served as the acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Afghanistan, responded on behalf of the organization. She confirmed that there were concerns that the Taliban might leverage a relationship with waw to portray itself in a more favorable light. But, she said, waw ultimately decided not to engage with the group because it believed that doing so would be ineffective and possibly illegal. (Sultan told me that the State Department knew she was pursuing meetings with the Taliban and didn’t indicate any legal concerns.)
On April 14, 2021, the Biden Administration announced that the U.S. would withdraw troops from Afghanistan by September 11th, ending the longest military conflict in American history. A team within waw—led by Nasim, Sayeb Muheballah Haqiq, the country director at the time, and Mohammad Shirzad, the head of security—put together contingency plans. If a district fell to the Taliban, the staff would destroy most documents and bring the necessary ones to a secure location. waw also started closing shelters, reuniting clients with their families, and transferring some women to the capital.
When Kabul fell, panic set in. This was the worst-case scenario that Sultan and Viswanath had feared, and waw was unprepared to deal with it. Nasim directed employees to completely halt shelter operations and to send as many women as possible back to their relatives. The abrupt decision surprised one of waw’s donors. “Suddenly, I get the news that everyone is reintegrated,” Tooba Mayel, the director of the Colombo Plan Gender Affairs Programme, told me. “We could have helped.”
Nasim, the executive director, would’ve been the one to find a way to operate under the new regime; several former staff and board members told me that, in mid-August, she seemed to disappear for weeks and did not respond to multiple urgent messages. (According to waw, she was in contact with a few people.) In New York, staff worked tirelessly on evacuations. In Afghanistan, Haqiq and Shirzad took charge, rushing to negotiate with local Taliban militias who had entered waw offices, confiscated furniture and cars, and in one instance detained some employees. Zahra, the shelter manager in Kabul, moved forty-five women and their children to a safe house, and fielded calls from other employees and clients looking for guidance. “It was mad days,” she told me, fighting back tears. Haqiq led talks with several Taliban officials to explain waw’s work. They didn’t get explicit permission to continue operating the shelters, but they weren’t attacked, either. Haqiq told me that he wished the conversations had happened before August’s chaos.
Despite these efforts, leadership in New York seemed determined not to continue. In a private conversation about how to work in the new climate, which I acquired a recording of, Nasim said that keeping shelters open would put the staff in danger. Kevin Schumacher, the deputy executive director, called the Taliban a “bunch of animals.” In early 2021, waw had been serving five hundred clients, many of whom had few options aside from returning to abusive homes or prison. After the takeover, waw permanently shuttered its women-focussed services, including the shelters and halfway houses, and evacuated many high-level employees, including Nasim, who ended up in Canada. By the end of the year, waw had let go of hundreds of staff members—defense lawyers who had once argued divorce cases in court, cooks who had worked in the shelters, personnel who had housed women at great personal risk. Like the clients, they were left behind. Pforzheimer emphasized that waw had to end its programs to protect staff and clients from danger, but Viswanath saw it differently. “Hatred of the Taliban defined the organization more than protection of women and girls,” she told me.
This spring, I travelled to Kabul and met with former waw clients and employees. We filed into an empty lounge inside a hotel in the center of the city, the gates of which are now guarded by the Taliban. Six staff members squeezed onto a sofa and a couple of armchairs, while about a dozen women—former clients—gathered around me. (Some names have been changed for their safety.)
Marwa, who wore gold-rimmed glasses, spoke softly and quickly. Like many of waw’s clients, she had transferred to a shelter from prison. She showed me photos of her face at the time: bloody cuts on her cheek and upper lip and bruises around her left eye. “My brother,” she explained. It happened after she ran away from her abusive husband. She had been with waw for eighteen months when the Taliban entered the capital. Marwa moved to a staff member’s house, but, soon, people started inquiring about the “strange women” living there, suspicions that morphed, as they often did, into accusations of prostitution. Marwa tried appealing to her father, who refused to allow her to enter his house; finally, the staff member helped her find a husband. He was a kind man, Marwa told me, but he had been part of the Afghan National Army and was now unemployed.
The women wanted to give each other the space to tell their stories, but whenever there was a pause in the conversation, they talked over each other in excitement. The staff seemed similarly impatient, often interjecting to reiterate how waw had abandoned them. At one point, the Kabul shelter manager, Zahra, who had been composed and stern, started to cry. She had worked with waw for ten years and was familiar with the weight these women carried. “What’s most hurtful is that leadership left us,” she said.
Mina, who wore a black-and-white floral hijab wrapped tightly around her face, told me that she had been a university student in Kapisa Province when she had a baby out of wedlock. She was imprisoned for several months before being transferred to waw, where she stayed for five years, working at the kindergarten in one of the halfway houses. In mid-August, she returned to her father’s home. When he finally allowed her in, he started beating her and withholding food. Her family taunts her, she told me, saying that her child should be killed. She had nowhere else to go.
It was Ramadan, and, with sunset looming, it was almost time to break the fast. Some women gave their apologies and left. Most, however, stayed, wanting to make sure that I heard what had happened. Rokhsana breast-fed her son as she told me that she and a few other women had pooled one-time payments given to them by waw (about ten thousand Afghanis, the equivalent of a hundred and twenty-five dollars, each) and, together, they had rented an apartment. Eventually, the other women left. Rokhsana was still living there; with no way to pay rent, she could be evicted at any time. Razia, who has three kids, leased a similar apartment in a squalid corner of Kabul, and hadn’t been able to pay rent in several months. Her daughter and two sons were helping her beg on the street.
Samira had not received any money from waw, and still didn’t have a regular place to live. After staying at the graveyard for three nights, she had moved to a settlement in a park. She started crying as she recalled a woman who handed her a hundred Afghanis, which she used to buy bread, her first meal that day. She spent the following months in the harsh cold, moving from park to park, she told me. She had been leered at and propositioned, and, at one point, in desperation, she befriended a group of women who gave her heroin.
Other women had faded into faraway corners of the country. Some had gone missing, and some had stopped answering their phones after sending cryptic messages. Haqiq told me about one woman who had been hurriedly reintegrated with her parents. One day, when she had left home to run errands, her husband approached and stabbed her to death. (waw declined to elaborate on the case, but told me that “we are devastated by the fact that we don’t have the tools to protect people anymore.”)
When Biden announced the pullout from Afghanistan, he promised that the U.S. would “continue to support the Afghan people.” The end of the military conflict has been a reprieve for many families, especially in rural parts of the country, but, since August, the U.S. and much of the international community have been waging a different type of war against Afghanistan, through economic might. The Biden Administration froze seven billion dollars of Afghan assets—and in February earmarked half those funds for families that lost relatives in 9/11. According to one estimate, around half a million government employees, including teachers and health-care workers, stopped getting paid. The U.S. has also imposed sanctions on the Taliban government, hampering the ability of aid groups and N.G.O.s to deliver services, and, in tandem with the asset freeze, causing a severe liquidity crunch. Before the withdrawal, foreign donors accounted for three quarters of the country’s public spending. That money has evaporated. In May, the United Nations warned that nearly half the population was at risk of starving. “We have never seen the impacts of poverty and societal breakdown on such a scale,” Anita Dullard, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said. (Last month, the World Food Program estimated that four million children are “acutely malnourished.”)
In Kabul, which is more connected to the banking system than the rest of the country, and where the population is bloated with internally displaced people, the economic crisis is visibly dire. Soon after I arrived, a man burned himself on the streets in desperation. Amid the orchestra of honks in downtown traffic, young girls tapped at car windows, begging for money. In a quiet corner of the city, women gathered outside a bakery at dusk to wait for a piece of bread. One woman thrust her son at me, holding up his thin arms; her husband had died in the war, she said, and she had been coming here to feed her family.
After the Taliban takeover, waw raised nearly eleven million dollars to help Afghans. Little of that money has actually gone to Afghanistan. Staff members in the country did not receive their paychecks through the end of 2021, and had little financial support to assist the women they once cared for. waw told me that it did provide small stipends and food to some clients and staff, using resources already in the country, but that it was unable to send more money because it was concerned about violating U.S. sanctions. Some organizations use the hawala system—an informal network of cash transfers that involve unknown middlemen—which waw deemed “too legally risky.” The organization insists that clients are still able to request ongoing humanitarian support. More than a dozen women and former staff I spoke with said that they hadn’t received anything in months.
Operating as a women’s organization under the new regime is mired in difficulties; for example, the Taliban dissolved the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, which had once been waw’s main government contact. To Viswanath, the fact that the largest Afghan women’s organization chose to focus on evacuations and refugee resettlement, rather than make plans for the twenty million women “who didn’t have luxury to leave,” reflects a moral problem. “We needed out-of-the-box, non-bureaucratic solutions for a huge crisis moment,” she told me.
The waw staff and clients I spoke with often circled back to a nagging point: the injustice of waw’s hasty withdrawal. One Saturday this spring, several dozen gathered outside the main office in Kabul to demonstrate against the leadership. One woman held up a sign that read, in English, “I was waw staff. Now I’m hungry and jobless.” They also lodged a formal complaint with the Taliban’s Ministry of Economy, alleging corruption, abandonment of clients, favoritism in the evacuation process, and failure to disburse donated money to clients and staff. In recent months, after the U.S. eased some financial restrictions, waw has paid back salaries to former staff. Haqiq and Shirzad, meanwhile, have been forced out of waw—in retribution, they believe, for speaking out against Nasim’s handling of the situation. (Pforzheimer told me that Haqiq was not performing his duties. Shirzad told me that he felt pressured to resign.)
Donors and women’s-rights activists are uncertain, and sometimes split, on how to support Afghan women under the Taliban, which has already reversed gains from the past twenty years. Despite promises to the international community, girls have not been allowed to return to secondary schools. The Taliban has also decreed that women should stay at home, hampering their ability to work. If they go out, they must be covered from head to toe in loose clothing. If they travel long distances, they must be in the company of a male relative. The rules are not enforced uniformly, or regularly, but the legal premise hangs like a cloud. Prominent activists have been harassed and detained.
In July, a report by Afghanistan Analysts Network found that aid organizations have scaled back their activities because of funding shortfalls, and that donors are concerned about the appearance of “working with the Taliban.” In fact, a split has emerged between high-level officials in Kabul, who want to engage the international community and allow girls to attend secondary schools, and the Supreme Leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, in Kandahar, who has taken a more hard-line approach. Some experts argue that further isolating Afghanistan will only undermine the moderate faction. Mayel, the waw donor, told me that humanitarian needs have to be prioritized regardless of the political leadership and that organizations should find openings where they can. “We can’t just let them die,” she said.
It occurred to me that the women I spoke with, both clients and former staff, hardly ever mentioned the Taliban. The concerns they talked about were more immediate—finding shelter and their next meal, how to avoid capture by abusive relatives. Samira was particularly vulnerable on the streets, young and alone. She has recovered from heroin addiction and continues to beg during the day; some nights, she goes to hospitals and pretends to visit patients so that she can find a place to sleep. When I asked her if she faced harassment from the Taliban, her voice was level. “Taliban is not the only threat for young women,” she told me.
The economic pressures bearing down on the country will likely lead to more abuse in households, exacerbating problems that organizations like waw had aimed to solve. According to an estimate by Save the Children, in the first eight months since the Taliban takeover, as many as a hundred and twenty thousand Afghan children may have been forcibly traded or married in exchange for financial reprieve by desperate families.
International donors and organizations have limited their support to humanitarian programs, mostly implemented through the U.N. According to one study, the number of local N.G.O.s and civil-society groups has been cut in half. In recent months, waw has begun working closely with the U.N. on children and girls’ education, but has chosen to stay away from women-focussed projects. Most of its efforts have been recentered on Afghan women in the U.S. “Over time, we would like to do more that is back to the core of what waw stands for,” Pforzheimer told me. I asked her if she believed it was possible under the Taliban. She laughed. “If we stay and do good work, and understand the landscape, maybe,” she said.
Sultan and Viswanath have both left waw, frustrated by what they described as the organization’s unwillingness to find solutions to help women in Afghanistan. Viswanath was upset, in particular, about how little of the eleven million dollars raised since the collapse has been directed to such efforts. (Half has been allotted to serve Afghans who came to the U.S.; a quarter will be used to assist with continued evacuations, humanitarian support, and children’s programs; and a quarter will be reserved for possible future operations.) They are starting a new N.G.O., called Abaad: Afghan Women Forward, which will provide humanitarian assistance and fund economic programs for women. Among its first clients will be those that waw once served.
For decades, Afghanistan has depended on N.G.O.s for service delivery, basic humanitarian aid, and projects geared toward helping the most marginalized. But being a “republic of N.G.O.s,” as one analyst called it, comes with its own problems. At its crux, an N.G.O. is beholden to donors and their ideological bent, not the communities it supports. As the scholar Faisal Devji argued after the U.S. withdrawal, “These beneficiaries possess neither political equality nor democratic power over their benefactors, however much they are consulted in the apportioning of aid or the launching of development projects.”
Women inside the country have little choice but to carve space for themselves however they can. I spoke with one female journalist who used to run a women’s media network in Kabul. She shut it down, but chose to stay in Afghanistan as an independent journalist. Last fall, a group of women gathered in the capital for a press conference on the right to education and employment. Just as waw had done over the years, the organizers drew upon the Quran to justify their demands, which focussed on a woman’s right to learn and work under Islamic law. They used Islamic history to point to how women had contributed to the fields of health care, business, government, and farming. One of the hosts recently told me that, although the political climate has worsened, the group is continuing to push the government on issues such as education.
Even in the context of women’s rights, shelters are a particularly sensitive issue, as they are often accused of being fronts for brothels. Some have chosen to take the risk. One afternoon, I travelled to one of the only shelters in the country, which has managed to obtain permission from the Taliban to operate. A few of waw’s former clients had been transferred there, and the group had grown to about thirty women and children. When I visited, they were cleaning the house in preparation for Eid. One woman was much older than the rest—she had gray hair and eyes framed by wrinkles. Another woman, who stood a few feet apart and looked on in silence, had arrived recently. She had been at a mosque by herself; I was told that the Taliban hadn’t known what to do with her and brought her to the shelter.
Sunlight streamed through the open doors at one end of the house. A group of four teen-agers moved from the staircase, where they had been chatting, to stand in the warmth. They wrapped their arms around one another, whispering fiercely, as if sharing a secret. They were giggling. ♦
Rozina Ali is a journalist and a fellow at Type Media Center.
After nearly two decades of U.S. presence, the Afghan conflict between the central government and the Taliban reached a deadly stalemate, taking a hundred lives a day from each side between 2018 and 2021. However sad, the international community viewed this impasse as a sign of Afghanistan’s ripeness for peace. Meanwhile, the U.S. shifted its policy from pursuing a military victory to achieving an expeditious political settlement. Yet despite multifaceted and multiparty motivations to finally end this drawn-out conflict, the peace process still failed. Why?
This article’s authors observed the peace process closely from within the Afghan government. The following identifies four interconnected factors that converged to spoil the final attempt to end the long war in Afghanistan, resulting in the Taliban unilaterally taking control of Kabul in August 2021. Additionally, the piece offers three sets of recommendations to the United States and the international community about how the lessons of the past 20 years could inform a workable peace process going forward.
Failure in shaping narratives
Aside from armed struggles over physical territory, the Afghan War was also fought on a parallel battleground: the minds of the people.
Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government, which existed between December 2001 and August 2021, had the burden to prove two narratives: its ability to provide basic services — physical security at a minimum — to the local population and a capability to advance counterterrorism efforts both at home and beyond the country’s borders.
But the Taliban’s car bombs and suicide brigades continued to speak louder than the government’s infographics proclaiming the competence of its institutions. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan described civilian casualties in May-June 2021 — on the eve of the United States’ announced withdrawal date — as the highest on record for those two months since the mission began recording such data in 2009.
The government itself, seeking sustained global support in the fight against terrorism, reported during every major international meeting that more than 20 terrorist organizations with regional and international reach enjoyed safe havens in Afghanistan under the patronage of the Taliban.
The Taliban, by contrast, defined their existence in terms of the enemy, America, which occupied Afghanistan and established a “puppet” government in Kabul. Over the 20 years of war, the Taliban used sustained offensive attacks and some short-term ceasefires to promote themselves as a cohesive military force. And foreigners interpreted that characterization to mean that if the Taliban committed to something like crushing internationally designated terrorist groups, the Taliban could deliver on it. Whether they actually would remained to be seen.
No narrative promulgated by the last Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, who garnered less than a million votes in a contested election in September 2019, could change a simple reality: the war against the Taliban was widely perceived as lost.
Failure in leadership for peace
During the last decade of America’s presence in Afghanistan, the international community and the local government came to an understanding that the way to end the conflict was through peace negotiations with the Taliban. However, the stakeholders in these talks had conflicting interests.
For Afghan technocrats, peace initially meant a full Taliban surrender. The highest leadership bodies of the government held internal discussions regarding the “reintegration” of the Taliban fighters. During these meetings, the officials offered four types of incentives:
Security in return for disarmament;
Political space to run for office or be appointed to political posts;
Economic incentives to provide jobs; and
Legal incentives to remove the Taliban from international sanctions lists and release their prisoners.
For former mujahideen factions, peace meant a division of power among influential parties. But this process of power-sharing, which would inevitably break down along ethnic lines, would leave no room for the technocrats who now held the presidency. The share of power for Afghanistan’s ethnic Tajiks would go to the Jamiat party; that for the Pashtuns would be given to the Taliban and Hizb-e-Islami; the Wahdat party would claim the Hazaras; and the Junbish party would represent the Uzbeks. Where would the technocrats fit?
Some individuals in the technocrat and mujahideen camps accepted that one way to achieve peace was to hold elections with the participation of the Taliban. However, there were disagreements around the timing of these elections, not to mention the Taliban’s total disinterest in sharing in what they believed to be an illegitimate political system imposed by the United States. President Ghani, in turn, demanded that the transfer of power be based on votes alone, but he showed willingness to hold early elections for the sake of peace. Potential rival candidates argued that no credible election could take place under a party to the conflict. These candidates pushed President Ghani to step aside and let an interim government oversee the elections, which he refused.
In the internal debates regarding peace, three important segments of Afghan society remained outside the process. Youth, women, and civil society organizations, including the media in Afghanistan, did not know what benefits peace would bring them. Apart from symbolic representation in some meetings that were held by the government or the international community, these groups did not meaningfully participate in the wider peace process.
Disagreements over how non-Taliban groups could negotiate with the Taliban were also not resolved. Ghani wanted a two-sided table — the government and the Taliban — in order to portray a united Islamic Republic. But others viewed this format as an unacceptable opportunity for government technocrats to assume leadership roles in the peace negotiations. Therefore, political opponents of the president advocated for multi-party talks in which each side could bargain based on its own interests: the government, the Taliban, political parties, and civil society.
The lack of a shared vision or clear objectives for the peace process among non-Taliban factions ultimately was another factor that contributed to the inability to achieve a settlement.
Parallel structures
In addition to leadership challenges, technical chaos prevailed over the political peace process. The High Peace Council, which later transformed into the High Council of National Reconciliation under Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, was in constant rivalry with the Afghan president and never achieved the power needed to represent the political arm of the peace process. The State Ministry of Peace attempted but failed to project itself as the technical arm of the peace talks. Others rightly viewed “technical matters” as a strategic tool to influence the process.
There were also other governmental agencies that claimed leadership, which instead only added ambiguity to the process. Chief among these agencies was the Office of the National Security Council (ONSC), which maintained a Directorate of Peace and Reconciliation Affairs. Furthermore, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs struggled to preserve its perceived status as the point of contact on peace affairs for foreign countries. Disjointed involvement from too many people and institutions in the peace process meant local Afghans and foreign diplomats had difficulty coordinating their activities with the government.
To make matters worse, rivalries, incompetence, and ideological differences led to the formation of factions within the Afghan state’s negotiations team. When the president was finally able to create a government-led team, it was divided. A former head of the intelligence agency, Masoom Stanikzai, was the lead negotiator. But the Islamist Taliban disregarded Stanikzai because of his former affiliation with parties that were known for their adherence to communist ideologies. Via the Chinese and Uzbekistani governments, the Taliban asked the central government in Kabul to keep Stanikzai out of the peace negotiations. The government responded that the Taliban did not have veto power. Parallel to the official negotiations team, a secret channel of communication between the government and the Taliban opened in Doha, according to Fawzia Koofi, one of the negotiators.
The process was further complicated by foreign interventions. In December 2018, after a year-long effort, high-level representatives from Afghanistan, the United States, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia succeeded in bringing the Afghan government and Taliban negotiators to Abu Dhabi. Even though the two Afghan sides did not meet face-to-face during that time, this quadrilateral effort saw some progress until the Americans shifted the venue to Qatar.
Two years later, there was a new team of negotiators from Kabul and a new process was underway in Doha. At this moment, the U.S. administration changed and the newly appointed Secretary of State Antony Blinken asked the sides, via a letter, to appear for peace talks in Turkey. A meeting in Istanbul never materialized, perhaps because the Qataris, with significant influence over the Taliban, opposed it. Each change of plan meant more stakeholders offended, a reshuffling of negotiating teams to adjust their levels of participation, new logistical complexities, discontinuity, and, eventually, failure.
Peace negotiations never took place directly between the Afghan government and the Taliban. Composed of a few members, a governmental contact group repeatedly met with the Taliban in Qatar; but this was the extent of the face-to-face interaction between the two sides. They worked out the principles for the talks but never succeeded in developing an agenda, let alone negotiated over it.
Reducing peace to one element of a foreign deal
The role of the United States was equally important in forestalling peace.
For many years, the overriding stated purpose of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan was to counter terrorism. And so, under the influence of this policy, the Afghan government continuously presented its peace plans as a counterterrorism strategy.
Over time, America’s assessment of the nature of the threat changed, with major terrorist hotspots appearing in other areas of the world. So, America shifted its sights toward withdrawal from Afghanistan, prioritizing the end of its protracted involvement in the region. The agreement U.S. officials signed with the Taliban in 2020 demanded security guarantees for the pull back of U.S. troops and the Taliban’s commitment to counterterrorist actions; but it encouraged the mere start of peace talks among Afghans and only included a ceasefire as a topic for discussion in subsequent intra-Afghan negotiations.
Once the U.S. was determined to depart and the collapse of the Afghan government became conceivable, negotiations with the Taliban were deemed more important than negotiating with the Afghan government. Diplomats and military generals from the U.S., Europe, and regional countries queued up to talk with the Taliban. The insurgent group viewed this string of international visitors as proof of the effectiveness of their violent movement. Now that the whole world was at their door and the United Nations had endorsed the deal they signed with Washington, they sensed it was only a matter of time before they would seize Kabul.
The Taliban, thus, encouraged the U.S. side to pressure the Afghan government into giving in without preconditions. Most notably, under foreign insistence, the Afghan authorities released more than 5,000 dangerous Taliban detainees in 2020, in return for one-fifth that number of their own prisoners. Against their pledge, these violent extremists returned to the battlefield with greater resolve for vengeance, while the Taliban leadership rewarded their time spent behind bars by appointing them as field commanders.
Conclusion and recommendations
The last political peace process failed, but the need for peace and reconciliation in Afghanistan did not disappear. In fact, conditions likely to drive armed conflict — such as political exclusion and social oppression — are growing daily under the new regime. Therefore, Afghanistan requires a new political process that aims to not only prevent another civil war but also achieve lasting peace. Afghan leaders need to develop the capability to rally the public and align all Afghan sides of the conflict around a common vision for the future of the country.
The international community, particularly the United States, should undertake three specific sets of actions to foster the conditions for such a political process:
First, the U.S. should change its pragmatic engagement with the Taliban to a more inclusive engagement with all Afghan stakeholders, including civil society organizations, political parties, armed opposition groups, ethnic and religious minorities, women, and youth. While the U.S. has no diplomatic presence in Kabul, American officials can engage Afghan actors in the region around Afghanistan as well as communicate with those inside Afghanistan virtually, through video conference calls. Finally, Washington could better coordinate its efforts with the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, which has a political office that is active on the ground.
Engagement with non-Taliban actors will have a range of repercussions. For leaders who remain inside Afghanistan, contact with the U.S. will come with security risks. Their identities should be protected; but ultimately, they must be allowed to determine for themselves whether the risks are worthwhile. U.S. interactions with the armed opposition to the Taliban can take place without providing material support to such factions. Engaging with America can still benefit armed groups as a means of exerting political pressure on the Taliban. If the U.S. administration shies away from such a policy, Congress should fill this gap.
In fact, Capitol Hill lawmakers ought to play a more active role regardless of the presidential administration’s stance vis-à-vis Afghanistan. American senators and House members should intensify their meetings with Afghans in the U.S. as well as travel to Europe and the region around Afghanistan to meet with leaders in exile. These meetings would broadcast a confident message that America stands with the people of Afghanistan in their struggle to create a peaceful and free country.
Second, the U.S. should use its leverage with the Taliban more strategically to encourage the start of a political process. For instance, the U.S. should work with the U.N. Security Council to turn international sanctions into effective tools of diplomacy rather than use them solely as punishment. Currently, neither imposed sanctions nor limited waivers are tied to specific political or accountability benchmarks and objectives. The unfreezing of Afghanistan’s assets and discussions about recognizing a new government should become conditional on progress in a legitimate political process.
Conditions and benchmarks for launching such a political process may include initiating a series of meetings between Afghan actors and the Taliban, developing a list of popular demands — from opening girls’ schools and reversing restrictive measures against women to creating a broad-based and people-centric government — and finally, delivering on these demands within agreed timeframes.
Identifying stakeholders to meet with the Taliban is complicated but not impossible. One way to group different segments of Afghan society is based on their ideological visions for the country: modernists who constitute much of the new generation of Afghan leaders, conservatives like the jihadist groups, fundamentalists such as the Taliban and their sympathizers, and moderates who have separated from or never joined the other three groups. Representation of all these ideological differences is important because not all civil society organizations, political parties, or women’s groups think alike.
Finally, Washington must revise its approach toward Afghanistan in light of the fact that al-Qaeda’s leader Ayman al-Zawahiri — who last month was eliminated by a U.S. drone strike — was found to have been sheltered in Kabul. America should, thus, take certain diplomatic steps to mobilize the region and the wider international community to ensure a political process leads to a government that does not harbor terrorists but promotes peace and stability in the world.
Al-Zawahiri’s presence only a few miles from Kabul’s Presidential Palace demonstrated that a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan can be dangerous for the region and beyond. A high-level visit from the U.S. administration or Congress to Central or South Asia in the near-term could potentially ignite momentum among regional countries to mobilize and diplomatically curb future threats that emanate from Afghanistan. The only sustainable means to achieve such an objective is to encourage the formation of a broad-based and people-centric government that is shaped by all Afghans through an inclusive political process. The fact that the Taliban continue to operate as a de facto “acting” government and have yet to announce a new constitution provides a window of opportunity for initiating such a political process.
These short- to medium-term measures by America are achievable. They could exert some pressure on the Taliban and reassure non-Taliban groups that they are not alone in their struggle. They could also mobilize the region to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a regime-run safehouse for terrorists with objectives reaching far beyond its borders. Lastly, these steps, if sustained long enough to jumpstart a potential political process and see it through to completion, could contribute to the restoration of America’s reputation after its catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Aref Dostyar is a Senior Advisor for the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc-Pulte Afghanistan Peace and Development Research Program, and former Consul General of Afghanistan in Los Angeles. He tweets from @ArefDostyar.
Zmarai Farahi is former Head of the Peace Unit at the Office of the National Security Council of Afghanistan. He tweets from @FarahiZmarai. The views expressed in this piece are their own.
The Middle East Institute (MEI) is an independent, non-partisan, non-for-profit, educational organization. It does not engage in advocacy and its scholars’ opinions are their own. MEI welcomes financial donations, but retains sole editorial control over its work and its publications reflect only the authors’ views.
Why the Afghan peace process failed, and what could come next?
For the Biden Administration, supporting the Afghan people without empowering the Taliban is the foreign-policy case study from hell.
Public anniversaries mark the meaning of the past in the political present. In Washington, one year after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, the failure of the United States and its allies is emotive and polarizing. This month, House Republicans issued a report, entitled “A ‘Strategic Failure,’ ” which is unsparing of the Biden Administration’s decision last year to withdraw all remaining American forces from Afghanistan, and of its conduct of the chaotic evacuation that followed. The White House denounced the report as “partisan” and demagogic; the National Security Council circulated a memo defending the Administration’s actions. There will be more of this, particularly if Republicans gain control of one or both chambers of Congress in November’s midterm elections. Democrats have reason, in that case, to fear Benghazi-inspired, election-driving hearings and investigations on Afghanistan, although any Republican drive to hang last year’s failures on Biden will be complicated by the central role played in the dénouement by former President Donald Trump.
The stark politicization of America’s experience in Afghanistan threatens to add one more loop of failure and self-defeat to a sad record. Accountability is vital if it can be achieved impartially and reflectively, yet the urgent question of the moment does not involve the apportionment of blame. Many of the forty million Afghans left behind last summer by evacuating troops and diplomats are being battered by severe crises of hunger and persecution. The policy choices faced by the Biden Administration and its nato allies are morally complex and excruciatingly hard. If they are fogged by partisan politics in Washington, they will be harder still.
Richard Bennett, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, joined by other rights experts from across the world, used the anniversary’s occasion to declare, “Nowhere else in the world has there been as wide-spread, systematic and all-encompassing an attack on the rights of women and girls—every aspect of their lives is being restricted under the guise of morality and through the instrumentalization of religion.”
Meanwhile, about half of the population is struggling to eat. “We’re looking at near-universal poverty,” Vicki Aken, the country director of the International Rescue Committee (I.R.C.), an aid-and-development nonprofit, told me from Kabul. When Aken arrived in Afghanistan in 2017, she said, the poverty rate was at about fifty per cent; by the end of 2022, it may reach ninety-seven per cent. “When you go into clinics and you go into hospitals, you see no medicines,” she said. “You see three people to a bed, lines out the door of mothers with malnourished children.”
Governments and nonprofits are navigating an uncomfortable tension between prioritizing human-rights advocacy and working with the Taliban to stabilize the Afghan economy. “We want the pressure” on the Taliban over human rights, Fereshta Abbasi, an Afghan-born researcher at Human Rights Watch in London, told me. “We need to let the Taliban know that we are standing with the Afghan people” and that the regime’s record must change “if they want any recognition.” Simultaneously, she added, “On the humanitarian side, we don’t want the Afghan people to be victims of this crisis and chaos.”
And Taliban repression is worsening, according to researchers, not moderating under outside pressure. “There are definitely differing views between the humanitarian and human-rights communities,” Aken said. “I have immense respect for the human-rights people,” she added, yet “the only solution to this crisis is to find a way to make the economy function.“ That requires coöperating or, at least, engaging with the Taliban.
“One of the things that I find so hard is that there are a lot of Afghan women who stayed behind, women who run their own N.G.O.s, who are attacked by those outside of the country for even hinting that it’s even possible to do that,” Aken continued. About three thousand women work directly for the I.R.C. in Afghanistan. “It’s not easy,” she said. “There does need to be a light shined on human-rights abuses, but, if we don’t stay engaged, the opportunities that remain for women and ethnic minorities might disappear altogether.”
For nato governments, the dilemma comes down to whether to release large sums of money to Afghanistan to stabilize the economy, even if doing so may strengthen the Taliban. The alternative would be to tighten sanctions and expand travel bans, and further isolate the regime’s leaders, even if this accelerates the economy’s free fall, perhaps to the point of widespread famine. This is not an either-or policy question, of course. The often subtle difficulties of prioritizing rights advocacy while engaging with authoritarian regimes to provide humanitarian aid is a familiar one. But the current Afghan case is distinctive—and unmistakably difficult.
The Taliban’s prideful restoration of gender apartheid in secondary and higher education and in many sectors of the economy is an outrage of special dimensions, as Bennett and the other rights experts noted. For the U.S. and other nato countries—champions of a modernization drive in Kabul and other major Afghan cities for two decades—the reversal of the status of women is all but impossible to countenance. “Women and girls have largely been erased from public life,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, in Washington, on July 28th. “It’s especially difficult to accept because we all remember how different it was not so very long ago.”
On July 31st, a U.S. drone killed the Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri at his hideout in downtown Kabul. The Biden Administration, like its predecessors, has identified counterterrorism as a “vital” continuing interest in Afghanistan. That the Afghan capital was Zawahiri’s haven has only deepened doubts in Washington about the Taliban’s reliability. By “hosting and sheltering” Zawahiri in Kabul, Blinken said after the drone strike, the Taliban betrayed “repeated assurances to the world that they would not allow Afghan territory to be used by terrorists.” The Taliban insisted that they didn’t know Zawahiri was present.
Even in the face of this record, development experts continue to urge the Biden Administration to release to the Afghan central bank billions of dollars in foreign-currency reserves. The issue is technically complicated. After the Taliban took Kabul last August, the Biden Administration froze seven billion dollars in reserves held in the U.S. Lawyers representing families of victims of 9/11 then asked a judge to designate those funds as compensation for their clients. (The Taliban, who never lawyered up to defend themselves, have been found liable for the attacks.) Last February, Biden issued an executive order allocating 3.5 billion dollars as potential compensation for the 9/11 families, but reserving the rest for possible future restoration to the Afghan central bank, which is known as Da Afghanistan Bank. One impediment to any future release: the first deputy governor appointed to the bank by the Taliban, Noor Ahmad Agha, has been designated as a terrorist by the U.S.
The Taliban want all of the reserves frozen in the U.S. back, and they have respectable allies. On August 10th, seventy-one economists, including the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, wrote to President Biden and the Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, urging them to immediately allow the Afghan central bank to reclaim all of its reserves. They argued that the funds are “critical to the functioning of the Afghan economy.” The Afghan private-banking system “has nearly ground to a halt,” salaries are not being paid, and businesses and individuals cannot access their savings. Repatriating the reserves would allow the central bank to stabilize the national currency and pay for food and energy imports, the economists wrote. William Byrd, a development economist formerly with the World Bank in Kabul, now at the United States Institute of Peace, argued in reply that the Afghan central bank is in no position to manage billions of dollars productively.
The Biden Administration has handed this foreign-policy case study from hell to two well-regarded mid-level State Department officials: Thomas West, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan, and Rina Amiri, the special envoy for Afghan women, girls, and human rights. West negotiates directly with Taliban leaders on aid, counterterrorism, and other subjects. He has ruled out releasing the Afghan central-bank funds as a “near-term option.”
Amiri has so far declined to attend bilateral talks with the Taliban, because of the regime’s policies toward the women and girls she is charged to defend—a split on diplomatic tactics that is a microcosm of the larger dilemma. “I support my colleagues engaging the Taliban,” Amiri tweeted recently. “Engagement on issues where there’s traction, such as economic stabilization & the humanitarian response, is necessary.” Yet, in the areas her office oversees, she continued, “robust international engagement . . . hasn’t produced meaningful outcomes for Afghan, women, girls & at-risk populations.”
This summer, the Biden Administration announced a one-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar contribution to U.N. agencies assisting Afghanistan—slightly more than half of it to address food insecurity, the rest targeting the needs of children and women, via unicef and U.N. Women. It is a significant commitment, but it cannot address the downward spiral caused by the collapse of Afghan banking or the inability of the Afghan central bank to pay for commercial food-and-energy imports.
Byrd is among those promoting a nascent plan to put frozen Afghan reserves into a trust fund that would be housed in Switzerland, perhaps to be overseen by central-banking experts—details to be negotiated with the Taliban. The State Department spokesman Ned Price acknowledged that the U.S. continues to explore “mechanisms” that would allow the 3.5 billion dollars of the reserves designated for possible release by Biden to be used “precisely for the benefit of the Afghan people . . . in a way that doesn’t make them ripe for diversion to terrorist groups or elsewhere.”
Hanging over these negotiations is America’s record of diplomatic failure in the run-up to last summer’s collapse, and during the first Taliban emirate, which reigned from the mid-nineties to late 2001. The Clinton years—when the Taliban controlled Kabul and its ministries—offer perhaps the closest parallel to the present layout. Initially flummoxed by the Taliban’s extremism, and later alarmed by the sanctuary it provided to Al Qaeda, State Department envoys pushed all of the buttons of professional diplomacy—direct engagement with Taliban ministers, multilateral peace talks, economic sanctions, travel bans, and weapons embargoes. The Taliban attended conferences, talked politely, and allowed some international aid to flow into the country, but the movement’s leaders offered no major compromises and stood by passively as Osama bin Laden and Zawahiri carried out deadly strikes against U.S. targets in Africa, in 1998, and Yemen, in 2000, meanwhile secretly plotting 9/11.
Eventually, in 1999, Clinton authorized C.I.A. covert action against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The C.I.A. funded and equipped anti-Taliban insurgents, such as those led by the legendary guerrilla commander Ahmed Shah Massoud. Today, some Afghan opponents of the Taliban and their allies in Washington advocate a rerun of covert-action strategies. But neither the Biden Administration nor other nato governments appear to have any appetite for fostering more violence in Afghanistan. In a Foreign Affairsessay this month, Ali Maisam Nazary, the head of foreign relations for the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan, a movement led by Massoud’s son, acknowledged that its anti-Taliban insurgents of 2022 have yet to receive “a drop of help from any country.”
For their part, the Taliban declared a public holiday to mark the anniversary of Kabul’s fall. On Twitter and in a round of media interviews, Abdul Qahar Balkhi, a Taliban foreign-ministry spokesman, promoted the emirate’s achievements one year on, including the resumption of commercial flights to and from Kabul, economic projects, and the accommodation of about a thousand foreign journalists who have travelled to report in the country since last summer. He also cited the Taliban’s engagement with diplomatic missions and argued that an international consensus had taken hold that there is “no alternative to [the] current government.”
It is certainly true that the Taliban have made themselves an intractable fact of life in international affairs. Five successive White Houses have failed to defeat the movement militarily or to influence its leaders to change their ideology. Yet the hardest and least politically rewarding problems in foreign policy are sometimes the most important ones.
For its own failings and those of its predecessors, the Biden Administration has a moral obligation to the Afghan population suffering today under Taliban rule. The U.S. and its nato allies also have an interest in preventing a further Afghan economic collapse that could trigger more mass migration toward Europe or foster more violent extremism. Blessed are the peacemaking, rights-promoting mid-level special envoys, but this is a crisis for Presidents and Prime Ministers. Where are they? ♦
One year after the United States withdrew its military from Afghanistan, relations between the two countries are stuck in a holding pattern. The United States remains the single largest humanitarian donor to the people of Afghanistan, with over $774 million USD distributed since the Taliban takeover, but the United States maintains no diplomatic presence in the country — nor does it send official diplomatic envoys.1
U.S. sanctions have not altered the Taliban’s calculus on human rights or ties with al-Qaeda. The Taliban has proved intransigent and unrealistic in its relations not only with Washington but with neighboring countries like Pakistan. Its senior leaders lack a coherent vision for the country and its emir remains reclusive.2
Future U.S. policymakers might be tempted to disengage diplomatically and economically from Afghanistan and instead rely primarily on “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism.3 The most likely consequence of this approach would be a more isolated and unstable Afghanistan, which in turn could foster an even more permissive environment for transnational terrorists. Consistent diplomacy tied to long-term U.S. security objectives is likely to produce incremental results at best, but is still preferable to diplomatic disengagement or military intervention.
This brief provides a concise background and analysis of the most pressing issues affecting U.S. interests in Afghanistan. It draws on open source data; interviews with government officials — including from the de facto Taliban government; and interviews with private analysts that were conducted remotely or in person — in the United States, Pakistan, and Qatar.
Broad policy recommendations
• The United States should work closely with regional countries, including Pakistan, India, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan to ensure they are prepared to handle security challenges as they emerge. If the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is revived, opportunities may emerge to engage Iran on Afghanistan. These should include routine dialogue, intelligence sharing, and capacity building, such as policing and border security. Washington should engage separately with India and Pakistan to bolster humanitarian aid and limited commerce to Afghanistan.
• The United States should reiterate mutual responsibilities under the 2020 agreement it signed with the Taliban in Doha, but recognize that it lacks effective enforcement mechanisms and therefore is better understood as an aspirational framework.
• Formal recognition of the de facto Taliban government should be withheld until it demonstrates a clear commitment to its counterterrorism responsibilities and respect for basic human rights, including for women. But Washington should place diplomats in Afghanistan either through the creation of an in-country Afghanistan affairs unit, whether based in the prior U.S. Embassy or inside a friendly third country’s diplomatic mission, or by sending temporary delegations to Kabul, as our allies have. This should be coupled with multilateral steps to remove the leadership’s travel privileges. It is important that U.S. officials interact with Taliban cabinet members in Kabul and other Taliban stakeholders based in Kandahar.4 Direct outreach by U.S. military officials and the intelligence community may have utility but it is not a replacement for a coherent civilian-led diplomatic strategy.
• Sanctions intended to target the Taliban as a non-state actor now extend far beyond their original scope, since they became the de facto government of Afghanistan. If not yet determined, the U.S. government should communicate what steps the Taliban must take to be de-listed as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Group.
Introduction
Much of the responsibility for Afghanistan’s diplomatic and economic isolation lies with the country’s new Taliban government. Afghan women, ethnic and religious minorities, former government officials, journalists, and anyone who dares to criticize the Taliban have suffered over the last year. The U.N. has estimated there are hundreds of al-Qaeda members in Afghanistan, in at least 15 provinces.5 However, the U.S. National Security Council released a memo claiming that less than a dozen core al-Qaeda members remain in Afghanistan today.6 The intelligence services of various countries have warned that the Taliban maintains a relationship with al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri was in a safe house held by the Taliban’s Interior Minister when a U.S. drone strike killed him.
U.S. interests in Afghanistan are rooted in managing the threats of terrorism and regional instability. During the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, many analysts erroneously, and even disingenuously, assumed that U.S. objectives were synonymous with the interests of the Afghan people. This led to inaccurate analysis at best. At worst, it resulted in empty promises by U.S. officials to the people of Afghanistan and unrealistic expectations by Afghan leaders. The analysis presented here accepts that short-term U.S. interests in Afghanistan are not currently, and never have been, perfectly aligned with the diverse interests of the Afghan people. However, the well-being, human development, prosperity, and human rights of Afghan men and women are a necessary precursor to long-term security and stability.
The Taliban have managed to maintain territorial control and a relative monopoly on violence despite pockets of anti-Taliban resistance and continued terrorism attacks by the Islamic State in Khorasan Province (IS-K). The Taliban’s offer of blanket amnesty to former government officials and security forces is undermined by frequent reports of collective punishment, arbitrary detentions, and targeted killings.7 IS-K continues to terrorize Afghans and in particular targets the predominantly Shi’a Hazara ethnic minority. The human and civil rights of Afghan women have been severely restricted with the imposition of severe limitations on freedom of movement, removal from the workforce with few exceptions, and the continued ban on secondary schooling for girls.8
The United States and broader international community must develop an Afghanistan policy that is sustainable in the face of Taliban intransigence and ready to capitalize on fleeting moments of Taliban pragmatism.
Afghanistan is also facing a gradual economic collapse. The country’s growth was propped up for 20 years by a war economy that supported industries such as construction and fuel transport, but hurt traditional agriculture. Historically unprecedented levels of aid and international attention were connected to the U.S.-led war effort and immediately declined when the Taliban assumed power. Afghanistan’s growth was not commensurate with its real economic potential. Relying on the altruism of a fickle international donor community will set Afghanistan on the same course as other long-ignored countries with humanitarian catastrophes.
The Taliban government has the most agency to take tangible steps to reduce the suffering of Afghans. The international community is unlikely to bring significant influence to Taliban decision making in the short-term. The United States and broader international community must develop an Afghanistan policy that is sustainable in the face of Taliban intransigence and ready to capitalize on fleeting moments of Taliban pragmatism. Ultimately, Washington must prioritize broad relations with Afghanistan as a country rather than adopting a short-sighted focus on the political reality of the Taliban alone. The consequences of inaction will include putting thousands of Afghan lives at risk while undermining the security of both the region and the United States.
This brief asseses the risks of economic collapse, civil war, and transnational terrorist threats, followed by an updated policy framework to address these risks through diplomacy.
Risk of economic collapse and prolonged humanitarian disaster
Afghanistan’s economy was in desperate straits prior to the Taliban takeover and the subsequent departure of aid agencies. Afghanistan’s landlocked location, fraught relations with its neighbors, poor infrastructure, and high rates of illiteracy and innumeracy have for decades hindered its economic growth. Foreign grants accounted for 75 percent of public spending9 prior to the U.S. withdrawal, while urban poverty rose to 47.6 percent by 2019-20, compared to 41.6 in 2016-17, with poverty exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.10
The economy deteriorated further after the Taliban takeover. The United States immediately froze the country’s central bank (Da Afghanistan Bank or “DAB”) reserves, halted shipments of cash and temporarily ended humanitarian aid. Sanctions that the United States and U.N. had previously applied to the Taliban and Haqqani Network, as non-state actors, were now applied to them as the de facto government. Most qualified technocrats fled the country and were replaced by inexperienced Taliban loyalists. The Taliban government cabinet includes members of the Haqqani Network and at least 15 individuals sanctioned by the U.N.11
Rapid inflation followed the Taliban takeover. By January 2022 the price of wheat flour and diesel had increased by 52.7 percent and 40.3 percent since the last week of June 2021, just prior to the August collapse of the Afghan government.12 The price of bread, which is a staple for many Afghans, increased by 12.8 percent during the same period.13 As of the first week of August 2022, the price of wheat and diesel has increased by approximately 5 percent and 35 percent since January 2022.14 With drought, aid and investment flight, Taliban mismanagement, and economic isolation, Afghanistan risks becoming a failed state with universal poverty rates.
Taliban focused sanctions, comprehensive effect
The U.S. government was initially slow to act following the Taliban takeover, despite calls from Congress and the international aid community to prevent a humanitarian disaster.15 Since a designated terrorist group gaining countrol of an entire country is unprecedented, it was initially unclear if existing U.S. sanctions on the Taliban would apply to the new government or the entire jurisdiction of Afghanistan.16 On December 22, 2021, The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) published FAQ 951, which clarified that, “[i]n contrast to sanctions programs administered and enforced by OFAC with regard to North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Syria, and the Crimea region of Ukraine, there are no comprehensive sanctions on Afghanistan.”17 Nevertheless, the chilling effect of U.S. sanctions and a Taliban-led government have in effect subjected the country to comprehensive sanctions.18 Few countries or private sector entities have enough political19 or economic interest in Afghanistan’s economy to outweigh potential risks. This distinguishes Afghanistan from most other U.S. sanctions targets, which still receive foreign investment from other countries.
Limited sanctions relief
Since late September, OFAC has issued seven General Licenses (GLs) permitting personal remittances, various types of humanitarian aid and non-commercial development activities, and some commercial transactions (see Appendix A).20 For example, General License No. 19 permits certain transactions and activities involving the Taliban so long as they are “ordinarily incident and necessary” to carry out specified humanitarian and development projects which includes the “payment of taxes, fees, or import duties, or the purchase or receipt of permits, licenses, or public utility services.” These general licenses are self-executing — i.e., individuals or entities that wish to conduct activities pursuant to them do not require additional clearance from OFAC. But this provides little comfort to NGOs attempting to interpret the vague and ambiguous language of the GLs.
Sanctions have also added complexity to crucial cross-border trade between landlocked Afghanistan and its neighbors. The Afghanistan Pakistan Joint Chamber of Commerce and Industry reported that Afghan businesses are finding it difficult to sell exports to Pakistan, historically Afghanistan’s second largest trading partner after India, due to sanctions that prevent the banking system from engaging in transactions with Afghan entities.21 Pakistan’s place on the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) gray list makes its banking sector particularly risk averse concerning transactions with Taliban-led Afghanistan. OFAC initially addressed this by reiterating that no sanctions prohibit the export or reexport of goods to Afghanistan or flow of money so long as they do not involve sanctioned individuals or entities. Although commercial transactions were not technically subject to sanctions, when the Taliban assumed governing authority, commercial transactions were effectively restricted because any payments to the Taliban would have triggered the sanctions.22 Furthermore, the issuance of GLs permitting the payment of taxes and other fees related to humanitarian and development projects to the Taliban government implied that similar payments related to non-humanitarian or commercial activities were subject to sanctions.
Policymakers must recognize that Afghanistan is effectively subjected to comprehensive sanctions, even if this is not legally the case.
OFAC responded to this conundrum by issuing GL No. 20 on February 25, 2022. In practical terms, GL No. 20 does for commercial business what GL No. 19 did for humanitarian aid and development, opening up commercial transactions and cross-border trade in Afghanistan by allowing for the kinds of incidental payments23 that are necessary to conduct business.24 However, neither of these GLs have fully overcome the chilling effect of powerful U.S. sanctions that instill more fear in law-abiding individuals and entities than those that flout them. Some humanitarian groups are accustomed to working in sanctioned jurisdictions, maintain close working relationships with the U.S. Treasury Department, and are motivated by a values-based mission that is willing to take on the sanctions risk. This is not necessarily true for private business and it is unclear that GL 20 has significantly alleviated the concerns of regional banks, let alone international financial institutions. Suhail Shaheen, head of the Taliban’s political office in Doha, claimed during an interview with the author that, while GL 20 produced a “positive” effect on the economy, many Afghan businessmen are still unable to utilize the international banking system for money transfers in and out of Afghanistan.25 Statements by analysts familiar with the regional banking sector suggest that most banks are too risk averse to take on transactions involving Afghanistan.26
Policymakers must recognize that Afghanistan is effectively subjected to comprehensive sanctions, even if this is not legally the case. The effects of U.S. sanctions are felt far beyond their stated intent, as shown by the fact that Afghanistan, unlike Iran or Venezuela, offers little commercial incentive for investors and businesses to assume risk. In order to alleviate the stress on Afghanistan’s economy, the United States should devise a roadmap commensurate with specific and realistic Taliban actions that will allow it to rescind broad sanctions on the Taliban as an entity, while maintaining sanctions on individual members of the Taliban leadership, including the enforcement of previously lifted restrictions like the privilege of travel abroad. The primary victims of U.S. sanctions on the Taliban today are ordinary Afghans. As mentioned above, there is little evidence that sanctions have influenced the Taliban’s behavior as an insurgency or government, or motivated them to break ties with al-Qaeda.
To punish the Afghan people for a foreseeable consequence of the U.S. decision to negotiate with the Taliban is nothing short of cruel.
The United States chose to negotiate with the Taliban and start the Doha process to extricate itself from Afghanistan. Achieving a political settlement to the war was an aspirational byproduct of this process which, if it had been successful, would likely have resulted in a new government inclusive of sanctioned senior Taliban figures. Even this best-case scenario would have required the United States to consider rescinding most sanctions on the Taliban. The collapse of the previous government was not an unforeseen possibility.27 India’s former ambassador to Afghanistan, Gautam Mukhopadhaya, argued early on that talks with the Taliban would provide Western governments the excuse that Afghans were offered an opportunity for peace but, “they squabbled amongst themselves and tore it up.”28 To punish the Afghan people for a foreseeable consequence of the U.S. decision to negotiate with the Taliban is nothing short of cruel. Most importantly, sanctions on the Taliban as an entity do little to enhance U.S. security and may even undermine it. But their removal at this point will require significant actions by the Taliban to reassure the world they will not finance terrorism.
Liquidity crisis
The GLs issued by OFAC have facilitated some movement in humanitarian aid but are insufficient to address either U.S. sanctions or the broader liquidity crisis. Without liquidity the private sector cannot pay for imports and Afghan consumers cannot pay for basic necessities. With its foreign exchange reserves frozen, Afghanistan’s central bank is unable to maintain a balance of payments or regulate the national currency.29 No amount of aid can compensate for the loss of this function, and direct humanitarian aid is both inefficient and unsustainable over the long term. One prominent development economist with an area focus on Afghanistan concluded that “it makes little sense for the donor community to facilitate high-cost food imports via the World Food Programme while hindering commercial imports.”30
As of January, some have indicated that cash injections of U.S. dollars into Afghanistan’s economy have gradually increased toward rates close to the Federal Reserve’s cash shipments into the country pre-August 15.31 However, Afghanistan’s economy finds itself in a kind of “liquidity trap,” whereby most money is hoarded or immediately exported rather than circulated within the economy.32 In February, the U.N. Development Programme in Afghanistan reported that it was unable to convert U.S. dollars deposited in the private Afghanistan International Bank into afghanis and therefore cannot withdraw cash to implement its programs on the ground.33 Moving money into Afghanistan is now more costly than ever, with one prominent global payments and foreign exchange company charging approximately 10 percent to move cash into Kabul and an additional 4 percent to reach Afghanistan’s provinces.34
On February 11, 2022, President Biden signed Executive Order 14064, titled “Protecting Certain Property of Da Afghanistan Bank for the Benefit of the People of Afghanistan.”35 The executive order split in half the approximately $7 billion USD of Afghanistan’s central bank foreign exchange reserves held in the United States. It set aside $3.5 billion in a consolidated account with the stated intention of facilitating access to those assets for the “benefit of the Afghan people.”36 It also left more than $3.5 billion of those funds to remain the subject of ongoing litigation by 9/11 plaintiffs in cases where the Taliban is a named co-defendant. Since this litigation is ongoing, President Biden’s hands were effectively tied; denying those litigants their day in court would have potentially constituted a violation of their constitutional rights.37 In February 2022, U.S. Special Representative Thomas West indicated U.S. willingness to recapitalize Afghanistan’s banking sector with $3.5 billion of the foreign exchange reserves set aside for the benefit of the Afghan people.38 This process was first hindered by serious concerns over the Taliban’s willingness and ability to combat the financing of terrorism and money laundering. It was further delayed by the Taliban’s decision to prohibit girls from attending school. The presence of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul has raised serious and legitimate concerns over whether the Taliban can be trusted with billions in foreign exchange reserves.39 One option would be to create a trust fund in a third country for limited disbursements; in late July, Reuters reported talks about this alternative were underway between the United States and Switzerland.40
Providing sanctions relief and returning at least part of the foreign exchange reserves to Afghanistan’s central bank, or an intermediary institution, should be a U.S. policy objective because it will help prevent Afghanistan from becoming a failed state. But it requires the Taliban-led government to take certain actions, including verifiable counterterrorism assurances, demonstrating a real commitment to preventing money laundering, and basic respect for human rights. The Taliban have increased their revenues by reducing corruption at customs checkpoints, but this is not enough to run their government effectively or save the economy.41 Afghanistan’s economy would remain in crisis even with broad sanctions relief and a return of the frozen foreign exchange reserves.
Refugee crisis
The United States should encourage regional countries to streamline the process of granting some form of status to Afghan refugees which would allow the refugees to live dignified lives.
Economic hardship and fears over a Taliban-led government have led to a new surge in refugee outflows from Afghanistan. There are 2,070,956 Afghans registered as refugees in neighboring countries, according to the UNHCR, with 182,590 having left since the beginning of 2021.42 Of this figure, 62 percent are located in Pakistan and 37.7 percent in Iran. This places significant stress on regional host countries already facing high inflation and economic stagnation. The refugees have no path to fully legal status in either Pakistan or Iran, leaving them unable to work or build a future, and sometimes prompting them to return to Afghanistan out of desperation. A significant number of Afghan refugees entering Iran hope to reach Europe, which involves undertaking extremely dangerous journeys. Despite the significant risk of being deported from Europe and returned to Afghanistan, thousands make the journey out of desperation. The United States should encourage regional countries to streamline the process of granting some form of status to Afghan refugees which would allow the refugees to live dignified lives. Washington can begin by improving its own process by which those who served alongside U.S. forces as interpreters apply for special immigrant visas.
Risks of transnational terrorism and civil war
Most assessments of the effect of a U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan predicted a period of protracted civil war, during which the Taliban would have a military advantage, but few imagined such a rapid collapse of the Afghan government and security forces. In the weeks following the dissolution of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANDSF) some former Afghan commandos continued fighting in the Panjshir valley — a historical stronghold of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance that was never brought under the control of the first Taliban emirate. Nevertheless, by mid-September the Taliban took control of Panjshir, forcing resistance groups to reorganize outside Afghanistan.
The two most prominent resistance groups are the National Resistance Front (NRF) and Afghanistan Freedom Front.43 Other groups include the Afghanistan Islamist National and Liberation Movement and Unknown Soldiers of Hazaristan. The Taliban has faced recurrences of armed resistance in the Panjshir Valley, but these groups lack the supplies and numbers to hold territory.44 U.N., Western government, and NGO assessments of the threat these groups present to the Taliban’s hold on power are sometimes exaggerated, especially when compared to past assessments of the ANDSF when they were in a far weaker position.45 Resistance groups unable to procure basic supplies are highly unlikely to present a challenge to the Taliban’s monopoly on power.
IS-K may present the greatest threat to the Taliban. It does not have the capacity to hold territory, but by committing assassinations and acts of terrorism it threatens one of the Taliban’s core claims to legitimacy — i.e., the ability to provide security. But IS-K is also a phenomenon feared equally by the Taliban, regional countries, Europe, and the United States. Special Envoy Thomas West has said that in his assessment the Taliban are genuinely committed to fighting IS-K, but may lack the capacity.46 Preventing its spread is more important than any perceived benefit that could be gained by allowing IS-K to harass the Taliban. But a more cooperative relationship also requires the Taliban to create the necessary conditions. Taliban leaders have continued to downplay the threat of IS-K and ignore its real causes. Suhail Shaheen, head of the Taliban’s political office in Doha, claimed during an interview with the author that IS-K attacks were orchestrated by outside opponents of the Taliban but also largely inconsequential; intelligence assessments indicate the threat is homegrown even if its funding model remains opaque. U.S. officials said they indicated to the Taliban that they might be willing to share actionable intelligence about threats — in part to encourage less draconian choices — but the Taliban showed little interest.47
The U.N. Security Council’s Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team concluded that the relationship between the Taliban and al-Qaeda “remains close and is underscored by the presence, both in Afghanistan and the region, of al-Qaeda core leadership and affiliated groups” and that “core al-Qaeda leadership under Aiman Muhammed Rabi al-Zawahiri is reported to remain in Afghanistan: more specifically, the eastern region from Zabul Province north towards Kunar and along the border with Pakistan.”48 We now know that al-Zawahiri certainly reached Kabul under the protection of the Taliban’s senior leadership.
Al-Qaeda remains degraded and will likely face some limitations in movement and activities from the Taliban. The Taliban have also allowed the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) to take refuge in Afghanistan as the group engages in attacks on Pakistan’s security forces.49 But policymakers should be careful not to assume that pragmatism will overcome ideology and personal connections in the case of the Taliban’s continued support for al-Qaeda or the TTP.
Fashioning a sustainable long-term Afghanistan policy
Regionalizing counterterrorism
The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and its Global War on Terror (GWOT) placed an invisible thumb on the scale of regional security calculations. In particular, the Afghanistan policies of India, Iran, and Pakistan became reactive to U.S. actions in the country. This discouraged regional countries from developing sustainable approaches to Afghanistan and enabled counterproductive state behavior by subsidizing overall regional security with U.S. boots on the ground. Pakistan and Iran took advantage of this by supporting the Taliban’s insurgency without concern that it would topple the Afghan government. India reaped the benefits of a friendly U.S.-backed government in Kabul without much skin in the game, although this was partly due to NATO’s admonition that a larger Indian footprint would rile Islamabad.
India felt excluded by the United States and other NATO countries, which preferred to cultivate a closer relationship with Pakistan when it came to Afghanistan.50 Pakistan’s tendency to publicly place the onus of internal instability on India is just one example of a counterproductive state narrative that was quickly deconstructed after the U.S. military withdrew. One Pakistani analyst observed, “[w]hile externalizing the extremist trends in Pakistan is not without merit, the multi-decade sustenance of extremist groups, ideology, and organizational network — combined with the incredible power of social media as a force multiplier for extreme political and social ideas and narratives — means that the bulk of the burden of extremism in Pakistan in 2021 is domestic, and not foreign.”51
Policymakers should be careful not to assume that pragmatism will overcome ideology and personal connections in the case of the Taliban’s continued support for al-Qaeda or the TTP.
Prevailing U.S. narratives about the role of regional countries in Afghanistan’s conflict were also counterproductive. The United States encouraged India to invest in Afghanistan, but dismissed its concerns over Washington’s commitment to the country’s stability. Pakistan was viewed as a double-dealing partner of necessity rather than an independent country with its own unique set of security concerns. This was due in part to Pakistan’s own short-sighted decisions to support some militants and not others. But strategic coordination between Washington and Islamabad was rarely achieved even when their priorities overlapped. Pakistan’s military establishment became an easy scapegoat for U.S. policymakers due to its shortsightedness and outsized influence over Pakistan’s foreign policy. But this dismisses the significant losses Pakistan’s military endured at the hands of militant groups and the fact that Washington was content to take advantage of the expediency of routing U.S. demands through Pakistan’s generals rather than its civilian politicians. A more assertive civilian government in Pakistan may or may not have been a more cooperative partner in GWOT.
Washington should learn from these mistakes. It should take advantage of having removed U.S. troops from harm’s way by encouraging regional countries to take a greater lead in dealing with the challenges of Afghanistan and counterterrorism. It can start by working closely with regional countries, including Pakistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, India, and, to the extent possible, Iran, to ensure they are prepared to handle security challenges as they emerge. This cooperation should include routine dialogue, intelligence sharing, bilaterals, and capacity building, particularly policing and border security. Just as it was a mistake to create the Afghan military in the image of the U.S. military, encouraging regional countries to recreate a U.S.-style GWOT would be a mistake of similar magnitude. This is not only because regional countries have different domestic and technological constraints, but also a recognition that the tactics of GWOT were often ineffective or unsustainable. However, there is a risk of regional countries replicating these tactics in unproductive ways. On April 16, 2022, Pakistan conducted strikes in Khost and Kunar, Afghanistan’s eastern provinces, which killed 47 people, including civilians and children.52Pakistan carried out the strikes in response to escalating TTP attacks on its security forces, but it is unclear that Pakistan managed to kill a single TTP leader.
Critics of over-the-horizon counterterrorism typically point to the impracticality of conducting traditional air and drone strikes without maintaining U.S. boots on the ground to facilitate logistics and intelligence gathering. Most of this criticism implicitly assigns value to recreating conditions as close as possible to the status quo of the last decade of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and the region. This skepticism is valid but misses the bigger picture in that U.S. policymakers must place counterterrorism strategy and tactics into context by closely examining civilian casualties, resilience of terrorist groups and their ability to replace leadership, cost and sustainability of high tempo drone strikes, effect on other U.S. policy priorities, and the overall terrorism risk relative to other threats. Much of the practices that came to define GWOT would not stand up against such a balancing test. Regional countries face greater domestic constraints and lack the budget and technological capacity to conduct counterterrorism campaigns à la GWOT.
Instead, U.S. policymakers should revisit approaches to counterterrorism in tandem with regional partners to build a more sustainable toolkit. This could involve going back to the basics by investing in a covert intelligence gathering architecture enhanced by current cyber capabilities. It may also involve bolstering the capacity of regional countries. This capacity-building should not necessarily focus on traditional military units, special operations, or intelligence agencies. Building local police capacity and enhancing the ability of partner countries to track and control terrorist movements may prove more effective in the long-run. As one analyst advises, “[r]ather than jumping straight to the discussion of drone basing, the United States should offer something of value to these countries: border security training and equipment.”53 Perhaps most importantly, Washington should take steps to increase confidence building, intelligence sharing, and cooperation with and among regional countries, like China, Pakistan, India, and to the extent possible, Iran and Russia on the limited goal of preventing transnational terrorists from using Afghanistan to conduct attacks abroad. As one Rand report recently concluded, “Afghanistan has proved more a burden than an asset and is better conceived of as a common challenge than a source of great power discord.”54 The next generation of terrorist attacks will be more effectively prevented by proactive communication between partners than reactive firepower.
Robust diplomacy
The United States should take steps to move towards the resumption of a limited diplomatic mission for the benefit of the Afghan people, its own security, and the security of its allies. This could begin with diplomatic envoys visiting Afghanistan, then transition to the establishment of a more permanent physical presence on the ground. The current status quo of meeting the Taliban at international forums only enhances the group’s legitimacy; the United States and its partners should consider a push to suspend the waivers that allow Taliban leaders to travel abroad, or simply refuse to meet them outside Afghanistan. It is also crucial that U.S. diplomats meet with various Taliban cabinet members in Kabul and stakeholders in Kandahar. Direct outreach by U.S. military officials and the intelligence community may have utility, but it is not a replacement for a coherent civilian-led diplomatic strategy.
Some of the United States’ closest allies during the war in Afghanistan have sent senior diplomats to meet with Taliban officials in Kabul even in the absence of a physical diplomatic mission in the country. These include Hugo Shorter, the U.K.’s intérim chargé d’affaires; Jasper Wieck, Germany’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan;55 Markus Potzel, then Germany’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan; and Emiel de Bont, the Dutch Special Envoy for Afghanistan.
The United States and its partners should consider a push to suspend the waivers that allow Taliban leaders to travel abroad, or simply refuse to meet them outside Afghanistan.
Various countries in Asia and the Middle East have maintained permanent diplomatic missions in Afghanistan.56 The E.U. also announced plans to establish a diplomatic presence in the country, without recognizing the Taliban government.57 A similar action by the United States is not without precedent. In 1977, at the height of the Cold War, the United States opened an Interests Section in its former embassy building in Havana.58 It was staffed by U.S. diplomats accredited to the Embassy of Switzerland and remained operational until the U.S. embassy reopened in 2015. Until 2019, the U.S. Consulate General in Jerusalem also served as the primary diplomatic link with the Palestinian people and leadership.59 It now houses the State Department’s Palestinian Affairs Unit, which serves a similar purpose.
A U.S. diplomatic mission in Afghanistan will facilitate consular services, including for the approximately 78,000 Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) applicants left in Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrew, and advance U.S. national security.60 The very presence of U.S. diplomats in the country will raise the stakes for any failure on the part of the Taliban to live up to its commitments under the U.S.-Taliban agreement signed in February 2020. It will also enhance our ability to react to fluid changes on the ground and demonstrate to our partners and foes that we are still engaged in the region.
More often U.S. interest sections are administered by the embassies of friendly countries, such as the Embassy of Switzerland in Tehran. Alternatively, they are located in friendly third countries: the Venezuelan Affairs Unit, for example, is housed in the U.S. embassy in Bogotá, Colombia. The expedited establishment of a formal interests section or Afghan affairs unit in a regional country could advance U.S. interests and fulfill our promise to continue supporting the people of Afghanistan.61
Afghanistan presents a unique set of security challenges for U.S. diplomats. Because terrorist groups like IS-K are capable of staging mass casualty terrorist attacks inside Kabul, the security of U.S. diplomats is a real concern. The Taliban regime has expressed openness to a U.S. diplomatic mission in the country but significant security challenges remain. A more sustainable first step may be to find ways to send small delegations for brief periods.
Economic engagement
Afghanistan’s economy will inevitably contract; this is a necessary step in shifting towards a more sustainable model of growth. But as one expert observed: “the [Afghan] population needs a glide path to a diminishing level of support, rather than the abrupt cutoff that hit the economy with a shock wave.”62 Humanitarian aid cannot provide this “glide path” without a functioning economy.
Keeping Taliban-led Afghanistan financially isolated may appear attractive to U.S. policymakers concerned about the group’s positions on human rights and terrorism, but this approach is unlikely to alter the Taliban’s core beliefs and behavior; on the other hand it is guaranteed to turn Afghanistan into a failed state, with all the negative consequences for the region and the United States. The future of the Taliban is uncertain and Afghanistan’s modern history suggests that regime turnover is the rule — not the exception. But destroying Afghanistan’s economy and undermining its institutions to promote regime change may make the country ungovernable by any authority for the foreseeable future.
European partners are unlikely to take the lead in addressing Afghanistan’s worsening economic situation if doing so contradicts U.S. policy. As one European official expressed to the author, the U.S. lack of consistent coordination on Afghanistan since the Trump administration and extending into the August withdrawal only solidified the tendency of these countries to be risk averse.63 Washington must continue to lead in order to avoid a complete breakdown of Afghanistan’s economy.
The United States should continue to communicate to the Taliban what actions it must take for sanctions to be lifted. At a minimum, OFAC should continue to clarify the scope of GLs by providing comprehensive FAQ guidance. Public and private sector entities should be encouraged to apply for specific licenses. Currently remittances sent to Afghans are only permitted for non-commercial uses. Regulating remittances by a specified value rather than the non-commercial status of the use will allow Afghans in the diaspora to help support small businesses while still providing protections against the financing of terrorism. Lastly, letters offering assurances to specific entities about sanctions-exempt transactions should be edited and redacted before they are published to protect the privacy of the original entity, while offering clarity to others engaged in similar types of permitted transactions.
Engagement with the Afghan people
The United States should continue to engage in proactive diplomacy with the people of Afghanistan, regardless of the state of its relations with the Taliban-led government. This can be achieved by restarting the Fulbright Program, exploring the funding and sponsorship of third country and remote learning programs for Afghan girls and women, and remaining engaged with Afghan civil society inside and outside Afghanistan.
Because Afghan women are particularly vulnerable, the United States must base its demands for girls to attend school and women to work outside the home on upholding human and civil rights, rather than on making mere concessions in exchange for legitimacy or greater engagement. No amount of aid or financial integration will allow Afghanistan to develop if half its population remains shuttered in their homes. Nevertheless, clear inducements must be provided to expedite the protection of human and civil rights for women. It is also crucial that the Biden administration increase efforts to assist the evacuation of former interpreters and other Afghans who closely assisted the U.S. mission in Afghanistan.
Utility of the U.S.-Taliban agreement
Both the United States and the Taliban have arguably violated aspects of the U.S.-Taliban agreement. The Taliban continue to reference the U.S.-Taliban agreement in their public and private statements and appear to view it as in effect, even as they violate its terms. The agreement was inherently unbalanced as it was negotiated because the primary objective of both parties was the withdrawal of U.S. troops. The revelation that Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaeda, was living in a home owned by the Taliban’s interior minister is assuredly a violation of the Taliban’s duty to “send a clear message that those who pose a threat to the security of the United States and its allies have no place in Afghanistan…” This is particularly true given that al-Zawahiri recently released videos threatening the United States. However, since the agreement is currently the only framework the two countries have for conducting diplomacy, scrapping it based on violations would risk ending whatever degree to which the Taliban have adhered to the agreement. Instead, it should be used as an aspirational framework that can guide future dialogue. Ultimately, strategic patience in diplomacy rather than war is required to develop a relationship with a modicum of trust.
Because Afghan women are particularly vulnerable, the United States must base its demands for girls to attend school and women to work outside the home on upholding human and civil rights, rather than on making mere concessions in exchange for legitimacy or greater engagement.
Conclusion
The United States was the single most important actor in Afghanistan for 20 years, which disincentivized sustainable development and fostered dysfunction in Afghanistan’s government. During this period Afghanistan occupied a disproportionate amount of U.S. government attention relative to other foreign policy priorities. The withdrawal of U.S. troops reduced the importance of each country to the other. But it would be a mistake reminiscent of the 1990s for Washington to disengage from Afghanistan or the region entirely. Instead, the United States must engage in gradual and consistent diplomacy with the Taliban and the Afghan people. Change will be incremental and there will be many setbacks, but there is no viable alternative.
U.S. policymakers should anticipate Taliban intransigence, accept the limits of outside influence, craft policies to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a failed state, and promote its long-term stability. Neither China nor Russia, nor any regional powers, have demonstrated a desire to fill the role played by the pre-withdrawal United States; policymakers should avoid viewing Afghanistan through the lens of great power competition or regional rivalries. Rather, there is a limited window in which the overall interests of most countries are aligned in Afghanistan.
It is crucial that U.S. policymakers seek a middle ground between a harshly punitive approach (and potential military intervention) or disengagement reminiscent of the 1990s. This will require the government to find creative ways of confronting terrorism rather than pouring resources into a forward-deployed GWOT.64 The United States should take steps commensurate with Taliban actions to issue GLs and ultimately rescind broad sanctions that were never intended to be used against the Taliban as a de facto government. This will require communicating clearly to the Taliban’s leadership precisely what actions will lead to a reassessment of U.S. sanctions policy. Ambiguity will not work with the Taliban, nor will holding out dialogue as a reward for concessions, rather than a starting point.
Formal recognition should be predicated on the Taliban upholding its commitments to counterterrorism and basic human rights, including for women. But U.S. diplomats must still use the framework of the U.S.-Taliban agreement to engage with the government that exists, which is likely to be the Taliban for the foreseeable future. This requires U.S. diplomats to travel to Afghanistan and ideally establish a semi-permanent diplomatic presence that can serve the Afghan people. Relying on diplomatic engagement in third countries separates U.S. decision makers from the Taliban’s senior leadership and unnecessarily grants the Taliban the privilege of international travel.
The United States and its allies have an interest in preventing Afghanistan from becoming a failed state. Fighting al-Qaeda will be easier with some semblance of a relationship with the Taliban than none at all. Disengagement will do little to undermine the Taliban or dismantle terrorist groups but much to hurt Afghanistan and the Afghan people. With U.S. troops out of Afghanistan policy makers finally have an opportunity to consider long-term interests rather than short-term necessities.
Appendix A: Current U.S. and U.N. exemptions to sanctions
*See FAQs 928-931; 949-955; 957-963; 991-997; and 1032 for scenario specific guidance.
“[…] all transactions involving the Taliban or the Haqqani Network […] ordinarily incident and necessary to the provision of humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan or other activities that support basic human needs in Afghanistan by the following entities and their employees, grantees, contractors, or other persons acting on their behalf are authorized:” [Emphasis added]
USGOVNGOsUNInternational Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) and Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA)African Development Bank Group, Asian Development Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and Inter-American Development Bank Group (IDB Group)Red Cross and Red CrescentIslamic Development Bank
“[…] all transactions involving the Taliban or the Haqqani Network […] ordinarily incident and necessary to the exportation or reexportation of agricultural commodities, medicine, medical devices, replacement parts and components for medical devices, or software updates for medical devices to Afghanistan, or to persons in third countries purchasing specifically for resale to Afghanistan, are authorized.” [Emphasis added]
“[…] all transactions involving the Taliban or the Haqqani Network […] that are ordinarily incident and necessary to the transfer of noncommercial, personal remittances to Afghanistan, including through Afghan depository institutions, are authorized.” [Emphasis added]
“Noncommercial, personal remittances do not include charitable donations of funds to or for the benefit of an entity or funds transfers for use in supporting or operating a business, including a family-owned business.” [Emphasis added]
“[…] all transactions and activities involving the Taliban or the Haqqani Network […] that are for the conduct of the official business of the United States Government by employees, grantees, or contractors thereof are authorized.” [Emphasis added]
“[…] all transactions and activities involving the Taliban or the Haqqani Network […] that are for the conduct of the official business of the following entities by employees, grantees, or contractors thereof are authorized:” [Emphasis added]UNInternational Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) and Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA)African Development Bank Group, Asian Development Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and Inter-American Development Bank Group (IDB Group)Red Cross and Red CrescentIslamic Development Bank
“[…] all transactions and activities involving the Taliban or the Haqqani Network […] that are ordinarily incident and necessary to the activities described in paragraph (b) by nongovernmental organizations are authorized.” [Emphasis added]
“Activities to support humanitarian projects to meet basic human needs in Afghanistan, including drought and flood relief; food, nutrition, and medicine distribution; the provision of health services; assistance for vulnerable or displaced populations, including individuals with disabilities, the elderly, and survivors of sexual- and gender-based violence; and environmental programs;” [Emphasis added]“Activities to support the following in Afghanistan: rule of law, citizen participation, government accountability and transparency, human rights and fundamental freedoms, access to information, and civil society development projects;” [Emphasis added]“Activities to support education in Afghanistan, including combating illiteracy, increasing access to education, international exchanges, and assisting education reform projects;” [Emphasis added]“Activities to support non-commercial development projects directly benefiting the Afghan people, including related to health, food security, and water and sanitation; and” [Emphasis added]“Activities to support environmental and natural resource protection in Afghanistan, including the preservation and protection of threatened or endangered species, responsible and transparent management of natural resources, and the remediation of pollution or other environmental damage.” [Emphasis added]
“This general license does not authorize:”
“Financial transfers to any blocked person described in paragraph (a), other than for the purpose of effecting the payment of taxes, fees, or import duties, or the purchase or receipt of permits, licenses, or public utility services;” [Emphasis added]“Any debit to an account on the books of a U.S. financial institution of any blocked person described in paragraph (a);”“Any transactions or activities otherwise prohibited by the GTSR, the FTOSR, or any other part of 31 CFR chapter V, or E.O. 13224, as amended.”
(a)…all transactions involving Afghanistan or governing institutions in Afghanistan prohibited by the Global Terrorism Sanctions Regulations, 31 CFR part 594 (GTSR), the Foreign Terrorist Organizations Sanctions Regulations, 31 CFR part 597 (FTOSR), or Executive Order (E.O.) 13224, as amended, are authorized.”
“This general license does not authorize:”
“Financial transfers to the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, any entity in which the Taliban or the Haqqani Network owns, directly or indirectly, individually or in the aggregate, a 50 percent or greater interest, or any blocked individual who is in a leadership role of a governing institution in Afghanistan, other than for the purpose of effecting the payment of taxes, fees, or import duties, or the purchase or receipt of permits, licenses, or public utility services, provided that such payments do not relate to luxury items or services;” [Emphasis added]“Transfers of luxury items or services to any blocked person described in paragraph (b)(1) of this general license; (3) Any debit to an account on the books of a U.S. financial institution of any blocked person; or (4) Any transactions involving any person blocked pursuant to the GTSR, the FTOSR, or E.O. 13224, as amended, other than the blocked persons described in paragraph (b)(1) of this general license, unless separately authorized.”
About the Author
Adam Weinstein is a Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute. Before joining Quincy, Adam worked for KPMG’s international trade practice and assisted multinational clients in navigating Asia’s changing trade landscape. Prior to that, he worked as senior law and policy analyst at the National Iranian American Council, where he focused on thesecuritization of U.S. immigration policy and its effect on communities. Adam is an attorney by trade and received his J.D. from Temple University Beasley School of Law with a concentration in international law. During law school, he contributed to a brief that was presented to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). He has presented papers at the 2016 International Society of Public Law Conference and 2019 Constitutional Resilience in South Asia Workshop sponsored by Oxford University and Melbourne Law School. He served as a U.S. Marine and deployed to Afghanistan in 2012.
Strategic Patience: Sustainable Engagement with a Changed Afghanistan
The Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan last year — followed by economic sanctions and other restrictions from the international community — precipitated a dire humanitarian crisis. Afghan women and children, particularly girls, have been hit the hardest. After two decades of hard-won gains, Afghan women have seen their rights evaporate before their eyes and young girls’ dreams for their futures have been squashed. Meanwhile, the country’s economic crisis has left nearly the entire population in hunger, with limited access to health care and other basic needs.
Mercy Corps’ Yasmin Faruki, Save the Children U.S.’s Allyson Neville, World Vision’s Ashley Igwe, Care USA’s Dhabie Brown and Norwegian Refugee Council’s Becky Roby look at what’s driving the humanitarian and economic crises, how it’s impacting access to food and health care, how it is uniquely impacting women and girls and what the United States can do to help. Recent reports and statements on the humanitarian situation in Afghanistan from their organizations and others can be found here.
The 2022 Humanitarian Response Plan for Afghanistan is the largest ever in history for a single country at $4.4 billion. What are the key factors driving humanitarian needs?
Faruki: Today’s humanitarian crisis is primarily an economic one. The crisis is driven by three factors. First, the country is suffering from a lack of access to cash, or liquidity. The credentials revocation of Afghanistan’s Central Bank, known as Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB), halted basic banking transactions and subsequently limited the flow of cash within the country. This flow of cash was crucial to daily market activities for Afghan families, who are now unable to earn incomes and buy basic goods. Second, foreign donors’ decision to suspend development assistance, which supported a majority of Afghanistan’s public sector budget, cut off salary payments for essential government workers in sectors like health and education. Finally, skyrocketing levels of inflation, including more than a 50% increase in the cost of goods since last July, have diminished Afghan families’ ability to purchase food and basic items, despite their widespread supply on the open market.
In addition, Afghanistan continues to battle COVID-19, among other infectious diseases, and recurring natural disasters, including a recent drought and 5.9 magnitude earthquake in June that left over 300,000 Afghans in need of humanitarian assistance. While humanitarian assistance has helped stave off even deeper levels of starvation, more support is needed. Ultimately, no level of humanitarian funding will be able to substitute the role of a functioning economy.
Many of your organizations have recently released reports. What’s one thing that either surprised you or that people should know about the situation in Afghanistan right now?
Neville: This is a children’s emergency. Because of the economic crisis, 97% of households are now unable to meet basic needs, including food and medical care. According to an assessment by Save the Children, an overwhelming majority of children report eating less. Some children describe only eating one meal a day — sometimes consisting of bread and tea only — or only one full meal a week.
The situation for girls is especially concerning. Girls are nearly twice as likely to go to bed hungry on a frequent basis, indicating that they are probably missing out to benefit their male siblings and peers, and more than twice as likely to be out of school compared to boys. They are also facing increased risks of child marriage. More than one in four girls were reported by their caregivers to show signs of depression and anxiety on a daily basis. There isn’t a single area in which the lives and wellbeing of children have not been negatively impacted by the ongoing crisis.
Igwe: Child protection systems in Afghanistan have weakened, and pressure on families from the economic crisis is exposing children to significant risk — child marriage, child trafficking, child labor, psychosocial distress from conflict and displacement and violence, abuse or exploitation closer to home.
A 14-year-old boy we spoke to dropped out of school to help provide for his family of seven. He told us, “Going to school helps me build my future, but how can I survive without eating something? Going to school means missing half of the work I do now, and that means half of my current income, which is never enough for our family.”
A devastated father admitted to selling his 7-year-old daughter in marriage to a creditor: “I did not have any alternative, so I agreed to sell my daughter for 200,000 Afs ($2,250) so that I can pay off the debts and feed my children for a while.”
There has been significant press coverage on increased hunger and malnutrition, and challenges in accessing health care. Can you describe what you are seeing in your programs, and how families are being impacted?
Igwe: After August 15, 2021, people who had been in inaccessible areas began seeking health care, and the health system was unable to cope with the additional load. It takes households an average of 90 minutes to reach the nearest health-care center, with some families traveling up to four hours. We are especially concerned about the effect this has on mothers and infants. Access to midwife care can reduce newborn mortality and stillbirth rates by over 80 percent, and pre-term labor and birth by 24%. However, we are finding that less than a third of births are attended by a skilled professional.
Further, malnutrition is rampant. So many children are dying, and even those who survive aren’t able to thrive. Malnourished mothers who are pregnant or breastfeeding are unable to give their babies the essential nutrients they require, which can cause long-lasting harm to brain development and make their children more susceptible to infections and illnesses.
Brown: Nearly the entire population of Afghanistan (95%) is not getting enough to eat, but what’s startling is that the hunger crisis is generally not due to a lack of food — it’s manmade. The markets are full, but people can’t afford to buy what they need. International economic restrictions and the suspension of foreign assistance to Afghanistan have had dire consequences on families. Inflation has driven the price of basic goods like food and fuel out of reach and family incomes have been devastated from job and salary losses. Drought and lack of access to agricultural inputs means we also expect domestic food production to decrease soon, adding another layer to this crisis. Humanitarian assistance has helped prevent catastrophe so far, but it can’t solve the economic and development crisis at the root of this suffering.
Can you say a little more about how women and girls are being uniquely impacted by the crisis?
Brown: CARE recently surveyed 345 Afghan women across nine provinces to better understand the gendered impacts of food insecurity. Women who previously worked outside of the home told us that job and wage loss, intimidation and restrictions on their mobility mean they can no longer earn an income and contribute to their households. Many have also been forced to adopt negative coping mechanisms — such as selling their jewelry, rugs and other personal assets; taking unfavorable loans; or resorting to harmful cooking practices like burning plastic instead of expensive oil — to make sure there is food on table. Unfortunately, Afghanistan’s crippling liquidity crisis has also precipitated a spike in early marriages. One of our young staffers who helped conduct the study wanted U.S. policymakers to know that the key to a brighter future for Afghan women like her is the ability to work, go to school and travel freely so they can support their families and communities.
Igwe: Women must now be accompanied by men (muharam) when they leave their homes. Consequently, women without muharam — like widows and single mothers — have lost their jobs and are struggling to find ways to survive. Moreover, girls can no longer be educated past sixth grade. Afghanistan has fewer female teachers and fewer girls in school than at any point over the last two decades. Soon, fewer and fewer female educators will exist to teach the next generation of girls. Many girls feel that they have no future in Afghanistan.
As families struggle to provide, young girls are given in marriage so their dowry can be used to care for the children who remain at home. We spoke to a 12-year-old girl. To cancel her family’s debt, she is promised to a man with grandchildren her age. She told us, “Getting a divorce is the only dream I have in my life.”
What actions can U.S. policymakers take to address the current crisis?
Roby: Going forward, there should be proactive engagement with financial institutions to encourage them to facilitate the financial transactions of aid agencies and the private sector operating in Afghanistan. U.N. member states should provide legal guidance and incentives to address the chilling effect of sanctions on private sector actors. This should include efforts to encourage financial institutions — including banks, payment platforms and other systems, such as SWIFT — to engage with Afghanistan.
The United States, along with other influential U.N. member states, can also take steps to secure mechanisms for providing technical assistance to DAB. This includes building DAB’s capacity and independence as a necessary step toward restoring the commercial banking sector and reconnecting the Afghan economy to the global economy. Such assistance is essential in maintaining macroeconomic stability and restoring confidence in the banking system. Furthermore, steps should be taken to resume the printing and circulation of Afghani banknotes. A functioning banking sector and economy are essential to prevent a perpetual cycle of humanitarian need.
Neville: In addition to the actions above, the United States should continue to demonstrate leadership in funding the humanitarian response. The United States has been incredibly generous, but humanitarian needs — globally and in Afghanistan — are at record-high levels. Support must expand to meet these needs. Additionally, there must be a plan to replenish development funding, including resources that were repurposed for humanitarian assistance. The United States and others must ensure that funding resumes for key sectors that had long been supported by development assistance. A humanitarian-only response is insufficient, and the lack of development funding also undermines the economy. One step would be to end the pause in teacher salary payments through the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund. Finally, work must be done to encourage the Taliban to ensure women can access and participate in the humanitarian response, girls of all ages can attend school and there is non-interference in humanitarian activities.
Dhabie Brown is a senior humanitarian policy advocate at CARE USA.
Yasmin Faruki is a senior policy advisor at Mercy Corps.
Ashley Igwe is a humanitarian and emergency affairs policy advisor at World Vision.
Allyson Neville is a senior advisor at Save the Children U.S.
Becky Roby is an advocacy manager at Norwegian Refugee Council.
A Year into Taliban Rule, Afghans Face Spiraling Economic, Humanitarian Crises
It is almost a year since the departure of the last foreign forces from Afghanistan, the collapse of the Republic and its armed forces and the Taleban’s capture of power. It is almost a year, as well, that the Taleban have been ruling Afghanistan. AAN has reported on every step of the way, on the collapse itself, how the United States both underestimated and bolstered the Taleban, and how the Taleban defeated a Republic hollowed out by corruption and vain hopes. We have looked at the makeup of the new Taleban administration, at its morality police, and its clamping down on the rights and freedoms of women and girls, journalists and musicians and the wider population. We have traced Afghanistan’s calamitous economic collapse and the struggles of its people to feed their families, and how aid is being delivered. In this dossier published ahead of the second Emirate’s first year anniversary, we bring together our reports to tell the story of this momentous year for Afghanistan.
The dossier is split into five chapters:Chapter 1: US withdrawal, Republican Collapse, Taleban Victory
Chapter 2: The Transition to a new political order
Chapter 3: Human Rights
Chapter 4: Economic collapse and the struggle to find food
Chapter 5: Aid after the Taleban takeover
Chapter 1: US withdrawal, Republican Collapse, Taleban Victory
President Biden’s 14 April 2021 announcement of the full, rapid and unconditional withdrawal of international military forces from Afghanistan by 11 September gave the Taleban a timetable to launch their assaults on government-held areas. They pushed against Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) which had been hollowed out by corruption, churn in senior leadership and demoralisation, as soldiers and police realised that neither the US nor Kabul had their backs. In a matter of months, district after district and then provincial capitals fell until finally, the Taleban captured Kabul on 15 August. The Taleban’s rise to power: As the US prepared for peace, the Taleban prepared for warargues that America’s strategy of recent years has been one factor – although not the only one – facilitating the Taleban takeover.
One week after the fall of Kabul, Kate Clark looked at the flaws in US Special Representative for Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad’s strategy, driven as it was by the United States’ desire to withdraw its troops. He and President Trump had already given away the US’s main bargaining chip when they signed the US-Taleban Doha Agreement on 29 February 2020. They had agreed to an almost unconditional withdrawal in return for the haziest of commitments to ‘intra-Afghan talks’, an effective gamble that the Taleban actually wanted to negotiate an end to the conflict with Kabul, rather than try for military victory.
As it turned out, the Taleban were planning their final push to take Afghanistan, while the Afghan elite were blind to the wolf at the door. Even as the US was packing up to leave and the Taleban were preparing to fight for power, Afghanistan’s elites continued to fight over posts and milk the state. The government failed to prepare for a post-US Afghanistan or even believe the US would ever actually leave.
In the final days of the Republic, Afghanistan’s last president Ashraf Ghani had few allies and was isolated. His micro-managing, inability to delegate, quick temper and fear of rivals had left the administration drained of talent, flexibility and decisiveness. Inaction, such as the failure to properly resource those organising to resist, had further sabotaged the Republic’s defence. He appeared out of touch with reality; as the Taleban marched towards Kabul, the Palace continued business as usual. On 12 August, three days before he was to flee Afghanistan, Ghani was busy meeting the country’s Olympics team and attending international youth day celebrations. His secret flight out of Afghanistan as the Taleban entered Kabul, without informing even the defence minister, and leaving no transitional arrangements in place, will be a lasting ignominy.
In the end, the fall of the Republic was more rapid than anyone had imagined and came well before the 11 September 2021 deadline set by President Biden. By fastening America’s departure from Afghanistan to the twentieth anniversary of the al-Qaeda’s 2001 attacks on the United States – the event that brought the American military to Afghanistan – President Biden ensured that the day will be celebrated by the Taleban and the various violent jihadist groups around the world as the second defeat of a superpower by Afghan mujahedin and remembered by history as the start of the Taleban’s second Emirate.
The beginning of the end
In the weeks following President Biden’s announcement, a thunderstruck Afghanistan struggled to come to terms with the implications of its looming abandonment. In his reportPreparing for a Post Departure Afghanistan, Ali Yawar Adili looked at how the Ghani government tried to put a brave face on the situation, even as it failed to gain consensus within its own ranks on what to do. Western diplomats and Afghans with means ‘rushed to the door’, while former factional commanders and leaders talked of mobilising a ‘second resistance’ outside the government’s formal military structures – a repeat of what they had done 20 years earlier as the anti-Taleban Northern Alliance. The announcement of unconditional troop withdrawal transformed the Taleban’s approach to the intra-Afghan talks, fatally weakening any chance of a negotiated end to the war.
It was not long before the Taleban started their push to capture territory in earnest. They kept to their agreement with the US not to attack the departing international forces, but no longer saw any benefit to be gained by restraint against Afghan forces. Following the 2020 US-Taleban agreement, they had already intensified their attacks on their fellow Afghans, but now the gloves were off. In A Quarter of Afghanistan’s Districts Fall to the Taleban amid Calls for a ‘Second Resistance’, Kate Clark and Obaid Ali charted the fall of some 127 district centres out of a total of 421 to the Taleban between 1 May to 29 June. The maps below by Roger Helms illustrate the Taleban’s mounting territorial gains, showing how the balance of power shifted steadily and then ineluctably in the insurgents’ favour.
Changes in district control as of 29 June 2021.
That shift of power was felt at first particularly in the north, which after bloody battles and ultimate defeat in a few key districts, saw a collapse of the ANSF and the civilian authorities at breakneck speed. More than 60 districts in nine provinces (Faryab, Jawzjan, Sar-e Pul, Balkh, Samangan, Baghlan, Kunduz, Takhar and Badakhshan) had been overrun or ceded to the Taleban by 29 June, most of them in the last ten days of the month.
Changes in district centre control in northwestern Afghanistan from 1 May to 29 June.
When the Taleban were last in power in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it had been the north where they faced their most resistance, so beginning their push for power in this region now looked like a pre-emptive strike to prevent any new northern opposition from organising. As much as Taleban strength of canniness led to their trouncing the ANSF, equally significant was corruption in government, especially in the all-crucial security ministries and forces; questionable senior level appointment-making and persistent scarcities in supplies and salary payments also helped precipitate the collapse. Running out of ammunition or food had demoralised troops, already reeling from the US decision to withdraw.
By mid-July, the insurgents had gained control of almost 200 district centres, or just under half of the total.
Kate Clark’s Menace, Negotiation, Attack: The Taleban take more District Centres across Afghanistan looked at the Taleban’s strategy of focusing on border crossings and other money-making locations while avoiding a move on provincial capitals and eastern areas which border Pakistan. Many of the first districts to fall had been dismissed as ‘low-hanging fruit’, places where the government and ANSF had only controlled the district centre, often precariously so, but by mid-July, Taleban gains had gone well beyond the capture of those centres. As districts toppled like dominoes, ANSF morale plummeted further, as did the confidence of civilians in the government. The Taleban’s narrative that it was heading to victory proved more powerful than the government’s insistence that it was in control and could protect the people.
Changes in district centre control as of 14 July 2021, including principal roads and border crossings.
The Taleban’s push to sue for power exacted a heavy toll on civilians in Afghanistan. Kate Clark took a deep dive into UNAMA’s mid-year report on civilian casualties, published on 26 July. New UNAMA Civilian Casualties report: The human cost of the Taleban push to take territoryexamined numbers of civilians killed and injured in the first six months of 2021 which were back up to the record highs of 2014 to 2018. UNAMA also reported on the deliberate destruction and looting of civilian homes, schools and clinics in newly-captured territory, the vast majority by or with the complicity of Taleban fighters.
As Afghanistan entered the second half of 2021, fears over the harm done by this bitter conflict were legion, of further loss of life and the destruction of homes, of having to flee through areas planted with IEDs, of being subject to abuse or ‘revenge’ attacks by armed men and of the denial of dignity and respect. The cut-off point for data for the UNAMA report had been 30 June. By the time it was published, on 26 July, the conflict had raged on, more districts had fallen to the Taleban and the toll on the civilian population had mounted. We calculated that at least 226 of Afghanistan’s 421 district centres, or more than half, had by then fallen to the Taleban.
Changes in district centre control as of 24 July 2021.
As well as looking at the national picture, AAN wanted to publish several case studies of how particular districts or provinces fell – the local politics, local economics, the deals done, the role of elders and how government forces had fared.
The first to be published was on Laghman province, which sits on the main highway between Kabul and the Torkham border crossing with Pakistan; focusing on it was consistent with the Taleban’s strategy of seeking to deny the government access to domestic revenues. At that time, in early August, Laghman, long-contested, had seen four of its six districts fall to the Taleban between late May and mid-July. Yet the government still had a precarious hold on the provincial capital Mehtarlam. Ali Mohammad Sabawoon’s Taleban Victory or Government Failure? A security update on Laghman province took a close look at how political rivalries, the competing demands of local elites and a failure to establish a united front with strong command-and-control had contributed to the Taleban’s success in this strategically important province. He looked at how three district centres and multiple security outposts had fallen to the Taleban without bloodshed, following mediation by local tribal elders and the surrender of government forces. The government arrested the civilian and military leaders implicated in these surrenders, but it was not enough to stem the political turmoil that had seen the province cycle through three governors in under a year.
In The Domino Effect in Paktia and the Fall of Zurmat: A case study of the Taleban surrounding Afghan cities,Thomas Ruttig and Sayed Asadullah documented the successive collapse of 11 of Paktia’s 14 districts to the Taleban in six days, in late June/early July, culminating in the fall of the politically significant Zurmat district on 2 July 2021. They reconstructed how these districts, protected by a 1,000-strong government force, had fallen so rapidly to just 200 to 300 Taleban fighters on motorbikes. Strategy and morale, it seemed, had trumped numbers. They explored the Taleban strategy, government weakness, the shifting loyalties of local people, the role of tribal elders and the history of violence in Zurmat – all contributing to the Taleban capturing Zurmat, which put the insurgents at the gates of the provincial capital, Gardez.
On 6 August 2021, the Taleban gained control of their first provincial capital, Zaranj in Nimruz province. As Taleban fighters entered the city, government security forces melted away, many to Iran through the nearby border. They left the provincial capital free for the taking. Fabrizio Foschini’s The Fall of Nimruz: A symbolic or economic game-changer?argued that after an unexpected and highly successful sweep of rural districts in Nimruz, the Taleban had encountered significant resistance when they turned their sights on major cities, such as Kandahar, Herat, Ghazni and Lashkargah. In order to boost the morale of their fighters, who had grown accustomed to routing the ANSF, Taleban military leaders changed tack; while keeping up the pressure on those cities, they also started targeting relatively undefended provincial capitals like Zaranj.
At first glance, this province in Afghanistan’s remote southwest might look inconsequential, but Nimruz is a leading import-export hub, ranking fourth for customs revenues, after Nangrahar, Herat and Balkh. It is also a gateway for the smuggling of illicit drugs and Afghans seeking to go to Iran and beyond. Capturing Nimruz was a morale boost to Taleban fighters, who went on to take four other provincial capitals in quick succession – Sheberghan in Jowzjan, Sar-e Pul, Kunduz and Taloqan in Takhar.
Changes in district centre control as of 8 August 2021.
From before the fall of Kabul, the AAN team had been interviewing Afghans on how their district or city had fallen and what changes they had seen in their lives.Afghanistan’s Conflict in 2021 (1): The Taleban’s sweeping offensive as told by people on the groundwas the result: a compilation of story fragments gathered by AAN researchers and compiled by Martine van Bijlert. These accounts reveal how variable takeovers had been – in the level of violence, the duration of the fighting or standoff, the pace of events, whether the ANSF had resisted, fled or surrendered, and the extent of suffering among civilians. Interviewees gave vivid descriptions of fierce fighting, particularly early on and around the cities, and of desperate attempts by individual ANSF units to hold on to their positions. Small pockets of besieged security forces left to fend for themselves often held off Taleban attacks for weeks. Such accounts explain the anger and confusion when people talk about the incompetency of the Kabul leadership, the absence of leadership and the lack of support. People described military units as being often unable, no longer willing or sometimes not even authorised to fight back against the Taleban onslaught.Things moved at breakneck speed after the fall of Zaranj. By the morning of 15 August, just nine days later, 19 more provincial capitals had fallen into Taleban hands and six of the seven zonal army corps had either surrendered or dissolved and the Taleban were on the outskirts of the capital. That morning, on what would turn out to be the final day of the Republic, we published Martine van Bijlert’s Is This How It Ends? With the Taleban closing in on Kabul, President Ghani faces tough decisions. It summed up what had driven the rapid fall of Afghanistan’s district and provincial capitals to the Taleban and described the government’s now tenuous prospects. Many, most notably the government itself and the US, which was still operating on the assumption that the Taleban would only begin their offensive on the capital in earnest after all the foreign troops had left on 31 August, were caught off-guard. Foreign governments were clamouring to evacuate their staff and nationals and the Afghan public was coming to terms with the fact that the Americans were leaving with scarcely any thought for what was left behind. A few hours later, Ghani fled Afghanistan in a helicopter for Uzbekistan, and eventually the United Arab Emirates, and the Taleban entered Kabul as conquerors. Kabul police and security forces melted away and, in the end, the Taleban entered Kabul without resistance. By nightfall, they had taken control of the Presidential Palace.
Changes in district and provincial center control as of 13 August.
The fall of the Republic did not come out of the blue. If the government and the US had been unprepared, the Taleban were not. They seemed to have been planning what they would do when international forces left for months, making deals and issuing threats and using networks they had built over the years. In many ways, those final months were an acceleration of the existing state of affairs in large parts of the country: an ongoing war with deaths, revenge killings, aerial bombardments and an ever-encroaching Taleban.
During the Taleban offensive, they were winning the information war with a mass of social media accounts distributing a deluge of carefully curated images and videos of their fighters running through towns or taking control of government buildings and the Taleban flag raised in various locations or, two days before the fall of Kabul, footage of a slightly dazed Ismael Khan, former governor of Herat and mujahedin strongman, was distributed on social media after being detained by Taleban forces as he attempted to cross the border into Iran. In the last days of Kabul under the Republic, cries of ‘Allah-u Akbar!’ had been shouted out across the night-time city, a symbol of opposition to the incoming Taleban. Yet, the Palace had continued to live in its own surreal bubble, including now pointless donor-driven ceremonies and meetings and even a bizarre visit by Ghani to the ancient Bala Hissar fortress in Kabul. Terrified Afghans had been arriving to what they thought would be the safety of the capital in their numbers, and a humanitarian crisis was starting to unfold. Ghani’s now infamous 14 August video message to the nation made vague commitments to remobilise the forces, conduct wide consultations, and work to end further violence, but the subtext was clear – the fight was over.
How Afghanistan fell to the Taleban, 2021.
Chapter 2: The transition to a new political order
The end, when it came, brought to the foreground the apprehensions of an anxious nation wondering what this turn of events would mean to their lives. Some Afghans headed to the airport seeking to flee and find refuge outside Afghanistan. Many more stayed home to wait for the start of a new chapter in Afghanistan’s history to unfold and the streets were largely left empty. Martine van Bijlert contemplated the emergence of the Taleban as Afghanistan’s new leaders in Afghanistan Has a New Government: The country wonders what the new normal will look like.
On reaching the Arg, the Taleban had reportedly declared that they had no interest in a shared interim government and were simply going to rule by themselves. And so it was that on Monday 16 August 2021, the Taleban started their transition from a warring group that used, among other things, terror to achieve its goals to a government that would be held to account and faced a plurality of opinions, politics and lifestyles. How would they negotiate the demands of a generation of Afghans unaccustomed to Taleban rule and, in particular, the demands of Afghan women for their share in public life? The real litmus test, van Bijlert wrote, was girls’ education. Would Afghan girls be allowed to attend school and university and, if so, under what conditions?
Taleban’s spokesman Zabihullah Mujahed held his first press conference with an announcement, among other things, of a general security guarantee (often referred to as an amnesty) for those who had worked with the Republic. He said there would be no reprisals. As we saw in Martine van Bijlert’s The Taleban leadership converges on Kabul as remnants of the republic reposition themselves, there was a great deal of uncertainty about the Taleban’s emerging strategy and the shifting alliances of Afghanistan’s old political elite: Would Taleban leaders engage with the various powerbrokers, such as former president Hamid Karzai and former chief executive Abdullah Abdullah, who had not fled and who were trying to mediate on behalf of the remnants of the Republic?
Outside Kabul, there were reports of skirmishes and protests, and also pockets of resistance by those still holding out against Taleban rule. In Panjshir, First Vice-President Amrullah Saleh and Ahmad Massud, the son of Ahmad Shah Massud, were said to be organising a resistance.
Meanwhile, the scramble to leave the country escalated, with Taleban fighters manning checkpoints outside the airport, often violently. The evacuations focused mainly on foreign nationals and employees, leaving many Afghans desperate to get to safe harbours rushing to the airport and risking life and limb to secure a much-coveted seat on one of the evacuation flights.
Two weeks after the Taleban takeover, the US announced that the withdrawal of its forces from Afghanistan was complete. The Taleban declared a “historic victory,” celebrated the defeat of America and the re-emergence of Afghanistan as a “free and sovereign” nation, while the Afghan public wondered what their country would look like and how it would be ruled. In The Moment in Between: After the Americans, before the new regime, Martine van Bijlert looked at how the Taleban continued to project an image of a government girding itself up to rule. Already, there were signs of power struggles between different Taleban leaders, Ghilzai and Durrani, eastern and southern networks, and hardliners and those looking for more flexibility. The Taleban were also grappling with a pressing problem – how to disarm the thousands of Taleban fighters who, in the absence of as yet codified rules and procedures, were policing the population of Kabul and other cities and towns, deciding themselves what was inappropriate behaviour, hairstyle and dress.
There were reports that they had beaten up, arrested and shot men and boys for flying the Republic’s flag and more worrying reports of reprisals against the proponents of the fallen Republic. In addition, on 26 August, ISKP (the Islamic State Khorasan Province) had killed at least 170 Afghans and 13 US troops in a suicide attack at Kabul airport. The violence was not over.
At year’s end, Kate Clark looked at the historical parallels and differences in the fall of the Republic and the coming to power of the Taleban’s second Emirate with earlier regime changes in Afghanistan’s conflict in 2021 (2): Republic collapse and Taleban victory in the long-view of history. It was an attempt to assess the strength of the new Taleban polity and the dangers it faced as it sought to secure its rule over Afghanistan. So much of what marked 2021 out – the swift toppling of the old regime, the hubris of the victors, their disdain for former opponents, or even murderous intent, and a refusal to hear dissenting voices – had been seen before and with disastrous consequences.
The Taleban face a very different Afghanistan than when they were last in power. Afghans are more urban, more educated and more connected through social media and mobile phones to each other and to the world. A majority of children, boys and girls, have grown up going to school, and far more women have enjoyed paid work and a public voice. Now, the Taleban were no longer an insurgent movement, Clark concluded, they might find that the business of ruling Afghanistan, of providing public services and keeping public discontent at bay, is far trickier than when they were last in power.
The Second Islamic Emirate
As Afghans grappled with what the start of this new chapter meant for them, the Taleban pressed forward with solidifying their rule and re-establishing their Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. They announced a caretaker government on 7 September, less than a month after they took control of Afghanistan. The 33-member cabinet was all-male, almost all-Pashtun, almost all clerical and all-Taleban.
Our report, The Focus of the Taleban’s New Government: Internal cohesion, external dominance, looked at the makeup of the new cabinet and what it signalled to other Afghans and to the outside world. Martine van Bijlert argued that the appointment of a ‘victors’ cabinet’ is not unusual after a change of regime. The 2001 cabinet was also heavy with the members of the armed factions that had opposed the Taleban, but there was a far greater ethnic diversity and two women. The Taleban cabinet, by contrast, is homogenous and dominated by southern Pashtuns. It has shown how the movement’s priorities coalesced around internal cohesion, monopolisation of power, the silencing of open dissent and dividing up the ‘spoils of war’, in terms of government posts, among themselves. The Taleban had seen no reason to compromise with anyone but their own.
Martine van Bijlert continued to look at the subsequent two rounds of appointments in The Taleban’s Caretaker Cabinet and other Senior Appointments. These appointments had solved only the immediate question of who would head the ministries and other state institutions that would help restart government. But there were still outstanding questions: How might the lack of experience by most of the new appointees in their respective portfolios affect the ability of the Taleban to govern a state whose economy and state institutions had collapsed? And how did the new government intend to fund itself, given almost all foreign aid stopped when the Taleban took the country by force?
As when they were first in power, in 1996-2001, ‘promoting virtue and preventing vice’ has emerged as a top priority for the new Taleban administration. Many Afghans feared the return of the Taleban’s ‘religious police’ and the notorious brutalities of the 1990s’ Amr bil-Maruf (virtue and vice) ministry. AAN guest author Sabawoon Samim compared Amr bil-Maruf in the two Taleban administrations, twenty years apart, in his report Policing Public Morality: Debates on promoting virtue and preventing vice in the Taleban’s second Emirate and argued that two decades on, Taleban views on the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice had evolved, but so had Afghan society. While all Taleban appear to believe it is a state’s duty to actively police public morality, Samim traced the emergence of a new generation of Taleban leaders, some of whom are less conservative, and asked whether they might take a softer approach.
Chapter 3: Human rights
Since the takeover, reports of human rights violations by the Islamic Emirate have been legion, but human rights abuses in Afghanistan did not begin on 15 August 2021. A little more than a week into the Taleban’s new regime, the UN Human Rights Council held a Special Session to discuss the human rights situation in Afghanistan – past and present.
Rachel Reid and Ehsan Qaane provided background to the UN session in UN Human Rights Council to talk about Afghanistan: Why so little appetite for action?, which the Ghani government, no doubt wary of additional accountability mechanisms that might implicate its own forces, had finally agreed to in early August 2021. Well before the Taleban takeover, pressure had been increasing for a stronger response by the UN to an escalation of human rights and conflict-related abuses in Afghanistan, especially since the massacre of schoolgirls at the Sayed ul-Shuhada school on 8 May 2021 in west Kabul. However, the resolution the council considered had been drafted by Pakistan, the Taleban’s main international backer. Far from creating a Fact-Finding Mission or Commission of Inquiry that would have had robust, long-term powers to monitor and investigate grave human rights violations, the resolution merely proposed that the High Commissioner report back to the Human Rights Council in nine months’ time, in March 2022. In the end, the Human Rights Council passed the resolution with just one revision: it asked the High Commissioner to give them an oral report in September, rather than wait for March 2022, giving rise to the question: Why, in the middle of a human rights crisis, did the United Nation’s leading human rights body signal to the world that the Taleban’s seizure of power should be met by nothing more than ‘business as usual’?
Kate Clark had taken a first look at civilian casualties in the Taleban’s military push for victory and accusations of Taleban revenge attacks in her already mentioned review of the takeover, ‘Afghanistan’s conflict in 2021 (2). UNAMA’s first major report on human rights in Afghanistan since the Taleban came to power on 15 August 2021 covered these and many more abuses, including arbitrary detention and the loss of the rights of women and girls. In Arbitrary Power and a Loss of Fundamental Freedoms: A look at UNAMA’s first major human rights report since the Taleban takeover, Kate Clark reviewed that report and found a recurring theme – the arbitrary way the new administration often works and the unpredictability of its laws, punishments and procedures. Her report examined what has facilitated these violations of Afghans’ rights: the clamping down on human rights defenders and the media, the suppression of free speech and peaceful protest and changes in state institutions, which all help to make the deployment of arbitrary and unaccountable state power so much easier.
Attacks on Hazaras/Shia Muslims
West Kabul, like many other places where Hazaras/Shia Muslims are in the majority, has been the target of some of the deadliest attacks in Afghanistan, especially since 2016. Attacks which, moreover, aim to kill the softest of targets – children, women in labour and with their newborns, sportspeople and worshippers. While the former government promised to step up measures to protect this community, including a much-touted security plan for west Kabul, it failed to deliver. Immediately after the Taleban took power in August 2021, the neighbourhood experienced a short-lived respite from attacks, but has since become the scene of a new cycle of assassinations and bombings.
In January 2022, Ali Yawar Adili looked at the post-Republic attacks in Dasht-e Barchi and argued that the failures of successive governments to protect ethnic Hazaras and other Shia-Muslims have left them exposed to violence, bloodshed and fear. His report A Community Under Attack: How successive governments failed west Kabul and the Hazaras who live there provides an overview of the widespread and systematic attacks against the community. In the face of ongoing attacks, the beleaguered residents of west Kabul have little hope that the country’s new rulers will take any more steps to protect them than the old ones did.
The rights of women and girls
Our last special report before 15 August 2021 felt, in retrospect, very important. We wanted to find out what women living in rural areas thought about war and peace. Given they are probably the most under-represented voices in the country and that women’s rights activists living in the cities were often dismissed and accused of misrepresenting their rural sisters who were assumed to be generally content with more conservative mores.
Through in-depth interviews with a wide range of women in rural Afghanistan, we gained rare insight into their views and experiences, fears about war and hopes for peace. Our special report Between Hope and Fear: Rural Afghan women talk about peace and war by Martine van Bijlert is an intimate snapshot of the pressures they were navigating, heartbreaking losses and, for most, the daily grind of living through a war while still, stubbornly, holding onto hopes for a peaceful future. In the end, our conversations revealed that the priorities of rural women were not that different from those put forward by the more well-connected women activists. They challenged the idea that women in rural areas are satisfied by what is often portrayed as ‘normal’ by the Taleban and other Afghan conservatives.
Since the Taleban took power, Afghan women have been stripped of many of their rights. Women workers have, largely, been sent home from government offices. They are hindered from travelling and suffer an enforced a strict dress code. Oder girls have been banned from school. Public protest dwindled in the face of the new authorities’ crackdown on those they viewed as dissidents and rebels. Women’s rights activists have proven the bravest of all, but the Taleban’s response has been harsh – detaining and, reportedly, beating women protesters who had taken to the streets to demand their rights. In the face of opposition, including even some reservations within their own ranks, the Emirate has appeared determined to disappear women from public life.
In May 2022, the Taleban announced a new order imposing what they called ‘sharia hijab’ with faces to be covered and women to only leave their homes if there is a real need; it tasked their male relatives with policing them. In We need to breathe too”: Women across Afghanistan navigate the Taleban’s hijab ruling, Kate Clark and Sayeda Rahimi heard from women across Afghanistan about what the ruling meant for them and how they and their families had responded. The authors argued that dress codes might seem less consequential than other curbs on women’s freedoms, but the order was symbolic of the Emirate’s desire to turn Afghan women into entirely invisible, private citizens again.
Girls’ education
Taleban policy towards women and girls, and especially towards girls’ schools, has always been one of the prisms through which the movement has been studied – and judged – since they first came to power in the mid-nineties. One of the first things the Taleban did after they took control of Afghanistan was to close girls’ high schools. All eyes, then, were on Nawruz, the spring equinox and the start of the new school year in most provinces, with the question of whether the Taleban would allow all the nation’s schools to reopen, as they had promised.
In a series of reports in the months leading up to Nawruz, the AAN team looked at Taleban practice and policy on schooling, especially for girls. The first piece drew on research from our ‘Living under the new Taleban government’ series. Kate Clark provided a clearer picture of where Afghan children were managing to go to school, and where they are not in Who Gets to Go to School? (1): What people told us about education since the Taleban took over.
The second report in the series, Who Gets to Go to School? (2) The Taleban and education through time traced the evolution of Taleban thinking on education historically to answer the question of why the Taleban are so uneasy about girls going to school when as mullahs, they should know the value Islam places on education and literacy. Authors Kate Clark and Reza Kazemi argued that many Taleban, coming from the rural south where women generally live in purdah, feel it is wrong for girls, especially those of marriageable age, to be outside the home. Yet, their discomfort stands at odds with the attitudes of many, if not most of their compatriots. There has been a sea-change in Afghan attitudes towards school education over the last 40 years: where there have been schools, Afghan parents, in very high numbers, have been choosing to send their children, including their older girls, to get an education. Going to school has become a normal part of most Afghan children’s lives since 2001.
In the third part in this series, Who Gets to Go to School? (3): Are Taleban attitudes starting to change from within?, guest author Sabawoon Samim looked at views of girls’ education within the Taleban movement, uncovering a relatively new trend, that some Taleban are now seeking out school and even university education for their sons and their daughters. He looked at how and why a significant membership of a group that banned girls’ education when it was last in power has changed their attitude towards schooling.
On the first day of the new school year, 23 March, the Ministry of Education’s preparations to open all schools were abruptly overturned by a last-minute decision from Kandahar to keep the ban on girls’ secondary schools in place. Months of promises that they would reopen left girls, parents and teachers alike distressed. The decision had profound ramifications for aid flows to Afghanistan, for the prospects of international recognition which the Taleban aspire to, and has led international interlocuters to rethink their policies on engaging with the Emirate.
Initially, the Taleban’s justification was confused, with various officials giving different reasons for the closure, from lack of teachers to inappropriate school uniforms. Eventually, a formal announcement cited the need for a “comprehensive plan, in accordance with sharia and Afghan culture.” In The Ban on Older Girls’ Education: Taleban conservatives ascendant and a leadership in disarray, guest author Ashley Jackson pieced together what had happened behind the scenes that led to this policy reversal. From interviews with local sources, including within and those close to the Taleban, aid workers, donors and diplomats, she found that Taleban power politics lay at the heart of the u-turn.
Girls’ education remains a sensitive issue with political repercussions. It is a key demand of the Western nations that are still not only Afghanistan’s main donors, but also key players in deciding to waive or maintain sanctions, both in Washington DC and at the UN Security Council. A far more important constituency, however, are the many Afghan parents who want their children, boys and girls of all ages, to be educated.
Freedom of speech/expression, civic rights
In Music Censorship in 2021: The silencing of a nation and its cultural identity, Fabrizio Foschini traces the threats and intimidation faced by musicians since the Taleban takeover. He explores how Afghan music had flourished over the previous two decades, and how it has contributed to the burgeoning of a national identity which recognises and enjoys Afghanistan’s diverse cultural traditions. Music in Afghanistan, he argued, has a unique potential for countering communal and ethnic rifts, rifts that the Taleban themselves denounce and claim to oppose.
The Taleban takeover of Afghanistan also delivered a devastating blow to one of the Republic’s few outstanding achievements – relatively good freedom of expression and a vibrant media sector. Since the fall of the Republic, nearly half of Afghanistan’s media outlets have closed and thousands of Afghan journalists and media workers have either left the country, lost their jobs, or are in hiding, with local media outlets and female journalists bearing the brunt of the downturn.
In Regime Change, Economic Decline and No Legal Protection: What has happened to the Afghan media?, Eshan Qaane attributed the media sector’s sudden and catastrophic decline to three principal reasons: the sudden shortage of financial resources, severe Taleban restrictions on press freedom, and a fear of violence. Access to information is now severely constrained in Afghanistan, and violence against journalists continues, with the Taleban identified as the main perpetrator. There are reports of journalists being told, formally and informally, what and how to report and women TV presenters are now compelled to cover their faces on air. In some cases, those who disobeyed have been summoned, interrogated, threatened, tortured and detained.
Chapter 4: Economic collapse and the struggle to find food
Even as the Taleban celebrated their unprecedented victory on 15 August 2021, Afghanistan had been transformed. It was suddenly poorer, more isolated and extremely economically fragile. The Taleban capture of power by military force had ruptured Afghanistan’s relationship with its donors, touching off a chain of events that triggered the collapse of an economy heavily reliant on foreign aid and already weakened by conflict, pandemic and drought.
Three weeks after the Taleban victory, Hannah Duncan and Kate Clark looked at the dynamics that had pushed the Afghan economy off a cliff – the turning off of the foreign aid tap, the empty treasury and frozen foreign reserves, the collapse of the banking system, the UN and US sanctions that had applied to the Taleban now applying to the whole country, and the flight of the country’s skilled workforce. In Afghanistan’s looming economic catastrophe: What next for the Taleban and the donors?, they argued that mitigating economic disaster would require revising existing sanctions regimes and continuing aid, but cautioned that negotiations between actors who have been hostile for years – the Taleban and the donor governments – would mean navigating a legal, practical and ethical minefield.
The collapse of the Republic had caught the country’s erstwhile backers unprepared and scrambling to devise new policies for engagement with the new Afghanistan. The victorious Taleban have demonstrated that they are in no mood to accept the concessions demanded by donors in exchange for funding, especially over the rights of women and girls.
Kate Clark continued her examination of the economic repercussions of the Taleban taking over a state dependent on funding from foreign donors hostile to them in Killing the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg: Afghanistan’s economic distress post-15 August. The report mapped out the decline of Afghanistan’s economy and the Taleban’s own economic fortunes since 15 August and looked at how, in the end, politics would decide whether the Taleban and Afghanistan’s donors could find ways – or not – to support Afghanistan’s ever-increasing poor.
Even what should have been a boon if no other existed, the end of the fighting, was wiped out by the grievous consequences of economic ruin: collapsing livestock prices, households selling their possessions, families taking children out of school to work or marrying very young daughters to men who would usually be considered unsuitable (too old, already married, or ‘strangers’) and parents of malnourished children unable to find a hospital or clinic still open. Typically, as is always the case, it has been women and girls who suffer disproportionately. When poverty strikes, they are often the last in the household to eat.
In the summer of 2021 AAN had started a new research project for ‘Living under the Taleban’ that looked into how life had changed in districts that were newly coming under Taleban control. The message from our interviewees was loud and clear: the new regime had brought many changes and much uncertainty, there was great disorientation, occasional nervous hope, but most of all, people were deeply worried about the economic collapse and the coming winter.
What was perhaps most striking from the conversations was the near complete lack of options, even for those who had been doing relatively well at some point in the past. The interviews presented a bleak blend of resilience, determination and depletion. People hoped to protect their children from harm and safeguard their future. They had aspirations for new ventures. They continued to look after others who were even worse off than themselves. And many of them were exhausted and stunned by the continuous onslaught of crisis and tragedy, every time disaster compounding disaster.
The series’ second report, Living in a Collapsed Economy (2): Even the people who still have money are struggling, mapped what the economic collapse has meant for the relatively fortunate – those who were wealthy to start with or had a diverse set of income streams, as well as those who still had a stable salary. We heard from a landlord and a relatively successful factory owner in Kabul, an NGO employee in Zabul, an extended family in Khost with a brother in Dubai, a former government employee in Badakhshan and the only ‘doctor’ in a remote area of Daikundi. It turned out that even these people were struggling. They too faced serious obstacles and setbacks and, in most cases, had to cut down on their expenses drastically. Most of them said they were no longer able to help others like they used to. Martine van Bijlert argued that the picture pointed to an unravelling of a critical part of Afghanistan’s social safety net – support provided by the relatively wealthy to others in need, within their families, neighbourhoods and communities – at a time when the country needed it most.
The series’ third instalment, Living in a Collapsed Economy (3): Surviving poverty, food insecurity and the harsh winter, provided a detailed and layered picture of the many ways Afghanistan’s economic collapse is affecting families and businesses. Martine van Bijlert and the AAN team returned to the people we had interviewed at the beginning of winter to find out how they had managed during the harsh winter months. For many, not much had changed, except that their situations had slowly worsened. Yet, despite the dispiriting hardship, most interviewees showed a remarkable determination to keep going and take care of their families and, often, their wider communities.
Van Bijlert wrote that the international focus on food aid for Afghanistan threatened to treat Afghans as a faceless and initiative-less mass, waiting to be helped. In reality, most households were doing everything they could to find marginal income and take care of each other. The problem was that the options are so very limited. Although most of our interviewees had received some form of food aid, which was much appreciated and provided a brief respite, the greater improvement in people’s lives would come only from access to income. The report underscored, once again, that Afghanistan needs more than humanitarian aid to restart its economy.
The change of regime was a moment of rupture, its aftermath the latest in a long series of upheavals that have marked the lives of most Afghans over the age of 55. For those living in rural areas, unpredictability stems not only from regime change and violent conflict, but also from drought, flooding and other natural disasters. Guest author, Adam Pain’s report, Living With Radical Uncertainty in Rural Afghanistan: The work of survival, helped deepen our understanding of how rural households attempt to survive and prosper in this ever-changing environment. He drew on lessons from a research project that traced the livelihood trajectories of rural households from 2002 to 2016. Given that rural households can rely neither on the state nor the market, he found they invested in village and household relationships. He asked whether this would be enough to get people through the latest economic shock. He also suggested a rethinking of the hitherto unsuccessful market-driven agricultural policy models for an Afghanistan that offers no long-term future opportunity for its rural households and no possibility of decent work in the urban areas domestically or regionally.
The state of the Agriculture sector
War, political upheavals and regime change are only part of the complicated dynamics that mar Afghanistan’s rural economy, but drought and regional politics also play a significant part in the fortunes of Afghan farmers.
In Crops not Watered, Fruit Rotting: Kandahar’s agriculture hit by war, drought and closed customs gates Ali Mohammad Sabawoon heard from farmers and others about the woes affecting the province, famous for its fruit production. While the end of the conflict should have meant better times for the farmers of Kandahar, as elsewhere in Afghanistan. Yet drought looked to be looming again and exporting produce has remained difficult and unreliable, with much of the fruit crop that was – or should be – destined for Pakistan and other markets further afield going to waste because of the frequent and unpredictable closure of crossings into Pakistan.
We also looked at two illicit crops, opium and cannabis, which are hugely important for the national and household economy. In March 2020, the Taleban banned the cultivation of cannabis and the production and trafficking of cannabis resin, known as hashish, in areas under their control. What now for the Taleban and Narcotics? A case study on cannabis looked at whether and how the ban was implemented using field research conducted by Fazal Muzhary before the Taleban captured power nationally. The report provided a useful context for considering future Taleban policy on this important sector of the illicit economy.
Then, seven and a half months after they took power in Afghanistan, at the beginning of the opium harvest, and at a time when Afghans across the country were suffering under the strain of economic collapse, the Taleban officially banned opium.
In The New Taleban’s Opium Ban: The same political strategy 20 years on?, Jelena Bjelica looked at the far-reaching and grievous consequences if the ban was implemented. Illegal opiates are among the few real export earners in a country where imports during the Republic had dwarfed licit exports, six to one. The illicit drug economy’s gross value in 2021, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), was estimated at between 9 and 14 per cent of the country’s GDP. Bjelica’s report probed the Taleban’s possible motives for banning opium and the similarities between this ban and the one the Taleban implemented in July 2000 when they were last in power. She argued that this ban, if implemented, would cause harm to many Afghans dependent on the illicit drugs industry, put even greater pressure on farmers and labourers already struggling to survive economically, and further dehumanise drug users put under compulsory and brutal treatments. Whether it even brings much goodwill from Afghanistan’s donors, she said, seemed doubtful; their concerns about Afghanistan’s opium cultivation are, for now, eclipsed by the Taleban’s ban on older girls going to school, their restrictive policies on women’s rights across the board and attacks on media freedom and the right to dissent.
Chapter 5: Aid after the Taleban takeover
With Afghanistan’s economy in freefall and a humanitarian catastrophe growing, donor nations came together at a virtual pledging summit, co-hosted by the United Kingdom, Germany, Qatar and the United Nations. The aim was to raise lifesaving humanitarian support for an unprecedented 22.1 million Afghans in need, as compared to 17.7 million in 2021. In A Pledging Conference for Afghanistan… But what about beyond the humanitarian? Roxanna Shapour and Kate Clark took a close look at the Humanitarian Response Plan – the UN’s largest appeal ever for a single country.
Donors were presumed to be on board with the Humanitarian Response Plan precisely because it was humanitarian, and therefore officially apolitical. Ultimately, however, the Taleban’s decision, made just before the conference began, to keep older girls out of school, derailed the funding drive and pledges came in at USD 2.4 billion, well short of the United Nations’ USD 4.4 billion target, although still sizeable.
A major focus of the international humanitarian response to Afghanistan’s economic collapse has been a ramped-up distribution of food aid, as large parts of the population no longer have the income to buy enough food for their families. Food Aid in a Collapsed Economy: Relief, tensions and allegations was the fourth instalment of our economic research based on interviews conducted across Afghanistan.
In this report, Martine van Bijlert and the AAN team looked at the reach, scope and implications of food aid distribution at the community and household levels and found that around half of the families we interviewed had, by mid-February, received some form of food assistance at least once. This was a testament to the determination and hard work of countless NGO employees, community members, government civil servants and UN staff, often under extremely difficult circumstances.
While our interviewees were grateful for the much-needed help and hoped it would continue, they also expressed recurring concerns that those who needed aid the most might not be receiving it. They described favouritism and interference in the selection of beneficiaries and, to a lesser extent, corruption and capture.
Most people reported that they and their communities were stretched far beyond their usual coping mechanisms. Many had depleted what reserves or options to borrow or sell they might have had. Food aid allowed them to feed their families, something at least, even if only for a short time, but Afghans desperately need their economy to restart, the government and its salaries to become dependable, and conditions for small businesses to improve.
However, while the Taleban continue to snub calls from Western capitals to respect human rights, including the rights of Afghan girls and women, and while they fear that funding will help strengthen the regime, donor countries have found it difficult to know what to do for the best to help Afghans.
In Donors’ Dilemma: How to provide aid to a country whose government you do not recognise, Roxanna Shapour looked at engagement between the donors and the Taleban, what the future of aid to Afghanistan might look like, how donors might reconcile their demands with the Taleban’s increasing restrictions on civic life, and what mechanisms exist that might allow for non-humanitarian assistance. She argued that what might at face value appear to be mixed messages from donors actually reveal real quandaries and complexities. While donors feel the need to respond to Afghanistan’s humanitarian and economic crises, they also want respect for human rights and security guarantees. The Taleban, for their part, are ambitious for international legitimacy, but have shown no inclination to concede anything to donors or, indeed, the demands of their own people.
Against this precarious backdrop, Western donors and diplomats have been left trying to answer tough policy questions and take difficult funding decisions. The strategy decided upon has been to funnel development and what has become known as ‘humanitarian plus’ aid largely via the World Bank’s multilateral trust fund to UN agencies and then to NGOs. The aim is to help Afghans and not help the Emirate, but the dangers are many – that the Taleban are inevitably strengthened as this policy frees up their own resources, that it creates parallel structures to government and is wasteful, with money going to headquarters costs and more expensive foreign and Afghan salaries.
Climate change
The change of regime has also affected the struggle to get money to help Afghanistan survive climate change. The Paris Climate Agreement recognises that the climate crisis has been caused by developed countries and requires them to compensate poor countries for the effects of climate change. Afghanistan, one of the lowest emitters of greenhouse gases but among the top ten countries most vulnerable to climate change, is suffering out of all proportion to the contribution they have made to damaging the planet’s atmosphere and climate.
In two reports, Global Warming and Afghanistan: Drought, hunger and thirst expected to worsen and The Climate Change Crisis in Afghanistan: The catastrophe worsens – what hope for action?, guest author Mohammad Assem Mayarlooked at how the climate catastrophe is already upon Afghanistan, evident in the increased frequency of droughts which cause hunger and distress and which are likely to become more frequent. He considered what the Republic did – or did not do – to reduce the harmful effects of global warming and finally discussed how climate change could be tackled under Taleban rule, now that Afghanistan is poorer, more isolated and cut off from global climate crisis funds aimed at helping poorer countries.
Out-Migration
Finally, AAN also looked at some of those trying to leave, focussing on the Afghans in Turkey. It has long been a destination itself and an important point along the transit route to Europe for Afghan migrants attempting to enter the European Union through its sea and land borders to Greece and Bulgaria. An increasing number of Afghans fleeing persecution or trying to find better economic opportunities have arrived in Turkey.
In the first instalment of a two-part report, Refugees or Ghosts? Afghans in Turkey face growing uncertainty Fabrizio Foschini looked at the worsening political and economic environment there, and at the bureaucratic hurdles that mean most Afghans in Turkey are undocumented. With its own unprecedented economic crisis, the climate has become increasingly hostile for Afghans.
Then, in Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: No good options for Afghans travelling to and from Turkey, Foschini explored how and where Afghans are living in Istanbul, their role in Turkey’s economy and how they are perceived in Turkish society. Through the voices of those interviewed, he looked at the difficulties of travelling to Turkey and when trying to move on, given that both Turkish security forces and those of neighbouring European Union countries have tightened their control of borders.
Conclusion
Like everyone else trying to report on what has been a momentous year for Afghanistan, AAN has had to struggle and persevere in trying to reflect the experiences of Afghans across the country, make sense of everything that has happened, and think about what this means for the future of the country and its people. We remain committed to producing analysis that is independent, of high quality and research-based and, as the second year of the Taleban’s second Emirate begins, of being bi-taraf but not bi-tafawut – impartial, but never indifferent.
AAN Dossier XXXI was compiled by Roxanna Shapour and edited by Kate Clark
All maps by Roger Helms
REVISIONS:
This article was last updated on 13 Aug 2022
Transition to a New Political Order: AAN dossier takes stock of Afghanistan’s momentous year
Afghanistan Peace Campaign
