BY JAMES DURSO, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR The Hill09/23/24 1:00 PM ET
Ahmad Massoud, the leader of the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan, recently declared he will defeat the Taliban “no matter the odds.”
For Massoud to mount a military threat to the Taliban, he would need the cooperation of the Central Asian republics, Iran or Pakistan (among others) to do the job. However, Afghanistan’s neighbors have no interest in another civil war in Afghanistan, as the violence and refugees would spill over their borders and cause economic dislocation and unrest all the way to Europe.
After two decades of U.S.-sponsored mayhem in the Hindu Kush, all the region wants is to recoup the missed opportunities of the “lost decades” of 2001-2021.
None of Afghanistan’s neighbors prefer the Taliban to any other group, and they object to the regime’s unrepresentative government and policies toward women. That said, their leaders must solve today’s problems despite their distaste for the Taliban’s retrograde ways.
The republics’ approach to Kabul has long been “neighbors forever” — or, for the pessimists, “captives of geography.” Kazakhstan removed the Taliban from its terrorist list in December 2023; Uzbekistan never declared the Taliban an extremist group, and in 2018 it publicly encouraged the Taliban to start negotiations with the Islamic Republic. Turkmenistan was mum on the topic of the Taliban in line with its policy of permanent neutrality. In September 2024, the chief of Tajikistan’s security service visited Kabul for talks that were described as “productive,” and the same month the Kyrgyz Republic removed the Taliban from its list of terrorist organizations.
Afghanistan and its Central Asian neighbors are collaborating to ease trade and transport; renovate Afghanistan’s roads and railroads; help Afghanistan improve irrigation projects; ship natural gas from Turkmenistan to Afghanistan, Pakistan and India; build a railroad from Uzbekistan to Pakistan’s seaports; and build a multi-modal transport corridor from Kazakhstan to Pakistan, terminating in the United Arab Emirates.
Economic growth depends on an adequate supply of water; Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush mountains form the headwaters of the region’s basins.
In March 2022, the Taliban launched construction of the 285-km Qosh Tepa canal, which will divert 10 billion cubic meters of water annually from the Amu Darya River, relied on by water-starved Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. They will suffer a 15 percent cut in the current supply. The project will cost $684 million, but it will irrigate 2100 square miles and create 250,000 jobs. Kabul feels it is critical to ensure food security for the emirate.
Tashkent and Ashgabat are unhappy with the project, but the Uzbeks offered technical assistance to Afghanistan to ensure the construction is “in accordance with international norms.” Now is a good time to consider inviting Afghanistan to join Central Asia’s regional water management organization, the Interstate Commission for Water Coordination of Central Asia.
Afghanistan also has unresolved water issues with Iran and Pakistan; those projects would be endangered, or further delayed, by a civil war.
According to the United Nations, there are now 7.6 million Afghans in Iran and Pakistan, most of them refugees. In 2023, Pakistan expelled over 540,000 Afghan refugees, and the next phase of the plan may see 800,000 more Afghans deported. Increased violence will likely reverse these flows and burden Iran and Pakistan, who cannot afford to support the refugees they have now.
China recently warned Pakistan it must get control of the violence that is endangering the $62 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor . More violence north of the Durand Line will further delay the corridor, which may be seen as a strategic “win” in Washington but will hurt Central and South Asia.
In April 2022, the Taliban banned poppy cultivation and methamphetamine production. This benefits Iran, which has the highest rate of opium abusers in the world, according to the World Health Organization. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “More than 3,700 national law enforcement officials have been killed and over 12,000 have been maimed in counter-narcotics operations over the last three decades.”
That’s good news, but if Afghanistan must fund a war against groups like the National Resistance Front (and its foreign confederates), the ban on drugs may go by the wayside.
In fact, if the Taliban suspect a foreign hand in an attack, will it encourage al-Qaeda and the Islamic State to strike foreign targets? Sure, that will violate the Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan, where the Taliban agreed “Afghan soil will not be used against the security of the United States and its allies,” but the Taliban will note the Americans pledged, “The United States and its allies will refrain from the threat or the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Afghanistan or intervening in its domestic affairs.”
Is the Taliban isolated? No, Seventeen countries, including every country that borders Afghanistan plus the European Union, maintain a diplomatic presence in Kabul. Aaron Zelin reports “between August 2021 and February 22, 2024 the Taliban has publicly announced 1,382 diplomatic meetings with at least eighty countries.” China and the United Arab Emirates have accepted the credentials from Taliban ambassador to their capitals.
Pragmatism may be winning, regardless what governments or their citizens think of Taliban policies.
After Shohna ba Shohna(Shoulder to Shoulder) proved weak, it is time for the locals to lead, though Washington and Brussels can help by facilitating diplomatic and economic support of beneficial projects. The Americans, in particular, will need a broad aperture to understand the needs and opportunities of the region instead of obsessing about what might have been.
The defeat of the U.S. and NATO may have seen the end of the era of empires in Central Asia and Afghanistan, after the Russian Empire (1713-1917), the British interventions (1839-1919), the Soviet empire (1917-1991), and the American empire (2001-2021).
Some questionable characters will make a few bucks along the way, but that’s the price of repairing the damage caused by the crusade to reform Afghan culture as part of Washington’s post 9/11 war on terror, the “first grand global experiment of the twenty first century.”
James Durso is a regular commentator on foreign policy and national security matters. He served in the U.S. Navy for 20 years and has worked in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
Afghanistan’s neighbors don’t want another civil war
Afghanistan has a façade of domestic stability, with armed conflict decreasing since the U.S. withdrawal.
But dire economic, humanitarian and human rights conditions and Taliban violence build pressure on the population.
The international community remains vexed over how to engage the Taliban.
Lacking formal recognition from all member states, the Taliban will not be present at the U.N. General Assembly next week. Their absence speaks volumes about how the international community struggles to constrain a regime that has repeatedly defied U.N. treaties, sanctions and Security Council resolutions. Three years into Taliban rule, the Afghan people are beset by a host of human rights, economic and humanitarian challenges, with women and girls particularly impacted. Meanwhile, the international community still has no clear approach to dealing with the Taliban, with the regime rejecting a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for a special envoy to develop a roadmap for normalizing Afghanistan’s relations with the international community.As world leaders prepare to gather and discuss the most difficult global problems, USIP’s Afghanistan experts examine the challenges of living in and engaging with Afghanistan under the Taliban and the implications of the present situation on moving forward.
How bad is the human rights situation, particularly regarding the Taliban’s approach to justice and civil liberties?
Belquis Ahmadi: Since taking control, the Taliban has issued over 100 decrees aimed at restricting the rights of women and girls to education, employment, healthcare and mobility, among other things. The Taliban’s latest vice and virtue law consolidates previous edicts and introduces harsher restrictions, including classifying a woman’s voice as awra — an intimate element that must not be heard publicly. The law marks a new phase in the Taliban’s systematic efforts to erase women from all aspects of Afghan society. If it is enforced, women will disappear from television and radio broadcasts, public employment and will be further restricted in getting an education.
Just as women’s fundamental rights are being eliminated, Afghans’ ability to seek justice has deeply eroded. Under Taliban rule, Afghanistan’s justice system has been transformed from a system that, while imperfect, was grounded in the rule of law with civil society playing a crucial role in ensuring that decisions were consistent with the country’s legal framework, to one in which unqualified clerics can apply their own (mis)interpretations of Shariah. In one of their earliest actions after seizing power, the Taliban suspended the constitution, a document that, while recognizing the primacy of Shariah, also acknowledged the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and enshrined the principle of equal rights before the law for both men and women.
Just as women’s fundamental rights are being eliminated, Afghans’ ability to seek justice has deeply eroded.
The Taliban have taken further steps to dismantle the existing legal framework, including the suspension of the Afghanistan Independent Bars Association, a vital institution that once played a key role in safeguarding legal rights, ensuring access to justice, advocating for fair trials and providing legal representation to those in need. Male lawyers are now subjected to a religious knowledge assessment, and only those who meet the Taliban’s criteria and expectations have been relicensed. This shift has subordinated the legal profession to the Taliban’s ideological agenda. Meanwhile, female lawyers, judges, prosecutors and court clerks have been dismissed from their positions.The Taliban’s so-called justice often consists of swift, brutal punishments, frequently ordered by a single judge with unchecked power. Since taking control, hundreds of Afghan men and women have been subjected to public floggings, followed by imprisonment for up to two years. The rule of law has been replaced by the rule of force, where justice is not administered in courts but meted out through fear and violence.
Women face significant barriers in accessing justice, noted Richard Bennet, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, in a 2023 report. Obtaining legal aid and counseling is particularly challenging, as women often need to rely on a mahram (a male guardian) to access the courts. In some cases, the mahram may be the very reason the woman seeks justice, complicating the process further. The Taliban dismissal of female legal actors combined with restrictions on interactions between men and women, exacerbates these challenges and leaves women in a desperate situation.
How has the security situation evolved for Afghans over the last three years?
Joyana Richer and Jill Baggerman: Armed conflict has decreased now that the Taliban has ended its violent insurgency. Though threats of violence and terrorism remain, the Taliban can accurately demonstrate that large-scale violence is at its lowest level in decades. Afghanistan’s streets are clean and “safe” in some respects — as long as the Taliban’s harsh restrictions on women are heeded. Tourism is up and kidnappings are down.
However, the absence of armed conflict represents only a negative peace. Broader human security has decreased for much of the population due to increased poverty, hunger and the Taliban’s repression and structural violence. Human rights advocates, former government officials, and people who break the Taliban’s strict interpretation of Islamic law are subjected to extrajudicial killings, disappearances and floggings. The regime enforces it policies through fear, coercion and discrimination.
The current low level of violence shouldn’t be conflated with peace nor become a distraction from addressing remaining sources of conflict. Afghanistan’s history is marked by deep-seated grievances, cycles of revenge and resource disputes. The Taliban’s current approach to security suppresses these issues, but those long-standing divisions will persist until they are resolved in a way that meaningfully benefits all of Afghanistan’s diverse population. Throughout Afghan history, political exclusion has often led to armed resistance, frequently fueled by foreign patrons of different factions. Avoiding this cycle of repression and violence will require collaborative efforts between local communities and external actors, who could potentially leverage this stage of domestic physical safety to address long-standing root drivers of conflict.
What about the Afghan economy and humanitarian situation?
William Byrd: Over the past three years Afghanistan’s economy has gone through three phases, with a drastic initial economic shock stabilizing at a low-level equilibrium that shows little prospect of improving any time soon.
Free-fall in the months following the Taliban takeover, precipitated by the cut-off of some $8 billion per year of aid and large international military expenditures in-country, exacerbated by stoppage of foreign financial transactions, freezing of Afghanistan’s $9 billion of foreign exchange reserves, and other shocks. Afghanistan’s GDP fell by more than a quarter, unemployment and underemployment increased, inflation soared and personal incomes fell, with tens of millions of people dependent on humanitarian aid. The urban service sector (bloated by foreign inflows of money) shrank greatly. Afghan women suffered disproportionately due to Taliban gender restrictions. Rural areas saw improvements in security with the end of the war, but any economic “peace dividend” was overwhelmed by the aid cut-off and other shocks.
Subsequent stabilization of the economy at a low, arguably below-subsistence level supported by humanitarian support and better-than-expected Taliban economic management. Inflation fell back, poverty and unemployment seem to have stabilized albeit at high levels, the exchange rate improved, imports recovered, exports grew and revenues were effectively collected despite the weak economy. Humanitarian aid funding reached a peak of $3.8 billion in 2022, and associated U.N. shipments have in the past two and a half years injected $3.8 billion in cash into the economy. Human capital development, however, is being decimated by the prohibition against women and girls’ education and many boys dropping out to seek work.
Current economic stagnation with downside risks and little prospect for robust growth. Exports and revenues seem to have plateaued, and the World Bank projects limited growth in coming years. The Taliban’s opium ban has devastated millions of rural households previously dependent on poppy cultivation to make ends meet, while not stemming flows of opiates out of the country from existing inventories. Humanitarian aid funding was halved in 2023 (to $1.9 billion) and is unlikely to increase in 2024. Basic development assistance, perhaps amounting to several hundred million dollars per year, will not offset this decline. Moreover, development projects currently underway and envisioned will not contribute much to overall economic growth. Most of the projects, which could be labeled as either humanitarian or development, will require money on a recurrent, in many cases, yearly basis. So, there will be little or no reduction in aid dependency, and overall a bleak economic picture.
How does the international community see the Taliban’s rule three years on?
Baggerman: The international community lacks consensus on how to engage with the Taliban. No state has officially recognized the Taliban as a legitimate government. However, China, Russia, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, multiple Arabian Gulf countries and a few others have cautiously moved toward a realpolitik acceptance of Taliban rule.
International actors’ core dilemma centers on principled versus pragmatic engagement. Many civil society groups and U.N. human rights bodies take a principled stance, focusing on promoting human rights, especially for women and girls. Pragmatic or tactical engagement — seen by the U.N.’s Doha meetings and humanitarian efforts — addresses immediate needs, but tends to normalize Taliban authority.
Most global engagement with the Taliban centers on counterterrorism. Taliban rule has created a safer haven for terrorist groups that threaten regional and international security. The Taliban has not expelled al-Qaida members, and ISIS-Khorasan (while opposed by the Taliban) has managed to secure a foothold in the country from where it has conducted recent attacks in Moscow and Iran. Pakistan is deeply threatened by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which the Taliban have given safe haven.
Overall, neither pragmatic nor principled approaches seem to have influenced senior Taliban policymaking in the last three years.
Regional nations take a pragmatic approach toward navigating shared challenges like border security, economic interdependencies and transboundary water challenges. Central Asian countries are apprehensive about infiltration by violent Islamic groups such as ISIS-K and ones with Central Asian roots but lack the power to change the Taliban and have thus resorted to policies of normalization and practical engagement. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have both removed the Taliban from terrorist lists. The region is enacting multiple deals that predated the Taliban takeover. For instance, the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India energy transfer deal began in Afghanistan on September 11 and the Taliban’s construction on the Qush Tepa Canal deepen Central Asia’s engagement. Tajikistan has raised the most objections to accepting Taliban rule, but recent signals indicate this position may be veering toward normalization.Overall, neither pragmatic nor principled approaches seem to have influenced senior Taliban policymaking in the last three years.
What does this mean for U.S. policy?
Scott Worden: Afghanistan has largely disappeared from high-level foreign policy debates as more acute crises like Gaza and Sudan and more strategic challenges like China and Russia have come to the fore. Afghanistan has taken a back seat in U.S. foreign and defense policy and neither presidential campaign has put forward detailed policy proposals about how they plan to deal with the country’s challenges if elected. The current administration has also avoided significant discussion about Afghanistan policy beyond condemning women’s rights violations and noting the absence of terrorist attacks on the homeland despite having no troops on the ground. In the background of all this silence is an uncomfortable sense that there are few good ideas on how to change a frustrating and depressing status quo.
U.S. policy toward Afghanistan is also hampered by the same tensions between a principled vs. pragmatic engagement approach discussed above. On one hand, maintaining a functional relationship with the Taliban is needed to achieve core U.S. interests of counterterrorism cooperation on ISIS-K and individuals that have been wrongfully detained. On the other hand, the U.S. condemns the Taliban’s women’s rights restrictions and does not want to be seen as “rewarding” the Taliban for their authoritarian behavior. Economic assistance is caught in the middle. Sanctioning the Taliban and withholding development assistance is a normal response toward an adversarial regime — yet it ultimately hurts Afghans the U.S. wants to support and increases humanitarian needs. Essentially, the Taliban’s human rights violations provide a low ceiling for U.S. engagement and the need to mitigate terrorism and migration risks put a floor on the degree of isolation the U.S. can afford. Policy will likely fluctuate within this middle band for the foreseeable future unless and until some surprising security shock like a foreign terrorist attack jolts the system.
Where is Afghanistan Three Years into Taliban Rule?
The ICC case and Taliban policies reflect systematic efforts to oppress women.
The similarities between the two underscore a vital need for ICC intervention.
The ICC prosecution shows a clear legal approach to gender-based violence, unlike the inconsistent international response to the Taliban.
Since the Taliban took power in August 2021, the situation for Afghan women and girls has dramatically deteriorated. Yet there has been little international action, as many in the international community lament the lack of legal, and other, avenues to hold the Taliban accountable for these draconian measures. However, a recent case at the International Criminal Court (ICC) may provide a legal roadmap to prosecute the Taliban.On June 26, 2024, the ICC announced its judgment in the case of The Prosecutor v. Al Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz Ag Mohamed Ag Mahmoud (the “Al Hassan case”), convicting the defendant, the head of Ansar Dine’s Islamic Police in Timbuktu, Mali, of crimes against humanity and war crimes. But the panel of judges found that while the crime against humanity of persecution on the basis of gender (hereinafter “gender persecution”) was ongoing at the time Al Hassan committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, criminal liability for the gender persecution did not attach to him.The court’s decision has been viewed with disappointment by many advocates for accountability for gender persecution and gender-based crimes, particularly advocates and women in Afghanistan who had eagerly awaited the decision to inform their efforts to seek accountability for Afghan women and girls. While Al Hassan was not convicted of the crime, the panel’s decision provides important indicators of what constitutes gender persecution, as well as instructive jurisprudence on potential opportunities and challenges in proving it.
The Crime of Gender Persecution
As defined by the Rome Statute of the ICC, persecution is “the intentional and severe deprivation of fundamental rights contrary to international law by reason of the identity of the group or collectivity.” Persecution rises to the level of a crime against humanity when committed on a widespread, systematic basis “against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender … or other grounds that are universally recognized as impermissible under international law, in connection with any … crime within the jurisdiction of the [ICC].” Persecution therefore requires the commission of another crime outlined in the Rome Statute to be charged. Prior to the Al Hassan case, gender persecution had not been charged by the ICC prosecutor, although the Prosecutor’s Office had taken steps to further define the crime and its approach to the crime through policies on gender persecution and gender-based crimes.
The Al Hassan Case
The Al Hassan case considers the defendant’s conduct during Ansar Dine’s and al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb’s (AQIM) 2012-2013 occupation of Timbuktu, Mali. Al Hassan was recruited by these groups to head the Islamic Police and was responsible for enforcing their restrictive interpretation of Shariah law. While these policies impacted the entire population, women and girls faced particularly severe restrictions, including requiring them to wear a veil and cover their bodies, constraining their ability to move freely, and subjecting them to forced marriages. Women were frequently beaten or detained for violations of these restrictions, in sharp contrast to men who were more likely to receive a warning. Female detainees were subjected to sexual assault, including gang rape.
Al Hassan surrendered to the ICC in March 2018 and was charged with crimes against humanity, including torture; other inhumane acts, among them forced marriage; persecution on the basis of religion and gender; and war crimes including torture, mutilation, and passing sentences without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court.
The ICC’s panel first considered whether the charged crimes had taken place under the Ansar Dine-AQIM occupation. The majority found that these groups committed persecution on the basis of religion and gender during the occupation of Timbuktu, intentionally and severely depriving the city’s population of fundamental rights, among them the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; the right to freedom of movement; and the right to freedom from discrimination based on gender. In finding that Ansar Dine/AQIM had committed persecution on the basis of gender, the panel noted that “specific rules and prohibitions were aimed at women and girls, and their violation was repressed with especially harsh punishment and detention conditions, involving gender-specific violence.” These specific rules were based on Ansar Dine/AQIM’s roles and expectations about the behavior of women.
The panel then turned to Al Hassan’s culpability. Al Hassan was found guilty of persecution on the basis of religion, among other crimes. However, he was acquitted of gender persecution, with all three judges taking different positions on his culpability. In separate and partially dissenting opinions, two of the judges considered the question of gender persecution, and their findings provide important, although less persuasive, precedent in future gender persecution cases.
Judge Kimberly Prost of Canada found that gender persecution had occurred for which Al Hassan was responsible and should be found guilty, and thus dissented from the majority’s acquittal. Judge Prost argued that gender persecution was fundamentally intertwined with religious persecution, and that “women and girls were not only particularly affected, but they were also specifically targeted on the basis of gender.” While Judge Antoine Kesia-Mbe Mindua of the Democratic Republic of Congo found that Ansar Dine/AQIM had committed gender persecution, he found Al Hassan not guilty of all charges by reason of duress and mistake of law. Judge Tomoko Akane of Japan, while also acquitting Al Hassan on the charge of gender persecution, dissented from the finding of judges Prost and Mindua that Ansar Dine/AQIM committed gender persecution, finding instead that none of the crimes against humanity committed met the “connection with” requirement for gender persecution and that the gender-based violence associated with the occupation was outside the common purpose of Ansar Dine/AQIM in occupying Timbuktu.
Applying Al Hassan to Afghanistan
The Al Hassan decision, while not the resounding victory advocates of gender persecution had hoped for, provides helpful insights into situations in which gender persecution is alleged, including Afghanistan. These insights relate to the rights violated by Taliban edicts and comments, the mechanisms for enforcement and patterns of punishment, the Rome Statute crimes committed “in connection with” gender persecution, the rejection of pre-existing discrimination on the basis of gender as a defense, and the potential need to overcome a “common purpose” challenge related to sexual and gender-based violence.
The Al Hassan decision provides helpful insights into situations in which gender persecution is alleged, including Afghanistan.
Taliban Edicts Amount to Severe Deprivation of the Fundamental Rights of Afghan Women and Girls
Taliban leaders have restricted the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan through a series of edicts designed to push women out of public spaces. As in Al Hassan, these edicts are based on a strict interpretation of Shariah law that defines what women “are suited for” within the Taliban’s vision of society. These restrictions undermine several fundamental rights under international law, including freedom of movement and association, and freedom from gender-based discrimination. The Taliban’s efforts differ from those of Ansar Dine/AQIM in the higher volume of edicts, which present an arguably more formalized attempt at repressing women on the basis of gender, and the expansiveness of the rights impacted. Repressive Taliban edicts include a harsh dress code forcing women to cover themselves entirely while in public and harsh limitation on the right to marriage, freedom of movement and association, and restrictions on access to education, employment, healthcare and cultural engagement. (For a comprehensive list of Taliban anti-women edicts, click the below infographic.)
Original artwork by Ahmad Fahim HakimFinally, as if the situation for women in Afghanistan was not already dire, a new vice and virtue law consolidates various previously issued edicts and instructions into a more rigid and comprehensive framework, adding several new restrictions. Among these, it now classifies a woman’s voice as “awra” — a private, intimate aspect that must be concealed from the public sphere, effectively silencing women from participating in any form of public discourse.
Similar Patterns of Punishment, and More Gender-Specific Enforcement Mechanisms
In the Al Hassandecision, the Court recognized a pattern of punishment for violations of Ansar Dine/AQIM edicts that was more severe for women than men as central to a finding that gender persecution occurred. This included corporal punishment and arbitrary detention in inhumane conditions, during which women were subjected to sexual assault. The Taliban has pursued a similar pattern of using more severe enforcement tactics, including corporal punishment and arbitrary detention, to implement edicts targeting women. A number of women have reported instances of sexual assault while in detention.
In addition, the Taliban has taken the additional step of creating specific enforcement mechanisms to police women’s compliance. The Ministry of Vice and Virtue created the female morality police in 2022 to “guide” women in following Taliban edicts. These police are thought to be stricter with women than their male counterparts. Men have been similarly empowered to enforce Taliban edicts within their families and communities, increasing the risk of violence against women.
Similar Rome Statute Crimes Committed in Connection with Gender Persecution
The crime of persecution can be charged only “in connection with” other crimes against humanity or crimes outlined within the Rome Statute. In the Al Hassan decision, the crimes against humanity charged that satisfied this requirement included torture and other inhumane acts, among others. The majority found that the existence of other ongoing Rome Statute crimes fulfilled the connection requirement. Further, while crimes considered to be part of the persecution charge had been committed, they were not necessary to fulfill the connection requirement. Similar crimes are ongoing in Afghanistan, stemming both from the Taliban’s treatment of women as well as their treatment of the population as a whole. Additional crimes against humanity alleged in Afghanistan include imprisonment, enforced disappearance and forced marriage. Given the majority’s ruling, these crimes would likely satisfy the connection requirement.
Pre-Existing Discrimination Against Women is not a Defense
A notable development from the Al Hassan decision is the court’s distinction between pre-existing discrimination against women and the systematic discrimination alleged as part of the crime of gender persecution. The panel dismissed a defense argument that the pre-existing levels of gender discrimination in Malian society should be considered in evaluating the extent of the discrimination emerging from the alleged gender persecution. This finding may be used to counter any potential defense argument surrounding the historical treatment of women in Afghanistan as a defense to the Taliban’s current treatment.
Overcoming Potential “Outside the Common Purpose” Argument
In her dissenting opinion, Judge Akane distinguished gender-based and sexual crimes — rape, sexual slavery, and forced marriage — from the remainder of crimes committed as outside the “common purpose” of Ansar Dine/AQIM in occupying Timbuktu. The common purpose doctrine recognizes that individuals who engage in a joint criminal venture share responsibility for the crime, allowing courts to hold them accountable for acts committed by others as part of a common purpose. Judge Akane viewed these crimes as opportunistic, committed by actors who exploited women’s vulnerability in detention or in situations of forced marriage. Commentators on the Al Hassan decision have starkly disagreed with Judge Akane’s findings as relying too heavily on long-debunked ICC precedent that rape within a “coercive environment” does not necessarily bring rape into a group’s common purpose. This line of thinking suggests that “those who created the coercive environment appear to have done so with the explicit shared purpose of controlling sexual and other aspects of the lives of women and girls in Timbuktu,” according to law professors Rosemary Grey and Valerie Oosterveld.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban have sought to control all aspects of the lives of women and girls. With such extensive control, it would be hard to argue that the Taliban does not aim to control women’s sexuality, as well as other aspects of their lives, arguably bringing sexual violence such as forced marriage and rape into their common purpose.
Conclusion
The striking similarities between the Al Hassan case and the Taliban’s policies underscore a critical need for ICC intervention. The Taliban’s systemic gender persecution mirrors the grave offenses identified in the Al Hassan case. They fall under the purview of the Rome Statute, which mandates accountability for such egregious acts. The international community must act decisively to prosecute those responsible for these crimes, ensuring that perpetrators of gender-based persecution face justice. This action is not only crucial for upholding the rule of law but also for affirming a global commitment to protecting human rights and dismantling impunity for gender-based violence.
Grace Luloff is a second-year master’s student at Georgetown University in the Conflict Resolution program. Her research focuses on atrocity prevention and transitional justice in Afghanistan and Central Africa.
What an ICC Case on Mali Means for Prosecuting Taliban Gender Crimes
The ban on girls’ secondary education, together with other policies by the Islamic Emirate, have severely affected the lives of female teachers across Afghanistan. This is seldom truer than it is in Shughnan, a mountainous district in Badakhshan province where men and women have long specialised in teaching, working in their own district and beyond. AAN’s Fabrizio Foschini has sought to understand what’s happening in this fragment of Afghanistan, one of the lesser known of the country’s many faces.The bridge connecting Afghanistan and Tajikistan in Shughnan district, seen from the Afghan side. Photo by Fabrizio Foschini, 2009
The number of female teachers in Afghanistan has plummeted since the re-establishment of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA). In 2018, women accounted for nearly 81,000 – 36 per cent – of the 226,000 teachers in the country’s state schools, according to a survey by Education International. By August 2022, one year after the IEA came to power, 11,500 women teachers had been pushed out of a job (see SIGAR here and this AAN backgrounder on the evolution of Taleban thinking on education). According to the 2023/2024 statistical yearbook, the women teachers employed are currently slightly over 71,000.[1] While the abrupt end to girls’ education beyond the sixth grade has been the most significant overall contributor to the decline in the number of female teachers (see this AAN report), over time, other IEA restrictions, such as preventing women teaching boys, have added to the decline (see this Human Rights Watch report). The IEA’s decisions regarding universities, such as the ban on women attendance (see BBC report) and the announcement of new rules that prevent women professors from teaching male students, caused a further loss of jobs for women educators.Although most of the teachers affected by the IEA decisions have not been fired and receive at least a part of their former salaries while sitting at home, the impact of the restrictions on their lives has been devastating. In some places, the policies have affected entire communities, leading to social and economic imbalances at the local level. One place where the restrictions have had an outsized impact is Shughnan district in Badakhshan province in the northeastern Amu River valley, bordering Tajikistan, where teachers account for a sizeable portion of the local workforce. In this district, the IEA’s policies are proving disastrous for the local population.
AAN has been listening to a number of female teachers from Shughnan and neighbouring districts, all increasingly depressed by the situation, concerned about losing their profession, the meaning attached to it and the status it affords them.[2] They are distressed by the deterioration of their household economies and their social standing as women in their communities.
Shughnan: a remote corner of Afghanistan
As a hadith of the Prophet goes, one should seek knowledge, even if it means going as far as China.[3] To find quite a deal of knowledge in Afghanistan, however, it suffices to stop shortly before the Chinese border. Travelling across Badakhshan province all the way up one of the branches of the ancient Silk Road, one reaches a remote mountain region, turned by modern boundaries into a cul-de-sac where only a few types of trade thrive, and those largely illegal ones. Shughnan is one of the so-called Pamir[4] districts – high-altitude areas in the northeastern-most corner of Afghanistan, largely inhabited by speakers of Eastern Iranian languages (the Pamiri languages, such as Shughni, Zibaki and Wakhi), who are followers of the Ismaili branch of Shia Islam.[5] Subjected in past decades to isolation, and marginalisation from the centres of Afghan politics and economy, the inhabitants of these districts have occasionally experienced discrimination and exploitation at the hands of political and military actors – typically belonging to the Sunni majority of central Badakhshan – who more often than not have enjoyed hegemony and control over the Ismaili areas. The Ismaili inhabitants, given their condition of minority and vulnerability, have also proven to be a peaceful and law-abiding community, keen on cooperating and supporting a central government able to bring a degree of security and order. Moreover, despite their remote location and poverty, the residents of these districts have consistently displayed satisfactory social indicators, at least with respect to educational standards, particularly when it comes to gender equality in education.
View on Shughnan from the Afghan side of the Panj, with Tajikistan in the background. Photo by Fabrizio Foschini, 2009
Shughnan district represents the foremost example of this, standing out among the other Pamir districts for its early and remarkable achievements in education. Shughnan shares a common history with neighbouring border districts such as Ishkashim and Wakhan: once ruled by an independent lineage of rulers who controlled the territory on both banks of the Panj river[6] these districts were integrated into Afghanistan only at the end of the 19th century during the reign of Amir Abdul Rahman Khan (r 1880-1901). Shortly afterwards, in 1895, a boundary commission set the river’s course as the border between Afghanistan and Russia (now Tajikistan). It was a most unsatisfactory choice, given that the riverbanks in this deep-cut and high-elevation valley represented the only suitable areas for human settlements; the new border split communities and separated many farmers from their fields. Shughnan, in particular, which until then had been the most prominent of the Ismaili principalities, lost much of its agricultural land, which was located on the right bank of the river. Bereft of agricultural resources other than its famed mulberry orchards, the population was unable to support itself. The area went through hard times, including an armed rebellion in 1925 against the oppressive rule and heavy taxation of government officials.
Living to teach and teaching to live
A turning point came only a couple of decades later, when, likely through the good offices of a Shughni (his name lost to time), who had been brought to Kabul in his youth as a ghulam bacha (a court page raised to serve the Afghan kingdom as a loyal official outside the system of tribal alliances) and who had not forgotten the plight of his home district, a high school was built in Shughnan. It was inaugurated in 1939-40. Lycee Rahmat was a unique institution in such a remote district at a time when high schools could only be found in provincial capitals or large cities. It created opportunities for locals to access higher education and pursue a career in teaching, as an alternative form of livelihood to the limited farming still possible. In the following decades, the Afghan educational system slowly expanded to rural areas throughout the country and the district of Shughnan became a rich source of teachers not only for Badakhshan but also for provinces further afield. As one of the teachers interviewed recalled, in the absence of other local commodities, education became an exportable resource for the people of Shughnan:
There’s very little agricultural land in Shughnan district, but the area is very populated. Local people have no other income. For this reason, if more than one person in a family is literate and educated, they will find a job outside the area, in Afghanistan’s other districts and cities. The ability to work anywhere means they can contribute to the family’s income.
This trend did not stop during the decades of war that hit the country, starting in 1978. Shughnan remained firmly under Kabul’s control almost until the collapse of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) government in 1992. Its schools remained open even during the civil war that followed (1992-2001), between mujahedin factions and then between the Taleban and the government led by Burhanuddin Rabbani. It was actually in the 1990s that, despite the dire lack of funding, the district saw the inauguration of a teacher training centre, the only one in the province outside Faizabad, officially sanctioning its role as a provider of teachers for the broader northeast of Afghanistan, which, back then, was under the control of Rabbani’s government (see AAN reporting here).
The establishment of the Agha Khan Development Network (AKDN) operations in Badakhshan in the late 1990s and the strengthening of the ties between the locals and international Ismaili communities and institutions, with their strong emphasis on the importance of learning, certainly favoured the continuation of what had already become a local tradition and export commodity for Shughnan. Despite the increase in the number of teacher training centres and prospective teachers across the province and the rest of Afghanistan in the years after 2001, Shughni teachers kept their primacy and benefited from some economic and social improvements in their positions thanks to the financial support offered by the international community. Indeed, many interviewees told AAN that if previously, most Shughni families already had a member working as a teacher under the Republic, the ratio increased, with some households counting as many as three or even five.
A former superintendent at the Directorate of Education in Shughnan district estimated the number of Shughnis employed as teachers at the fall of the Republic to have been around 2,500, of whom 1,800 were employed outside the district, while other interviewees claimed the number of teachers was actually higher. Whatever the true figure, it is impressive when you consider the district’s population stands just over 30,000. While many teachers are still working in districts across Badakhshan province, the former superintendent said that for decades, Shughni teachers have been sent to as many as 21 provinces. If their destinations have mostly been majority Dari-speaking provinces, such as relatively close-by Takhar and Kunduz, finding work could still lead them, in some cases, even to the opposite corner of the country. Soraya, one of the women teachers interviewed, confirmed that this is still very much the case today: “They [teachers from Shughnan] travel to all districts of Badakhshan and even to Herat and Farah provinces, which are far from Badakhshan.”
With the bad state of road infrastructure, compounded more often than not, for many decades, by security problems, travelling could take days, if not weeks. The roads have not improved much since the 1950s. Before the IEA’s new interest in improving connections to China through the Wakhan corridor (read Khaama Press here), hardly any road building had taken place in the Pamir region. Even now, although roads leading to Ishkashim and Wakhan have been improved, Shughnan remains one of the most inaccessible districts in Afghanistan, and during the long winter months, travel is only possible on foot or by horse.
Most teachers return to Shughnan at the end of every school term to spend the holidays with their families, although others, said Soraya, travel to their school at the start of the school year in the month of Hamal, which starts on 21 March, and return home in the month of Qaws, which starts on 21 November. “That means they come home [only] after nine months – although some take their families with them.” Indeed, some teachers have eventually settled in their places of work and bring their families along.
In 2009, a Shughni teacher employed in Faizabad told the author how he would live almost ten months a year in a rented room with other colleagues in the provincial capital and undertake adventurous travel, partly by car and partly on foot (one week each way) to return to Shughnan for the long winter break. Things were only slightly easier during the two-week summer break, when the seasonal opening of a high mountain pass over the Shiwa Plateau, reduced the trip to two days only.
A group of travelers en route from Shughnan to Ishkashim tries in vain to clear the way for a vehicle at the end of winter. Photo by Fabrizio Foschini, 2009
This lifestyle is more typical for Shughni men. The mobility of Afghan women has always been hampered by higher hurdles. Even so, female teachers from this district have also travelled for work. Indeed, another teacher interviewed estimated that in recent times, the number of Shughni women teachers employed outside the district was nearly three times more than those teaching in the district itself. In other words, some 900 female Shughni teachers had been (or are currently) working away from home, especially in districts in Badakhshan, where Shughni women traditionally accounted for a large share of the female teachers in Faizabad, as well as elsewhere in the province (see AAN’s 2012 report on education in Badakhshan here).
The fact that many male teachers take up positions in faraway places has further enhanced the central economic and social role of women teachers in Shughnan, as they came to make up roughly half of the local teachers, and are often the main breadwinners in their families. Moreover, teaching is a profession that commands much respect in the area. Despite the insufficient salaries teachers have received for most of Afghanistan’s recent history (see AAN’s 2015 report detailing the problems in contract and salary conditions of teachers here), households in Shughnan that claim teachers among their members have generally fared better economically than those who are solely farmers. Over the decades, this, coupled with other cultural, religious and political traits of the local Ismaili population, gave many Shughni female teachers a prominent role in local society.
Multiplying the effects of education
“If you teach a man,” said one of the interviewees, “you teach one person, but if you teach a woman, you educate three people.” By quoting this local saying she went on to explain how an educated woman, necessarily, brings about a change inside her family, as the benefits of her education are amplified. The importance attached to education and the respect afforded to educators was quite apparent in the words of many of the teachers we interviewed. Stressing the suitability of women in taking up the role of educators both at school and at home, female Shughni teachers firmly believe in the power of education to change local society for the better. Female teachers, they believe, should be at the forefront of this reform, as one young teacher, Fawzia, explained:
Education is fundamental to all-round development everywhere, whether in cities or villages. Education in a remote society that does not have any kind of access to life’s conveniences is the best path to progress. For example, we can see the difference between a family whose members are all educated and a family that isn’t educated. We see the impact an educated family can have on themselves and their area. … [T]his itself causes the economy of a place to grow.
For Soraya, who lost her job as a teacher at a girls’ school in Shughnan after the IEA came to power, female teachers can play a transformative role in conservative rural societies:
Had there been no teachers, today’s world, with these levels of progress, would not exist. Therefore, whether in a rural community or a city, the role of the teacher is very important. But when it comes to how effective the role of female teachers can be, this is even more important in the villages and among the rural people because female teachers can help those people and their families understand the need to break some traditions. On top of teaching students in class, female teachers can put an end to some old customs. For example, in some areas, people believe women should not study and work. So, I can say that female teachers are extremely important because they can change people’s old beliefs and ways of thinking.
The head of a secondary school for girls, Sharifa, also currently at home, shared Soraya’s opinion:
Female teachers can be an example for other women [showing them] that they too could win their freedom and rights and defend those rights.In rural communities where more women are teachers, the other women of the village are more aware and have more independent personalities.
Another teacher, Narges, pointed to the dedication and hard work of female teachers compared to many male colleagues and their value as role models for their pupils and their families. Drawing on her experience outside the district, she said: “Families are encouraged to let their daughters go to school [when they see female teachers].” In Shughnan, she added: “it’s been a long time since anyone has kept their girls from going to school.”
Such views cannot be easily dismissed as over-optimistic, wishful thinking, as they might be, if coming from other rural districts of Afghanistan. The female teachers expressing these views draw on their firsthand experience of and participation in a social reform they have seen, against all odds, become a reality in Shughnan over the past 70 years – at least until the most recent and unexpected turn of events.
Part of a decades-long tradition
Most interviewees trace the presence of female teachers in their district back to an earlier era, one where the politicised struggle between so-called ‘western-influenced’ modern education and ‘fundamentalist’ religious schooling was not top of the agenda in Afghanistan, as Farida explained:
We’ve had female teachers in Shughnan for more than sixty years. My father, who is seventy-five years old, says he had a female teacher when he was a pupil at the Bashar primary school, the only school at that time in Shughnan. Her name was Sayed Begum, and she taught Dari.
Another teacher, Narges, also recalled her teacher.
We had female teachers who, twenty years ago, had been teaching for forty years. Then, they retired and some of them have now died. If we count it this way, seventy to eighty years ago, we had women teachers in Shughnan, teaching in schools that were called village schools.
Testimonies indicate that the early presence of female teachers in Shugnan was not due to the influence of the then (slowly) expanding model of modern education from the centre, which was epitomised by the establishment of four lycées, with foreign curricula and often foreign languages as their medium of education, in Kabul between the 1910s and 1920s. Rather, our interviewees suggest that in their district, it was locals who spurred the transformation that sprang from the modest local high school established in 1940. Also, however, self-taught women who overcame barriers and went on to teach in village schools were important, as Soraya recalls:
Shughnan has had female teachers in its schools for more than 60 years. But I should say that the women who were teachers many years ago didn’t have higher education. Some had mostly received their education at home, reading religious texts and poetry books like Hafez-e Shirazi. But in this way, they became literate and could read and write and were appointed as teachers in Shughnan schools due to necessity. Gradually, they gained experience, added to their knowledge, with a lot of effort, and then could keep teaching.
Shughni youth in a hamlet’s mehmankhana (guesthouse). All available surfaces have been used as blackboards for teaching. Photo by Fabrizio Foschini, 2009
Shughnan after 2022: a functioning model of local economy and society endangered
Shughnan has been heavily affected by IEA policies on girls’ education. According to the former superintendent interviewed by AAN, more than half of the over 300 women who, until recently, worked as teachers, have lost their jobs. According to other interviewees, some female teachers have been let go because of cuts to teaching staff. Others, who have been forced out of the classroom by the IEA’s restrictions – they include those who had taught at girls’ high schools – still receive a salary, now reduced to 5,000 afghani (USD 70) a month, from the state. In the words of Sharifa:
Some teachers lost their jobs because the education department in Badakhshan downsized or reduced the tashkil after the Taleban came to power. They don’t get a salary. … [O]thers who still sign their attendance sheet receive a salary of 5,000 afghanis. They don’t receive it on time, only after five or six months. Also, the Taleban get 500 Afs of that as zakat and a teacher only receives 4,500. Their salaries have been reduced to half. In the past, they received 10,000 [USD 140] to 13,000 afghanis [USD 185].
Until recently, the teachers sitting at home received an average of 6,500 Afs (USD 92) , but the salaries of all female public sector employees who have been forced to stay home by the IEA has now been reduced to 5,000 Afs by order of the Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada (read AAN report on the pay cut and its consequences here).[7] All the teachers we spoke to knew about the pay cut, but at the time of the interview, they had not seen its application. At any rate, their monthly salaries, which were hardly sufficient to make a living, were never paid on time, they said, and were usually delayed by four to six months. “They pay our salaries,” said Narges, “with a delay of four months and with the money we finally get, we can hardly cover our expenses for two of the months we’ve waited.”
Interviewees also reported that many Shughni teachers employed outside the district, both those commuting periodically back home and others who had settled elsewhere, had now returned to Shughnan after losing their jobs. Most of them, especially women, who are barred from most other jobs, could not find other ways to earn a living. After spending some months searching for employment, they were in dire circumstances and many had decided to try and leave Afghanistan for good, as Sharifa said:
With the coming of the Taleban government, most of those who were working in the provinces became unemployed and returned to their homes. They either live in a desperate and inadequate situation or have gone to Pakistan or Iran.
Teachers employed in other provinces returning to their homes during the winter break, Roshan area of Shughnan district. Photo by Fabrizio Foschini, 2009
This is not the first time Shughni teachers have faced hardship, privations and bans. After the arrival of the mujahedin in 1991-92, for example, the local situation became complicated. The local Ismailis were accused of having supported the PDPA and some, especially those who had worked for the Kabul government, such as teachers, risked harassment. Initially, restrictions were placed on female teachers, as Sharifa recalled:
When the mujahedin came and Burhanuddin Rabbani became the head of state in Afghanistan, he had a somewhat extreme behaviour. He didn’t let female teachers teach at boys’ schools. But after a while, this problem was solved and everything returned to its place. There was another problem, though. Rabbani and the mujahedin couldn’t govern and the salaries of teachers and employees were cut. Despite that, the teachers, without any salary or benefits, wouldn’t let the schools close. They kept going to school and teaching students.
The comparison ends there. Back then, Shughni teachers eventually saw their positive social role recognised, if not remunerated. The efforts by those teachers to keep education alive across northeastern Afghanistan during the difficult decade before 2001 – with no government support and only limited economic help from NGOs such as the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan and AKDN – are still remembered in Shughnan. Several local teachers speaking to the author back in 2009 referred to this time as their ‘jihad’, comparing it to the service to the Afghan nation that mujahedin fighters boasted of. From the more recent interviews, it appears that keeping schools alive during that hard time still provides a source of pride for teachers who lived through it, including Sharifa:
Shughnan was the only district to have already had a teacher training college 35 years ago. Boys and girls studied there in the same class. Many boys’ schools had female teachers, which was rare in other parts of Afghanistan. … We had English language teachers who taught a course in Faizabad and hundreds of boys were studying on that language course whose teachers were Shughni women.
Pride gives way to despair
The pride in their perseverance in the face of difficulties has now given way to despair and a sense of futility. Many interviewees feared the government could progressively and quietly do away with their already heavily reduced salaries. They felt they could do nothing to prevent this, as under the IEA “teachers are not allowed to say anything” and “no one has the right to protest.”
The situation is, of course, especially bad for those women who are no longer allowed to work. Interviewees equated the plight of those who have been compelled to stay at home but still receive a heavily reduced salary to that of those who have completely lost their jobs. “In general,” said Farida, “those who taught the sixth grade and above are at home, which means losing our jobs because we don’t work only for a salary. We enjoyed working and serving the children.
These feelings relate to the loss of purpose and role in life, the fear of even their meagre salaries disappearing and hopelessness about their ability to mobilise to defend their rights. These are largely coincident with those expressed by other female public workers countrywide, as detailed in this recent AAN report. Our interviewees also made clear that the economic and psychological impact of IEA policies were exacting a heavy toll not only on the women but also on their families. One of the teachers, Farida, explained:
It’s a very bad and painful situation for women because we’re not allowed to leave the house and our economy and expenses are now completely dependent on other family members. … Apart from the fact that the behaviour of the families has changed, the women themselves are suffering from mental problems. This situation has affected many women and girls with mental problems. The women are nervous and sometimes fight with other members of the family because they’re mentally unstable.
Her feelings were echoed by Sharifa:
Every family has a different way of life and perspective. However, in general, I can say that when the family’s economy weakens, without doubt, a person’s mental status or psyche is damaged as well. This problem causes one to be in a bad temper and there’ll be conflict at home with one person blaming another.
Another problem is that female teachers and women in general who used to work and were not dependent on their family members, that is, their husbands or fathers or brothers, had their own funds. But now their husbands or brothers have to pay for them, and that’s another, separate issue. In itself, it’s a problem for women, how much money they get from their fathers or brothers or husbands. This is really hard and painful for them.
The possibility that such dramatic changes in the economic situation of women could lead to a loss of social status is real, even in liberal and progressive communities like those of Shughnan. Conflicts and subjugation inside families are likely to increase, especially in poor and resourceless regions like this one. Over the past decades, as the author found on a research trip in 2009, the area has been hit particularly hard by opiate addiction, exacerbated by its position on a trafficked border. Additionally, local women are not accustomed to being dependent on men and are unlikely to easily abide by their new circumstances of seclusion and subjugation. Soraya has seen evidence of this already:
Unfortunately, some female teachers complain about bad behaviour inside the family, especially women whose husbands are drug addicts. Sometimes, their husbands even beat them because they used to give them some money to buy opium, heroin, or whatever they were using. But now, these men can’t work and neither can their wives, so in some families, women are suffering violence.
Interviewees like Narges also mentioned an increase in forced marriages, prompted by the economic woes faced by families: “Some families behave badly. Some have forced girls who were teachers to get married. This will eventually drive the girls crazy.”
Over the past spring, an independent monitoring NGO reported several instances of honour killings or suicide among girls as a result of being pressured by their family to marry in other Pamir districts such as Ishkashim and Wakhan (see also this report by Afghan Witness on the issue). An interviewee, a student of midwifery from Ishkashim, confirmed the link between those deaths and the lack of access to education and prospects:
Today, teachers who’ve studied and gained bachelor’s and master’s degrees have turned to handicraft skills to meet the economic needs of their families. … The situation of women who’ve stopped working and are not active is not so good. It is because, in the past, they used to be self-sufficient and could at least provide for the necessities. Along with men, women were also supporters of their families, financially. Now, the behaviour of some men towards women might have changed because women who used to work outside are now at home. It’s a major challenge for men and women in our society.
She also spoke about the impact on those who should still have been at school:
Nowadays, the closure of schools is a big challenge for girls. They’ve lost their goals and dreams during the three years of school closure. Almost all girls are forced to get married, and where I live, every day, I see an educated girl who’s deprived of schooling being married off. They’re disappointed and worried because it’s the girls who educate a generation, but now they’re deprived of an education. Just where I live, I’ve seen several cases of girls taking their own lives. This is all down to unemployment and the lack of education.
AAN tried to find out about the occurrence of such incidents in Shughnan. Some of the teachers interviewed, such as Sharifa, confirmed that they have also happened there:
The fact that a girl isn’t allowed to study and achieve her ambition is the biggest problem in her life. And when a woman isn’t allowed to work outside the home, all her freedom and rights are taken away from her and she’s imprisoned at home. Then, what is left for her? Right now, I can say that women and girls are literally imprisoned in their homes, where all their rights have been taken away. Some families force their daughters to get married. Unfortunately, we have seen the suicide of several girls who were educated. After the universities were closed, their fathers forced them to marry, but these girls preferred to die.
That it was often highly educated girls who, in the face of their families’ decision to get them married, preferred to take their own lives was also mentioned by Mahram, a resident of Bashar village in Shughnan who said he knew some such cases. He cautioned, though, that it would be difficult to gather information about them, adding that he had heard from a teacher from Roshan (the northern part of Shughnan district) that the local Taleban authorities had held a meeting with the village heads in that area, stressing that such incidents should not be discussed publicly or with the media.
Shughnan district will not lose overnight the cultural and social achievements made over several decades by its own people that have become part of its identity. Nevertheless, the district is undoubtedly facing one of its darkest times, Fawzia said:
Sometimes, because life and economic problems increase, people’s tolerance becomes low and this causes them to behave inappropriately. … [T]he treatment of women in Shughnan district is generally very good, whether they’re responsible for their families or unemployed, as is the case now. Only some narrow-mindedpeople or [those] who aren’t educated have changed their behaviour.The main challenge in our region with school closures is that some girls are forced to get married. That is not because of family pressure, but because of unemployment, economic problems and despair. … [T]here are some people who endure problems and are patient. From my personal point of view, I have a feeling of darkness, that there is no light to see ahead. We don’t feel we see the daylight. We feel it is always night, darkness and nightmares. We feel good dreams never come true.
The unique position of Shughnis, especially its women, as the country’s educators is at risk of vanishing as though it were only a dream. The people of this district, who lost half their land when it became part of Afghanistan and painstakingly worked out a solution to overcome their resulting lack of resources and managed to become part of and contribute to the country’s life in such a vital sector as education, now stand to be left without viable options.
Shughnan had already been put to the test during the civil war of the 1990s, but this is the first time that its hard-gained, fragile economy – one based on learning and teaching – is facing outright obliteration. Such a scenario would not only see the deterioration of the district’s hard-won social development but also lead to significant economic decline. Furthermore, if more Shughni teachers, men and women alike, lose their jobs, livelihoods and social standing, and are forced to migrate in search of a livelihood and a better life, the dramatic loss of human capital and expertise for Afghanistan would be incalculable.
Edited by Roxanna Shapour and Kate Clark
References
References
↑1
In its July 2023 accountability session, the IEA mentioned that 92,000 women were working in the public education sector, although not all were employed as teachers (see this AAN report).
↑2
The names of all interviewees have been changed in order to protect their privacy.
↑3
A famous hadith, though most Islamic scholars consider its chain of transmission to be daʿīf (weak) and thus likely spurious, it has sometimes been considered hasan (fair) on account of its wide circulation. It appears as hadith number 28,697 in Kanz al-Ummal fi Sunan al-Aqwal wa al-Af’al (Treasures of the Doers of Good Deeds) by Ali ibn Abd-al-Malik al-Hindi, 1472 CE – 1567 CE.
↑4
Geographically, the Pamir Mountains are located mostly in Tajikistan on the right side of the Amu River and its headstream the Panj, with the exception of Wakhan district in Afghanistan’s Badakhshan province. However, in Afghanistan, Shughnis, Zibakis, Wakhis and other communities in the area are often referred to as Pamiris.
↑5
Ismailis separated from other Shia Muslims as they recognised a different line of imams from among the descendants of caliph Ali, cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, as the rightful heirs to religious and political leadership. They live nowadays in many countries across the world; in Afghanistan they inhabit mostly Badakhshan and Baghlan provinces.
↑6
The Panj is the headstream of the Amu Darya which forms Afghanistan’s border with Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and partially with Turkmenistan.
↑7
On 2 June 2024, the de facto Directorate General of Administrative Affairs issued a letter purporting to “standardise” the salaries of women civil servants hired by the former administration to 5,000 Afghanis per month, regardless of grade, pegging women’s salaries to the lowest possible level. However, on 7 July 2024, the de facto Ministry of Finance issued a letter clarifying that the order would be applied to women civil servants who did not attend work daily or did not perform their duties according to their job description, and that it did not apply to women who were reporting to work and performing their duties (read this UN report).
Education in Hibernation: The end of a virtuous cycle of literacy and empowerment for women in Shughnan?
PhD candidate at the Gulf Studies Center, Qatar University
Published On 14 Sep 202414 Sep 2024
The recently announced vice and virtue law reflects efforts by the Taliban’s old guard to consolidate power at the expense of internal unity.
On August 21, a strict public morality law was issued in Afghanistan. The 114-page document outlining the legislation contains provisions that cover transportation, media, music, public spaces and personal conduct. Among its most restrictive provisions are a ban on music and on women singing or reading aloud in public.
The announcement of the law provoked widespread condemnation internationally and raised questions about the direction in which the Taliban government is taking Afghanistan given past promises to ease restrictions on women.
The law also caused a lot of unease in Afghanistan, even if opposition was not voiced publicly. This has prompted the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, to call for the group’s members to avoid division and embrace unity.
While the public morality legislation makes clear that the Taliban is pressing ahead with ultra-conservative policies in the face of international criticism, it also reflects growing tensions within its leadership.
Kandahar vs Kabul
In the lead-up to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban takeover of Kabul in 2021, some Taliban officials sought to persuade the international community that a Taliban 2.0 had emerged, which held more moderate views on governance compared with the old guard’s highly conservative and stringent approach.
This new guard spoke the language of international diplomacy and made clear its desire to scrap more conservative policies to attract international support and secure legitimacy for the new Taliban government.
The formation of the interim cabinet, however, showed the first signs that the old guard was not ceding power. Promises of an inclusive government were not fulfilled, and some members of the old guard were given key roles, including Mullah Mohammad Hassan Akhund, one of the Taliban’s founders who was appointed prime minister; Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who was appointed as his deputy; and Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob, the son of another Taliban founder, Mullah Omar, who was made defence minister.
As the interim government took on the uneasy task of steering the country away from collapse, Akhundzada established his residence in Kandahar as another seat of power, declaring himself in charge of political, military and religious affairs.
Over the past two years Akhundzada has made clear he does not intend to step back from his hardline positions. In March 2022, on his order, girls and women were banned from attending secondary school and university.
He has also sought to concentrate power in his own hands and further tighten the old guard’s grip on the government. He ordered a number of cabinet reshuffles in which his loyalists were appointed.
In September 2022, Education Minister Noorullah Munir was replaced by Maulvi Habibullah Agha, one of the figures closest to the supreme leader. In May this year, Health Minister Qalandar Ebad, a trained doctor and the only technocrat in the Taliban government, was replaced by Noor Jalal, a hardline cleric and former deputy interior minister.
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While Akhundzada appears in control, signs of growing internal divisions have surfaced. In February 2023, Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani implicitly criticised him, saying, “Monopolising power and hurting the reputation of the entire system are not to our benefit. … The situation cannot be tolerated.”
In his Eid al-Fitr message this year, the interior minister again hinted at internal troubles. He called on the Taliban to avoid creating divisions with the Afghan people.
Akhundzada, for his part, urged Taliban officials during Eid to set aside their differences and serve the country properly. He has repeated this call for unity frequently, most recently during a rare trip to northern Afghanistan, in which he met with local leaders.
Dissent and silencing
The public morality law codifies rules that the Taliban promoted before but did not fully enforce. Now, the law empowers the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice to monitor, censure and punish any Afghan citizen found in violation of it.
The announcement of this legislation demonstrates that the old guard of the Taliban led by the supreme leader have an upper hand in directing policy. This is yet another sign that the Taliban 2.0 is not a more “moderate” version of the group that ruled in Afghanistan in the 1990s.
Previously, Taliban representatives who touted the Taliban 2.0 idea hinted behind closed doors at international forums that certain hardline officials could be replaced to appease the international community.
But developments over the past year, including the vice and virtue law, show that the old guard, who believe in the need for a rigid stance to maintain unity within the group, are suppressing the voices of the new guard, creating a culture of conformity through fear, replacement and sidelining.
In interviews I have conducted with current and former Taliban representatives who do not support some of the conservative policies of the Taliban government, some have shared that they have relocated their families to other countries. One of them said: “The family is more comfortable abroad and the children’s education can seamlessly continue.”
The lack of public response to the vice and virtue law may signal that disgruntled Taliban members who disapprove of it would not risk breaking the unity of the group over policy disagreements.
Silencing of dissent, however, does not help with the two major problems the Taliban is facing: growing dissatisfaction among the Afghan population and continuing international isolation.
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The government in Kabul is feeling the pressure from the Afghan people, who are asking for services and jobs amid a collapsing economy and limited international assistance. That can be alleviated only by gaining international recognition of the Taliban government.
However, efforts of some Taliban members, including Haqqani, to reach out to the international community and seek engagement, more aid and investment are being undermined by Kandahar doubling down on policies like education bans for girls and women and the morality law.
In the end, Akhundzada’s strategy of consolidating power may have the opposite of the intended effect: It may sow more internal division that could lead to fragmentation or even rebellion.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
PhD candidate at the Gulf Studies Center, Qatar University
Lakshmi Venugopal Menon is a PhD candidate at the Gulf Studies Center, Qatar University. She was previously a Research Associate at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Indian Institute of Sciences.
Accountability for war crimes and human rights violations in Afghanistan has been on the agenda this week at the 57th annual session of the United Nations Human Rights Council. For almost half a century, various Afghan factions, governments and foreign forces have perpetrated abuses – indiscriminate bombing, torture and rape, arbitrary arrest and enforced disappearance, massacres and land grabbing. Women’s rights have been violated, as has the right to free speech, assembly and protest. While many of these crimes are well-documented, instances of accountability are rare in the extreme. This week, says AAN’s Kate Clark, two reports that take stock of accountability options have been debated at the Human Rights Council: the annual report on human rights in Afghanistan by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ (OHCHR) and a second, far stronger report published by the Raoul Wallenberg Institute. It addresses head-on the politics of why there has been so little accountability and has some suggestions for what could be done now.Instances of accountability for war crimes and human rights violations committed In Afghanistan since 1978 are so few it is possible to list them in a few sentences. There have been a few trials: the Khalqi head of intelligence, Abdullah Sarwary, was convicted in 2006 by an Afghan court of mass killing[1] (AAN reporting here), while a handful of Afghans have been put on trial in Europe under universal jurisdiction – among them, Hezb-e Islami commander Faryadi Sarwar Zardad convicted in the UK in 2005 of hostage-taking and torture (AAN reporting here) and three Parchamis[2] convicted in the Netherlands, Pul-e Charkhi commander Abdul Razaq Aref (recently acquitted on appeal as AAN reported), Director of KhAD[3] Military Intelligence Hesamuddin Hesam and Head of KhAD Military Interrogation Habibullah Jalalzoy (more details here).[4]Some states that fought in Afghanistan after 2001 have carried out investigations that have uncovered evidence of war crimes committed by their own forces. A United States Senate report detailed the CIA’s use of torture, rendition and black sites (published in redacted form in 2014; AAN analysis here). President George Bush had authorised the torture. President Barack Obama admitted it but also downplayed it – “we tortured some folks” – and effectively ruled out prosecutions.[5] President Donald Trump praised his country’s use of torture and said waterboarding was not harsh enough (see AAN reporting here). (He also pardoned four contractors who had been convicted of murder or manslaughter for killing fourteen Iraqi civilians, described as a “massacre” by FBI investigators). One Afghan, the last known person to be tortured by the CIA and rendered to Guantanamo, Muhammad Rahim, remains in the prison camp (AAN reporting here).
An inquiry by the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force, Major General Paul Brereton, reported evidence in 2020 of the murders of 39 people and cruel treatment of two others by members of the Australian Special Forces: one man has been charged. An ongoing inquiry by the UK Ministry of Defence, begun in 2022, is looking into allegations of possible extra-judicial killings by UK special forces between 2010 and 2013.
The International Criminal Court began a preliminary examination into the situation in Afghanistan in 2006, but only, finally, got permission to investigate in 2022 (a timeline of events up to that point can be read here), at which point the Chief Prosecutor, Karim Khan, narrowed the focus to just looking into the Taleban and Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISKP), ie he dropped the US military and CIA and the forces of the Islamic Republic from his investigation, thereby creating the impression of a hierarchy of victims and perpetrators.[6]
In Afghanistan itself, after 2001, great efforts at transitional justice programme were made over many years, but these were repeatedly stymied by hostile political actors – President Hamed Karzai, cabinet ministers, MPs, the United States and UNAMA – all of whom either did not want their own records, or those of their allies, laid bare, or they feared scrutiny would trigger instability. (For more on this see this recent report by the author. It also links to the 2004 UN Mapping Report, which brought together published documentation of war crimes from 1978 to 2002, was suppressed at the time and was recently posted by AAN). As to Afghan actors admitting wrongdoing, it is difficult to think of any, apart from General Abdul Rashid Dostum who made a public apology in 2013, which appeared to be a condition of his joining Ashraf Ghani’s ticket in the 2014 presidential election.[7] Instead, MPs in 2007 voted for a blanket amnesty for “[a]ll political factions and hostile parties who were involved in one way or another in hostilities before the establishing of the Interim Administration.”[8]
In light of such a poor record on holding those responsible for grave abuses and the current human rights situation in Afghanistan, which, according to the OHCHR report, is “very serious,” what more could or should be done?
Considering accountability at the UN
OHCHR’s annual report on the human rights situation was presented to the Human Rights Council on 9 September. After summing up the current situation, it presented a “stocktaking of accountability options and processes for human rights violations and abuses.”[9] The report does not grapple with why, after the establishment of the Islamic Republic, “there was little impetus for accountability or transitional justice processes at the national level,” nor does it address why “a number of initiatives to map and document past human rights violations and abuses and develop options for a domestic accountability and transitional justice process” failed to bear real fruit, including the 2004 UN Mapping Report, which OHCHR itself had undertaken and that was buried because of political pressure.
Far more substantial is the report published by the Raoul Wallenberg Institute (RWI), ‘Accountability for Human Rights Violations and Violations of International Humanitarian Law’, authored by Latifa Jafari Alavi, Mehdi J Hakimi, Kobra Moradi, Orzala Nemat, Haroun Rahimi, Huma Saeed and Ehsan Qaane.[10] The RWI report describes the “almost complete impunity for all state actors – of varied ideologies – that have held power, and for all armed forces, including those of foreign states, that took part in the conflict” and how “[c]ycles of violence have fed off each other … as those in power have replicated many of the same patterns of abuse and retribution against their foes as they had experienced when out of power, ensuring unstable transitions and fuelling grievances that have led to further violence.” It looks at attempts to analyse why previous efforts at accountability failed and proposes “ways that some progress could be achieved.” Like the OHCHR report, but far more emphatically, it embeds current concerns about human rights violations in the context of the last 46 years of conflict and includes, for example, an important section on economic crimes, such as land-grabbing, under the Republic, and even back to earlier conflicts and atrocities.
The RWI report lists the Emirate’s institutions of accountability, such as the Ministry for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice and Hearing Complaints, which is the address for members of the public to complain about Emirate officials. It concludes, however, that the prospect of holding human rights offenders accountable under the current authorities is “discouraging.” Since taking power, the report says, the Emirate has “dismantled the existing institutional setup and in its place set up exclusionary institutions with narrow focus and questionable effectiveness, suggesting a lack of political will to hold human rights abusers to account.”
The report also lists a wide range of international accountability mechanisms, their shortcomings, potential benefits and problems that includes the ICC, the International Court of Justice, regional judicial bodies like the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and various UN mandates, such as special procedures, and the use of universal jurisdiction by courts outside Afghanistan. It has a final section on non-judicial, or not necessarily judicial routes to accountability – documentation, memorialisation, oral history, archiving and truth-telling initiatives.
The RWI report recommends the establishment of a UN-mandated international investigation and accountability mechanism that would look into past and current human rights violations and abuses by all parties to the conflict in Afghanistan.[11]
It calls on member states to support the work of the ICC, which should itself “[e]xpedite the Afghanistan investigation and avoid further delays.” It should also “reaffirm its mandate to address the most serious abuses by all parties to the conflict” and “reverse the decision to deprioritize” alleged crimes pursued in its preliminary investigation and widen the scope of its current investigation to include the US military and CIA and the forces of the Islamic Republic, the report urges. It goes on to call on the UN to enhance UNAMA’s monitoring and reporting function and ensure it cooperates with the ICC “particularly with regard to information on abuses contained in its database.” On sanctions, it calls for ways to be found “to ease current sanctions-related harm to banking and liquidity” and focus on targeted sanctions such as travel bans and asset freezes on individuals responsible for grave abuses.
The RWI report urges the UN to finally make public the 2004 Mapping Report and also has some interesting recommendations for international and Afghan civil society organisations, including looking into publishing the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC)[12] conflict mapping report, which documented alleged crimes committed between 1978 and 2001, based on historical documents and extensive field research in all of Afghanistan’s provinces. “This report likely includes information about perpetrators, the conditions and causes of violations,” the RWI report says, and their impact on affected populations. Its release is important for shedding light on past abuses, promoting transparency, and validating and recognizing the experiences of victims,” it says. It urges their collaboration on expanding the AIHRC Mapping Report to document alleged crimes to 2001-2024 and beyond, and the establishment of an online registry system for war victims in Afghanistan whereby Afghans inside and outside the country can access, submit information and register as war victims.[13]
Accountability after 2001, and after 2021
The main problem with pushing for accountability during the Republic was that those who had power opposed it. Even though major state backers of the government (and the government itself) spoke about human rights and democracy, the US, in its initial intervention, had facilitated the takeover of the Afghan state largely by men who were dogged by allegations of war crimes, but who had helped the US get rid of the Taleban. At every turn after that, Washington kept supporting its new allies, squashing moves to have a more representative government or curb the power of the new elites. The men who had come to power on the back of the US intervention viewed the now very lavishly funded state as a means of enrichment, enabling them to build up their networks and restrict or target their opponents. Technocrats who gained government positions, mainly later on, were often just as corrupt. In those early years, the US special forces and CIA hounded men they believed to be Taleban. They carried out mass arbitrary arrests and used torture, often duped by their Afghan allies to pursue personal or factional enemies. After that, allies in the police and NDS did the same, with police in Kandahar alone carrying out some 2,000 enforced disappearances – a crime against humanity. Meanwhile, those in power in the Afghan government, its Western backers and the UN blocked attempts to pursue transitional justice.
The opportunity lost after 2001 to deal with past crimes tastes even more bitter in hindsight than it did at the time. In those years, there had been enough of a rupture with the past to face up to it, especially as Afghans assumed the war was finally over and hopes for a brighter, fairer, peaceful future were commonplace. Yet, under the Republic, there was not merely a lack of accountability for past or continuing abuses but a failure to acknowledge or speak about those crimes. The gaslighting by the new elite after 2001 was extreme: groups and individuals that had perpetrated war crimes were publicly celebrated as national heroes and patriots and going against this hegemonic discourse was dangerous. However, if power and politics failed or obstructed any sort of accountability after 2001, the politics appear even worse now. The underlying problem is not a lack of evidence of wrongdoing or even a lack of accountability mechanisms, but the absence of political will.
The Islamic Emirate, for its part, is either proud of what activists say are human rights violations, including ‘gender apartheid’, or denies them, for example, accusations that it persecutes individuals from the former government and armed forces, or it feels it is acting positively on past abuses, for example, taking back state land that was usurped by powerful individuals during the Republic (AAN reporting here).
Meanwhile, Western backers of the Republic, who remain Afghanistan’s largest donors of civilian aid, have largely tried to ignore the country since the debacle of their forces’ withdrawal in 2021. There might be interest among some of them for backing an accountability mechanism that targeted the Emirate, but would they support something which put a spotlight on their own conduct or that of their former allies? It is difficult to imagine.
Now, yet another cycle of a regime falling and another rising in its place has only added a new layer to the complexity of the pain and suffering of Afghans and the difficulties of getting accountability. Veteran human rights activist Patricia Gossman (her first visit to Afghanistan was in 1990 when she interviewed President Nabjibullah) described in 2018 how, in various national and international surveys asking Afghans for their views on the conflict, “one common theme emerges as a minimum requirement for a functioning polity: the need for acknowledgement and truth about what has happened.” She also said that in interviews with victims of both insurgent bombings and coalition airstrikes, “the (predominantly poor) survivors” told her they wanted “acknowledgement by those who had caused their suffering, and they want material help, something reparations could potentially help address.” Researchers involved in the (still unpublished) AIHRC Conflict Mapping Report had also found, she said, the experience of interviewing victims across different districts and provinces revelatory, that they had a “shared history beyond what their own community, tribe or ethnic group has suffered.”
One reason, the author was told by an AIHRC commissioner that they never leaked the report was that its benefit as a stand-alone document was limited and indeed could have been harmful. It needed to be the spearhead of a push to open up a nationwide conversation about what Afghans had suffered, an acknowledgement of the crimes of the past, an opportunity for truth-telling, and perhaps reconciliation. That realisation of a shared history seems further away than ever now, while truth-telling by Western states, Moscow and Afghanistan’s neighbours as to the part they have played has been slow to come or remains non-existent.
Edited by Roxanna Shapour
References
References
↑1
Sarwary was the head of the intelligence agency, AGSA, under President Nur Muhammad Taraki (1978-9): it carried out mass arrests, torture and forced disappearances. He was convicted in 2006 of conspiracy against the Burhannudin Rabbani government in 1992, arresting people who subsequently disappeared and mass murder. Patricia Gossman and Sari Kouvo’s special AAN report from 2013, ‘Tell Us How This Ends: Transitional Justice and Prospects for Peace in Afghanistan’ called the trial “flawed and hasty.” Sarwary was found guilty of all charges and sentenced to death. In early 2007, an appeals court ruled the evidence was insufficient and reduced his sentence to 20 years imprisonment, beginning with the first day he was taken into custody in 1992. He was released in January 2017.
↑2
Parcham was a faction of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) led by Babrak Karmal. It was active from 1967 to 1990.
↑3
Khadamat-e Etla’at-e Dawlati (KHAD), or the Government Information Services, was the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan’s (1978-1992) intelligence agency, from 1980 to 1992.
↑4
Hesam and Jalalzoy were both convicted of torture in 2005, while Aref was convicted of arbitrary deprivation of liberty, cruel and inhuman treatment, and assault on the personal dignity (of prisoners) in 2022. He was acquitted in 2024 after the Dutch appeal court decided there was no nexus between his actions and the armed conflict, so they could not be classed as ‘war crimes’.
Document A/HRC/57/22, ‘A stocktaking of accountability options and processes for human rights violations and abuses in Afghanistan – Report of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights’ can be found on this webpage.
↑10
The RWI report was debated at a side event on 12 September, co-organised by RWI and the Human Rights Research League and co-sponsored by the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) with Huma Saeed, Kobra Moradi, Richard Bennett, and Tom Syring.
↑11
See also this open letter signed by 73 Afghan human rights, women’s rights and pro-democracy organisations and backed by 17 international human rights organisations to the member states of the Human Rights Council, which also called for the establishment of such a mechanism.
↑12
The IEA dissolved the AIHRC in May 2022. However, it argued that since the IEA lacked international legitimacy, it had no authority to dissolve it (see here). The AIHRC was reconstituted as the human rights organisation, Rawadari, under the leadership of Shaharzad Akbar (who was chair of the AIHRC at the time of the Taleban takeover).
↑13
One interesting voice at the ‘Enhanced Interactive Dialogue’, which took place on 9 September at the Human Rights Council off the back of the OHCHR report, was the Center on International Cooperation’s Hanny Megally, who spoke about the need to consult victims and survivors about ‘their justice-based needs’ (see video of the session at 1.08.48 and Megally at 1.39.00).
In Iraq, he said, a survey of victims in 2003/4 had emphasised the need to find disappeared relatives, reparations and holding those responsible to account, including distinguishing between those who had given orders and those who obeyed them out of fear; de-Ba’athification in these circumstances, Megally said, may have led to a “failure of the justice project imposed from outside with little consultation.” In Morocco, victims had prioritised getting to the truth about torture and disappearances over state reparations, while also wanting those most responsible held accountable. Tunisians surveyed in 2012 wanted corruption dealt with, especially in the judiciary, as well as highlighting the need to tackle long-term social exclusion and regional inequality. Syrian activists stymied by the Security Council from getting the ICC to act, Megally said, had worked via the General Assembly to establish an international institution in 2016 to pursue criminal justice; their efforts also expanded to go after alleged perpetrators who had fled to Europe and elsewhere through the courts, using universal jurisdiction. Syrians also persuaded the General Assembly to set up an institution focussing on finding the truth about the disappeared and dead.
Megelly’s points were first, that ‘accountability’ can take many forms and criminal prosecution may not be priority of the victims and also that, as in Syria, pursuing criminal justice and the truth, can be done in complementary fashion.
Will There Ever be Accountability for War Crimes in Afghanistan? Two reports take stock of past failures and make some proposals
Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security
Women are now forbidden from showing their faces or using their voices in Afghanistan after the Taliban issued a new restriction in August. Since their takeover three years ago, approximately 100 of the Taliban’s edicts have specifically targeted women and girls constituting what many consider gender apartheid. In a blow that is both substantial and symbolic, the Taliban’s so-called Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice–which is responsible for restricting women’s rights–now occupies the building where the former Ministry of Women’s Affairs once stood.
“I did not think we would be in prison and slaves again after 23 years,” said Dr. Sima Samar, Afghanistan’s Former Minister of Women’s Affairs.
To mark the third anniversary of Kabul’s fall to the Taliban, the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security and the Afghanistan Policy Lab at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) hosted a day-long event to discuss Afghanistan’s economy, humanitarian situation, shrinking civic space, and ways forward.
“We need to have an honest conversation about how we can go forward, how we can leverage the tools that we have to try to have some impact in ways that will make a difference, no matter how difficult it is,” Ambassador Melanne Verveer, Executive Director of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, told an audience of Afghan leaders in exile, experts, and policymakers.
Following a morning of private dialogue, Verveer moderated a public discussion featuring Afghanistan’s former Minister of Women’s Affairs Dr. Sima Samar, former US government official Lisa Curtis, and Afghanistan’s former chairman of the Independent Civil Service Commission Nader Nadery. Ambassador Adela Raz, Afghanistan’s former Ambassador to the United States and Director of the Afghanistan Policy Lab at SPIA, provided opening remarks.
A common refrain from panelists was that the international community cannot be complacent.
“For any country that believes in universal human rights, to allow what is happening in Afghanistan, is, simply, unconscionable,” said Curtis.
By allowing abuses to go unchallenged, the international community has empowered the Taliban to dictate the agenda and act with an air of legitimacy to which they are not entitled. Although the international community may be hesitant to crack down on the Taliban, the challenges of promoting accountability pale in comparison to the challenges that inaction will pose not only for Afghan women and girls, but women and girls worldwide.
Panelists offered clear strategies to advance a more peaceful, secure, and inclusive future for Afghanistan. A resounding call was to leverage sanctions to hold the Taliban accountable, using both US and United Nations authorities to target those implicated in grave human rights abuses and/or support for terrorism.
Utilize the Global Magnitsky Act more broadly. The United States Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act (“Global Magnitsky Act”) gives the US government authority to sanction perpetrators of “gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” In December 2023, the US Treasury used the Global Magnitsky Act to sanction two Taliban officials, Fariduddin Mahmood and Khalid Hanafi, responsible for the closure of schools for women and girls. Panelists echoed a recent Washington Post oped by its Editorial Board to sanction more Taliban officials.
Utilize Executive Order 13224. Executive Order 13224 (“E.O. 13224”) gives the US government authority to sanction “persons who commit, threaten to commit, or support terrorism.” The Taliban have utilized their de facto authority to support terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda and Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, and should be held accountable.
Target sanctions evasion. Despite existing United Nations sanctions programs and individuals countries’ designations, notorious Taliban leaders have been able to travel freely. In June, Sirajuddin Haqqani–who has been sanctioned by both the US and United Nations–traveled to the United Arab Emirates. In July, the United Nations lifted travel restrictions on Haqqani and three other Taliban leaders–Abdul Kabir Mohammad Jan, Abdul-Haq Wassiq, Noor Mohammad Saqib–to travel to Saudi Arabia for the Hajj. The officials enjoying freedom of movement are those responsible for confining women to their homes.
Beyond sanctions, panelists called for codifying gender apartheid as a crime against humanity; monitoring and documenting human rights abuses and continuing the United Nations’ independent assessment on Afghanistan; and including Afghan women in decision-making about Afghanistan’s future.
“We lost the capacity of crying,” Dr. Samar told the audience, acknowledging the devastating and innumerable blows that Afghan women have suffered in the past three years. “It is against human dignity no matter where we are.”
The international community is witness to the Taliban’s systematic persecution, gender apartheid, and crimes against humanity, and cannot stand idly by. The Taliban’s actions demand not only condemnation, but action. There are tools to uphold human dignity in Afghanistan. It is our collective responsibility to ensure that leaders use them.
Sanctions are a key tool to support Afghan women and girls
Ms. Mehran is an Afghan activist and policy specialist.
The New York Times
September 9, 2024
Ever since the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan in 2021 with promises that — this time — they would be more moderate, they have played a deceitful game.
The Taliban government has introduced one decree after another, incrementally stripping away the rights of women and girls to education, employment, justice, freedom of speech and movement, and it has progressively criminalized their existence outside the home. Taliban leaders reached a new low last month when they published rules that, among other restrictions, make it illegal for a woman’s voice to be heard by male strangers in public.
Each new tightening of the screw has sparked international condemnation — but no real consequences for the Taliban. The mullahs merely wait for the outrage to subside before further entrenching their misogynist rule, undeterred by criticism, the threat of repercussions for violating international laws or even the risk of losing badly needed humanitarian aid.
But a potential new international treaty covering the prevention and punishment of crimes against humanity may finally provide the world with more legal and diplomatic leverage — and a new way to hold the Taliban to account for the repression they have unleashed on millions of women in Afghanistan. This is an opportunity that cannot be wasted.
In October a U.N. General Assembly legal committee will meet to decide whether the treaty should move forward to the stage of formal negotiations. The effort to create a better tool for prosecuting crimes against humanity has gained momentum because of growing alarm over conflicts in places such as Myanmar, Ukraine and Gaza, and the treaty includes a proposal to criminalize “gender apartheid.”
Fueled by the Taliban’s actions, the notion of making persons and states that enforce gender apartheid liable for criminal prosecution has gainedglobaltraction. Last October, I joined nearly 100 prominent organizations, jurists and individuals, including the Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai, Hillary Clinton and Gloria Steinem, in signing a legal brief that defines gender apartheid as the institutionalized, systematic subjugation of one gender. The brief urges U.N. member states to codify it as a crime against humanity in the proposed treaty. Many countries have indicated support for the proposal.
There is no better way to describe what Afghanistan’s women face than gender apartheid. Over the past three years, the Taliban have issued dozens of edicts curtailing or eliminating the basic rights of women and girls while abolishing laws and agencies that were dedicated to protecting those rights. The former Ministry of Women’s Affairs, for example, was disbanded by the Taliban and its building handed over to a reinstated Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, which enforces the current government’s hard-line interpretation of Shariah.
Today, even when a woman is accompanied outdoors by a male relative, as required by law, judgments on the legality of her dress, behavior — and now even her voice — are at the total discretion of the Taliban’s ever-present morality enforcers. If one of them deems that a violation has occurred, a woman can be taken into custody, where many have reportedly been subjected to torture and rape. Afghanistan’s women now suffer from one of the world’s highest rates of gender-based violence, according to the United Nations. Women who complain about such violence have been sent to prison.
Women are now effectively confined to their homes and to the only roles deemed by the mullahs to be appropriate for them: caregiving and childbearing. Since men can be punished by the Taliban if their female family members break the rules, women are, in practice, under the strict control of their male relatives. All of this is counterproductive for the nation: By barring women from working outside the home, including as aid workers, the Taliban are harming the country’s economy and compounding its severe humanitarian crisis.
The Taliban’s new rules drag women even deeper into an abyss that seems to have no bottom. Besides muzzling women in public, the rules require women to completely conceal their faces and bodies and place new restrictions on their freedom of movement. I left Afghanistan after Kabul fell to the Taliban in 2021, but my work as an activist in exile keeps me in contact with many women still there who tell me that the latest rules add to the hurdles they face in getting access to even their most basic needs. As one woman recently said to me, even speaking to a shopkeeper to buy food is fraught when her voice is now considered awrah — a term referring to the intimate parts of the body that must be concealed to avoid tempting and morally corrupting others.
The codification of gender apartheid in international law will, of course, not automatically eliminate the crime, and bringing perpetrators to account will not be easy. But it’s an important first step toward providing victims and the global community with legal pathways to hold violators responsible and to deter other governments from committing the same crimes.
Beyond the legal aspect, international recognition of gender apartheid as a crime against humanity would have great moral power. The global condemnation of South Africa’s former apartheid regime galvanized political, legal and social resistance efforts that ultimately contributed to that system’s demise and later resulted in racial apartheid being classified as a crime against humanity by the International Criminal Court.
There is still much work to be done. If the U.N. committee agrees to move the treaty to the next phase, a range of legal and other issues will have to be worked out, including the potential inclusion of gender apartheid as a crime, and the treaty would need to be ratified internationally.
Several countries already expressed in previous committee meetings their openness to codifying gender apartheid as a crime against humanity. For this to become a legal reality, many more nations will need to step up and join in solidarity with the women of Afghanistan, particularly those countries that claim to be leaders on women’s rights or have female heads of government.
The alternative is to continue on the current path, in which the world wrings its hands but essentially does nothing to stop the Taliban from rendering Afghanistan’s women faceless, silent and invisible.
The Department appreciates the Committee’s longstanding interest in Afghanistan policy, and we strongly believe in Congress’s independent role in shaping U.S. foreign policy. We remain committed to working with Congress on its oversight requests and advancing the interests of the American people.
Since 2021, we have expended thousands of hours fulfilling congressional requests for documents, briefings, and interviews related to Afghanistan. The Department has provided approximately 20,000 pages of documents to Congress, conducted nine high-level briefings for committees and members of the House of Representatives and Senate, and made available or engaged 15 senior officials for transcribed interviews to House Foreign Affairs Committee staff and members. This includes the Department taking the unprecedented step of providing Congress with a highly-sensitive cable and internal memos related to the Department’s After-Action Review.
Additionally, Secretary Blinken has testified before House and Senate Committees 14 times on Afghanistan, including four times directly before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. It was critical to have done so. Americans deserved to hear directly from their leaders on the decisions made to end America’s longest war and the steps taken to fulfill our commitment to the thousands of brave Afghans who stood side-by-side with the United States over the course of two decades.
As the House Foreign Affairs Committee Majority and Minority members complete their review of the 2021 withdrawal from Kabul, the Department wants to especially recognize the dedicated State and Department of Defense professionals who showed extraordinary courage and tenacity as they worked tirelessly on the ground in Afghanistan, in Washington, and at other sites, alongside other critical U.S. Government and civil society partners, to evacuate and assist as many people as possible in the closing days of our presence in Kabul. Our people remain our greatest asset.
We also share our abiding respect and reverence for the 13 servicemembers whose lives were taken by ISIS-K during the withdrawal. These heroes embodied the very best of who we are as a nation and we owe them an immense debt we can never repay. Their selfless sacrifice in the line of duty saved thousands of lives. Our deepest sympathies are with the Gold Star families they left behind.
**
Ending America’s longest war was never going to be easy. But President Biden pledged to do so, and within months of taking office, he made the difficult but necessary decision to end America’s 20 years of war in Afghanistan. He inherited an agreement his predecessor had reached with the Taliban to remove all remaining U.S. forces from Afghanistan by May 1, 2021. As part of that agreement, the previous Administration compelled the Afghan Government to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners, including several top war commanders helping the Taliban achieve their strongest position in 20 years. Meanwhile, the agreement reduced our force presence to 2,500 troops.[1] And while the Taliban had agreed to cease attacks on our troops, it was contingent that all were withdrawn by the May 31 deadline.
It was, and remains, a flawed agreement that hampered efforts to end the war through negotiations among Afghans. As General McKenzie, the CENTCOM Commander who served both the current and past administration, testified: “The signing of the Doha agreement had a really pernicious effect on the government of Afghanistan and on its military…”[2]
Due to this agreement, when the Biden Administration entered office it found a revitalized and emboldened Taliban, along with a decimated SIV program and a complete lack of planning for a withdrawal.
The President acted in the best interests of the American people when he decided to bring our troops home and end America’s longest war. This decision ensured another generation of Americans would not have to fight and die in Afghanistan — a full decade after Osama bin Laden had been brought to justice. It strengthened our national security by better positioning us to confront the challenges of the future and put the United States in a stronger place to lead the world. It freed up critical military, intelligence, diplomatic, and other resources to ensure we are better poised to respond to today’s threats to international peace and stability – whether that be Russia’s brutal and unprovoked assault on Ukraine, China’s increasingly assertive moves in the Indo-Pacific and around the world, or a persistent and global terrorist threat.
**
In the three years since the end of our country’s longest war, important questions have been asked about what could have been done differently. The Department has made every effort to answer these questions transparently – whether they be from Congress, members of the media, the American public, or our own workforce.
As the Department has undertaken this effort, regrettably, others have sought to advance their own interests or agendas that have almost nothing to do with learning important lessons to strengthen American national security. Even more unfortunately, misinformation about the Department’s role and efforts have sought to tarnish the reputation of dedicated non-partisan professionals, many of whom tirelessly worked on Afghanistan policy for years.
The Department has a deep respect for Congress’ legislative mandate and responsibility, and as stated above, cooperated extensively with the Congress to provide the information necessary to do that important work. This is why it remains frustrating that time and time again, Majority members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, along with their Republican counterparts in the House, issued partisan statements, cherry-picked facts, withheld testimonies from the American people, and obfuscated the truth behind conjecture.
Their so-called midterm report on Afghanistan in 2022 did a deep disservice to the American people by further politicizing U.S. policy towards Afghanistan instead of focusing on bipartisan solutions. There is little reason to believe the final report will be anything different than the conclusion of a blatantly partisan exercise.
**
One of the most persistent misunderstandings of the leadup to the withdrawal was that the State Department lacked a strategy, specifically a “Noncombatant Evacuation Operations” plan to close operations in Afghanistan. This is not accurate.[3]
Noncombatant evacuation operations – often called NEOs – are partnerships between the Department, the U.S. military, and the host government to “assist the Department of State (DOS) in evacuating noncombatants, nonessential military personnel, selected host-nation citizens, and third country nationals whose lives are in danger from locations in a host foreign nation to an appropriate safe haven and/or the United States,” as described by the United States Military Joint Publication. The planning for a NEO originates within the State Department before the President approves the action to bring in the military to assist in any needed evacuations. It is a whole-of-government action — planned and decided through a National Security Council process — and statements or suggestions that the Department has the sole authority to activate a NEO are inaccurate.
State Department officials who spoke with the House Foreign Affairs Committee explained during their hours-long interviews that there was extensive planning by the State Department for a possible diplomatic exit from Afghanistan. Planning began in April 2021, with multiple inter-agency and embassy exercises, using a range of scenarios. The inter-agency developed detailed indicators and warnings to inform a decision to declare a NEO — including the encirclement or siege of Kabul, the closure of HKIA, resumed attacks on American forces, and a declared or demonstrated Taliban intent to take Kabul.
As Brian McKeon, the Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources during the Afghanistan withdrawal and evacuation, described, there was continued development of a NEO between the State Department, the Department of Defense, and CENTCOM – with the latter traveling to Kabul in July of 2021 to “further refine the NEO planning.”[4]
Additionally, the U.S. government intended for the U.S. Embassy to remain open after the end of the war — a decision Congress broadly supported. So, while U.S. military forces would end combat operations, Department personnel planned to operate out of Embassy Kabul to assist Americans and Afghan allies, coordinate diplomatic and development activity and investments, and help protect and advance U.S. national security interests after August 2021. Given those expectations, along with the continued operation of commercial flights out of Kabul until August 15, executing the NEO before that date would have signaled to the people of Afghanistan the U.S. had lost all confidence in the then-Afghan government and precipitated the very collapse we sought to avoid.
The government of Afghanistan controlled all 34 Provincial Capitals until August 6. Between August 6 and the 14, they began to fall rapidly, crossing the indicator and warning trip wires established by the inter-agency. On August 14, State initiated the NEO through an inter-agency agreement. On August 15, President Ghani abandoned his office and fled the country, and the Afghanistan Republic security services and government collapsed. The Taliban then entered Kabul.
Again, while the State Department formally triggers a NEO, the decision to do so is a collective, inter-agency one, coordinated by a National Security Council process that includes multiple Principal and Deputies Committee meetings. Statements or suggestions that the Department has the sole authority to activate a NEO are false – moreover, principal-level discussions did not conclude a NEO should be initiated prior to the collective interagency decision that was reached on August 14.
Executing a NEO requires substantial military and diplomatic resources, so the State Department, alongside our military colleagues, quickly adapted to the situation on the ground.
Throughout the crisis, there was intense coordination between military and Department personnel. As former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan John Bass described, there was engagement “on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis in terms of the operational coordination of aspects of the NEO” engagement with “the senior military commanders regularly.”[5]
A NEO is but one tool in the diplomatic toolbox, and one of last resort. And NEO planning was far from the only preparation State took in the weeks and months leading up to August 2021.[6]
In March, the Department began urging Americans living in Afghanistan to leave the country. At the end of April, the State Department placed Embassy Kabul on ordered departure status.[7] That same month, State senior leaders and officials traveled to the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan alongside Department of Defense personnel to prepare for the forthcoming absence of the United States military in the region.[8] In total, between March and August, the Department sent 19 unique messages with warnings to Americans living in Afghanistan to leave, as well as offers of help, including financial assistance to pay for plane tickets.[9]
Despite these efforts, when Kabul fell, approximately 6,000 American citizens remained in Afghanistan — almost all dual nationals who had been living in Afghanistan for years or decades. Almost all were evacuated by August 31 thanks to a relentless effort by the State Department to identify them, contact them, and help bring them to the airport. This effort included more than 55,000 phone calls and 33,000 emails in a two-week period. It was unprecedented in scope and scale.
On August 31, several hundred American citizens remained in Afghanistan who could not or would not leave because they could not reach the airport, did not want to leave extended family members behind, or simply chose to remain. Secretary Blinken vowed to facilitate the departure of any remaining Americans. “We’re continuing our relentless efforts to help any remaining Americans… leave Afghanistan if they so choose,”[10] the Secretary said publicly. Between September 1 and the end of 2021, the State Department made good on that pledge, facilitating the departure of nearly 500 American citizens.
In February of 2021, the President took a crucial step to ensure America lived up to its enduring commitment to the individuals who stood side-by-side with us in Afghanistan by issuing an executive order directing a review to improve the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program, which was undertaken with great care. Domestic resettlement agencies have traditionally welcomed Afghan SIVs to the United States, but these critical partners had been deliberately left in shambles by the previous Administration and needed massive investments to be reinvigorated.[11]
As the White House’s summary of Pentagon reviews of U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan details: “The Department of State began seeking transit agreements for Afghans with third countries in June, secured agreements with Qatar and Kuwait in July, and negotiated arrangements with other countries including Germany, Italy, Spain, UAE, Bahrain, Kosovo, and Albania. Setting up this network of transit sites— “lily pads”—would not have been possible without the support of international partners across the Middle East and Europe.”[12]
In late July, the State Department, along with the Department of Defense and interagency partners, initiated Operation Allies Refuge to begin evacuating SIV applicants in the final stages of processing.[13] U.S. diplomatic missions in the Middle East and Europe worked successfully and quickly with host government and Department of Defense personnel to establish temporary housing for tens of thousands of evacuees. During the U.S.-facilitated evacuation, vulnerable Afghans went to overseas Defense Department facilities for security screening, vetting, and the administration of public health vaccinations.[14] Afghan evacuees were then transported by air to eight Department of Defense domestic safe-havens. More than 10,000 State, Defense, and Homeland Security personnel supported this unprecedented humanitarian effort alongside other U.S. Government partners and a cross-section of America.[15]
Throughout the first half of 2021, the Administration was constantly assessing the likelihood of President Ashraf Ghani’s government’s staying in power and considered multiple scenarios. Even the most pessimistic assessments did not predict the government forces in Kabul would collapse while U.S. forces remained. As General Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has previously said, “Nothing I or anyone else saw indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days.”[16] In an August 14 2021, phone call to Secretary Blinken, President Ghani expressed his intent “to fight to the death” to stave off the Taliban takeover before subsequently fleeing the next day.[17]
Nonetheless, we planned and exercised a wide range of contingencies. Because of that planning, we were able to draw down our embassy and move remaining personnel to the airport within 48 hours and the military, which had pre-positioned in the region, was able to secure the airport and start the evacuation within 72 hours.[18]
The U.S. Government achieved the largest airlift in U.S. history with approximately 120,000 Americans, Afghans, and third-country nationals departing Afghanistan in those final two weeks of August 2021.[19]
Throughout this process, the Department relied heavily on the expertise and guidance of those on the ground and across the globe to assess the fluid environment in Afghanistan. Secretary Blinken has spoken publicly of his respect and appreciation for the selfless work of all these individuals, who stepped up to help others in their time of need, and his commitment to hearing from any State Department employee who wanted to share their Afghanistan-related insights.
Much attention has been paid to the State Department’s highly-valued dissent cable – a way for State Department employees at all levels to directly reach a Secretary of State with dissenting views on U.S. foreign policy. As Secretary Blinken previously stated in public testimony before Congress, the cable did not suggest the Afghan government and security forces were going to collapse prior to our departure. As the Secretary also said publicly, the Department agreed with the concerns raised in the cable, and in fact, a number of the recommendations the cable made were already in motion before it was received. Still, the opinions expressed in the dissent cable were heard at the senior-most levels of State Department leadership. The Secretary personally read and oversaw a response to the dissent cable, and its contents were factored into his thinking.
“With regard to the so-called dissent channel cable, it’s something I’m immensely proud of. It’s a tradition that we have and you’re right, I read every such cable, I respond to it, I factor into it my own thinking and actions, and that cable did not predict the collapse of the government or security forces before our departure. It was very focused and rightly focused on the work we were doing to try to get Afghans at risk out of the country and pressing to speed up that effort,” the Secretary told the Congress.[20]
The continued distortion of the dissent cable – which remains classified – by Members of Congress to further a political talking point is deeply disappointing, especially after the Department went to extraordinary lengths to allow members of the Foreign Affairs Committee the ability to review the document — the first time since the inception of the dissent channel during the Vietnam War this access had been granted.
**
The State Department remains committed to the thousands of brave Afghans who stood side-by-side with the United States over the course of the past two decades. As Secretary Blinken has said: our commitment to these individuals is enduring.
When President Biden took office, the State Department inherited an SIV program with a 14-step process based on a statutory framework enacted by Congress involving multiple agencies – and a backlog of more than 17,000 SIV applicants. There had not been a single SIV applicant interview in Kabul in nine months, going back to March 2020.[21] The program was basically in a stall as the previous Administration made no senior-level or interagency effort to address the SIV backlog or consider relocation and resettlement options for our Afghan allies and their families as they worked to negotiate a military withdrawal.
Within two weeks of taking office, State re-started the SIV interview process in Kabul. On February 4, one of President Biden’s first executive orders directed the State to immediately review the program to identify causes of undue delay and find ways to process SIV applications more rapidly. Starting in the Spring, Secretary Blinken surged resources to the program, quadrupling the staff dedicated to processing applications by May 1 and increasing it six-fold by August 1. The administration went from issuing 100 visas per week in March to more than 1,000 per week in August.
To date, the Administration has worked to resettle 165,000 Afghans who the American people have welcomed to communities across our country.[22]
Our commitment to helping resettle thousands of Afghan allies has continued well past the withdrawal.
Over the past few years, we’ve worked to resettle tens of thousands of Afghan families within the United States, welcoming them to their new homes and communities and demonstrating the very best of American generosity. Many international partner nations and organizations assist us in this ongoing effort. Since September 1, 2021, the Administration has approved or welcomed to the United States more than 80,000 Afghans under the SIV program. In Fiscal Year 2023 (FY2023) alone we issued more than 18,000 Afghan SIVs, the most in a single year. In this fiscal year (FY2024), we have already surpassed that total.
The Department has also rebuilt the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), which was deliberately undermined and partially dismantled by the prior administration. Drawing on best practices from processing Afghan cases in near real-time has helped make this rehabilitation a success story and speaks to the strength and ingenuity of Department and interagency personnel, as well as our refugee resettlement nonprofit partners. So far for this fiscal year, we have interviewed more than 20,000 Afghan refugees in 44 countries, contributing to the admission of one of the highest numbers of refugees through USRAP in a single year in more than three decades.[23]
Ensuring we fulfill our promises to those individuals who stood by our side is one aspect of our continued commitment to the people of Afghanistan. Since August 2021, the United States has provided more than $2.2 billion in funding toward the humanitarian response inside Afghanistan and for Afghans in neighboring countries through established partners with rigorous vetting standards.[24] The United States is also the single largest humanitarian donor for Afghans in Afghanistan and neighboring countries, providing more than $844 million in humanitarian assistance in FY 2023.[25]
The Department also stands with the women and girls of Afghanistan and has repeatedly called for their access to education and careers to be restored following edicts by Taliban leaders banning women from universities and working with NGOs. For example, through the establishment of the Afghan Women’s Economic Resilience initiative, a public-private partnership between the Department of State and Boston University, the Department has catalyzed innovative and scalable partnerships between the private sector, civil society, academia, government, and Afghan women leaders to support Afghan women’s education, employment, and entrepreneurship.
The Department remains committed to ensuring that Afghanistan never again becomes a launching pad for terrorism, and we continue to push the Taliban to fulfill all their counterterrorism commitments. We are taking a whole-of-government approach to our Afghanistan counterterrorism efforts, cooperating with partners and allies. We are working vigilantly to prevent the re-emergence of external threats from Afghanistan.
**
There are valid and important criticisms of the two-decade-long war in Afghanistan and how it concluded, which is why the Department has remained focused on evolving and growing from this moment, learning important lessons and making sustainable changes to crisis operations.
In December 2021, the Secretary asked retired Ambassador Dan Smith — a long-serving veteran of the Department — to lead a review of how the Department carried out its duties between January 2020 and August 2021. Ambassador Smith and team interviewed 150 people — including Secretary Blinken — and had access to all contemporaneous records. Studying and learning from Ambassador Smith’s review is a vital component of building a stronger Department that is better prepared to respond to future challenges and to fulfill our mission.
This after-action review[26] made recommendations on several areas where the Department could have done better by improving processes and systems. In the interest of maximum transparency, the unclassified sections of this after-action review have been made public. The Department has already taken more than 40 concrete actions and identified additional steps to guide itself in responding to future crises, including a new, state-of-the-art Operations Center opened in August 2022 with increased surge capacity and modern technology to facilitate information sharing, streamline coordination, and promote a common operating picture.
**
The Department once again expresses its respect for the Congress and its Members who remain dedicated to reviewing the actions taken ahead of and during August 2021. It is our sincere hope the Administration can work hand-in-hand with Congress to make improvements from the lessons learned from the withdrawal. The Department stands ready to work alongside any Member who expresses serious interest in finding legislative and administrative solutions. However, we will not stand by silently as the Department and its workforce are used to further partisan agendas.
State Department Comment on House Foreign Affairs Committee Afghanistan Review
There is a consensus that the private sector is crucial to getting any real growth back into the Afghan economy – described by the World Bank as “persistently stagnant.” Long-term growth, it said, was contingent on a “more resilient, private-sector led economy that capitalizes on the nation’s inherent strengths.” Boosting the private sector is also high on the list of the Islamic Emirate’s policy aims; ‘Enabling the Private Sector’ was one of two topics chosen for discussion at the United Nations hosted Doha III conference, which brought Emirate officials and special envoys together on 30 June and 1 July. In this light, Kate Clark and the AAN team wanted to look deeply at the Afghan economy and the prospects for private-sector growth. However, their starting point was not World Bank analysis or the more positive take of Emirate officials, but interviews with Afghan business ownersabout their everyday struggles.
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We spoke to seven men and two women, all with employees and all but one with a business pre-dating the fall of the Islamic Republic. Our nine interviewees, based in Nangrahar, Mazar-e Sharif, Paktia, Bamyan, Kandahar and Kabul, include the owner of a factory that processes pulses; an importer of crockery and glassware for domestic retail, a trader in potatoes and onions; the deputy manager of a factory making pressure cookers; a children’s clothes manufacturer; the owner of a rug-making factory; the owner of an embroidery business; and a herbalist. We also conducted a number of less in-depth interviews in Kandahar.
Three of the interviewees said their businesses were flourishing, one after a significant decline because of Covid-19, followed by the change of government and collapse in the economy. Most, though, were struggling and most had downsized. The businesspeople spoke of plummeting sales and having to lay employees off or dip into savings to retain staff when profits could not cover wages. They described problems ranging from shrinking consumer demand to delays and bureaucracy at customs, high taxes, cheap imports, lack of capital, problems with banking and a patchy electricity supply.
Their day-to-day problems provide the context for the second section of the report which scrutinises the national economy. It considers the main takeaways of the World Bank’s most recent ‘Afghanistan Development Update’, published in April 2024, which was packed with information and was gloomy in its outlook, and the Emirate’s responses, which were far more positive. This report considers the reasons behind the shrinking of the economy when the Republic fell and the resulting sharp contraction in consumer demand. It looks at dynamics about which Emirate officials are proud, but the Bank is worried about, such as deflation and the strong currency. It looks at Emirate revenue collection and spending, including its focus on the security services, and the economic impact of the opium ban and changing Pakistani policy on trade and exports/imports.
The paper ends by looking at what our nine businesspeople, the Bank and the Islamic Emirate say would help the Afghan private sector, as well as the wider economy, to flourish. All the policy options, the report concludes, are highly political and would involve the Emirate or donors backing down on principled positions, or difficult domestic considerations, or measures by neighbours and countries further afield that would go against their perceived interests. Yet until at least some of these changes happen, it is difficult to see Afghanistan finding its way to an upward path of real sustained growth.
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Afghanistan Peace Campaign
The bridge connecting Afghanistan and Tajikistan in Shughnan district, seen from the Afghan side. Photo by Fabrizio Foschini, 2009
