Ms. Gannon is a Canadian journalist who covered Afghanistan and Pakistan for 34 years for The Associated Press.
The New York Times
4 January 2024
It’s striking how much Afghanistan, which has the unfortunate legacy of being the site of America’s longest war, has all but disappeared from public discussion in the United States. But perhaps it’s understandable. After all, there always seems to be another conflict, another war — which, as it happens, is also Afghanistan’s history.
Since 1979, Afghans have lived in almost perpetual conflict. Millions of people have been forced to flee their homes or their country. Foreign interventions have come and gone, ending in failure, leaving Afghans and their neighbors to live with the consequences.
Today, America’s longest war is over. The U.S. Embassy in Kabul sits empty, a daily reminder of how America has sought to isolate Afghanistan since the U.S. military’s withdrawal in 2021. Washington has done so in an effort to pressure the ruling Taliban to moderate its views, including committing to women’s rights, expanding the government to non-Taliban members and addressing human rights abuses.
That tactic backfired the first time the group was in power. And vacant Western embassies aren’t going to get girls back to school or increase women’s participation in the work force. Instead, isolating the Taliban has served only to isolate Afghans, leaving many of them feeling alone and, worse, helpless.
It’s time to accept that past policies have failed and that the United States and its allies must change course and commit to greater engagement, which would in turn bring a better understanding of the realities in Afghanistan. Along with the large amount of humanitarian aid Washington provides, it’s time for America to return to Afghanistan and the 40 million people who live there. Washington should reopen its embassy in Kabul and commit to engaging with Afghans across society. Afghans need to know that the United States and others are there and that they can be depended upon.
As a journalist who worked in Afghanistan for decades, I have seen the country through its many wars and witnessed the results of successive failed policies. I watched as so many nations and international organizations scrambled to evacuate some of the country’s brightest and best-educated people. I watched the last U.S. aircraft fly out of the Kabul airport in 2021, bringing a frantic end to the war and ushering in the Taliban’s return to power.
I wondered then whether the world would ever be able to see Afghanistan for the striking country it is and to see Afghans — not just the Kabul elite and expatriates but also those in villages and cities, on farms that stretch for miles or in the rugged mountains — not as a problem to solve but as the very answer to lasting peace in their country.
When the Taliban previously controlled Afghanistan, from 1996 to 2001, Washington, the United Nations and others came down hard on Taliban leaders with conditions they were instructed to meet if they could hope to gain recognition by the United States and other nations. The Taliban were told to educate girls, end drug production and expel Osama bin Laden, who had lived there since the spring of 1996, before the Taliban took power.
But U.S. and U.N. sanctions closed off Afghanistan and undercut those among the Taliban who wanted to engage with the world and had a vision for their country that — while it might not have matched the conception in Western capitals — included having girls and boys attend school.
Most significantly, some of those Taliban members open to engagement did not support foreign fighters taking up residence in their country. As I reported at the time, the Taliban’s then deputy interior minister, Mohammad Khaksar, told me that in the years before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist strike on the United States, he had reached out to a U.S. diplomat and a C.I.A. official in neighboring Pakistan for help in expelling foreign fighters but was rebuffed. Gregory Marchese, at the time the vice consul at the U.S. Consulate in Pakistan’s northwestern city of Peshawar, later corroborated to me that he’d had that meeting with Mr. Khaksar and a C.I.A. official, Peter McIllwain. Mr. McIllwain later confirmed what Mr. Khaksar had said about it.
America did not focus on Afghanistan in the years after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, when it closed its embassy. This left Washington blind to what was taking shape there in the lead-up to Sept. 11. Over the past two years, Washington has pursued a similar policy, shunning a diplomatic return to Kabul and believing it can pressure Taliban leaders into educating girls and easing restrictions on women with the promise of international recognition. And once again, that notion is failing.
In my reporting on the Taliban movement since 2021, I have found that the most restrictive Taliban leaders have grown more assertive, capitalizing on the nation’s isolation to tighten their grip, at the expense of those who advocate international engagement and whose vision for their country does not exclude girls from education or seek to make women invisible.
Financially, America has continued to be generous to Afghanistan, providing significant humanitarian aid since the Taliban’s return to power. In fact, America remains one of the nation’s largest humanitarian donors — having spent about $2 billion on aid since leaving the country. (At the same time, the United States and European nations are holding more than $9 billion in Afghan assets, frozen since the Taliban’s return.) But humanitarian aid alone won’t help Afghanistan move forward.
The public face of the anti-Taliban movement in Afghanistan is composed of some of the same discredited warlords accused of war crimes and former generals who took charge after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, some of whom have also been accused of — and denied — crimes against Afghan civilians. The United States has been engaged with those leaders, but they are part of the problem, not a solution.
Of course, America talks to the Taliban as well. U.S. officials have met with Taliban leaders in Qatar, where the group maintains a political office and where the U.S. diplomatic mission to Afghanistan is based. Washington’s special envoy, Thomas West, is the public face of America’s Afghanistan policy. He has met with the Taliban in Qatar to discuss topics like education for girls and humanitarian aid, and he holds meetings with the leaders of Afghanistan’s neighbors and those in the Middle East and Europe.
But it is engagement at a distance. That strategy offers a voice to only a few Afghans — the Kabul elite, expatriates and former government officials. That means U.S. officials don’t hear, see or understand what is happening on the ground. The United Nations has maintained a steady presence in the country since the Taliban took power, and nearly 20 nations, including Japan, China, Russia and some Middle Eastern nations, have maintained or established some sort of diplomatic presence there in the past two years. Until the United States and other Western nations do the same, there will be people in Afghanistan who will continue to feel alone and unable to make the changes that only they can make.
It would also be helpful if Western officials’ public statements aided in finding a path forward rather than inflaming sentiments. Speaking to Congress in April about how U.S. funds were being used in Afghanistan, the U.S. special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, John Sopko, said: “I would just say I haven’t seen a starving Taliban fighter on TV. They all seem to be fat, dumb and happy. I see a lot of starving Afghan children on TV. So I am wondering where all this funding is going.”
While Mr. Sopko’s concerns about how U.S. money was being spent may have been legitimate, that kind of caricature is not in anyone’s interest. The Taliban is a movement defined by its religious zeal, whose tribal roots are deeply wedged in Afghanistan’s conservative countryside. Respect goes far in Afghanistan — and a lack of respect goes equally far in unproductive directions.
The Taliban come from within Afghan society. That does not mean all Afghans support the relentless restrictions on girls and women, but it does mean that navigating a way forward requires deeper understanding, less arrogance and more of a homegrown Afghan solution.
And like it or not, that means returning to Afghanistan.
Kathy Gannon is a Canadian journalist and former correspondent and news director of 34 years for The Associated Press, covering Afghanistan, Pakistan, Central Asia and the Middle East. She was seriously injured in 2014 when an Afghan police commander fired on her car, killing an A.P. photographer from Germany, Anja Niedringhaus.
We thought we would start the new year by asking AAN writers and friends to recommend books about Afghanistan. The books they reviewed were diverse – fact and fiction, classics and newly-published and written in English, Pashto and German. Two were books that the reviewers felt helped make sense of why the Islamic Republic and its foreign backers failed, both written well before 2021. Three are accounts of journeys, from the 1930s, 2010s and after the 2021 fall of Kabul, all far more than travelogues. The memoirs of a United States airman who listened in to conversations from insurgents far below, gathering intelligence in order to target them, reveals the danger of realising your enemy is human, while a novel brings out the humanity of those living through an earlier phase of the war – the devastating fight over Kabul in the 1990s. We hope you enjoy these reviews as much as we did.
Rosita Forbes, ‘Forbidden Road. Kabul to Samarkand’, 1937
It was one of those finds. I had never heard about the book before, never saw it in a footnote or referred to elsewhere, but then discovered a story from a world long gone.
“The frontier you wish to cross is generally regarded as closed,” is what Rosita Forbes was told at the Soviet embassy in London when she earnestly started planning her trip to Samarkand, “through Afghanistan.” It is the 1930s and her wish to travel had been generated by seeing refugees from Soviet Turkmenistan, fleeing collectivisation, in Mashhad, Iran.
Finally, the journey happens. Forbes, an English travel writer, who had driven an ambulance in the first world war, travels through Afghanistan, a country then in the middle of – underreported – reform. The take of historians is usually that ‘reformer-king’ Amanullah’s abdication in 1929 was followed by half a century of stagnation. But Forbes speaks about then prime minister, His Royal Highness Sardar Hashem Khan, as “Asia’s wisest politician” and describes passing through “amazed villages lectured” by radio broadcasts in “Pushtu” on “agricultural reform, trade, sanitation, and the suppression of unnecessary murder.” She sees an Afghanistan with the potential for change – although the few glimpses into women’s life are sobering.
The road to Samarkand, described in the second half of the book, leads her through Kabul, a city with (you hear echoes of Babur) “a beauty like nothing else on earth.” She travels to the Khyber Pass and Jalalabad, and Herat and Bamyan, with the old bazaar at the feet of the Buddha statues still existing, and Charikar and Duab and finally Mazar-e Sharif, “the mecca of Central Asia.” To get there, she has made ‘a little detour’, mainly by lorry, squeezed in between male passengers and the driver. In a black hat, shawl, overcoat and sunglasses. And lipstick, if one of the ‘76 half-tone illustrations’ in the book does not deceive me.
“We lunched in the middle of [a] Ghazni street under the lovely long walls of her fortress.” road to Mukur, she describes villages with “excellent rest-houses with clean beds, tea, and a pilau for the ordering.” (70 years later, this writer still found pilau there.) “To travel with Afghans is a pleasure,” Forbes writes: “With seventeen Afghans on the post lorry,” mind you, on the way back from Kandahar to Kabul, “we had no food for eight hours, and were half frozen by sleet and wind.” In Kabul, the passengers all said farewell. “It was a good day. I had enjoyed it.” So did I, this very unexpected book.
Rosita Forbes, ‘Forbidden Road. Kabul to Samarkand’, 1937, EP Dutton & Co, New York, 289pp, (second-hand, found online)
Reviewed by Thomas Ruttig, a co-founder of AAN.
Jamaluddin Aram, ‘Nothing good happens in Wazirabad on Wednesday’, 2023
This moving debut by Jamaluddin Aram is an ode to life in the midst of war. His novel tells the story of a neighborhood in Kabul in the early 1990s (Wazirabad, for those who don’t know it, is next to Kabul Airport and was a ‘prize’ greatly fought over) and presents a fascinating cast of characters. There is the Kite-Seller and Bonesetter, the Widow, the Electrician, three militiamen and a young calligrapher called Seema; the men are mostly named by their work or profession, while the women are mostly defined by their familial positions and relations. However, the novel takes us beyond these titles and the stories of the women are detailed and layered – as they provide for their families, questioning and subverting the norms, or skillfully navigating a world where the stakes are set against them, to survive and pursue their hearts’ desires.
This novel is unexpected and refreshing in its language and structure. While written in English, the book incorporates Persian poetry, local proverbs, sayings and elaborate curse words and phrases with ease and grace, immersing us in a particular place and time. The structure is nonlinear, interweaving the stories of all the characters and integrating gossip, rumors, predictions and dreams, giving a surreal quality to the storytelling. The book tells stories of love, hate, faith, doubt and survival with tenderness for a community suffering poverty and living in the shadow of the war but not defined by either.
Jamaluddin Aram, ‘Nothing good happens in Wazirabad on Wednesday’, 2023, Simon & Schuster, 299 pp, ISDN 978-1668009857
Reviewed byShaharzad Akbar, a human rights activist in exile who misses home and loves books.
Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, ‘Connecting Histories in Afghanistan’, 2008
While in Herat recently, I re-read Hanifi’s ‘Connecting Histories’that explores the economy and society of the country in the 19th-century and its relations with colonial British India, through a lens of trade, literacy and state building at a critical and turbulent period of history.
Drawing on official and oral historical sources, Hanifi describes how British hopes of a subservient ‘frontier zone’ that might enhance their economic interests were thwarted by successive Afghan rulers who, while relying on handsome subsidies, gradually expanded their bureaucratic infrastructure in order to retain a monopoly on transnational trade in key commodities that depended in large part on nomadic communities for secure transport. The author documents how control of commerce enabled Abdul Rahman Khan (r 1880–1901) to invest in measures that he deemed essential for a ‘modern’ and independent state, while still making the case for increased subsidies.
The book has particular resonance in the aftermath of the most recent foreign engagement, when a culture of entitlement seemed to prevail among many Afghan politicians and officials whose legitimacy derived largely from financial and material support provided – often unconditionally – by outsiders. Just as in the 19th-century, such assistance was portrayed as a bulwark against an ever-shifting set of perceived threats to both donor nations and their allies in Kabul. By contrast, external aid has, since 2021, been employed as a means to pressure the current administration, whose response is to maximise locally-generated revenue and question the manner in which much ‘humanitarian’ assistance is provided. Hanifi’s book serves as a reminder that tension between Afghan leaders and their foreign backers is nothing new. Since 2021, this tends to be portrayed as primarily a tug-of-war over control of external aid with the administration in Kabul, but may also be about the current leadership’s assertion of a right to determine the longer-term vision for Afghanistan.
Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, ‘Connecting Histories in Afghanistan’, 2008, Columbia University Press, 282 pp, ISDN 0804774110
Reviewed byJolyon Leslie, who has lived and worked in Afghanistan since 1989 and is currently engaged in building conservation in the old city of Herat.
Ian Fritz, ‘What the Taliban told me’, 2023
This is the memoir of a US airman who deployed to Afghanistan after having learned Farsi and Pashto. In 2011, at the age of 22, he began flying hundreds of hours on ‘Whiskey and U-boat gunships’.[1] This was the time of the US military’s ‘capture or kill’ operations and of ‘the surge’ when President Barack Obama pushed US troop numbers up to more than one hundred thousand to break the Taleban insurgency.[2] Fritz’ job was to listen in to Afghans speaking on their walkie-talkies far below – and use that information to kill them.
He offers an entertaining, very personal, worm’s-eye view of the war. He is smart, well-informed and writes with insight about contending with strange languages, cultures and comms systems.
His perch gave him a rare window on the war. Most of us could only really see it from the single angle our particular perspective permitted, but occasionally you get a clear look from a different angle, and it makes your eyes go wide. Fritz shares his double vision with the reader, of the enlisted member of the US armed forces, and the man listening in to the conversations of fellow human beings. That was very hard on him.
The core of the narrative is how Fritz’ comms monitoring got him seeing his ‘targets’ as humans and the war itself differently. It made him suicidal. He did quit in time to save himself, but had a hard time getting the people around him to even understand what the problem was. He describes how the same thing happened to most other specialists in his role. Fritz went on to become a medical doctor.
I had expected more about the Taleban in this book, given its title, but it really only offers glimpses of them: he condemns them, but likes them. Fritz only deals with the politics of the war on a very abstract level, focusing on the stupidity and wrongness of it.
Ian Fritz, ‘What the Taliban told me’, 2023, Simon & Schuster, 304 pp, ISDN 978-1668010693
Reviewed byRoger Helms, who has been involved in Afghanistan since the 1980s when he worked on cross-border aid projects from Pakistan. He features in AAN largely as our map-maker.
Lillias Hamilton, ‘A Vizier’s Daughter: A Tale of Hazara War’, 1900
Hamilton, a prolific journalist as well as family doctor to the Afghan king, Abdul Rahman Khan (r 1880–1901) wrote what reads now like historical novel, in 1900. That was only a few years after the events which give it its setting, the brutal suppression by the ‘Iron Amir’ of the Hazara uprisings of 1888-1893. The author gives a fictionalised account of real events, saying she wrote about what had been seen and heard by people that she spoke to. They included Gul Begum, the heroine of her story.
Gul Begum is the daughter of an arbab, a Hazara landowner, who was a minister – vizier – in the self-governing Hazarajat before the war. Beautiful and wise, her father was really proud of her. When Hazaras lost their lands and property after defeat in the fight against Abdul Rahman Khan, Gul Begum was among the women and children taken captive and sold as slaves, while her father disappeared. In a complicated but compelling story, she tries to escape a forced marriage to a colonel in the amir’s army. Whether or not she escapes her fate, the reader will need to find out.
I found the book realistic and exciting, and with everything narrated simply and fluently, in a way that any reader could easily understand. Hamilton was an outsider, a British woman at a foreign court, but also an insider, family doctor to the royal family. Her account feels authentic.
Lillias Hamilton, ‘A Vizier’s Daughter: A Tale of Hazara War’, 1900, Gale and The British Library, 430 pp ISBN 978-1535800402
Reviewed byRohullah Suroush, a researcher with AAN.
Barnett R Rubin, ‘The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System’, second edition 2002
Of the books about Afghanistan that I have read over the years, and they are quite a few, there is above all one which gave me a major piece in the puzzle of why everything turned out the way it did in that agonised country – Rubin’s ‘The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System’.The main focus of the book is how the Afghan political elites, including the state, as well as civil society and later the armed opposition groups during the Soviet occupation, became increasingly dependent on foreign assistance from competing international powers. It was a development which began in earnest during the reign of Abdul Rahman Khan (r 1880-1901) and which ultimately led to the collapse of the state and the fragmentation of Afghan political and social society in the beginning of the 1990s. Although it is not covered in the book, the same conditions came to characterise Afghan political life in the coming decades and was an important cause to the downfall of the Islamic Republic in August 2021.
Barnett R Rubin, ‘The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System’, 1995 (second edition 2002), Yale University Press, 420 pp, ISDN 0300095198
Reviewed byAnders Fänge, a Board Member of the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan (SCA), SCA Country Director for 17 years during different periods between 1983 and 2011 and UNAMA Field Director 2001-03.
Whitney Azoy, ‘Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan’, 1982
Books published on Afghanistan that adhere to at least a minimum academic standard are not known as enjoyable reads. That is not their purpose; they should instead have rigorous analytical standards and be of value in helping you to understand Afghanistan, either as a whole system or one of its smaller components. Reading these books does often feel like a chore. But on occasion — a rare occasion — there is a book that offers both high quality analysis and is an enjoyable read. Whitney Azoy’s 1982 classic about buzkashi is one of those few.
Whitney Azoy first came to Afghanistan at the beginning of the 1970s as a US State Department Foreign Service Officer. He later resigned from the State Department and enrolled in an anthropology PhD programme. He returned to Afghanistan for fieldwork and departed in 1978, as did most foreigners. The result of his fieldwork was a PhD dissertation on the horse-riding sport of buzkashi, a project that was later published in 1982 as a book. In 2012, a 3rd edition by Waveland Press was published that included two new chapters and 30 more years of buzkashi in Afghanistan.
Buzkashi, a sport with deep Turkic cultural roots and historically popular in northern Afghanistan, and often described as horseback polo with a dead goat (or calf), is usually considered at most to be an entertaining game to play or watch once the temperatures drop. However, the game as a metaphor for politics and power competition in Afghanistan is a rich one. There is so much in this sport that can, once analysed, offer insight into how Afghanistan works. It is a metaphor, not strict engineering schematics, so it does take some literary license to make the metaphor work. Azoy goes beyond that simple comparison and observes everything around buzkashi as part of the broader game – from powerful local elites to the lowliest of social outcasts who are present on the sidelines. The importance of buzkashi was not lost on the national government, and they eventually introduced it in Kabul in a sanitised and controlled version for public consumption.
The book has, throughout the text, engaging characters and vivid scenes of people angling for position – both on and off the field. It is as valuable a read now as it was when it was first published. I consider it mandatory reading when considering a short list of introductory texts to Afghanistan.
Whitney Azoy, ‘Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan’, 1982, University of Pennsylvania Press, 152pp, ISDN 978-0812278217
Reviewed byChristian Bleuer, a researcher with two decades of experience in Central Asia. He is currently updating his Afghanistan Analyst Bibliography (2019); to be published by AAN in 2024.
Muhammad Ismail Yun, ‘What was Not Said in the Palace’ (in Pashto), 2017
This book was written by Kabul University professor and owner of Zhwandun TV station. Muhammad Ismail Yun. He also worked as the Head of Cultural Affairs in the Security Council for about two and a half years during the second Hamed Karzai presidency, sitting in the Arg, Afghanistan’s Presidential Palace.
Before that, Yun worked as an elected first clerk (munshi) in the Emergency Loya Jirga and member of the secretariat (dar al-insha) in the Constitutional Loya Jirga and as a campaigner for Karzai in the 2009 presidential election. He had established good relations with Karzai during his jobs in the Jirgas and been able to have many meetings with the president. He said he accepted Karzai’s offer of a job at the Security Council on the understanding that he would not only be a government employee, but the voice of the nation.
Yun provides short biographies and character sketches of all those who were in the palace during his time there, what he observed and heard, including in special meetings with the president, whom he said he met more than ten times.
He mostly speaks about the demands of the various powerbrokers. As a staunch Pashtun nationalist, it is not surprising that Yun mainly highlights those coming from the Northern Alliance – Shura-ye Nizar – whom he says were able to get Karzai to accept their demands and work for their interests. He also describes how it was individuals working in the palace, rather than the rule of law which prevailed, and how the neighbouring countries were also able to put pressure on Karzai, obliging him, he said, to accept their proposals concerning the internal affairs of Afghanistan. An example he gives of something which actually took place in Karzai’s first term, before Yun got his palace job, was what Yun calls the ‘unnecessary pampering of minorities’, when the districts of Panjshir and Daikundi were promoted to the rank of provinces in 2004.[3] He says that after making scores of arguments to Karzai against this promotion, the president told him: “I was very much forced to – Iran forced me a lot.” Yun believes that, as there was no parliament at the time, these decisions were unlawful.
“I understood from my first meeting with him,” Yun says of Karzai, “that anyone could spend time with him. His social behaviour was very good, but his political behaviour was full of ‘dealings’, and he obeyed force.”
People outside the palace, writes Yun, kept asking: What’s going in the palace? While people inside the palace were asking each other: What’s the gossip (sar-e chowk)? The real situation, he contends, was unknown not only to the people outside, but also even to those working in the palace. Yun claims to have been the voice of the nation when speaking to those in power, a sane voice in a place of chaos and an observer of that chaos and of what ‘really went on’ behind the scenes. The detail he gives, the accusations he makes and the stories he tells are all interesting. He was also, of course, an individual with interests as well.
Muhammad Ismail Yun, ‘De Arg Nawayalai, 2017, De Afghanistan Mili Tahrik [the National Movement of Afghanistan]
Reviewed byAli Mohammad Sabawoon, a researcher with AAN.
Matthieu Aikins, The Naked don’t Fear the Water’, 2022
I find it difficult to read books about Afghanistan, partly because so few compare with my experience of the country and its people. Most are still written by non-Afghans with an outsider’s view, some of them downright orientalist. Of course, I belong to this group of outsiders, although I have lived and worked in the country for many years, so feel entitled to criticise. So, it’s rare that books come along that pique my interest, but Matthieu Aikins’ book, “The Naked don’t Fear the Water”, did pique my twin interests – Afghanistan and refugee studies. It is also written by someone I met during my time in Afghanistan and respect deeply.
This non-fiction book tells the story of a journey made in 2016 by Matt with his Afghan translator, driver, ‘fixer’ and friend, Omar, to reach Europe in search of a better future: the aim was to experience first-hand and chronicle the dangerous journey many refugees and migrants take to escape poverty, economic uncertainty and conflict.
It is written in the sort of beautiful and compelling prose that I have never been able to master. It is an important book that has come at an important time – when the discussion of forced migration is once again dominating politics, and when the humanity of the refugee is too easily lost or forgotten. If you read it carefully, it also tells us how differently some countries welcome ‘outsiders’ – like Matt – who was welcomed by Afghans and Pakistanis with open arms and friendship, in stark contrast to the way most Western countries approach refugees, which is increasingly hostile and suspicious.
For the journey – described by one reviewer as “a modern version of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’”[4] – Matt had to “leave behind the passports that allowed me to move so easily through this world of borders.” There are many such reflections along the way, reminders of the enormous privilege that comes with a ‘respectable’ passport that enables easy border-crossing. Hopefully, readers will keep these differences in mind – and not simply be swept up by the incredible journey. The majority of refugees, lack such a privilege; Omar fittingly observes that his only possession is luck.
Matt tells us early on that he is making the treacherous and risky journey in part to give something back for all that Omar made possible for him in Afghanistan since they first met when both were about 24 years old: “I was confident that we would leave Afghanistan together, no matter what. Our trip would close a circle, for there had been a reciprocity in our motion, it seemed to me, since the day we met.” Matt does sometimes wonders if it was this reciprocity – or brotherhood – that drove him to make the journey, or whether, perhaps, it was the great story. The truth perhaps is a bit of both, friendship and story become blurred. After all, the book is written by Matt, not co–written with Omar, and while it tells Omar’s story, it is from Matt’s perspective, and in many ways, it is really Matt’s story.
When I recently reread the first 50 pages of this book, I was struck by two things. Firstly, this story is underpinned by male privilege – it is unlikely that a woman could have had quite such an experience or written such a story. At the least, the story would have been drastically different. Mostly though, Matt is aware of his various privileges, reflecting, for example, on how he can pass as an Afghan while also holding Canadian and US passports: “My ancestors came from Japan and Europe, but I look uncannily Afghan: almond eyes, black hair, wiry beard, describing the reaction of an early tea house acquaintance: “He’s a foreigner! But why does he look so Afghan?” Elsewhere, he experiences racism because of that appearance, so the privileges it brings is highly contextual: “With my dark hair and Asian eyes, I had crossed a color line somewhere over the Atlantic. In Europe, I was no longer included with the whites. I got called a Paki in England; in France, I was arabe. But as I travelled into central Asia, it was like walking toward a mirror; in norther Afghanistan, with its mix of Hazaras, Tajiks, and Uzbeks, I’d found my phenotype. People saw their face in mine.”
Matt was able to slip in and out of these two apparent identities, passing as Afghan when it suited, and calling on his Canadian-American identity when it suited, such as entering Afghanistan with the two litres of alcohol allotted to foreigners, in an exchange with the border police: “‘Brother, are you telling me you’re not Afghan?’ ‘No sir,’ I’d say, scrambling around the let with my passport before the cop could snatch the bottles. ‘Look at my name, I’m not even Muslim – sorry’.” Most refugees, including Omar, don’t have this privilege, to take on different identities, although Omar did try – and fail – to pass as a non-Afghan on his refugee journey.
The second surprise for me when re-reading the book for this review also came early on, when Matt tells his story of throwing a big party in Kabul, with alcohol and drugs flowing freely. I wondered why this had to be included in a story about displacement. Was it there to show the decadent lives of many Westerners in Kabul (not all, possibly not even a majority of us) and to remind the reader why the Taleban might feel that the West had corrupted Afghans? Did he mention this, along with other earlier stories of first going to Afghanistan, travelling on local transport and staying in small hotels and guesthouses, hanging out with some questionable characters, smoking hashish and occasional opium, as honest truth-telling of his own coming of age as journalist, or unnecessary bravado? These are the parts I stumbled over – perhaps, because I wondered how much of an Indiana Jones or Lawrence of Arabia mentality there was in the many Western men who worked in Afghanistan, especially as I had not pegged Matt as one of them. There is always a danger in such great stories, even when written with great sensitivity and finesse, that they appeal to readers on a different level than intended – to those in search of a good adventure story.
In the end, Afghanistan and Omar gave Matt what he had wanted since graduating from college in 2006 – great stories: “I wanted to be a writer and thought I’d find in the world the material I lacked within myself.” And while Matt has delivered an insightful and empathetic story about Afghanistan, Afghans and displacement, and the global dilemma of how to humanely address forced displacement, I could not help but wonder how the story would have been told differently if Omar had not been the protagonist in Matt’s story, but the author of his own story. What would Omar have told us about the experience of the failed Western state–building project in Afghanistan that squashed his hopes of a better future, how he felt about working for the Western military and Western journalists, ‘fixing’ their stories and fame? How did Omar experience the trip – and what was he thinking when Matt got annoyed at him being homesick and lovesick and wondered to himself: “What kind of protagonist was he?”
I enjoyed the book, despite the occasional discomfort at some passages, but also wondered if I would have liked it more had it been co–authored or written from Omar’s perspective. Does it take a Western author to draw attention to the plight of refugees? There are, after, all excellent first-person narratives written by refugees, such as Behrouz Boochani’s acclaimed autobiographical book ‘No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison’,[5] and I think we need more of these books, especially from Afghans, where the authors are the protagonists of their own story, not someone else’s. I can’t wait to review such a book next time.
Matthieu Aikins, ‘The Naked Don’t Fear the Water: An Underground Journey with Afghan Refugees’, 2022, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 384 pp, ISDN 978-1913097851
Reviewed bySusanne Schmeidl, a critical peace scholar-practitioner. She has worked for nearly three decades in academia and the non-profit sector, much of it in Afghanistan.
Christoph Reuter, ‘We Were Happy Here: Afghanistan after the Victory of the Taleban – A Road Trip’, 2023
“We met Taleban who offered, with a flirtatious smile, to carry our luggage,” but also “local commanders who held us for hours, time and again, just because they could.”
This book by veteran German journalist and occasional AAN author Christoph Reuter provides a deep look into a period in Taleban-ruled Afghanistan that might well be already over – the immediate aftermath of the re-establishment of their Emirate. Chaos reigned in many places, allowing access to areas that had been off-limits for reporters – and most Afghans – for at least a decade. Given the subsequent consolidation of the Kandahar-centred Taleban leadership’s power and increasing control of Afghan and international journalists, Reuter’s freedom to move, his ability to make a ‘road trip’, as the book’s subtitle calls it, might already be a historical anomaly.
“Suddenly, we were able to travel everywhere,” the author says and takes us to 18 of the (now) 33 provinces of Afghanistan: to Nuristan where former government employees try to survive as hunters, to Zaranj in Nimruz province where desperate Afghans try to break through the border to Iran and to Daykundi where an accusation of ‘Taleban land-grabbing’ turns out to be the work of a Hazara landlord. Reuter also takes the reader to Ghormach in Badghis province where a farmer ploughs a field that has seen no rain and is not even his own, and for a walk through Kabul’s terror victim cemeteries. The road trip is completed by glimpses of Kabul in the dramatic time just before and then after the collapse of the Islamic Republic. Reuter had been in Kabul just before the collapse, not anticipating – like everyone – that it would come so soon.
Reuter also takes us back to the pre-August 2021 Kabul bubble, with parties where German diplomats and aid officials shared thoughts on ‘how it really looks in the country,’ a reality which they did not share in their official reporting. The Afghan government’s narrative of difficult but incremental ‘progress’ had to prevail – until it was too late. Reuter laments that, in German, there is “no plural for ‘self-delusion’.” It is a great line.
The book, however, is much more than pure reportage, let alone travelogue. A chorus of Afghan voices permeates the book, from Baridad, the farmer, to Afghan parliamentarian Raihana Azad, from the Taleb who apologised for his boss’s rudeness, to Muhammad Yassin, an aircraft mechanic who was sitting on an evacuation plane in August 2021 about to leave Kabul airport. Reuter had sneaked onto what was a private evacuation flight, only to be forced off it at gunpoint by the US military. It was Yassin, the Afghan about to go into exile, who provided the quote for the book’s title: “We were happy here.”
Reuter slips in a good amount of – sometimes dead-pan – analysis. He draws from two decades of Afghanistan exposure, from not just flying in from time to time, but from spending years in the country. For some of them, he was the only German journalist permanently based in Afghanistan. He carried out pioneering investigations, including an early report into one of the many US ‘wedding bombings’, in 2002 in Uruzgan province, the result of a local US ally covering up his men’s looting of a village.
In Kunduz, Reuter and photographer Marcel Mettelsiefen visited each family of the 90 people who had been killed in the German bombing of two fuel tankers highjacked by Taleban in 2009. The tankers had got stuck in a sandy riverbed during a dark Ramadan night and the insurgents had called the inhabitants of a nearby village to syphon off the fuel and get the tanker afloat again (they failed). Meanwhile, a German commander – fed disinformation by a sole source (an NDS employee who augmented his earnings with a German salary) that all the people assembled there were ‘Taleban’ – ordered an airstrike. Reuter called it “the gravest order to kill the Bundeswehr [German armed forces] issued in its history.” His investigations – recalled in this book – brought the incidents back to light, the horror fresh again, after all these years.
Some parts of the book were published as reportages in English on Spiegel magazine’s website (see here; here and here). The book deserves to be translated in its entirety.
Christoph Reuter: ‘Wir waren glücklich hier: Afghanistan nach dem Sieg der Taliban – Ein Roadtrip’, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2023, 336 pp. ISBN 978-3-421-07005-0
Reviewed byThomas Ruttig, a co-founder of AAN.
Edited by Kate Clark
References
References
↑1
The Airforce-speak for variants of the C-130 military transport plane.
↑2
The surge in troops began in December 2009, peaked in summer 2011 and numbers returned to 70,000 in by summer 2012: see a timeline from the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations. For more on the ‘capture or kill’ operations see this AAN report by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, ‘A Knock on the Door: 22 Months of ISAF Press Releases’, published on 12 October 2021.
↑3
These decisions were, however, immensely popular with local people who felt they had been neglected by successive central governments. People in Daikundi, for example, one of the poorest and most isolated areas of Afghanistan, believed that splitting from Uruzgan and gaining a status as a province would bring them more attention, services and funding.
A pseudonym for an Afghan peace and women’s activist
Al Jazeera
Published On 1 Jan 2024
The biggest challenge of teaching girls and women in Afghanistan is not the security risk or the bad internet connection, but the creeping hopelessness.
I have sent the link and I am waiting for my students to join the Zoom session. I am teaching them English. I receive a notification that my students are in the waiting room. I put a big smile, I let them in, and greet them in English.
I know that they can’t see my smile because I don’t turn on my camera for security reasons, but I know they hear it in my voice. I know that I have to do everything and anything to keep up the spirits of my students. And I have to do it for myself as well.
Since 2021, we have had to struggle against two enemies: the Taliban ban on secondary and higher education for girls and women and the desperation and hopelessness that are slowly overcoming us.
According to the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), some 2.5 million girls and young women are out of school due to the ban. Before the universities were closed for us, one in three young women were enrolled; some 100,000 were denied their dreams of pursuing the degrees they wanted. Not only that, even when students have found opportunities to study abroad, the Taliban has denied them the right to do so.
Islamic scholars have repeatedly said and emphasised that there is no basis in our religion for this ban. Even economically, it does not make sense. The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates that preventing girls from attaining secondary education costs the Afghan economy some $500m per year.
The Taliban government has refused to change its decision despite the repeated appeals of international organisations and agencies. Afghan women and girls, for their part, have refused to give up.
The need and desire for education has been so great that soon after the bans were imposed, a few teachers got together and organised classes online. At first, it was a small group with just a few students. I joined them about a year and a half ago.
We teach English as well as all high school subjects and a few additional courses, like computer skills. News of our courses spread by word of mouth and more and more students joined. By 2023, we had grown to 400 students from across Afghanistan.
I consider myself lucky to have this opportunity – to be able to help a little my family financially and help other young women and girls who want to study and learn.
I had received training at a teacher training centre before 2021. I did the course without having the intention to be a teacher one day; my dear father had suggested that I do it and I followed his advice.
At the centre, they taught us how to approach education through different methods and how to interact with students to help them learn better. But a lot of what we learned could only be applied in a normal situation where the teacher and students are in a classroom together, not online struggling with a frustratingly bad internet connection.
So when I began teaching online, it was a challenge. I struggled and often thought about quitting, but the desire of my students to learn kept me going and I found a way to make it work.
“Whenever I thought I couldn’t do it, you showed me somehow that I could. You are the best role model in my life,” one student wrote to me recently. Such messages really warm up my heart and motivate me to keep going.
But there are other times when I also get difficult questions that I struggle to answer.
“Teacher, if I had been allowed to go to school, now after two years, I would have graduated from school. But it would have been useless because I am not allowed to go to university. Or if I were to graduate from university, again it would be useless because I would not be allowed to work. So why should I study now?” another student asked me recently.
It was a heartbreaking question. I wonder how many girls and young women across the country are asking themselves this question.
Due to the prison-like conditions that Afghan women and girls live in, many suffer from mental health problems. According to statistics from medical facilities, there has been a sharp increase in Afghan women taking or trying to take their own lives.
Many don’t have hope for the future and I can see it in my students. I am often compelled to assume the role of a counselor and sit and listen to stories of suffering and depression. Some of my students have shared that they are mocked or blamed for what has happened to them – working hard and dreaming big, only for everything to come crashing down.
Hearing and knowing what my students are going through makes it all the more challenging to teach. But I know I cannot give up and must keep going for their sake. I constantly try to keep them motivated, keep their spirits high, and encourage them to love learning and exploring.
I share inspirational stories and biographies of great people from across the world. I ask them to write lists of their dreams and goals, to share their plans for their future and everything that keeps them hopeful and motivated. I try to help younger students discover their talents; I ask them to write stories and poems or to paint. We try to break out of prison through learning and creativity.
The other teachers and I are doing our best to keep the hope of Afghan girls and young women alive. But we need support. It would make a huge difference for our students if the United Nations and international organisations could help us set up a mechanism to formalise the education we provide and grant valid documents certifying degrees attained. This would help motivate young women and girls and lessen the troubling feeling that they are wasting their lives.
Things in life often don’t go according to plan. I never planned to be a teacher, especially not one in hiding. But here I am teaching online, defying an unjust ban, trying to help my fellow Afghan girls and women, and fighting despair. It is a job I never wanted, but I love doing it.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
I teach in secret, defying the Taliban ban and fighting despair
The United Nations Security Council has passed a resolution on the Independent Assessment on Afghanistan, which former Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs Feridun Sinirlioğlu had put together. UNSC Resolution 2721 only passed after a month and a half of Security Council meetings, mainly held behind closed doors, and two weeks of intensive negotiations on its language. The result is a resolution which failed to fully endorse the Sinirlioğlu report. AAN’s team here summarises the developments around the Independent Assessment, from how it came to be proposed, to its contents, to the Resolution passed on 29 December, the last working day of the Council in 2023.
The Security Council adopts resolution 2721 (2023) on the independent assessment on Afghanistan. The resolution was adopted with 13 votes in favour and two abstentions (People’s Republic of China, Russian Federation). Photo by UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe, 29 December 2023.
The Independent Assessment on Afghanistan, mandated by the UN Security Council on 16 March 2023 (see UNSC Resolution 2679), was given to UNSC members on 9 November. Since then, it has been the subject of much discussion among Security Council members, Afghans and other interested parties and Afghanistan has loomed large on the Council’s agenda, both formally and informally.[1] On 11 December, the co-penholders, Japan and the UAE, circulated a first draft of a resolution concerning the Assessment to Council members. The members then met to discuss the draft on 12 December and later provided written comments. A second draft was shared on 18 December, and after an additional round of comments and edits, a third draft was shared with council members’ under silence ‘on 26 December.[2]
The following day, China, France and Russia broke the silence, with Malta, Switzerland and the United States providing additional comments. The penholders then put a fourth and final draft ‘in blue’ on 28 December (here). This was the resolution that was put to a vote on 29 December.
This report is structured around four questions. The first deals with the events that preceded the Assessment and how the Security Council embarked upon this course of action. The second and third summarises the Assessment, while the fourth sums up what the Resolution says.
Why did the UN Security Council ask for an assessment?
In the two years following the dramatic collapse of the Islamic Republic, the question of ‘what to do’ about Afghanistan has been of great concern to the UN Security Council (UNSC). Three of its permanent members – the United States, United Kingdom and France had given military and financial backing to the Republic and, for greater or lesser periods of time, had fought the Taleban, who took power on 15 August 2021.
Afghanistan has been high on the Security Council’s agenda as it concerns the Council’s specific powers, especially Chapter VI (articles 33-38) on the specific settlement of disputes and Chapter VII (articles 39-51) on actions with respect to threats to the peace, breaches of the peace and acts of aggression.[3]
On the day after the takeover, 16 August 2021, Afghanistan was the priority item on the agenda for the 8834th meeting of the Security Council (see here); UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appealed to the Security Council and the ‘international community’ to “stand together, work together, act together and use all tools at their disposal to suppress the global terrorist threat in Afghanistan and to guarantee that basic human rights will be respected.” Since then, the Security Council has continued to single out these two primary concerns, what it casts as the ‘global terrorist threat’ and ‘respect for basic human rights’.
The 2021 annual report on Chapter VI related practices of the UNSC also touched on the situation in Afghanistan, encouraging all parties to:
[S]eek an inclusive, negotiated political settlement, with the full, equal and meaningful participation of women, that responded to the desire of Afghans to sustain and build upon the country’s gains over the past 20 years in adherence to the rule of law, and underlined that all parties must respect their obligations (see page 434 here).
The 2022 UNSC annual report on Chapter VII concerns named Afghanistan as one of the countries which it saw threats to international peace and security as continuing to emanate from and expressed particular concern over:
[T]he cultivation, production, and trafficking of illicit drugs and acknowledged that illicit proceeds of the drug trafficking in Afghanistan were a source of financing for terrorist groups and non-state actors that threatened regional and international security. (page 4)
[T]he Council reiterated the need to ensure that the sanctions regime pursuant to resolution 1988 (2011) contributed effectively to ongoing efforts to bring about sustainable and inclusive peace, stability and security in Afghanistan, and noted the importance of the sanctions review when and if appropriate, while taking into account the situation on the ground, in a manner that was consistent with the overall objective of promoting peace and stability in Afghanistan (pages 24 and 25).
Afghanistan continued to figure prominently on the UNSC agenda in 2022. Of the 127 UNSC consultations in 2022, seven were about Afghanistan and the country was referenced 11 times in the list of highlights of UNSC activities that year (see here). It was discussed, among other places, at a country-specific high-level meeting on 26 January and also at an informal, confidential gathering under the Arria-formula on 24 October. (see here).
However, differences in how the member states of the UNSC wanted to deal with Afghanistan emerged in 2023 in discussions surrounding the extension of the United Nation’s Assistance Mission in Afghanistan’s (UNAMA) mandate in March. The lack of a consensus became evident. Initially, the co-authors of two March resolutions on Afghanistan — Japan and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – envisioned an extension of the UNAMA mandate without any changes for nine months and an independent assessment regarding Afghanistan by October 2023. The United States, in particular, strongly opposed extending UNAMA’s mandate for only nine months, saying that shortening the mandate for four months would “negatively affect both UNAMA and the Secretary-General’s plan to convene Afghanistan special envoys” (see AAN reporting here).
The result was two resolutions, both passed on 16 March 2023. One extended UNAMA’s mandate until 17 March 2024. The second, Resolution 2679 (2023), requested the UN Secretary-General, in his role as the UN’s chief administrative officer, to provide the Security Council with “an integrated, independent assessment” no later than 17 November 2023 (see AAN reporting here), following consultations with “all relevant Afghan political actors and stakeholders, including relevant authorities, Afghan women and civil society, as well as the region and the wider international community.” The Assessment should:
[P]rovide forward-looking recommendations for an integrated and coherent approach among relevant political, humanitarian, and development actors, within and outside of the United Nations system, in order to address the current challenges faced by Afghanistan, including, but not limited to, humanitarian, human rights and especially the rights of women and girls, religious and ethnic minorities, security and terrorism, narcotics, development, economic and social challenges, dialogue, governance and the rule of law; and advance the objective of a secure, stable, prosperous and inclusive Afghanistan in line with the elements set out by the Security Council in previous resolutions”
The mandate was broad and somewhat vague, covering the actions not only of the UN but also other ‘relevant political, humanitarian, and development actors’, in other words, everyone concerned with Afghanistan.
About a month later, Guterres appointed senior Turkish diplomat Feridun Sinirlioğlu as the Special Coordinator for the independent assessment (announcement on 25 April here). The appointment preceded a long-awaited meeting of special envoys on Afghanistan, held in Qatar’s capital Doha, on 1-2 May 2023. The meeting, said Guterres, was “about developing a common international approach, not about recognition of the de facto Taliban authorities,” and that it was important to “understand each other’s concerns and limitations” (see readout of the press conference here). Participants in this meeting, Guterres said, agreed on “the need for a strategy of engagement that allows for the stabilisation of Afghanistan but also allows for addressing important concerns” (see also AAN analysis here).
What key issues does the independent assessment identify?
The Independent Assessment on Afghanistan was not published on the UN website until 6 December 2023 (here), but was leaked and widely distributed soon after it was circulated to UNSC members (see for example, the independent, women-led non-profit news website Pass Blue here).
The Assessment says it has one “overarching goal” – to “advance the objective of a secure, stable, prosperous and inclusive Afghanistan in line with elements set out by the Security Council in previous resolutions.” It does not, however, identify what those elements are.[4] Widespread consultations with Afghans and others, it says, have underlined that “international engagement is not working.” It does not “serve the humanitarian, economic, political or social needs of the Afghan people,” nor does it address the concerns and priorities of “international stakeholders, including the neighbouring countries.”
Following what the Assessment coyly refers to as “the political transition in August 2021” (ie the military defeat of the Islamic Republic, which donor countries and the UN itself had done so much to support, and the re-establishment of the IEA, which many of those countries had previously been fighting), it says that many Afghans, nations and UN bodies had been concerned about IEA governance and the protection of rights, especially of women and girls. They are also concerned about “potential threats” to regional stability. From the IEA’s point of view, the Assessment says, it controls Afghanistan’s territory and governs the country, but has “appealed unsuccessfully for political and economic normalisation.” This situation “has led to an impasse, leaving much of the international community’s relations with Afghanistan in a state of uncertainty, with serious repercussions for the Afghan people.”
It concludes that it is necessary to find a ‘political pathway, basing this premise on current problems with aid (more on which below) and the fact that Afghanistan has the potential to both “enrich the region” as a hub for “trade, connectivity and people-to-people contacts” and destabilise it as a potential source of “transnational terrorism,” illegal narcotics and migrants” and because Afghans and others do not want to see renewed conflict. It says the pathway should allow all sides to discuss and deliberate their interests fairly.
The end state of those discussions, the Assessment says, is the “definition of a future where the State of Afghanistan is fully reintegrated into the international system without passing through a further cycle of violence while respecting all legal obligations.” It offers proposals “for a way forward and an engagement architecture to guide and bring more coherence to political, humanitarian and development activities” and that it presents “a substantive roadmap” that will “enable more effective negotiation and implementation of the priorities of Afghan and international stakeholders.”
This is a grand vision, but even at the earliest stage of the document where these quotes are from – page 2 of 19 – questions are raised and not answered, for example, given that the various Afghan and international stakeholders have contradictory priorities, how can Sinirlioğlu confidently assert that they will be implemented?
The Assessment then identifies five “key issues and priorities”. The first is human rights, especially what it calls the “basic rights of women and girls,” including to education, work and representation in public and political life. It also mentions “other patterns of unequal treatment and discrimination” towards citizens of “a number of ethnic or religious minority groups” (without specifying which – here or anywhere else), reports of extrajudicial killings by the IEA, especially of former officials and members of the security forces, the shrinking of civil space, including the harassment of civil society and the media, and restricted access to justice.
A second, shorter section outlines concerns about “counterterrorism, counternarcotics and regional security”. Security has improved since August 2021, it says – not surprisingly, given the (unmentioned in this document) the complete victory of the Taleban over the Republic. It acknowledges Emirate moves against the Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISKP), again not surprising as it is the IEA’s most dangerous armed opponent. It then points to the Emirate’s “limited responsiveness” to international calls to contain or control “terrorist groups and individuals inside Afghanistan, including members of Al Qaeda,” who, it says, have shown a “persistent presence.” These groups include significant numbers of Tehrik-e Taleban Pakistan (TTP) fighters who “appear to have free movement and shelter in Afghanistan and are carrying out an intensifying campaign of violence inside Pakistan.” This section also acknowledges the IEA’s “significant progress” on counter-narcotics (although as AAN has reported, so far, that has focused on cultivation, while trade has largely continued) and says “many stakeholders” want to help with “alternative crops and livelihoods”.
The Assessment then moves on to a third key issue/priority – economic, humanitarian and development issues. Those consulted by Sinirlioğlu and his team “across the spectrum” urged, the Assessment says, for “any international engagement strategy” to give attention to the combined humanitarian, development, and economic challenges facing Afghanistan.” Neighbouring countries, it says, see their interests served by Afghanistan having a robust and healthy economy. Afghans want urgent relief, it said, but also “but also an ability to fully invest in and pursue their own economic futures and livelihood opportunities freely.”
The Assessment describes the collapse of the economy in August 2021 as a consequence of the abrupt halt to aid and the freezing of Afghan access to the international banking system and (for the new IEA government) offshore foreign exchange reserves. Although the economy has, it says, for now stabilised, albeit at a low level, it warns that aid, already insufficient, is expected to fall, and that the banking system is still not functioning properly. It devotes one bullet point to shortcomings in IEA policy, which have contributed to “chilling” the economy: “Failure to institute measures of fiscal transparency, abrogation of the judicial system and basic legal guarantees, and lack of equal economic participation among all sectors of society have all contributed to continued low confidence among international donors and investors.” It also cites the IEA’s “exclusionary policies” towards women and some former technocrats.
The Assessment recognises that the nature of the aid – off-budget, with little development funding and no technical assistance – “limits the degree to which [it] can respond to basic needs in a sustainable and cost-effective way” and that delivery via an “overlapping network” of UN agencies and NGOs is costly and lacks necessary scale and coordination. It hones in on the particular damage of restricting technical assistance in agriculture, water management, demining and public health and denying Afghanistan access to funds aimed at helping the poorest countries adapt in the face of the climate crisis.
The last bullet point in this section feels significant. Stakeholders, the Assessment says, suggested ways to improve the effectiveness of aid or ensure economic recovery, but it warns: “[T]he triggers that have led to the current situation are as much political as economic, and economic recovery will depend significantly on a political decision, by donors in particular, to promote the development of the economy for the benefit of the Afghan people.” It lays Afghanistan’s problems with development and the economy squarely at the door of donors, alone.
A fourthkey area, Inclusive Governance and Rule of Law, deals with what the Assessment describes as the call by many Afghan stakeholders, member states, multilateral institutions, the Security Council, neighbouring countries and near-neighbours that the IEA establish “an inclusive system of governance.” A “balanced, broad-based, inclusive, accountable and responsible government” is both a “reflection of fundamental rights” and “a key ingredient for peace, stability and harmony within the country and in the region.” It says that in this “diverse, multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian, multi-linguistic and multi-cultural society,” the inclusion of all communities in governance structures is “central to the social and political stability.” Many Afghans, it says, “expressed perceptions of exclusion and discriminatory practices on the basis of ethnicity, language and gender” under the IEA. Many spoke of their disenfranchisement from the “full ability to participate in political life” and the “marked decline in the space for political engagement”, to raise concerns and affect policy-making.
This, it says, was especially the case for Afghan women.
It says the IEA interprets such calls as a demand for power-sharing and “specifically for a return to government of some former political leaders”. The IEA also denies the charge that it is exclusive, insisting its government is ethnically diverse and that it has retained much of the Republic’s civil service.
The Assessment acknowledges that the IEA has established some limited means for consultation and complaint and that “many Afghan civil society actors” have continued to “build bridges and create spaces for dialogue among themselves and with the [de facto authorities] on an informal basis.” It believes these could be “built upon and be complemented by national dialogue.” Re-establishing “a justice and rule of law system that protects equal participation and fulfilment of rights,” it says, “would advance inclusive governance, while also contributing to economic growth and stability”. Notably, no mention is made of elections.
The fifth key indicator deals with Political Representation and Implications for Regional and International Priorities. In this short section, the Assessment acknowledges the IEA’s call for recognition, bilaterally and at the UN, and its assertion that it meets the requirements for occupying Afghanistan’s seat at the UN General Assembly (a decision on this was postponed for the third year in December 2023, see AAN report here). The Assessment acknowledges that this lack of recognition disadvantages Afghans and has limited the means to deal with regional concerns, including on trade, connectivity and transboundary resource management. However, “International stakeholders,” the Assessment says, remain “aligned behind the position expressed at the Secretary-General convened meeting of Special Envoys on Afghanistan in May 2023, which supported engagement with Afghanistan and the development of a common international approach, but that acknowledged the DFA [de factor authorities] should not be recognized at this stage”.
Already, in this laying out of the key issues, assumptions have come into play: that donors are overwhelmingly responsible for the economic woes of Afghanistan, or that the IEA will change what it fundamentally believes to be correct, for example, why would the Emirate want to ‘re-establish’ something it believes it has already instituted, the establishment of a justice system based on holy law that fulfils the rights of both God and people?
What are the Assessment’s recommendations?
The Assessment makes four broad recommendations and offers an analysis of the justification for those recommendations as well as suggestions regarding their implementation.
The first set of recommendations proposes a series of measures aimed at addressing the basic needs of Afghan people and strengthening trust through structured engagement.These include:
Expanding international assistance, including technical assistance, to improve the capacities of relevant Afghan institutions to deliver services to Afghan people more effectively.
Supporting food security and agricultural livelihoods, including the IEA’s ongoing counternarcotics campaign, environmental security and water management, the health sector, and demining, prioritising the most vulnerable groups and women and girls.
Finalising some near-finished infrastructure projects that were started before August 2021.
Establishing economic dialogue and financial reforms to reduce the effects of existing sanctions on the banking sector and supporting efforts to rehabilitate Afghanistan’s central bank, but only after the Emirate demonstrates transparent and accountable fiscal governance.
The Assessment point out that while “economic dialogue may positively impact blockages to private investment and banking transactions,” the “chilling” economic effects will likely ease only after significant policy changes, including removing restrictions on women and girls. The Assessment envisages that progress on economic issues would promote the Switzerland-based Fund for the Afghan People to disperse funds, which would stabilise the currency and offer a “gradual transition from current cash shipment-based assistance.”
Enabling partial restoration of regular transit, trade, and other means of connectivity between Afghans and the world, including airport safety and capacity, which would pave the way for more flights at Kabul International Airport.
Restoring regular administrative processes inside the country and abroad to issue passports and visas.
Encouraging and assisting activities that help Afghans realise their political, economic, cultural and social rights, including support for media, civil society, and victim-centred approaches to justice and reconciliation.
Recommendations to provide women and girls “educational opportunities, including for online learning, employment, micro-finance, preventing gender-based violence and providing psycho-social support” seem to fall well short of pursuing avenues that would see Afghan women benefit from the full spectrum of their rights as guaranteed by international law. This section also includes assistance to “women and girls and vulnerable Afghan groups and individuals who have sought protection and refuge outside Afghanistan” and dialogue with the IEA on its human rights obligations.
The second set of recommendations addresses what the Assessment calls security-related concerns of “International stakeholders and UN bodies” about “the use of Afghan soil to threaten or attack any other country, the planning and financing of terrorist acts, and the production, sale and trafficking of illegal narcotics.” The Assessment stresses the need for coordination and cooperation between the IEA and international stakeholders to address these concerns and enumerate priority areas as:
Supporting bilateral and multilateral security cooperation, which it says will require significant capacity and resources.
Cooperating with international counter-narcotics efforts to maintain the current pace of the IEA’s plan to eradicate illegal narcotics.
Strengthening international borders, including border controls and issuance of identity papers and travel documents.
Expanding international cooperation and assistance in areas that advance regional and global priorities, including in response to climate change, transboundary water issues (presumably on the Helmand Water Treaty, see AAN report here), counter-narcotics and global health security.
Reviewing and updating relevant provisions of the UN 1988 Sanctions list to “facilitate better compliance … and make the sanctions regime more relevant to current realities.”
Gradually resuming diplomatic engagement inside Afghanistan, which would pave the way for more sustained dialogue with all Afghan stakeholders, without specifying who these might be, as well as the delivery of international aid, including development assistance.
The third set of recommendation lays out a roadmap for political engagement intended to fully reintegrate Afghanistan into the international community in line with its international commitments and obligations. This section sets out to explain how the Assessment’s stated objective: “An end state of Afghanistan’s full reintegration into the international system” can be achieved using a “more coherent political engagement process…. pursued through a performance-based roadmap.” The outline of which is explained broadly as: “(A) international obligations of the State of Afghanistan with suggested benchmarks to indicate progress in meeting them, and (B) a call for an intra-Afghan political process that will build toward inclusive constitution-making. Progress in both of these components will build toward (C) an end state of the international community’s normalisation of relations with the State of Afghanistan.”
The final and fourth set of recommendations suggests a set of mechanisms designed to coordinate and oversee the recommendations made in the report. The Assessment stresses that significant resources and coordination platforms are needed to implement its recommendations effectively. To this end, it recommends three interlinked mechanisms:
UN-Convened Large Group Format: This group currently exists and was first convened by the UN Secretary-General in May 2023 in the Special Envoys format. The Assessment recommends another meeting of the large group format to discuss and advance its recommendations.
International Contact Group: This smaller group, selected from members of the large group format, would coordinate action and approaches “take a more frontal role” in political engagement with Afghan stakeholders.
UN Special Envoy: The Special Envoy would have a complementary mandate to UNAMA and focus on “diplomacy between Afghanistan and international stakeholders as well as on advancing intra-Afghan dialogue.” She/he would represent the UN in the above-mentioned groups and lead coordination efforts.
What is in the Resolution about the Assessment and where do we go from here?
Resolution 2721 was adopted on 29 December by 13 votes in favour, with China and Russia abstaining (see here). The Resolution sets forth six points as a common approach of the Council members on Afghanistan, with some reservations from China and Russia (more on which below).
It says that the Security Council:
1. Stresses the critical importance of a continued presence of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) and other United Nations Agencies, Funds and Programmes across Afghanistan, and reiterates its full support to the mandate and the work of UNAMA and the Special Representative of the Secretary-General;
2. Takes positive note of the independent assessment on Afghanistan (S/2023/856);
3. Encourages member states and all other relevant stakeholders to consider the independent assessment and implementation of its recommendations, especially increasing international engagement in a more coherent, coordinated and structured manner, affirms that the objective of this process should be a clear end state of an Afghanistan at peace with itself and its neighbors, fully reintegrated into the international community and meeting international obligations, and recognizes the need to ensure the full, equal, meaningful and safe participation of Afghan women in the process throughout;
4. Requests the Secretary-General, in consultation with members of the Security Council, relevant Afghan political actors and stakeholders, including relevant authorities, Afghan women and civil society, as well as the region and the wider international community, to appoint a Special Envoy for Afghanistan, in a timely manner, provided with robust expertise on human rights and gender, to promote implementation of the recommendations of the independent assessment, without prejudice to the mandate of UNAMA and the Special Representative of the Secretary-General and their vital work in Afghanistan;
5. Welcomes the Secretary-General’s intention to convene the next meeting of the group of Special Envoys and Special Representatives on Afghanistan initiated in May 2023 in a timely manner, and encourages the meeting to discuss the recommendations of the independent assessment;
6. Requests that the Secretary-General brief the Security Council on the outcome of these consultations and discussions within 60 days.
According to the independent think tank, The Security Council Report,[5] it appears that negotiations concerning the Resolution were complex and contentious (see here). This was evident also from the discussion at the Security Council following the vote on 29 December (see here). On one side of the rift were the UK and US, both very supportive of the Assessment and apparently also of the initial draft of the Resolution. China and Russia, on the opposite end, were primarily concerned about the lack of IEA buy-in for the process suggested in the Resolution. In remarks delivered on 20 December, US Ambassador to the UN Robert Wood said:
[W]e welcome the UN’s Independent Assessment on Afghanistan. We agree with the report’s recommendations on appointing a UN Special Envoy in establishing an international contact group. The UN Special Envoy and the contact group will be important for the development of a roadmap that ensures Afghanistan meets its international obligations. They will also complement UNAMA’s work to accomplish its mission of promoting peace and stability in Afghanistan.
Following the vote, Deputy Political Counsellor of US Mission to the UN Lisa Browne said:
The United States strongly supports this resolution’s call for a UN Special Envoy for Afghanistan. A Special Envoy will be well positioned to coordinate international engagement on Afghanistan, including with relevant Afghan political actors and stakeholders, to achieve the objectives laid out in this resolution. The resolution’s request to set up a Special Envoy for Afghanistan, emphasizing that such a post would help coordinate work to achieve progress in the country.
[S]hould seize the momentum of the independent assessment with the hope of changing Afghanistan’s current negative trajectory.… [W]e encourage all parties, including Afghan and international stakeholders, to take forward the independent assessment’s recommendations, working towards an Afghanistan that is at peace with its people, its neighbours, and the international community.
China and Russia built their argument around the Islamic Emirate’s response to the Assessment (seen by AAN), which was provided to Council members. The IEA defended its record on women’s rights, security, the economy and narcotics and rejected any suggestion of intra-Afghan dialogue or the creation of the oversight mechanisms referred to in the report, particularly the Special Envoy. It blasted the “malicious and illegal sanctions” regime, “grudge-motivated pressures” on it and interference in Afghanistan’s internal affairs. The IEA did welcome “recommendations of the assessment that support the strengthening of national economy of Afghanistan, opens the pathway to the recognition of the current government and encourages regional connectivity and transit via Afghanistan.”
It is obvious that currently Council members remain divided on the follow-up implementation of the assessment report, and the Afghan authorities, on the other hand still have reservations on some recommendations…. China and the Russian Federation expressed these concerns in the consultation and constructively proposed amendments to the draft of relevant issues, which however were not taken on board. It is deeply regrettable, and we have to abstain in the vote just now.… It is our hope that going forward, the Secretary-General will cautiously deal with the appointment of the Special Envoy, continue to strengthen communication and interaction with the Afghan authorities, and strive to find appropriate solutions.
Russia abstained on a draft resolution on the independent assessment report on Afghanistan.… [W]e assume that the Secretary-General will consult the de facto authorities when appointing a Special Envoy and will also take into account the views of all members of the Security Council. That is a principled condition that we have insisted on from the outset. We would like to make it clear that we will not support Secretary-General’s decision unless it has the approval of the de facto authorities.
China and Russia, according to The Security Council Report, also raised questions regarding the composition of the “smaller contact group” and suggested deleting the paragraph about the Special Envoy altogether. However, the penholders have not gone as far, and their suggestion was left out of the final ‘in blue’ draft. The think tank reported that:
[C]hina and Russia apparently suggested deleting the paragraph that requests the Secretary-General to appoint a Special Envoy for Afghanistan and removing text noting that the next meeting of Special Envoys and Special Representatives should discuss the proposed establishment of the “smaller contact group,” In the next draft of the Resolution, the penholders apparently removed the text on the “smaller contact group” and added language requesting that the Secretary-General consult with relevant Afghan political actors and stakeholders (including the Taliban, Afghan women, and civil society); Council members; the region; and the international community before appointing a Special Envoy.
It also seems that UNSC members could only agree “to take a positive note of the independent assessment” and “encourage member states and all other relevant stakeholders to consider and implement its recommendations.” China and Russia were reportedly behind the latter formulation. Altogether, any language that stipulated endorsement of the Assessment and its recommendations was a point of debate among Council members. The Security Council Report said:
Although the first draft of the Resolution endorsed the independent assessment and its recommendations, it appears that later drafts instead welcomed them, following a proposal from Malta and the US. It seems that China and Russia argued that the draft should either take note of the independent assessment or welcome the efforts of Sinirlioğlu and his team. In an apparent compromise, the draft in blue takes positive note of the independent assessment.
Text affirming that one objective of this process was to see Afghanistan fully reintegrated into the international community and meeting its international obligations was subsequently added to the Resolution, The Security Council Report said. However, the Resolution was stripped of any conditionality, ie any language that suggested that IEA compliance with the obligations under international law was a precondition to Afghanistan’s full reintegration into the international community.According to The Security Council Report,a group of European members of the Security Council, including France, Malta, and Switzerland had sought to bolster language relating to Afghan women and the ‘women, peace and security agenda’. The think tank said:
Several members, including France, Malta, and Switzerland apparently proposed language emphasising that the Taliban’s compliance with their obligations under international law, particularly those relating to human rights, is central to the roadmap for political engagement outlined in the independent assessment report.
Text reaffirming the indispensable role of women in Afghan society was added to the Resolution following a proposal from Switzerland, as was language noting that the Special Envoy for Afghanistan should have robust expertise on human rights and gender.
The independent assessment has generated a dynamic discussion about Afghanistan, which has been on the global side-line for some time, but so far, responses to its recommendations among Afghanistan’s stakeholders appear to fall short and be far from adequate. The move to have an independent assessment was driven by a desire to establish a consensus on how the Security Council deals with Taleban-ruled Afghanistan. No such shared approach, however, appears to have emerged. The Resolution does authorise the appointment of a Special Envoy, but “in consultation with members of the Security Council, relevant Afghan political actors and stakeholders, including relevant authorities, Afghan women and civil society, as well as the region and the wider international community”. There is no mention in the Resolution of an intra-Afghan dialogue envisioned by Sinirlioğlu’s report as the key mandate of the Special Envoy. Instead, the Special Envoy, as per the text of the Resolution, is seen as a gender and human rights expert who should “promote implementation of the recommendations of the independent assessment, without prejudice to the mandate of UNAMA and the Special Representative of the Secretary-General and their vital work in Afghanistan”. This also limits the space where a future Special Envoy would work and have a say. It is also noticeable that the idea of a smaller contact group has been dropped entirely. The Resolution only confirms that the negotiations between various international and local actors will continue without a feasible conclusion any time soon. China and Russia’s firm position that they will not approve any choice that the IEA has not approved, seems to indicate that the appointment of the Special Envoy will not happen any time soon.
Edited by Roxanna Shapour, Jelena Bjelica and Kate Clark
References
References
↑1
The following meetings were among those held:
10 November A first discussion of the report by Security Council members during an informal lunch organised by the outgoing co-penholders on Afghanistan, Japan and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
28 November Closed-door Security Council meeting (see here).
30 November Meeting of the high-level diplomatic grouping, the Group of Friends of Afghanistan, co-organised by Canada, UK and Qatar (see hereand here).
11 December Closed-door, ‘Arria-formula’ Security Council meeting on “women’s perspectives on Afghanistan” (see here), organised by Switzerland and co-sponsored by Japan and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)
20 December Briefing of the Security Council by Special Representative of the Secretary-General and head of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) Roza Otunbayev (see the video here). Statements were also given by the Representative of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Geneva and Director of the Coordination Division, Ramesh Rajasingham, a “representative of Afghan civil society” (unnamed in UN reporting ahead of the event) and the chair of the 1988 Afghanistan Sanctions Committee, the Ecuadorean Ambassador to the UN José Javier De La Gasca. This meeting was followed by closed consultations.
↑2
According to UNSC procedures, draft resolutions go through a negotiation process before they are put ‘under a silence’ – normally lasting 24 hours – to allow for final comments from Council members. When the Security Council approaches the final stage of negotiating a draft resolution, the text is printed ‘in blue’. See The UN Security Council Handbook.
↑3
The Security Council, as one of the six main organs of the United Nations, is primarily responsible for maintaining international peace and security (here). The Security Council takes the lead in determining the existence of a threat to the peace or act of aggression; it calls upon the parties to a dispute to settle it by peaceful means and recommends methods of adjustment or terms of settlement. It can also impose sanctions or even authorise the use of force to maintain or restore international peace and security. It can set forth principles for a peace agreement; undertake investigation and mediation, in some cases; dispatch a mission;appoint special envoys or; request the Secretary-General to use his good offices to achieve a pacific settlement of the dispute. Its powers are laid out in Chapters VI, VII, VIII, and XII of the UN Charter. The UNSC deliberations on Afghanistan are based on powers listed in Chapter VI (articles 33-38) on the specific settlement of disputes and Chapter VII (articles 39-51) on actions with respect to threats to the peace, breaches of the peace and acts of aggression. Based on these powers, the Security Council authorises UNAMA’s mandate and obliges the mission to provide quarterly reports on the situation in Afghanistan.
↑4
The list of Security Council resolutions on Afghanistan is long (read them here). There have been eight since the IEA takeover, dozens during the Republic and after the al-Qaida attacks on the US on 11 September 2001, and 11 before that.
↑5
The Security Council Report (SCR) is an independent think tank that works towards the promotion of transparency in UNSC decision-making. See the organisation’s website here.
UN Security Council Resolution on Afghanistan: Just another ‘much ado about nothing’?
The cold weather marks the start of the hunting season in many countries across the world. In Afghanistan, despite a hunting ban, this time of year sees the resumption of particular hunting-related activities. One particular group of hunters – raptor birds migrating through the country – become the hunted. Every year, some are caught and sold, often abroad, to be trained to hunt other prey in turn. At this time of year, as well, foreign falconers, notably wealthy sportsmen from the Gulf endowed with special hunting permits, come to western Afghanistan in order to indulge their passion for falconry and hunt their most prized quarry, the houbara bustard – which has also become the objective of a Qatari conservation programme in the country. In this second and concluding instalment of a two-part report on falconry in Afghanistan, AAN’s Fabrizio Foschini examines the illegal export of raptors from Afghanistan, and also the hunting of and efforts to conserve the houbara in Farah province. He notes the ambivalent effects of this particular form of foreign intervention.
Part 1 of this report, which traced falconry through poetry and memoirs, can be read here.
From hunting with falcons to hunting falcons
At Kandahar and above Kabul nests the Khorasani falcon When Aries comes the chicks of the peregrine are born And with Taurus you fetch them from the nest From Khorasan come peregrine falcons who are Great, healthy and powerful as marine falcons
In the first part of this report, centred on Khushal Khan Khattak’s Baznama, his poetic treatise on falconry from which these lines are taken, we have been referring to falcons in a rather general sense. Some classification will be required here before delving further into contemporary falconry. Raptors employed for falconry must be divided into two main groups, according to both modern Linnaean classification and traditional Arabo-Persian medieval categorisation, besides practical visual recognition when flying.
Falcons proper (Persian shahinan), that is members of the falconidae family such as the peregrine, saker, gyrfalcon, and even the smaller merlin and hobby, are categorised in Persian as siyahchashm (black-eyed) and can roughly be described as long-winged raptors.
Hawks (Persian bazan), on the other hand, such as the goshawk and the sparrowhawk, belong to the Accipitridae, which are traditionally labelled zardchashm or gulabchashm (yellow-eyed or rose-eyed) and can be described as short-winged.
Hunting techniques further set the two groups apart: falcons mainly hunt other birds, climbing above their prey before dropping on them out of the sky in a fast dive. Among these, the peregrine is pre-eminent, the fastest-moving creature on Earth, reaching speeds of 320 km/h. Hawks are more apt at catching prey both in the air and on land in manoeuvred flight through woodland or semi-covered areas. Falcons tear apart their prey, using a beak which has evolveda sharp ‘tooth’, one of the characteristic features of this group. Hawks kill with their talons.
Both types of raptors can be taken from the nest as chicks and reared and trained until they are able to hunt, or they can be captured as adults. Those who take chicks follow the birds’ reproductive calendar and sites of different species, seeking out the many falcons who nest in rugged mountainous terrain across Afghanistan, notably Badakhshan, Nuristan and Bamyan as well as other areas to the south and north of the Hindu Kush. Nowadays, however, adult falcons captured while migrating are considered superior, as they are already skilled hunters and do not require excessive training.[1] Consequently, their market price is much higher than that of birds taken from their nests and reared by humans. October and November are considered the best months for catching wild birds, especially falcons such as the saker or peregrine, when these migrate from Central Asia and western China to warmer areas, flying through northern and central Afghanistan.
The opening lines of this section show how modern-day Afghanistan was already considered a primary ground for catching raptors for falconry in Khushal Khan’s time. And if today, falconry practised by Afghans has by and large disappeared, hunting falcons in order to sell them, often on the international market, has increasingly become a profitable business.
A falcon hunter interviewed in Kabul agreed to share with AAN some details of the profession he had inherited from his father. He originally hails from Kunduz province and mostly traps migrating falcons in that area, in the districts of Dasht-e Archi and Khanabad or in neighbouring Darqad in Takhar province.
When we go hunting, prior to hunting we first catch some small birds – we call them sarkheli, badori, torlaki (black tail) or shinlaki (blue tail). We tie snares to their feet and head and to all places where it is possible to put snares on. We sew the eyes of these small birds shut and tie their wings so that they cannot fly away and get lost. They can fly maybe one or two hundred metres and we can easily catch them back. Some people use pigeons as bait, also putting a snare harness on them. When we see falcons and hawks in the air, we throw the birds towards them. They attack them, but they get stuck in the trap and then we catch them.
Some people also tie the bait birds into a net and when the hunting falcons see them, they attack and also get stuck in the net. They pin the caps of the net into the earth, so the falcons cannot fly away and carry it with them.[2]
Falconry in Afghanistan, like a number of traditional practices, has suffered the consequences of four decades of war, destruction and displacement. Until recently, a quite common sight on Kabul’s streets was men pulling handcarts filled with cages and birds of various kinds for sale, among them, inevitably sparrowhawks or other small raptors. Now, hunting raptors are mostly purchased by foreign buyers and trafficked outside the country.
Of course, there are exceptions: a number of falconers remain in the country, especially in the eastern region around Jalalabad (read a 2011 report here), where research into the current situation by members of the Pakistan Falconry Association (PFA) between 2014 and 2016 was undertaken. Afghan falconry also still exists in the Shomali plateau north of Kabul, whose residents have a deep-rooted interest in all types of hunting.[3] Here, when NATO troops were present, Afghan falconers were employed by the US Army to keep rabbits from encroaching on lanes at the Bagram airbase.
Falcon hunting and falconry are interconnected activities and often a family affair, passed down from father to son. Some contemporary hunters thus keep up hawking as a hobby, especially with birds they cannot profitably sell on the market. Such was the case with the hunter interviewed by AAN in Kunduz. He had captured two peregrine falcons during the 2022/23 season, the female he sold for a million Pakistani Rupees (around 3,700 USD), while the male he kept for himself for occasional hunting. He said males are not usually sold; as with most raptors, adult females are comparatively larger and more powerful than males (a differential which allows a pair of birds to hunt different prey in the same area) and are therefore more frequently employed in falconry as well as being in higher demand. Hawks are also more likely to be kept or sold in local markets.
Foreign demand for falcons is driving the market and comes overwhelmingly from the Gulf; falconers there do not employ hawks for hunting, but only and exclusively falcons. So, despite the veneration of the peregrine, the saker and other falcons in Khushal’s treatise and the presence of saker falcons in stories by Rattray and other colonial officers, much of the recent photographic evidence, as well as the author’s personal observations over the past two decades, point to a predominance of accipitridae, ie hawks, in the hands of Afghan falconers. Falcons, on the other hand, are probably not something the average Afghan falconer can afford any more and so those captured or raised inside the country are usually sold to foreign markets.
To highlight the difference this makes, a survey by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in Mazar-e Sharif in November 2007 found that the price of a female saker falcon ranged between 1,000 and 3,000 USD, while that of a sparrowhawk was only around 100 USD. Needless to say, the same falcons, once they are exported, are worth many times that price. In the late 1990s, a female saker falcon was worth between 20,000 and 40,000 USD in Riyadh or Dubai. After a temporary price drop in the early 2000s, more recently, prices were reported to have reached similar or higher figures already at the Pakistani market level, which is usually the retail outlet for Afghan falcons. The final price in the Gulf would be higher still.
As a consequence of this trade, the saker falcon’s status is endangered across the whole region, as reported already in 2007 by the WCS:
The case of the saker falcon is especially worrying. Biologists from the Environmental Research and Wildlife Development Agency (ERWDA) in Abu Dhabi (now Environmental Agency, EAD), mandated to address the impact of falconry on saker falcon populations, have documented a very rapid population decline, particularly on Central Asian breeding grounds, mostly caused by inadequately controlled offtakes for the falconry trade.
Successive Afghan governments from Karzai onwards have tried to tackle the trafficking of raptors (see Tolo News report here), although without much success. Despite several confiscations in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Gulf countries over the past two decades that have enabled the return and release of dozens of smuggled birds, the trade has continued unabated (see and by Pajhwok).
The hunting ban announced by the previous Afghan government (and which has been replicated by the Islamic Emirate) has not been enforced with regularity. High-profile Pakistani or Arab traders or their local contractors acquire permits for nest-hunting or trading raptors by government officials; thus, the ban has mainly affected local hunters who cannot afford to secure permits or bribe officials. For some involved in the hunting and rearing of hawks for local markets, these restrictions have forced them to give up their profession, while those making better profits have been able to continue their activities undisturbed.
The insurgency both exacerbated the previous government’s unwillingness to prioritise the fight against bird smuggling and also helped curb Afghan falconry and the raptor trade. The Taleban forbade hunting in areas under their influence in order to reduce the risk of villagers, wandering in remote and mountainous areas on a hunt, chancing upon their hideouts and reporting them to government or NATO forces. Long periods of high-intensity conflict typically have ambivalent effects on fauna as they tend to disrupt people’s hunting activities (read a report on falcon trafficking in Syria and the war’s impact). At the same time, it hinders attempts to protect the environment, launch restoration programmes and combat wildlife smuggling. While war in Afghanistan probably reduced people’s hunting for personal consumption or leisure, it did not stop the lucrative poaching of species in high demand in foreign markets.
The Kunduzi hunter said that, whereas in the past he used to go to Peshawar to sell the falcons he caught, in the last two years, he now goes to Kabul to meet contractors acting as buyers for foreign customers. This may be a result of the difficulties Afghans currently face crossing the Torkham border with Pakistan, but is surely also a sign that the raptor trade has not in any way been disrupted by the re-establishment of the Islamic Emirate, despite the continuing official ban.
A few short-winged hawks are still employed by the Afghan falconers who still hunt, given they are cheaper to buy and keep, and since their hunting techniques are more suited to the hilly and partially wooded terrain of central and eastern Afghanistan. The more specifically aerial prowess of falcons, such as the peregrine, seems to be better suited to the flat and open expanses of southern and western Afghanistan and, in those regions, it is to the glove of foreign falconers, rather than Afghans that the birds return to. Foreign hunting parties have become a fixture of Afghanistan in the past decades. Come winter, wealthy Arab falconers from the Gulf flock to western provinces such as Farah to fly their favourite falcons – often originally from Afghanistan, but smuggled to the Gulf via Karachi – at their favourite prey, the houbara bustard.
A hunting paradise in Farah
But the bustard, that miracle of the sky But for its leash it would grab! Higher than bustard can the falcons fly
From Khushal Khan’s geographical perspective in Afghanistan’s southeast and the Vale of Peshawar, bustards would probably not have been typical birds. Although they were present, they were and still are more common in the steppe expanses from Baluchistan to the north of Afghanistan. However, given his use of the phrase, “miracle of the sky,” the bustard’s flying skills and its value as game for falconry because of the sport it offered were very well known to him. This is further made clear by a hunting calendar he provides in the Baznama, where the bustard is featured from the month of October:
When it’s Virgo there come quails
And at the start of Scorpio white geese
For the bustards you must wait for Libra
This is indeed the time when the first houbara bustards – increasingly referred to by Afghans by their Arabic name ‘houbara’– arrive in Afghanistan.[4] Houbaras migrate between the northern steppes of Central Asia, such as in Kazakhstan and Mongolia, where they go to find mates and reproduce, and their winter quarters in western Afghanistan and Pakistan, where they stay between October and March. The season between the end of autumn and the early part of winter is also when falconers from the Gulf, who have a real obsession with the houbara bustard, fly to these parts.
There are several reasons why the houbara is such prized game among Gulf Arabs: partly, it is nostalgia for the old times, when houbara hunting during transhumance guaranteed food for Bedouin households, but also due to the unmatched sport offered to falconers by this bird with its size, mimetic plumage, flying skills and peculiar defensive techniques. Despite living partly on the ground, the bustard rises high into the air and spirals to avoid being struck, while reportedly also being able to defend itself by defecating on a pursuing falcon. Even more importantly, houbaras are considered a delicacy in the Gulf. There, the bird’s meat is believed to grant longevity and also, reportedly, to be an aphrodisiac (see this report by wildlife author, Richard Conniff). On a hunting trip, houbaras are often eaten right away, boiled first in order to tenderise the meat and then grilled, with the broth served as a starter.
A houbara bustard in western Farah province, 2023. Photo by AAN.
Due to intensive hunting, houbaras have become very rare in the Arabian Peninsula read a report here) and, after attempts at importing live birds captured elsewhere, Gulf hunters started to explore new hunting grounds, notably western Afghanistan.[5]
The presence of hunting parties from the Arab Gulf in Afghanistan dates back to the mid-1990s and has been no secret since Steve Coll, in his book Ghost Wars, wrote about an episode when the US were about to bomb a group, believing Bin Laden to be among them.[6] Under the Islamic Republic, Gulf hunters were sometimes even invited by government officials, in spite of the hunting ban (reported by Pajhwok here) and were able to secure permits to hunt in Afghanistan.
The current Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) also put forward a national hunting ban in November 2022. In some provinces, such as Farah, where hunting has evidently become of national strategic significance, the ban was imposed through other means. The local minister of Haj and Religious Affairs asked residents through sermons in mosques to stop hunting rare birds (see this Tolo report). The ban occurred just in time to stop the impending hunting season and the effects of its enforcement soon followed: Afghan media reported that a number of local hunters were arrested in Anardara and Khak-e Safed districts between the end of December 2022 and end of January 2023.
However, shortly after this, and in an even more timely fashion for the houbara season, the possibility for foreigners to hunt in Afghanistan became regulated through a series of contracts tendered by the Ministry of Culture and Information at a total of 42 million USD (ToloNew report here). Though the announcement alluded to different contracts, the main beneficiary is certainly Al-Gharrafa, a Qatari organisation headed by prominent businessman Sheikh Ali bin Abdullah al-Thani.
The Al-Gharrafa Foundation began its activities in Afghanistan (or at least was registered as an NGO in Kabul) on 23 April 2014, although it had already explored possible areas of interest (see an earlier Pajhwok report here)). Despite having a central office in Kabul (where its main project has been the building of a residential project for needy people, Shahrak-e Qatar in PD5 on land given to it by the Republic in exchange for investment by Qatar), its main focus has been on Farah province.
The first priority of the foundation was indeed a houbara conservation project, which started in 2014 with the building of a breeding farm about 15 km south of Farah city. Around one hundred houbaras were imported from Qatar and it was planned that 1,300 would be raised in the period up to 2019. By 2016, they had reached 855 birds and began releasing them in Dasht-e Chakerta, to the west of Farah city. According to Al-Gharrafa’s website, 470 were released in 2017 and around 400 in each of the following years (see also Afghan media reporting). According to an employee of Al-Gharrafa interviewed by AAN, to this day, around 2,800 houbaras, both male and female, have been released. Al-Gharrafa has also developed a date palm farm, some of the produce of which is given to locals as alms, and is also engaged in other charitable construction projects, such as building the airport of Farah, the local Friday Mosque and some educational facilities.
Qatari interest in Farah clearly lies in falconry, although a rationale for working there could could be found in need – although one of the largest Afghan provinces, it has seen some of the lowest aid and investment from donors. Moreover, given the vast expanses of desert ravaged by an ‘unstoppable’ wind, there is also a lack of alternatives to invest in.
Al-Gharrafa is not new to agreements on hunting permits. During the Republic in 2016, it obtained the right to hunt 30 per cent of the birds it would release each year (read a Pajhwok report from that time).
Hafez Burhanuddin, Director of the Environment Protection Department of Farah, told AAN that:
Every year, the Arabs come here in Jadi (December-January), Dalw (January-February) and Hut (February-March). Some years, they stay here for one month, some years for 15 days, but it’s always according to the policy and laws of the government. The Emirate has organised that this can be five months each year and that every time they come here, the Emirate is responsible for their security. This year and the past one, the Arabs have travelled here for three months.… They go about their business and spend their time here. All their activities are arranged with the central government. Then Kabul tells us and we execute what it is told to us.
The Arabs hunt with the falcons, they hunt the houbara and when they’re on a safari, they kill two or four houbara each day and eat them. They don’t hunt, except with the falcons and it must be said that they do not hunt the indigenous birds of Farah, except the houbara. When they come to Farah, they are given some 50 guards and moreover, they’re accompanied by drivers and some other local helpers, and these people are assigned to them by the Ministry of Interior.
Sheikh Ali himself comes every year for hunting trips, followed by guests and customers. According to local hunters and drivers who have served as guides to these parties, besides Dasht-e Chakerta, where Al-Gharrafa has a hosting facility and an additional preserve with other animals such as ostriches and wild goats, the Arabs mainly head to the westernmost districts of Farah and stay in mobile camps in Anardara and Lash wa Juwayn on Iran’s border, where houbaras are said to concentrate.
Despite some initial suspicion by locals as to the Qataris’ ‘real objective’ (read reports written during the Republic by ToloNews here and Killid here), as well as unease by some members of Farah’s civil society over the lack of accountability of hunting and aid alike – some locals interviewed complained about the big fluctuation in the level of charitable support and environmental impact from year to year – Al-Gharrafa’s activities certainly constitute a much-needed boost for Farah’s economy. The Arabs employ around 40 locals on the houbara farm (guards, veterinarians and the keepers). When hunting, they hire drivers, guides and other attendants and buy provisions and fuel, spending as much as 20 lakh AFS (27,000 USD) per day.
Al-Gharrafa’s interest in Farah also seems to have brought the attention of central government to the province: as reported by local officials to AAN, for the past two years since the re-establishment of the IEA and in contrast to other provincial administrations, where very little money has been distributed by the central government, the governor of Farah province has received a yearly sum of 500,000 USD to be spent on relevant projects.
Everybody interviewed by AAN seemed to agree that Qataris are not interested in buying local falcons in Farah. Visiting Arabs bring their own falcons and the only falcons on the farm in Farah are elderly specimens that cannot be released into the wild, something the foundation has often done with retrieved smuggled raptors. Similarly, although the mountainous areas of Farah, such as Kuh-e Sharafat in central Farah and Kuha-ye Saji in Khak-e Safed district, are still inhabited by falcons, nobody in the province hunts them. According to two local hunters interviewed by AAN, professional dealers from Helmand or Herat still operate, selling the birds on to Pakistani contractors.
Altogether, the IEA’s ban on hunting reinforces efforts made by the previous government, although it is probably better able to enforce the ban, even though at this time many impoverished Afghans might have turned to hunting to boost their meagre incomes. Such a short-term solution to economic woes would irrevocably deplete Afghanistan’s remaining wildlife reserves. One of the hunters from Farah interviewed by AAN, who in past years hunted quails, partridges and rabbits to sell in the city for their meat, said that for the past two years the hunt had not been good and that animals had become few and far between because of intensive hunting. He said the Taleban ban had only spurred him on further to give up his profession, at least temporarily.
Nonetheless, the hunting ban exposes the unfair relationship between Afghan citizens and wealthy foreigners, as the latter are permitted to hunt, even if only for leisure, in exchange for economic and political support.
Falconry and environmental conservation: concerns from which the Afghans are excluded?
Hunting with falcons? You need to have money Or neither money nor needs
Any impression that the presence of an organisation such as Al-Gharrafa in a remote place such as Farah is a bizarre eccentricity, the whim of a sheikh indulging in his private pastime, needs to be dispelled. Not only, as mentioned, is Al-Gharrafa’s engagement with Farah’s wildlife a part of the organisation’s portfolio in Afghanistan, the Qatari organization is far from being an exception in the Gulf landscape.
It can be reductive to describe houbara hunting by Gulf Arab falconers as simply an aristocratic pastime practised by a powerful minority of foreigners in a poor country which finds itself in a position of dependency. The cultural value of falconry as a tradition has been widely explored and is charged with social and even environmental significance in Gulf countries. In the words of the director general of the International Fund for Houbara Conservation (IFHC): “Falconry remains, for many people, intrinsically linked to… tying people together with wildlife and enforcing conservation programmes.” In recent times, however, the effects of this ancient tradition – coupled with modern technologies such as off-road vehicles and GPS – have been detrimental to the animal and bird species involved.
Arab Gulf countries began efforts to protect and repopulate bustards at home in the 1980s, following which, programmes were launched to support bustard populations abroad as well. The International Fund for Houbara Conservation (IFHC), a United Arab Emirates-led effort, was founded in 2006 and established houbara farms and other conservation projects in Morocco and Kazakhstan. Saudi Arabia soon sponsored a centre in Morocco as well. Qatar seems to have decided that Afghanistan could be the place to test its mettle in the competition for the conservation and hunt of bustards and, indeed, it seems to have found in it the perfect terrain for regaining any ground it might have lost with respect to its neighbours. A similar project sponsored by the UAE centred on curbing smuggling and establishing a research farm, appeared in northern Balkh province in 2013 (see this report by Radio Azadi).
The long-term Qatari engagement as a potential mediator during the Afghan conflict and its solid relationship with the Taleban has offered an unrivalled entry point for cooperation with the IEA, even on these types of projects (see ToloNews report). If nothing else, Afghanistan probably offers Qataris less of the bureaucratic hassle involved in organising falconry safaris abroad (read here about a diplomatic incident caused by the death of the Qatari Emir’s falcons at customs in Kazakhstan).
This sort of ‘sporting’ competition between Gulf countries to launch conservation programmes and to secure and expand hunting preserves and opportunities across the region include elements of ruling family or national prestige, and has become an established part of the diplomatic game played by Gulf countries. When the Pakistani Supreme Court sought to ban houbara hunting in 2015, then-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif asked it to reconsider because of the potential fallout with Gulf states, key investors in the country. The ban was revokedthe following year, as reported by Arab News. When it comes to Afghanistan, that Afghans become mere gamekeepers for wealthy sheikhs may not be the main problem – such a role would hardly rank even low down among the different ways in which foreigners have sought to use Afghans as pawns for their own geopolitical struggles in recent centuries. Still, the scenario is controversial.
Part of the International Fund for Houbara Conservation’s mission states that: “Through restoring sustainable wild populations of houbara, IFHC will secure the continuation of traditional Arabian falconry for future generations.” The proportion of birds bred and released into the wild that are then hunted in Farah seem to satisfy the need for the numbers of houbara in that province to slowly but steadily increase and the risk of their extinction be avoided. However, given the VIP status of the hunters, it is unclear how the number of kills is monitored and, should quotas be introduced, who would exercise control over them. With no consistent reporting on the issue from within Afghanistan, recurrent scandals in neighbouring Pakistan regarding the excessive killing of houbara by the occasional irresponsible Arab hunter do not help dispel these concerns (as reported here).
Whatever becomes of the fine balance between hunting and conservation, it is clear that programmes such as those enacted by Al-Gharrafa in Farah represent interests external to Afghanistan and will always tend to focus and orient their activities to satisfy those interests in the absence of any strong partnership or supervision by the Afghans themselves. It is in Afghanistan’s interests for civil society and the authorities at all levels to be more engaged when it comes to planning and implementing initiatives for the conservation of the country’s natural environment. It may seem marginal to suggest this at a time when so many Afghans are more concerned with survival, but as shown by increasing environmental problems affecting human life, efforts at conservation and restoration and critical rethinking about the use of natural resources are going to be key for a sustainable future, both in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Wildlife repopulation programmes driven by hunting, as seen only too often in Europe in the recent past, can tend to overlook the need for extreme care, both by boosting the target species to the detriment of competitors or the natural environment, or when releasing into the wild animals as the programme’s targets which are not indigenous. Western Afghanistan, for example, has traditionally seen the presence of two species of gazelle, the goitered gazelle and the chinkara or Indian gazelle. The introduction by Al-Gharrafa in 2015 of 33 specimens of gazelle from Qatar, as it reported here, which in a matter of years multiplied to well over one hundred, might become problematic in the future. They are most likely Arabian sand gazelles, once considered a sub-species of the goitered gazelle but since 2011 recognised as a separate species.[7])
Khushal Khan Khattak may be a model for modern-day Afghanistan here. Notwithstanding the hard times he was facing, he managed to leave his descendants with a lasting record of his love of falconry and in the process elevate himself from the position of courtier to that of independent leader. So too could any Afghan government strive to pay attention to the management of its natural resources and environment – not simply for the leisure and health of the Afghan people, but for future generations, and to uphold the country’s dignity.
If the decline of an ancient tradition such as falconry is considered a ‘minor loss’ against the backdrop of over four decades of war, the disappearance of a rich and often unique natural life cannot be. Afghanistan’s wildlife cannot wait for Afghans to have lots of money and no other priorities. Help and funding from the outside, such as that provided by Qatar in Farah province, can play a pioneering role in preserving and even restoring parts of the country’s environment. Yet, for the best results, it should be done within the framework of a comprehensive national strategy for the preservation of wildlife and Afghanistan’s natural resources.
Edited by Emilie Cavendish and Kate Clark
References
References
↑1
As Khushal Khan writes:
Only that who is a Jack-of-all-trades
Ought to try and catch a wild peregrine
Better if you take it from the nest
‘Tis a treat then, worth that of a court
Strangely enough, Khushal Khan seemed to prefer birds taken from the nest to those captured as adults. However, this may also point to a decline in expertise in falcon training and the search for faster and better results over the care and passion for rearing one’s own birds.
↑2
In desert areas such as in Farah province, hunters told AAN that falcons would be ambushed with nets close to water springs, which are scarce.
The houbara does not normally constitute the falcon’s typical prey, so they must be specifically trained to hunt them with live animals.
↑6
AAN has in the past written about the bird and its ‘Arab connection’: ‘Bird Bomber: Police kill ‘dangerous’ houbara bustard’.
↑7
Questions are raised also by the presence of ‘alien’ ostriches in Al-Gharrafa farms. However, it has not been possible for the author to ascertain what, exactly, they are meant for, whether for husbandry or hunting (and thus likely to be released into the wild.
Of Hunters and Hunted (2): Falconry, bird smuggling and wildlife conservation
Unbeknownst to many, Afghanistan has a rich historical heritage related to falconry. Photographs dating from the 1950s to the 1970s offer a relatively recent glimpse of Afghan falconers with their birds. However, those ancient traditions of Afghans practising falconry – embodied in literary works such as the Baznama, The Book of the Falcon, by Pashtun poet Khushal Khan Khattak – may now be on the verge of extinction following decades of war and turmoil. Ironically, however, the country still plays a central role in falconry practised by foreigners as a provider of both hunters and prey. Afghan falcons are sold into the international (and illegal) trade in raptors, supplying Gulf countries, while falconers from the region come to Afghanistan to practise their favourite pastime. In this first instalment of a two-part report, AAN’s Fabrizio Foschini looks at the roots of Afghans’ fascination with falcons and other birds of prey through references from local and colonial literature.
Part 2 will look at how Afghan falcons are trapped and sold abroad and how wealthy Gulf Arabs, keen to hunt in Afghanistan, are also involved in conservation programmes for the birds that their falcons capture.A personal memory as an introduction to the topic
I was made aware of Afghans’ fascination with falconry some fifteen years ago in a rather accidental way. Back then, I was carrying out field research in Badakhshan for a project on oral history, travelling in winter to take advantage of the locals’ comparative immobility in that frozen season and so able to conduct my interviews at ease. I often got stuck in one village or other due to heavy snow that made roads impassable, even for people like me, travelling either on foot or horse. It thus happened me to have to put up for a few weeks at a mehmankhana (guesthouse) in the comparatively cosmopolitan little town of Ishkashim, where I joined the company of other seasonal travellers from various parts of Afghanistan, mostly Mashreqi (eastern) Pashtun traders.
When you are stranded far away from home and family, snowed in by a six-month winter, you come to appreciate a good story being told around the evening stew and before the board game of carambole. After a few nights and unable to compete with the veteran storytelling skills of my companions, I resorted to that ample reservoir of good stories by the Italian 14th century author Giovanni Boccaccio, brought together in his The Decameron. Out of all the stories, I picked for an impromptu translation that of the noble but poor Federico degli Alberighi and of his beloved falcon, whom he willingly sacrifices to feed an unexpected guest, a widow he devoutly loves but who – alas! – had in fact come to see him to beg for the falcon alive, for her ailing child.
Considering the often spicy corpus of The Decameron, mine was a rather prudish choice made in order to navigate safer waters and avoid giving unpleasant impressions about old Italian society to my Pashtunwali-abiding audience. What I could not have foretold was the great success that my tale would reap (I was afterwards compelled to write down an abridged version in Dari.) The interest from my public was elicited not only by the flawlessly ghairatmand (honourable) behaviour of the novel’s protagonist, but by the very subject of falconry, which spurred an immediate reaction in the form of a salvo of quotes from Khushal Khan Khattak and possibly other (and unknown to me) Pashto poets. Though my friends in Ishkashim were more partridge-fighting enthusiasts, I suddenly realised that they, like many Afghans, nurtured a deep fascination for both falcons and falconry alike.
A book and a symbol: Khushal Khan Khattak’s Baznama
The nature of the falcon is in my pride You see, it fits every type of game!
Previously, as a student of Afghanistan, I had only been marginally exposed to the subject of Afghan falconry. The existence of an excellent and unique translation and study of the Baznama, the Book of the Falcon by eminent 17th century Pashto poet Khushal Khan Khattak (1613-1689) in my native language was probably the main reason for this.[1]
The book’s fame is largely due to it being a major and early literary work in Pashto. The choice of Pashto was a conscious one, explicitly pointed out by the author (he is reported as having composed another work on falconry in Persian that was subsequently lost):
Persian art, that of the falcon
But I versified it in the Afghan language
This came at a time when Khushal Khan’s commitment to the struggle for Pashtun independence from the Mughals was at its highest. The book, consisting of 47 ‘chapters’ – actually poems of different lengths – was written in less than a week in 1674. Khushal Khan was busy entreating for tribal coalition-making in order to overcome the forces of the Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb (1658-1707) – against whose rule he had rebelled – and for this purpose was travelling to Swat to convince the Yusufzai to join ranks. The text opens with a powerful contextualisation of this literary enterprise during political events that were to shape the author’s life:
Today, that by two years I passed sixty
With this oppression and this pushing against us
Of Aurangzeb’s Mughals who advance from India
Greedy to grab our people
And it is four years, and maybe five
That on Pashtun steel his rush is crushed
And a vane desire of revenge urges upon him
Day and night your Khushal is on the alert.
To help the Mughals: gold, and lands and riches
To me the force that the Almighty gives!
Wanderer without a home, without quarter
Roaming the mountains alone like an ibex
Two lanterns has the night, the third am I
Hence, what time is left to me for hunting?
Yet, no other ghost lingers before my eyes
The love of falcons brought me to the Swat valley.
His work is also remarkable for its particular style and for treating the subject of falconry, an all-time favourite for treatises throughout the Middle Ages and into the modern era, in poetic form. The main text is in the form of a mathnavi, where couplets feature end-rhymes, while several ghazals interrupt the text in order to deal with specific topics.
When compared to that most famous of all falconry treatises, the prose-written De arte venandi cum avibus by Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, or even to geographically closer precedents who had likely been read by the author, such as the 11th century Persian language treatise, Baznama-ye Nasavi, Khushal Khan’s text appears much less schematic: there is no classificatory introduction, and the chapters, although each concern a specific subject, are not organised in regular order. Chapters describing the value and characteristics of several species of falcons and hawks are intermingled with others devoted to the cure of maladies, proper nutrition and training.
In particular, the text delves into all sorts of remedies and attention to be given to the falcons: how to get rid of sickness or parasites, how to entice and teach them to hunt, how to feed them the proper way (also according to Ayurvedic concepts) and make sure they defecate regularly. Peculiarly, not only is all this done in verse, but also with great verve:
Lots of guano, steady speed!
(the falcon) Enjoys water, twists and twirls!
The falcon owner or carer is urged to take up a personal and devoted role in providing for his bird’s well-being, such as, for example, extracting glands from the necks of wolves and cows, which:
You grind them well with your teeth
‘Til a yellowish water comes out
Let it dry and then for four days
Twice a day mixed with minced food
You give them, and a tasty omelette
Of mice and dried rabbit flesh
And a potpourri of young gadflies
Well-boiled in cow butter
Khushal Khan Khattak was evidently fond of falcons, and this fondness led him to use the bird as a poetic metaphor in all contexts. Besides the Baznama, falcons reoccur in many lines of his poetry, describing a red that is like the falcon’s talons are the hands of the brave Afghans after battle with the Mughals or separation from the beloved that tears the poet’s heart to pieces as the falcon tears apart a quail. Khushal even imagines himself as an old expert falcon, happily swooping down on those “pretty plump partridges,” the Afridi maids (which suggests that I may have been more liberal with my choice from The Decameron), but also that the eyes of his lover, like two falcons, pounce upon his heart, that poor pigeon![2]
If Khushal Khan Khattak is exceptional in his love of falcons and his use of them in symbolism and metaphor, still, these birds are no strangers to the literature originating in or around Afghanistan. Indeed, falconry may well represent one of the oldest motifs to have appeared in literature in the territory in and around present-day Afghanistan. There is a story of a falconer from Balkh, for example, guilty of having offended his master’s wife by teaching parrots to slander her and punished by a falcon who subsequently blinds him, which appeared as early as 400-200 BCE in the Panchatantra-related corpus of tales. It was later popularised throughout the world in the Arabic derivation, Kalila wa Dimna.[3]
The region to the east of the Iranian Plateau, known in medieval times as Khorasan, was likely to have been one of the world’s earliest cradles of falconry as a favourite pastime among elites and ruling classes. We know this to be true due to the many Persian words in the falconry lexicon of the eastern Arab world, whose inhabitants would eventually become even more passionate about hunting with falcons than their eastern neighbours.
Indeed, falcons and hawks were not as central to classical Persian literature as they would later become to Arab poetry. However, some of the earliest and most important falconry treatises to appear were composed in Persian (such as Nasavi’s aforementioned Baznama from the 11th century) and there are references to falcons interspersed through the works of major Persian poets, such as Fariduddin Attar and Omar Khayyam, and more relevant for Afghanistan, Jalaluddin Rumi Balkhi. For him, the falcon came to symbolise the human soul, able to rise up when unfettered and which returns to God, the falconer; the prophets are God’s own falcons launched to communicate with humanity.
There is also a much more transcendent and timeless symbol at play when dealing with falcons, which has justified the enduring fortune they found in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Among the animals that can be kept and trained, falcons offer a unique living demonstration of dexterity and regality, of hunting skills – which, through the ages, have easily been equated with battle prowess – and ‘noble’ demeanours. This explains why these birds have evolved from the totemic value they held in ancient societies to heraldic and aristocratic symbolism.[4]
The practice of falconry has thus been associated with status and power among the region’s courts for centuries. Falconry was similarly held in the highest esteem and practised by the ruling classes in Mughal India, a major source of influence on Afghans during Khushal’s time, as well as on Khushal’s own life.
Zain Khan Koka, the scion of an Afghan family who distinguished itself under the Mughals in the 16th and 17th centuries, riding with a falcon. Source: Pinterest.
Khushal Khan Khattak’s passion for falcons may have partially derived from his persona as an indomitable, independent leader, no matter that he may have been in dire straits or under pressure from powerful enemies – an early model for the ‘king-unto-his-own’ Afghan khan that, in the 19th century, would be popularised by British diplomat Mountstuart Elphinstone’s remarks on what he perceived to be the extreme independence, characteristic of this nation. But falconry may also have been one of the last few courtly pleasures Khushal did not have to relinquish when he became the wandering rebel banished from his home and family (the Mughals replaced him as chief of the Khattak tribe with one of his own sons, who subsequently became his sworn enemy). His attachment to falconry may simply have been the very human reaction of an old man trying to cope with the loss of privilege and trying to face increasing struggles with undiminished dignity.
Khushal Khan’s combination of treatise-style learning and poetical form as well as his larger-than-life personality are quite unique and certainly self-aware. Throughout his Baznama, packed as it is with practical medical remedies and dietary advice, a number of meditations are also found, usually in the form of short ghazals, which offer a break from the text. They alternately compare a passion for falconry with the pursuit of a more meaningful way of life, the experience of the hunt and its teachings with war and life itself, and even the proud temper of the falcon with the poet’s own. These may be in line with pre-existing traditions of mystical symbolism rooted in the imagery of Sufi-influenced poetry or the conventional association of falcons with ruling power. However, Khushal’s typically concrete and passionate approach to his poetic creation also suggests a very personal, if not autobiographic, meaning for the writing of such a book at such a time in his life.
Falconry in modern Afghanistan
Difficult art, that of rearing falcons In Kabul maybe you will learn it
Khushal’s verse, reproduced above, shows how, in his time, the still-to-be Afghan capital held first place in falconry across the region. Besides being the seat of a Mughal governorship and thus a cultivated and refined city, Kabul found itself open to influences and knowledge related to falconry proceeding from different geographic and cultural areas.
A dominant model portrays Afghanistan as located at the convergence of three main cultural-political areas: the Iranian Plateau, the Indian subcontinent and Central Asia. Without judging its overall validity, we can concur that the country sits at the confluence of three major areas of interest, at least for falconry and the traditions connected to it. Hawking has indeed been common, in the flat, barren expanses of western and southern Afghanistan with their Khorasanian traditions, and the steep valleys south of the Hindu Kush, where Khushal divided his time between war and hunting. It has also been practised in the hills to the north of the Hindu Kush, where the steppe tradition of falconry had spread from Mongolia to the historical region of Turkestan which encompassed today’s northern Afghanistan.
Looking for historical records of falconry practices in modern Afghanistan, it must be remembered that most travellers, especially during the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, were chiefly interested in information that might have political or military relevance, or customs particular to Afghanistan that differed starkly from those of neighbouring countries. Hence, falconry was not a subject that elicited more than an occasional passing note.
It is difficult, for example, not to argue with the laconic comment by that pioneer of Afghan travelogues, Mountstuart Elphinstone, that “Afghans do not have falconry except in the east.” At the time, in 1809, he had never travelled west of Peshawar or Multan, so how would he know what went on in the western half of the Durrani Empire, for example around Kandahar or Herat?
The Kashmiri Mohan Lal travelling across Afghanistan in the service of the British in the mid-1830s reported, for example, two instances of hawking in western Afghanistan. In the hills outside Herat he had a meeting with the chief of the local Hazara tribes, who was out hunting with falcons. Moreover, heading south of the city through Adraskan district, he mentions an area called Basha – though a scholar of Persian, Mohan Lal apparently failed to notice that this name means ‘sparrowhawk’. He reported that it was a green plain where hawks abounded and that it used to be a favoured hunting spot for Timur Shah (r 1773-1793), the son of Ahmad Shah Durrani. This seems likely, that Timur liked to hunt there when he was governing Herat for his father or at any rate before he moved the Afghan capital from Kandahar to Kabul.[5]
Lal’s travel companion and patron Alexander Burnes, while on his way to Kabul in 1836, did write down a few observations on falconry, but only when passing through Sindh (Cabool, A Personal Narrative, 1843, p.35, 50-51), where the local Talpur rulers were exceedingly fond of hawking. A few years later, British diplomat and explorer Richard Burton, deployed to a garrison in Sindh, also had ample opportunity to enjoy falcon-hunting with the last of the Talpur rulers, experiences he wrote about in Falconry in the Valley of the Hindus (1852). Until only recently, the Talpurs had been vassals of the Afghan rulers and no doubt shared many of the cultural traits of the courts in Kandahar and Kabul. Burton’s work is organised as a collection of anecdotes following his conversations with a native prince and his entourage on what could have conceivably been a single day trip of horse-riding and hunting with falcons. The numerous technical details about falcons and hawk species – their characteristics, origins, training, etc. – are at first interspersed within the text, but gradually come to constitute separate topical chapters around which the text is construed, as in the classical forms of falconry treatises.
This text offers a unique insight into falconry practices most likely similar to those of contemporary Afghanistan, at least to those in Kandahar, which enjoyed a closer connection to Sindh. A typical feature, for example, something which Burton found so peculiar that he suggested it be adopted by European falconers, was the practice of the falconer literally throwing the falcon into the air to enhance its acceleration. More generally, the broad use of short-winged raptors, such as goshawks and sparrowhawks, able to catch their quarry on the ground, connects to other data on falconry and hawking in Afghanistan. Indeed, as shown in a rather dramatic engraving in the book, goshawks were also trained to attack mammals as big as chinkara gazelles, by plunging their talons into their eyes.
Painting by James Rattray portraying two hawkers from Kohistan at the times of the British occupation of Kabul (1839-41).
As for Kabul and its surroundings, the British occupation of 1839-1841 also produced some sources. Among a series of paintings left by James Rattray, one has for its subject two Kohistani hawkers engaged in conversation with a number of raptors resembling sparrowhawks on their wrists (and head). To the British officer and painter, we are also indebted for a lengthy description, probably the most complete besides Burton’s treatise on Sindh, of Afghan practices when capturing and training falcons:
The wild falcon is caught in nets, and regularly harnessed in leg and breast strings, hood, bells, and wing-straps. Its eyes are then sewed up, and it is placed on a perch in a dark room. For two or three days it is starved, and then crammed. About the seventh day one stitch in the eyelid is unfastened, and if it proves tractable, and on a dead quail being shown to it, it alights on the fist of its instructor, and afterwards comes to be fed at the call, ‘beea’ (come), its education is nearly accomplished. Its eyes are then quite unsewed, and should it strike a quail thrown up in the air, and bring it to its master, it is considered fully trained, and makes its début in the field forthwith.
Rattray also noted that it was customary to set free the raptors at the end of the hunting season; it could happen that the same bird be recaptured and employed for hunting by the falconer in successive years.
British officer Harry Lumsden, stranded in Kandahar for a year in 1857-58 due to the Indian Rebellion, reported that during the winter, Afghan ruler Dost Muhammad Khan sent him saker falcons which had been trained to hunt hares in collaboration with the tazi, the Afghan hound (Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, March 1907, Vol III, n°3).[6]
Amir Abdul Rahman Khan (r 1880-1901) remarks in his memoirs that in his youth he was usually accompanied when travelling by several falcons, and we know from other sources that he kept up this hobby at his court in later years. In the early twentieth century as well, there are a number of references to falconry. At the Afghan court, a character repeatedly associated with this pastime is Prince Nasrullah. The Briton, Doctor Gray, in his memoirs, At the Court of the Amir, portrays the prince hawking for partridges.
Nasrullah’s brother, Amir Habibullah (1901-1919), was also an avid hunter, going as far as elephant-riding in order to shoot ducks around Afghan reservoirs and lakes. M.E. Bell, an American who served as an engineer in Kabul for ten years, recalls him carefully tending a falcon on his wrist while out hunting. In all likelihood, given that Habibullah was also an enthusiast of European technology and introducing new habits at court, he will likely have neglected falconry for more ‘modern’ types of hunting.
It is thus possible that falconry at the Afghan court experienced a period of decline during this era, which saw the introduction of modern hunting guns, much like what reportedly happened in neighbouring Qajar Iran. As in Iran, where falconry lingered as an attribute of noble status among tribal chieftains in remoter areas, such as among Kurds and Lors, in Afghanistan it is likely that the comparatively larger class of rural khans, maliks and arbabs perpetuated the tradition during this age of transition. It is they who are featured prominently in a comparative wealth of photographic evidence from all corners of the country from the 1940s to the 1970s, certainly too vast to be treated here. Surely, rural falconers suited the lens through which foreign visitors to Afghanistan were keen to see the country: a land of ancient customs unspoilt by globalisation and modernity.
Afghan falconer with sparrowhawk, early 1950s. Photo from the exhibition by Yvonne von Schweinitz in Munich, 2014-15. Source: versicherungskammer-kulturstiftung.de
By contrast, few written academic studies have appeared concerning falconry in Afghanistan in that era. A German zoologist who lived in Afghanistan between 1963 and 1974, Gerd Kühnert, left a study of the hawking practices he witnessed and participated in, in his Falknerei in Afghanistan (1980).
A peculiar account of falconry in 20th century Afghanistan is also that told by Sirdar Muhammad Osman. A descendant of Amir Sher Ali’s family exiled to India after the second Anglo-Afghan War (1879-1881), he was born in Dehra Dun and became a famed naturalist and conservationist of the Indian Himalayan foothills. However, he also resided for long periods in his ancestral homeland in the 1940s and 1950s, working for the Helmand Valley Authority. His book of recollections about his experiences there is titled Falconry in the Land of the Sun (2001). It details practices that seem to have been particular to Afghanistan, such as using eagles asquarry to be hunted with saker falcons, after these had been trained on buzzards.
The decades of conflict and upheaval that racked Afghanistan from 1978 onwards brought a radical decline to the local practice of falconry. However, war in Afghanistan did not create hurdles for the lucrative international (and illegal) trade in raptors, which became increasingly fed by birds smuggled out of the country. Then, in the 1990s, a new type of falconer appeared in Afghanistan: wealthy Arabs from the Gulf countries, who discovered in it a favoured hunting destination. All this will be the subject of the second part of this report on falconry in Afghanistan: hunting, smuggling and conservation.
Edited by Emilie Cavendish and Kate Clark
References
References
↑1
Il Libro del Falcone, edited by Daniele Guizzo and Gianroberto Scarcia, volume 55 of the series Eurasiatica, Ca’ Foscari, University of Venice, 2001. The Baznama has since also been published in English by Sami ur-Rahman (The Book of Falconry, Islamabad, 2014). A previous English translation by a local scholar, dating back to the 1930s, had limited circulation. Excerpts from the text given here are based on the Italian translation and the Pashto text (the Italian edition includes the original text).
↑2
This, at least, is the rendition of his poem known as ‘The Maidens of the Adam Khel Afridi’ by HG Raverty (Selections from the Poetry of the Afghans, 1862, p203 – available online here). Dupree’s Afghanistan offers three alternative English translations of the same verses (p83-86).
↑3
The collection of fables with animals as heroes, likely originating from the Sanskrit Panchatantra, had already reached European countries by the late Middle Ages through its Persian and Arabic renditions, while at the same time, travelling to the Far East via Indonesia.
↑4, ↑5
Traces of a ‘totemic’ value attributed to these birds seem to linger even in an orthodox Muslim society such as Afghanistan: the prefix ‘baz’, (hawk), especially in combination with ‘Muhammad’, is still a favourite among both Pashto and Dari speakers (as well as other groups). ‘Shahin’ (falcon), on the other hand, is a relatively common unisex name in Afghanistan and other countries of the region.
BY MALALAI HABIBIOPINION CONTRIBUTORThe Hill12/19/23 8:30 AM ET
In the shadows of the oppressive and misogynistic Taliban regime, Afghan women find themselves navigating a perilous journey where their rights are systematically erased. Yet amid this darkness, a formidable spirit of resistance, agency, and activism by Afghan women has emerged, becoming an example of courage and a source of inspiration worldwide.
The civic and social spaces for Afghan women — particularly activists, journalists, and all those who have loud voices — are being restricted with each passing day. Over 90 decrees issued by the Taliban have taken away fundamental rights to education, freedom of movement, work, and employment, protection against gender-based violence, political and social participation, access to healthcare, freedom of expression, and equal access to resources and protection during an emergency. In the tragic Herat earthquake, for example, over 90 percent of casualties were women and children.
The women of Afghanistan have been relegated to sexual objects and reproductive machines as they are also denied rights over their bodies and reproductivity with the banning of contraception pills.
In the face of such dire circumstances, Afghan women have refused to be silenced. Despite the looming threats of arbitrary detention, torture, imprisonment, and forced disappearances, they have taken to the streets, raising their voices to reclaim the rights unjustly and illegally taken from them. This defiance and resistance stand in stark contrast to the portrayal of Afghan women as passive victims during the NATO invasion in 2001.
Two decades later, in 2021, Afghan women stood undeterred in the face of the Taliban’s resurgence. From the earliest moments of the Taliban’s return to power, these women declared that they would not succumb to silence nor permit themselves to be lost in the cycle of victimization, violence, and power struggles. Their continued activism, widespread street protests across the country, and online campaigns have shed light on the situation inside, and are a testament to their unwavering commitment, courage, and resistance.
At every gathering, event, and seminar, whether behind closed doors or in public, the activism and resilience of Afghan women take center stage, garnering both attention and admiration. These women have not only set a new standard but have also encouraged men to mobilize for peace and freedom as well. This is a significant shift from the historical perception of Afghan women as passive.
The acknowledgment of their courage has generated discussions about their critical role in bringing fundamental change. With their remarkable resistance, Afghan women also underscore that their call for international community support is about solidarity and support, not about fighting their battles for them. The message is simple: to stand beside them and ensure they receive the rights, respect, and recognition they rightfully deserve, echoing universal principles and laws.
Although there has been extensive engagement with the Taliban, mostly without the presence of Afghan men and women, the international community has refrained from recognizing the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan. This cautious approach has been largely driven by the persistent resistance of Afghan women to reject endorsing a regime marked by brutality, suppression, and unlawful and illegitimate power.
Afghan women have joined forces with their Iranian counterparts to codify and eventually end gender apartheid in Iran and Afghanistan. Their advocacy focuses on the legal and strategic implications of acknowledging the Taliban within the international system and institutions. Afghan women’s resolute stance has played a pivotal role in dissuading global recognition of a regime mired in brutality, shedding light on the moral imperatives and fundamental principles of the world obligation to fight atrocities committed in other jurisdictions.
The remarkable resilience displayed by Afghan women under Taliban rule has been nothing short of exemplary. They have shattered the biased and passive image that the world had painted of them.
Throughout their resistance, Afghan women advocated and fought not only for their own rights, demands, and needs but also those of the entire Afghan citizenry across genders, ethnicities, religious affiliations, and ideologies. They demonstrate that their fight is for collective humanity. They even fearlessly took to the streets, despite Taliban brutality, to show solidarity with Iranian women and the Women, Life, Freedom movement, underscoring the universal nature of their cause while weaving a tapestry of resistance.
While the past two decades of democracy enabled substantial political engagement from Afghan women, their focus had predominantly been around social activism — addressing societal concerns and promoting positive change through community organizing, national-level advocacy, and building institutions.
But the landscape drastically shifted with the Taliban’s resurgence. Today, their resistance has taken the shape of a formidable political activism where women inside and outside the country, both young and old, work together to bring about fundamental political and structural change. They are organizing political campaigns against the current regime, protest marches, and public demonstrations to challenge political systems, often enduring beatings in the process. They are engaging in civil disobedience and resisting unjust laws and policies, writing letters and petitions, and using online platforms to raise awareness and share information.
They are also mobilizing support for their cause, creating diverse coalitions advocating for political issues, and engaging in global political issues through international organizations and movements. This has taken Afghan women’s agency a few steps forward and positioned them as a structured and powerful resistance front, enabling them to further consolidate their impact on the political landscape.
The women of Afghanistan endure one of the harshest periods in their history, yet their exceptional rebellion marks a turning point. This chapter in the history of their resistance is a showcase of their unwavering courage, resilience, and refusal to be forgotten. The world must stand in solidarity with Afghan women, acknowledge their courageous leadership, and join the call for justice and human rights.
Malalai Habibi is a women, peace, and security expert and an advisor at the Kroc Institute, University of Notre Dame.
Afghan women are hanging on amid Taliban repression
When the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) retook power, it started reclaiming state land that had been seized during previous administrations. In October 2022, the IEA established the Land-Grabbing Prevention and Restitution Commission, within the Ministry of Justice, whose purpose is to investigate land-grabbing under the Islamic Republic, restore any state land and prevent it happening in the future. The IEA has also established a special court to which any party with an objection to a decision by the commission can appeal. AAN’s Ali Mohammad Sabawoon gives an account of the commission’s work and assesses how much usurped land has so far been reclaimed.
Disputes over land ownership have been a major issue in Afghanistan for decades, helping to fuel the broader conflict since 1978 (for more on this, see this USIP paper). With each turn of the political wheel, a new set of actors took power and could seize or redistribute land, making disputes ever more complex. Many disputes over land are between citizens, and the IEA has said these have to be dealt with by the courts. The commission it has set up deals solely with what the Emirate believes could be usurped state land – and this is also the subject of this report.
This report looks at how the Emirate has dealt with historical state land-grabbing since the takeover. It provides a short historical background to land-grabbing and previous attempts to counter it and then details the legal framework adopted by the newly-created land-grabbing commission and special court and provides an overview of the commission’s work through five case studies in Kabul, Kandahar, Nangrahar, Uruzgan and Helmand provinces.[1] To gain granular detail of the commission’s work in these provinces, AAN interviewed 16 people with direct knowledge of the commission’s work (seven face-to-face interviews and nine by phone). The interviewees included journalists, tribal elders and IEA officials.
A short background of land-grabbing
State land comprises forests, ‘protected land’ (ie protected from development by the state or protected by law) and non-irrigated land. Only non-irrigated land can legally be sold or leased by the state, and then only under certain conditions.[2] However, such rules broke down under the Republic and in earlier periods when there was widespread grabbing of state land by senior officials, their close relatives and other influential and powerful figures (see Middle East Institute (MEI) report here). They either took the land for themselves and sold it on to others, or distributed it to clients and supporters, especially to relatives, sympathisers, factional comrades and fellow tribe members, further strengthening their power among their own community and thus their relevance at the national level. The phenomenon was especially common in or around Afghanistan’s cities. In some cases, the land-grabbers made sure to obtain legal documents from the government to show that they had been granted the land legally. This was possible for those holding high office, their relatives or other powerful individuals, who could threaten or bribe officials or give them a share of the land as a reward for the title deeds.
Attempts to reclaim such land were made – or seen to be made – under the Republic. In 2014, the Karzai government established a law which was passed by the Wolesi Jirga (lower house of parliament), determining punishment for the usurpers of land. At that time, members of the Wolesi Jirga and deputy of the commission established for evaluating state and public land in the parliament, Sher Wali Wardak,saidthat 1.3 million jeribs (226,000 hectares) of state and public land had been usurped by 5,300 people. That number, he said, included members of parliament, ministers and commanders (see media report here). However, the issue appeared to drift – certainly, no reports were published to indicate whether or not any land, or how much, had been reclaimed based on the efforts made by the Wolesi Jirga commission
Two years later, in 2016, the new president, Ashraf Ghani, asserted that “the culture of land usurpation is not accepted by the nation anymore.” He said he had appointed provincial governors, heads of police, municipalities, corps commanders and others whose first and fundamental duty was to prevent land usurpation (see Ghani’s Facebook page here). However, a former government official in Kandahar told AAN that a delegation tasked by Ghani to investigate just one case, the Aino Mena township in that city, just took money from “the owner” (Mahmud Karzai, brother of then former president Hamed Karzai), as a fine for having built on state land – USD 27,00 per jerib. Nothing changed. It was an example of how those who had usurped land could challenge even the power of the president of the Republic.
Land was also an issue for the Taleban leadership even before they captured power, as evidenced by it being regulated by two decrees issued by Sheikh Hibatullah Akhundzada during the insurgency: state land can be leased to the public, he ordered in 2017, while private land must not be seized by the ‘mujahedin’ (Taleban fighters and commanders) or anyone else (ordered in 2019). Following the takeover, Hibatullah’s first two published orders also concerned land. In the first five weeks of Emirate rule, he had ordered an end to the usurpation of state land, which he said had been “the norm” under the “puppet administration.” He also ordered provincial governors “to rigorously prevent the grabbing of Emarati [state] land and hand over usurpers to face sharia law.”
A month later, in October 2021, he again banned land-grabbing, this time for land whose ownership was unclear. Only the supreme amir, ie himself, the order decreed, “Based on necessity and expediency, can give [such land] to a member (of the Muslim community) as property.” The decree drew a parallel with what it said was the amir’s right to “withdraw from the public coffer [bait ul-maal]” and presumably give money to someone, again because of expediency. Elsewhere in the amir’s body of orders, this is also banned for others. In March 2023, the ban on officials selling land, or transferring land to individuals or corporations, was repeated, unless there was a specific decree from the amir (for the texts of the decrees up to March 2023 and an accompanying report, (see here and here).
The land commission, the special court and their objectives
The supreme leader of the IEA, Sheikh Hibatullah, established the Land Grabbing Prevention and Restitution Commission (in Pashto, de zmako de ghasab de makhniwi aw de ghasab shoyo zmako de istirdad kamesuin) by decree in mid-October 2022. See this report on the Supreme Court website and the text at the end of this report. The commission is headed by the Minister of Justice, with the Ministers of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock, Urban Development and Housing and Work and Social Affairs as members. The commission has 11-member delegations in each province (12 members in Kabul), as well as 146 administrative and technical employees. The supreme leader also appointed a court consisting of a judge, mufti (cleric able to give fatwas or religious decisions), head of the court and a clerk (moharir) (see a tweet from the spokesman of the IEA here). He also ratified the draft law that the members of the commission had prepared. The draft law consists of four chapters and 22 articles, in Pashto and Dari languages (see the draft law here and read AAN’s translation of part of it in the Resources section of this website).
When the commission intends to assess any land, according to a journalist who has followed commission proceedings, it first invites community elders to a meeting and speaks to them. It provides them with information about the process and tells them to come along with any kind of ownership documents they have. The commission then sees and assesses the documents. If they are legal, they simply tell the people that the land or property does belong to them and no one else has any business with their land. If someone fails to present legal ownership documents to the commission, it will conclude that the property lacks legal documentation and the person who claims to own it is banned from building on the land or selling it. Anyone breaking this ban is forcefully stopped by the IEA. However, the commission gives people a chance to appeal its decision and submit their case to the special court. The author has seen neither any published number of cases presented to the court nor a breakdown of how many are successfully appealed and how many fail.
According to the Minister of Urban Development and Housing, Hamdullah Nomani, speaking at a gathering on 28 June 2023 to celebrate the achievements of the ministry during the previous year, 80 per cent of land in Afghanistan is owned by people who only have informal documents, which are not acceptable to the courts, based on current rules and regulations. He said eleven kinds of documents were accepted by the IEA and mentioned three – a legal ownership documents issued by the state (sharie qabala), letters of guarantee (de wasiqai khatona) and in some cases, tax receipts (see Pajhwok report here).
As the minister said, ownership of the vast majority of private land is evidenced by a customary document (orfi qabala). This is not an official document, nor is it issued by the state, but by the owner of a plot of land at the time when he or she wants to sell it or transfer its ownership. It is a customary guarantee that the land is theirs. If any third party claims ownership of it through witnesses, documents or other means and goes directly to the buyer to claim ownership and if the land is proven to belong to that third party, the seller of the land would have to give the buyer a refund. Importantly for this report, if a landowner only has an orfi qabala, and the government claims the land, the document is worthless. The commission will insist that the land belongs to the state.
The commission has been working apace. IEA-run newspaper Hewad Daily, quoting Ministry of Justice spokesman Hamid Jahadyar, wrote on 30 May that by that point, the commission “had assessed four million jeribs (800,000 hectares) of land, of which 500,000 jeribs (100,000 hectares) had been identified countrywide and taken and delivered to IEA departments.”
Two months later, on 27 July 2023, the secretary of the commission, Ehsanullah Wasiq, said in the commission’s accountability session (milat ta the zawab wayalo programme) that it had by then evaluated 7,949,721 jeribs (about 1.6 million hectares) of land.[3] Of that, the vast majority – 7,551,343 jeribs (1.5 million hectares) had been identified as state land and 589,499 jeribs (118,000 hectares) had been retaken and registered in the government’s land bank.
These statistics represent the bare bones of the commission’s work so far. To better understand the impact of its judgements, AAN has conducted five provincial case studies.
Houses on the slopes above Kabul built on state land. In the Old City below, much of which was destroyed in the 1990s civil war, land grabbing and informal development has taken place, largely on private land. Photo: Fabrizio Foschini, 2012
Provincial Case Studies
Kabul
In terms of cost and quality, Kabul holds the first position in the usurpation of land in Afghanistan. Ten square metres of land in Sherpur, the upmarket neighbourhood in the heart of the capital, is worth more than hundreds of jeribs of land grabbed in Marja or Nad Ali districts of Helmand or any other province.
Land-grabbing began early in the capital. In 2003, armed police, led by Kabul Chief of Police Abdul Bashir Salangi, and acting on the orders of then Minister of Defence, Marshall Muhammad Qasim Fahim, violently and suddenly levelled the homes of people living in Sherpur. The land belonged to the ministry, but as Joanna Nathan, writing for the Middle East Institute (MEI), described, the residents had been there for decades and were given no opportunity to argue their case or indeed pack up their belongings. All of those directly involved in the destruction (ie minister, police chief and most of the police) belonged to the group which had captured Kabul in 2001, the Shura-ye Nizar network within Jamiat-e Islami. The minister then handed out plots of land to commanders, cabinet ministers and other well-connected individuals, most of them Shura-ye Nizar comrades or other powerful figures in the government. Two Shura-ye Nizar commanders received multiple plots, according to MEI. For a list of those receiving plots compiled by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), published by MEI and with added biographical information from AAN, see the end of this report.
There were only three high-profile state officials who publicly criticised the move, then Minister of Finance, Ashraf Ghani, who also refused a plot, head of the AIHRC, Sima Samar, and AIHRC employee Nader Naderi. Beneficiaries defended taking the land. For example, as reported by MEI, Education Minister Yunus Qanuni claimed the land-grabbing was legal because the Ministry of Defence owned the land and could distribute it as it wished. Central Bank governor (later Finance Minister) and head of the Afghan Millat party, Anwar ul-Haq Ahadi told journalists he was entitled to the land and denounced anyone who dared criticise the process as participating in “political terrorism.” Nathan ended her report:
The Sherpur evictions were a seminal event in puncturing the enormous hope that had surrounded the 2001 intervention. The resulting mansions serve as monuments to the powerlessness of ordinary Afghans and a daily reminder to Kabulis of the impunity of the new administration and international inaction.
The table below lists the people who received plots of land in Sherpur, originally published by MEI and sourced to the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. Details in the status column have been amended by AAN: information from the AIHRC, via MEI, is in plain text; information added by AAN is in italics.
Governor of the Afghanistan Bank, Afghan Millat party leader
1
2
Habiba Sarabi
Minister of Women’s Affairs
1
3
Khaleq Fazel
Chair of Evaluation and Review Commission on State Industries
1
4
Marshal Qasim Fahim
Minister of Defence, Shura-ye Nizar
1
5
Muhammad Yunus Qanuni
Minister of Education, Shura-ye Nizar
1
6
Kabul Mayor’s Deputies [sic]
Khaled, finance office for the late Shura-ye Nizar leader Ahmad Shah Massud during the ‘Resistance’ (Tajik from Mazar-e Sharif)
1
7
Hamid Seddiqi
Head of Protocol, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Employee of former King’s Office
1
8
Hedayatullah Dayani
Employee of former King’s Office
1
9
Malik
Possibly General Malik, who led the rebellion against General Dostum, allowing the Taleban into Mazar-e Sharif in 1997 and subsequently oversaw the murder of thousands of Taleban fighters.
1
10
Haji Muhammad Mohaqeq
Minister of Planning, Hezb-e Wahdat
1
11
Baba Jan
Commander, former PDPA, then Shura-ye Nizar
1
12
Haji Almas
Commander,Hezb-e Islami
1
13
Amanullah Guzar
Commander, latterly Shura-ye Nizar
8
14
Abdul Rahim
Minister of Justice, Shura-ye Nizar
6
15
Halim Khan
1
16
Shakir Kargar
Minister of Water & Power, Jombesh-e Meli
1
17
Baba Jalandar
Commander, Shura-ye Nizar
1
18
Gul Haidar
Commander, Shura-ye Nizar, head of security southeast zone (Loya Paktia)
1
19
Commander Gada
Shura-ye Nizar
1
20
General Momen’s family
Jombesh-e Meli, although close to Shura-ye Nizar, died in 1994.
1
21
Gul Agha Sherzai
Minister of Urban Development, commander in Kandahar
1
22
Haji Ferozi
055 Corps Commander
1
23
Haji Katib
Ministry of Defence Employee
1
24
Muradi
Director of Planning, Kabul Municipality
1
25
Bismillah Khan
Deputy Defence Minister, Shura-ye Nizar
1
26
General Aziz
1
27
Jegdalik
Mayor of Kabul, Shura-ye Nizar
1
28
Haji Qadir’s family
Minister of Public Works, Hezb-e Islami Khales, assassinated in July 2002
1
29
Dr Taj Muhammad
Minister of the Interior, married to the niece of his predecessor, Yunis Qanuni (from Shura-ye Nizar)
1
Details of the recipients in the status column have been amended by AAN: information from the AIHRC, via MEI, is in plain text; information added by AAN is in italics.
The usurpation of state land in and around Kabul has been a constant of the past two decades, said AAN analyst, Fabrizio Foschini, who has followed the issue closely. He says, however, that its forms changed over time.
From the more brazen grabs of state lands such as in Sherpur in the early years of the Republic, land appropriation schemes evolved, coming to involve ‘land development firms’ usually linked to powerful government officials or the hijacking of government housing projects meant for specific categories (civil servants, returnees, etc).
In other cases, it was the plight of specific dispossessed groups, such as the Kuchi nomads, that provided the excuse for occupying state land: political patrons emerged who helped the landless settlers secure their squats around the capital in exchange for support at elections or in other mobilisations meant to increase their own relevance as powerbrokers, while also extracting economic dividends from the allocation of the plots thus conceded by the government.
Calls for the government to do something about land-grabbing were futile because, most of the time, it was members of the government, senior figures in the armed forces and politicians – or their relatives – who were doing the land-grabbing. Another such example was the brother of the Second Vice President, Abdul Karim Khalili, Haji Nabi. According to a 2013 report from Radio Liberty, he acquired 50 jeribs (10 hectares) of state land belonging to the Ministry of Defence in the north of Kabul and built a township, called Omid-e Sabz on that land. The report also said that he usurped more than one thousand jeribs (200 hectares) on the slopes of Koh-e Korukh, (Korukh Mountain) in the neighbourhood of Omid-e Sabz.
Reclamation of land in Kabul by the IEA began by the municipality soon after the takeover, before the land-grabbing commission was set up. For example, a road in the Spin Kali area of Khushal Khan, located in district five, was taken back by the municipality. The road leads from Khushal Khan towards Dast-e Barchi and joins the ring road in the Dar-ul-Aman area. AAN saw that a 40-metre-wide road was being asphalted and some houses that had been built on the road or on its brink had been completely or partially destroyed by the government. One resident, Sayed Khan, said the road had been built during Daud Khan’s era (1973-78) and, over the years, people had encroached on it with their house-building. He said officials from the Republic had also tried to reclaim the road, but “the people refused to return this part of the road to the government.” He said IEA officials had also come and asked people to present their legal ownership documents. When they could not, he said the officials gave them only a three-day deadline and, on the fourth day, came with different kinds of vehicles and bulldozers and started razing the houses or parts of them, to the ground. Sayed said the government had not reassured the people with promises of alternative places to live.
However, after hearing different accounts of what had happened, it became clear to the author that the situation of landowners varied: some had legal documents and others did not, but all had seen parts of their houses destroyed. Two people living on what had been agricultural land said the officials had promised to compensate them. Another man, who was busy repairing the parts of his home that had been destroyed, said the amount of compensation had yet to be specified by the IEA.
The same road also connects to Chaharahi-ye Qambar and then on to Kotal-eKhair Khana in district 17, where hundreds of houses have been destroyed by Kabul municipality since the IEA takeover to fit in with the government’s master plan for the capital. In the area from Chaharahi-ye Shaheed to Qasaba in district 15, 450 houses were also razed (see YouTube video reports by Afghanistan Map here and Kabul Show here).
On 10 June, Pajhwork reported, quoting the municipality, that 100 jeribs (20 hectares) of land had been retaken from usurpers and that according to the city plan, the land would return to a green area and a road was planned to be constructed through the area as well (see Pajhwok report here).
AAN also visited Tarakhel township, located around 30 kilometres northeast of Kabul, in Bagrami district of Kabul province. According to residents, the township had been built in the era of Hamid Karzai, most probably in 2007, on around 35,800 jeribs (7,160 hectares) of land. They said Karzai had granted this land to Mullah Tarakhel Muhammadi, an MP in the Republic. The land was then divided between Mullah Tarakhel and Haji Monjai, a tribal elder not from Tarakhel’s tribe, but another important political actor and like Mullah Tarakhel with a jihadi background with Hezb-e Islami. These two men then distributed the land to the people of their clans and they, in turn, sold it on to different people from different provinces who built houses there. The township has a large bazaar with many shops and markets. The previous government also built some schools in the township, but not enough to meet the requirements of the residents in terms of basic education.
One of those who bought land and built a house in the township, Nur Khan, who is originally from Sayed Karam district of Paktia province, told AAN that an IEA official from Kabul municipality (whether with the commission, or not, he did not say) had come to the township and spoken to the people and to Mullah Tarakhel himself. He said they surveyed the land and found the plot was not bigger than the limit stated in the document that Karzai had given to Tarakhel.
Nur said the officials then said the width of the streets in the document was 12 metresand there were places specified for parks, schools, mosques and clinics, but none of these appeared on the ground. “The officials then told the people that [from now on] all construction work was banned and no one could buy or sell the land.”
Another resident, who is from the Tarakhel clan, Sharbat Khan, however, said that if a person had the approval of an NGO to carry out construction, the IEA would allow the building to go ahead. He said a Norwegian NGO had given some people around 300-500 USD to make a shelter. Pajhwok news agency reported on 26 October that a ‘credible source’ had revealed to it that Mullah Tarakhel had been summoned by the commission and arrested (see Pajhwok report here).
An IEA official, who wished to remain unnamed, told AAN that Tarakhel had been ordered by the Minister of Justice to vacate his house, but he had not. He said the minister had him arrested and sentenced him to one week of detention. Even though his time was completed, the official said, Tarakhel’s detention was lengthened for 10 more days. Mullah Tarakhel’s brother, Musa Khan, said in a video posted on Facebook on 8 November that he had emptied Mullah Tarakhel’s home, his guest house and madrasa on the order of the Minister of Justice. In the video, he requested the minister to release his brother. The official said that Tarakhel was then released
The process of identifying and reclaiming state land is also underway in the Omid–e Sabz township. According to a report from the Afghan Voice Agency (AVA) from February 2023, the commission, in its initial deliberations, had declared that the township was built on state land. As to the even more valuable Sherpur land, it has not yet been reported whether or not the IEA has begun to look into it. High-profile Taleban are now living in some houses, like those of two former vice presidents, brother of Ahmad Shah Massud, Ahmad Zia Massudand Jombish-e Melli leader, Abdul Rashid Dostum. However, the IEA official told AAN that the commission would discuss Sherpur soon. He said the IEA had established a commission to investigate all the homes of people who had left Afghanistan (evacuated in August 2021), including in Sherpur and asked those who had moved into the houses – mostly Taleban – to leave or pay rent into a special bank account which, if the house is proved to have been legitimately owned, will be transferred into the owner’s personal account.
The official also said they would be discussing other neighbourhoods, “in PD [police district] 17, the townships of Tilayi, Safa, Zakirin, and in Sar-e Kotal-e Khair Khana, where Amanullah Guzar usurped land [and also] Dasht-e Champtala, taken by commanders related to [leader of mujahedin faction, Ettihad-e Islami and later MP, Abdul Rabb Rasul Sayyaf] and to the Hazara ethnic group [sic] and in Mullah Ezat’s township in PD 5, and in Khushal Khan Mena, Kampani, Kart-e Mamurin, Afshar, Mirwais Maid and other [neighbourhoods].”
In the summer, at its accountability session, the commission’s secretary, Ehsanullah Wasiq, said the fate of about 41,972 jeribs (8,394hectares) of usurped land in Kabul had been sent to a special court for its final decision. It has apparently decided in the state’s favour, given the recent announcement of a new law ratified by the supreme leader of the IEA. It said that “41,970 jeribs of land in PDs 8, 16, 17, 20 and 21 of Kabul city have been declared as state land and the Ministries of Agriculture, Hajj and Awqaf, and Information and Culture ordered to rent the land out on lease to their current owners, according to sharia principles.” The new decree says reclaimed state land in Kabul will be leased out to its ‘current owners’, but does not mention what would happen to the land that had changed hands several times.
Informal settlements in Kabul were estimated in 2017 to account for around 70 per cent of the built-up areas in the capital (see p20 of this 2017 study of Kabul), with the assumption that that proportion would have grown since. AAN analyst Fabrizio Foschini writes:
Most of the land on which these houses were built did not feature in the master plan and was originally state land. That includes everything from shantytowns erected by IDPs to well-off residential projects, built by land developers connected to Republic-era political powerbrokers. Nowadays, the total area of Kabul city is estimated at over 1,020 km2 (510,000 jeribs). Taking into consideration only the built-up areas of the city, assessed in 2019 to be around 35 per cent of the total, the amount of grabbed state land in the capital looks bound to exceed by far the 42,000 jeribs (84 km2) that the IEA has so far declared as usurped.[4]
AAN raised the issue of the new law, which turns former owners into tenants, with residents who are living on land declared as state-owned in PD 8 (Kart-e Naw, Rahman Mena, Shah-e Shahid, Qalacha and Beni Hesar), PD16 (Microrayon One, Qala-ye Zaman Khan, Deh Khodaidad, Alukhel, Bagrami, Sharak-e Khorasan and Shahrak-e Cement Khana), PD17 (Bustan-e Kabul, Chamtala, Bagh-e Aref Khan)and PD21(Hudkhel and Deh Khodaidad), and Tarakhel township. It appears that the court’s decision and decree has yet to be shared with the local people. If this became the pattern nationwide, it could represent a new income stream for the government and the effective and ongoing transfer of resources from private households to the state.
Butkhak on the eastern periphery of Kabul has witnessed massive unplanned urban growth since this photo was taken in 2010. The land was partly state, partly privately-owned land, as well as pastureland, rights to which were claimed by local Pashtun tribes. Photo: Fabrizio Foschini
Helmand
In Helmand province, land-grabbing took place in the era of Hamid Karzai. Self-appointed police chief of Helmand province in 2001 Abdul Rahman Jan, grabbed a reported 20,000 jeribs (4,000 hectares) of government land in the districts of Nad Ali, Marja and Nawzad in the same year. He then settled members of his clan on this land (see AAN report here). A resident of Marja district told AAN that the Taleban had themselves also distributed non-irrigated land in Marja district well before the takeover. Residents use the term dashti simi (desert areas) for this land, as it was not part of the green, canal-irrigated areas of Nad Ali district, which was distributed to people during Zahir Shah’s reign. The resident believed the people to whom the land had more recently been distributed belonged to the Taleban or were pro-IEA, with each family considered eligible for 15 jeribs because a member had been martyred while fighting in Taleban ranks – they included children of fathers who had been killed – or were Taleban fighters. He said the distribution had taken place by issuing a small piece of paper as an order (amr) but that, after the takeover, no more land had been distributed or given to the people (see also AAN’s report about the sale and distribution of state land by the Taleban during the Republic here). The interviewee said that sometime after the takeover, the IEA had takenback any land whose new owners had failed to fertilise and was still fallow, but had not reclaimed land from those who had improved and were actively using it.
A source in the IEA, who had received a document giving him ownership of 15 jeribs of land in Marja district before the takeover, but had yet to receive the land, told AAN that he and many others he knew had been denied land after the takeover. He said the document he had received had been signed by Mawlawi Yaqub, the current defence minister, who was then a deputy leader. He was not willing to discuss or speculate about the reason behind the refusal, as he saw it, to honour the order. However, another source in Helmand said that some commanders of the IEA had been involved in the distribution and the refusal might be because there had been corruption in the distribution. Another interviewee said that, before the takeover, the Taleban had distributed land in Nad Ali and Nawzad districts as well as Marja.
So far, the IEA has not reclaimed the land distributed by Abdul Rahman Jan in Nad Ali, Marja and Nawzad districts or that distributed by the Taleban in Nad Ali and Nawzad districts. However, the interviewee in Marja said there were rumours that the IEA would seek to reclaim it.
Uruzgan
The pattern of land-grabbing in Uruzgan province is different from other provinces because, interviewees told AAN, in a district like Dehrawud, state land was taken directly by local people, rather than being grabbed by a powerful individual and then sold, leased, or districted by him (or rarely her).
Pajhwok, an Afghan news agency, reported that the commission had taken around one thousand jeribs (200 hectares) of land back from the residents in the Jono area of Dehrawud district. It said that some houses and agricultural fields had been destroyed by the government and the residents forcefully displaced from their houses. The report quoted the spokesman of the security headquarters, Mullah Bashir, saying that the local people had been found to have grabbed state land and following the special court’s decision, the authorities had warned the people to leave the area, but they had not moved (see Pajhwok report here).
A local journalist said that many people had grabbed the land in the Jono area and made gardens and houses on it, under the pretence that because it bordered their land, it was theirs. He said the residents had failed to present ownership documents.
This local journalist also said that after the destruction and taking back state land, the people of that area had come together and protested in reaction to the step taken by the government. The protest ended without a result.
So far, AAN’s interviewee said, 20,000 jeribs (4,000 hectares) of state land had been taken back by the IEA in Dehrawud district.
Kandahar
The most high-profile dispute over land ownership in this province is over the land on which the exclusive Aino Mena township in district 11 of Kandahar city was built. This is some of the most valuable land in Kandahar and the construction of houses, parks and buildings providing services on it, laid out to a regular and well-made plan, has further lent value to the location. However, questions remain as to its legal ownership: Was the state land legally purchased by Mahmud Karzai, brother of then president Hamid Karzai, before construction began in 2003? Did the then governor, Gul Agha Sherzai, sell it, and if so, did he do so legally? Do the people who live there and purchased homes have a right to their property? Both of the Karzai brothers stayed in Afghanistan after the fall of the Republic, meaning the IEA cannot just confiscate the land as they might if the brothers, like other senior politicians, had fled in 2021.
When the township was in its initial phases of construction, the Taleban sought to dissuade individuals interested in buying the land by contacting a local media outlet, but the matter was kept quiet and their warning was not reported back then.[5]
Around ten months ago, Mahmud Karzai was reported to have been banned from travelling outside the country (see Azadi Radio report here). He told the media that the Minister of Justice had asked him to stay in the country because of differences between him, as head of the township, and his deputy, Abul Hamid Helmandi. Mahmud Karzai said the minister had said that his (Mahmud’s) signature might be needed during any division of the property. The two men are also head and deputy head of AFCO, the company responsible for building and other related activities of Aino Mena, which was set up in 2002 (see Tolo News report here).
An engineer from Kandahar city, Khan Muhammad, told AAN that two different issues were at play. First, there were indeed differences between Karzai and his deputy, but these had been resolved. Second, Khan said, Mahmud Karzai had been found to have grabbed 1,300 jeribs of state land neighbouring Aino Mena and the IEA has already taken this back. AAN was unable to find a written report on this. However, a source in the IEA confirmed that this land had been retaken.
On 27 July 2023, the secretary of the Land Grabbing Prevention and Restitution Commission, Ehsanullah Wasiq, spoke about Aino Mena in the government’s accountability programme, although without mentioning Mahmud Karzai by name. He said the land had been sold by then governor Gul Agha Sherzai, to “the ones” who had built a township on the land, adding, “Whether the land was sold in a legal way (sharei tariqa), or not, or the land is considered the property of those who bought it, or not, the issue has been submitted to the special court and the special court will make [a] decision about it in the next days.” So far, however, no reports have been released as any Special Court decision.
In late May 2023, the IEA said it had clarified ownership of 1,500 jeribs of land in Shakur Karez area near the Amir Lalai hotel in Daman district, next to the Kabul-Kandahar highway, as belonging to the state. Theycirculated a video showing their officials razing down the walls of illegal buildings. Dozens of IEA officials are seen in the video destroying the walls, shouting while pushing the walls to collapse (see a video report here).
A source in Kandahar told AAN that the person had bought an amount of land and usurped an equal amount of state land neighbouring his newly acquired land. The source said the government had destroyed a house built on the land and drills (deep wells, locally called, barma). He said that the usurper then reclaimed the land in the court and alleged that his land was forcefully taken from him.
The densely farmed and densely populated province of Nangrahar where state-land promised to returnees from Pakistan and teachers never reached its intended recipients, but was grabbed instead, while leased state land of the Nangrahar Canal was illegally sold on. Photo: Fabrizio Foschini, 2011.
Nangrahar
Nangrahar might be one of the most complicated provinces in terms of land-grabbing, not only because of the variety of ways in which state land was grabbed, but also the sheer amount – 485,000 jeribs (97,000 hectares), according to the Agriculture Department of this province, (as reported by the state-owned Hewad newspaper).
For example, land in two townships, intended for returnees coming back from Pakistan and teachers, was usurped. 3,000 plots out of the 8,000 allocated for returnees in Chamtala township in Surkhrod district were stolen in 2008, as reported by AAN in this 2012 report. As we also reported, in Sheikh Misri township, on the border between Surkhrod and Chaparhar districts, teachers and returnees who had been given ownership documents in 2005 were unable to obtain their plots. The returnees had protested in Jalalabad city, but failed to receive the promised land. Powerbrokers sold the land, and the returnees and teachers never received their land. A local journalist in Nangrahar, who wished to remain unnamed, told AAN that some land was allocated to the teachers in the Kama district and in the Gamberi desert, but the plots were never given because, he said, the area’s residents said they owned the land.
The returnees settled in two camps, Form Ada Camp and Kabul Camp. However, according to the journalist, the commission has warned them to leave the camps because it says they were built on state land and the returnees have usurped it.
There is also land in Nangrahar that was usurped and then sold on. The IEA has asked these new owners to come along with documents to prove the ownership. For example, a tribal elder who, along with other people of his clan, had bought land in the Sayyaf Family township in Surkhrod district was summoned by IEA officials. He told AAN the officials had asked them to present any kind of document they had to prove their ownership. When they presented only the documents of the land which they had bought from the brother of a leading senator (both brothers still live in the country), he said, the officials did not accept them. “We finally told the IEA that we’d bought the land from that mentioned person and that he had taken money from us several times by sending police or his bodyguards when we had built houses there.” The tribal elders said the person told the commission, “I was a paid representative of a well-known jihadi leader and was just obeying his orders.” The tribal elder said, “The IEA then jailed him for a few days.” The elder said it was still unknown to them what the IEA would do with their issue.
Amid the process of retaking state land, a delegation of the commission visited a township in the area near to Sayyaf Family township in Surkhrod district and discovered that the township, which was built on 3,648 jeribs (730 hectares) of state land, had been sold by one tribal elder Haji Gul Meran to another, Sabawoon, without any legal documentation.
The IEA officials warned the residents not to do any kind of construction work in the township and to avoid selling and buying houses and land. The report, published on the Ministry of Justice website, did not provide any other information (see the report on the Ministry of Justice website here).
There were also other kinds of land-grabbing in Nangrahar. For example, the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock (MAIL) leased out around 14,000 jeribs (2,800 hectares) of the Nangrahar Canal land to private investors. The leases ran for 90 years. However, the investors then divided the land into residential plots and sold them to people – an illegal act. AAN quoted a provincial council member, in its 2012 report, saying the investors “told the buyers: for 90 years the state cannot say anything to you, and after that, who knows.” However, a new government has demanded answers. The journalist we interviewed told AAN that so far, 2,000 jeribs (400 hectares) of canal land had been repossessed by the IEA and that efforts to recover more were ongoing.
Conclusion
Reactions to the reclaiming of state land, in Kabul at least, seem largely to depend on who is speaking. Generally, it appears to be welcomed. People think the government should take back land from anyone who has usurped it. However, those who bought land, sometimes after it had changed hands several times, argue differently: the IEA should hold the big land-grabbers accountable, but not the poor people who subsequently bought it.
Those who have bought land and possess only orfi qabalas (customary ownership documents) have said they were always ready to pay some amount towards the cost of the land to the government. In this scenario, they would receive legal documents of landownership and the government would get thousands of millions of afghanis. The new law does, in some conditional cases, give the option to take money from the current owners and issue them legal documents. However, so far, those people who bought state land have not been informed whether this will be possible or whether, instead, as the law appears to imply, they will have to pay rent for the homes they thought were their own. Being transformed from homeowner to tenant would be hard.
During the Republic, any decision made by the government against the ‘the people’ could be challenged, especially if a person or group had a connection with high-ranking officials or powerful politicians. However, now, everyone thinks that the IEA has banned protests and who would dare violate the Emirate’s law?
Grabbing of state land under the Republic was rampant and widespread. Most of the major land-grabbers are long gone, but they have left a mess of disputes behind, which the IEA will find difficult to resolve without alienating those who thought they had become landowners and will now be dispossessed. Those now former landowners will also be looking particularly closely at what happens in a neighbourhood like Sherpur, in Kabul, where some high-profile members of the IEA are now living, having taken over villas there. There is one other issue that may prove troublesome. The amir has reserved to himself the right to distribute state land. If redistribution does happen, it would be particularly upsetting to anyone who has lost property in the process of the state reclaiming its land.
Edited by Kate Clark
References
References
↑1
These provinces were chosen for this research for the following reasons: first, they featured many cases of land-grabbing and these, compared to other provinces, had been exposed previously, though none of them thoroughly. Second, AAN knew that in these provinces the activity of the commission was intense. Third, the author had well-informed sources in these provinces to provide him with good and accurate information.
↑2
There are three types of land in Afghanistan – private, public and state. Public land comprises pastures and graveyards. Graveyards cannot be transferred or leased, but ‘common pastureland’ can be transferred or leased out by the government to anyone it chooses. ‘Special pastureland’ (maximum area 2,700m2) cannot be leased or sold by anyone, including by the government, but can use it for social purposes, such as a playground or for grazing cattle or other livestock.
↑3
This is a programme in which government ministries provide detailed reports of their activities during the previous year. It started during the Ghani administration and the IEA has continued it.
↑4
Foschini adds:
Built-up areas, at 35 per cent of the total, are at an all-time high due to in-fill (they were 20 per cent in 2000). As of 2019, the rest consisted of barren land (53%), vegetation (11%) and water bodies (0.1%) according to land use surveys made with GIS/GPS technology.
↑5
When the project of this township was in its initial stage, most probably in 2008, this author was sitting in the office of a local reporter. The local reporter received a call from the Taleban, saying that all people should be aware that the land of the Aino Mena township was a government asset and people should not buy property there. The Taleban warned that when the government of the Islamic Emirate came into power, all the property would be retaken from anyone who had land or built houses in the township.
A few days later, the author, who was a working journalist at the time, asked the reporter what had happened to the issue, as he wanted to write a report about the case. The journalist said when he contacted the authorized body of the township, he was told to be aware that the authority has spent millions of dollars on this township and that the journalist should be careful not to write a report in this regard. He said he then decided not to make a problem for himself and simply forgot about reporting it.
Land in Afghanistan: This time, retaking instead of grabbing land?
The last Afghan still held in Guantanamo, Muhammad Rahim from Nangrahar province, has failed in his latest attempt to persuade the United States authorities to release him. The US continues to assert that he was a translator, courier and facilitator for al-Qaeda leaders and even though it is more than two years since US forces left his country, still claims his release would be a threat to its national security. As AAN’s Kate Clark reports, the US has detained Rahim without charge or trial for almost 17 years, never giving him the chance to have its claims against him independently scrutinised.For all previous AAN reports on the Afghan experience in Guantanamo, see our dossier, published in October 2023. It includes two special reports which give more detail about Rahim.
There had been hopes of a positive decision for Rahim as, for the first time, he had a lawyer representing him at his hearing in front of the Periodic Review Board, the body made up of senior officials from the US military, intelligence and government, which decides the fate of those at Guantanamo – to free them, put them on military trial or keep them locked up. However, it has again determined that his detention “remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the national security of the United States” (the unclassified summary of its decision, dated 21 November and published on 6 December, can be read here and all published documents related to the hearing here).
Rahim is one of only three men, out of the 30 still in Guantanamo, who remain in indefinite detention. 16 others have been cleared for transfer, but remain there, three for more than a decade, while 10 are on trial in what are called ‘military commissions’; one has been convicted. Rahim is also the only Afghan left in Guantanamo out of the 225 men and boys who were rendered to the camp, among them shepherds, taxi drivers, tribal elders, Taleban military and civilian officials, abused boys and old men with dementia.
Rahim was picked up in Pakistan by the ISI in 2007 and handed over to the CIA, which tortured him at a black site in Afghanistan and then rendered him to Guantanamo. The details of the torture were published in the US Senate’s 2014 report on the CIA.[1] Rahim was the last detainee to go through this programme and the last man of any nationality to be rendered to Guantanamo.
What was said at the hearing, what was decided and the ‘peculiar injustices’ of the Periodic Review Board
Rahim’s counsel, James Connell, described Rahim to the Board as “an anomaly,” a “poor candidate to be one of the last” detainees neither cleared for transfer nor put on trial. He pointed out to the Board that in the four current military commission trials involving Guantanamo detainees, the Office of the Chief Prosecutor has named nearly 100 co-conspirators, but not a single case names Rahim. That, he said, casts “significant doubt on the allegation that Rahim played any significant role in al Qaeda.” He said Rahim was not alleged to have been involved in any attack on the US or its allies, nor to have personally committed any act of violence.
Connell’s arguments were in vain: the Board again asserted, without giving any details, that Rahim had advanced knowledge of many al-Qaeda attacks, including 9/11, and had financed, planned and participated in attacks against US and Coalition targets in Afghanistan.
The Board also cited what it called Rahim’s “consistent and long-standing expressions of support for violence against the United States and Coalition Forces.” It said he showed a “lack of candor when answering questions regarding pre-detention activities and beliefs prevent the Board from assessing whether he has had any change in mindset or his current level of threat.”
One of the peculiar injustices of the Guantanamo system is that detainees have to show remorse for what they are accused of, even if they have actually done nothing wrong. Indeed, after enduring what the former Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, called “the horrors and harms” of Guantanamo, men like Rahim, who have been tortured and detained without trial for decades, much of it in solitary confinement, have to say that they really like America in order to try to persuade the Board that they are no longer a threat to US national security.[2]
In his statement to the Board, Rahim clearly tried to do just that while still being true to what he has suffered. He spoke of the “lessons I learned at Guantanamo.” The “violations I experienced” had taught him, he said, the importance of respecting the human rights of every man, woman, boy and girl. From his long imprisonment, he said he had learned the virtue of patience and the pointlessness of violence. He admitted that he had struggled with remaining patient during his imprisonment and had “sometimes let my frustration get the better of me.” Connell also pointed out that Rahim had had no serious disciplinary issues for well over five years, despite living with high heat and humidity, in decrepit buildings with problems including sewage block-ups in the cells, conditions that were especially difficult for an “aging detainee” like Rahim (he is now 57) to bear, given he has mounting health problems and suffers from insomnia.
Rahim told the Board that he was not an enemy of the US. In the 1980s, he said, America had helped him and other mujahedin in their fight against the Soviet invasion and in the 1990s, he had worked alongside the US Drug Enforcement Agency, including assisting a US ambassador’s visit to Jalalabad. He condemned the 9/11 attacks, ascribing them to al-Qaeda and saying Afghans “did not and would never agree to attacks on civilians.” He also said he had learned that the “positive view of America I had as a young person was mostly justified… During the darkest days of my captivity, the biggest shock was that Americans could do these things to me.” It was not only American attorneys that had been kind to him, he said, but also medical staff, guards and officers.
It was all to no avail. The only hopeful part of the Board’s short statement was that it said it was “encouraged by the detainee’s participation and discussion of his future plans and hopes for further candor when discussing his pre-detention activities and beliefs so that any change in mindset can be evaluated.” This is a step forward from previous determinations which had turned down his transfer point-blank.
The claims against Rahim
As to Rahim’s “pre-detention activities and beliefs,” in statements supporting his habeas corpus petition,[3] Rahim admitted to working with Arab fighters before and just after 2001. This was not in itself unusual and did not necessarily point to any shared ideological stance; being in paid employment was much sought after in what was then a very poor country (even more so than now). The US military had previously claimed the job of another Afghan detainee, Abdul Zahir, for example, who had worked as a chokidar (doorman) and occasional translator for an Arab commander, was sufficient to detain him from 2002 to 2015, a position later overruled by a Periodic Review Board. When it finally decided to release him, it said he “was probably misidentified as the individual who had ties to al-Qaeda weapons facilitation.” (For details on Zahir’s case, see pages 30-33 of the author’s 2016 special report, Kafka in Cuba: The Afghan Experience in Guantanamo.)
What Rahim has denied is the US claim that he also cooperated with al-Qaeda beyond the immediate post-2001 era. He said that when he was detained he was living in Lahore making a living selling honey, something his family also said in recent interviews (more on this below). CIA statements to the media when it announced his detention that he was one of Osama bin Laden’s “most trusted facilitators,” “a tough, seasoned jihadist” who was “best known in counter-terror circles as a personal facilitator and translator” for bin Laden were undermined by the US Senate’s 2014 report on the CIA’s use of torture. It revealed that the agency’s interrogation of Rahim had “resulted in no disseminated intelligence report.” It suggested that the only information it had about him were the ISI’s allegations and that nothing useful had been ascertained from questioning him. Documents released in Rahim’s habeas petition also point to the basis of US accusations being hearsay, including ‘double hearsay’, ie what someone claimed someone else had said about Rahim, testimony from other detainees obtained under torture or duress and unverified and unprocessed intelligence reports.
However, whether or not Rahim was a seasoned al-Qaeda facilitator almost two decades ago, it is hard to fathom why the US would still consider him a risk to its national security now, especially given it no longer has forces in Afghanistan and there are plenty of men now in power in Kabul/Kandahar who have had working relationships with al-Qaeda over the years. Moreover, the US chose to withdraw its forces despite members of al-Qaeda and other similar groups being based in Afghanistan.[4] Any risk a freed Rahim could conceivably pose would be marginal compared to existing threats. He, himself, was unconvinced that this was the real reason for his continued incarceration, telling the Board:
As a 57-year old man in poor health, I am confident that the United States does not fear that I would return to a battlefield that no longer exists. But I can understand that you might fear what I would say if released, so I will tell you the lessons I learned in Guantanamo.
Rahim has previously said explicitly that he believes it is the torture he endured that is behind his continuing detention: he is kept locked up not for anything he did, but because of what was done to him and the US authorities’ reluctance to free a man who could speak about CIA practice.[5] Connell also told the Board that he believed Rahim had probably not been cleared for transfer before “as a result of the circumstances which brought him” to Guantanamo (see Connell’s statement here), again, an allusion to his being a victim of torture.
The author is not convinced that this is the only reason, however, because of the peculiar way the US authorities understand risk when it applies to those incarcerated at Guantanamo. The casting of anyone who arrived at Guantanamo as, in the words of US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld in early 2002, the ‘worst of the worst’ created monsters in the public imagination. In the absence of any proper scrutiny of allegations and evidence, there has been nothing to reduce these imagined monsters down to size or create a space to deal with them rationally. Nothing in US files on the last eight Afghans held at Guantanamo (many classified but published by Wikileaks) scrutinised by the author suggested the eight were especially dangerous individuals. Most of the claims failed to stack up at all. Yet the inertia fundamental to the Guantanamo system means that assertions made against detainees can stand in the eye of the US authorities for years, even, as was the case with some of the Afghans, that they were ludicrous.[6]
Exacerbating this is the way that, after Barack Obama took office in 2008, Republican members of Congress who had been unconcerned about transfers suddenly strived to block them, complicating all subsequent transfers or attempts to close the camp. Moreover, at the end of the day, both detention and any release are arbitrary, given that the US authorities exercise unrestrained power over the individuals in Guantanamo.
Unfulfilled dreams
At his hearing, Rahim and his counsel tried to paint a future for Rahim that was less frightening for the Board. If released, Rahim said he would like to cook and open a restaurant or a mobile ‘food truck’. His counsel described him as the best in “a field of good cooks” among Guantanamo detainees and said that he, himself, would be first in line to eat at any outlet Rahim established. His spinach curry was the best Connell had ever eaten. For now, however, a future outside Guantanamo remains a dream. Rahim is still incarcerated and about to enter (in February) his seventeenth year away from his family.
Meanwhile, in Kabul, where Rahim’s family now lives, members have been speaking to the media about their son/father’s long detention and absence.[7] In a video published by BBC Pashto (see clips on X, formerly Twitter) on 29 November 2023, which was actually eight days after the Periodic Review Board had decided to keep him incarcerated, but had yet to publish their determination, one of Rahim’s four sons, Ismael, said they needed their father home; they missed him so much. He described his father’s arrest in Lahore in 2007:
We were very small when our father was arrested together with us. My little brother, Daud, was two years old and was sitting in my mother’s lap when my father was arrested.… We don’t remember our father sitting with us at all.
Ismael is now, of course, a grown man. Alongside him, Rahim’s mother, Safora Bibi (see also ToloNews), old and crying, said that after he was dragged forcibly from his car and taken away, they heard nothing about him for four years. Then came a message from the International Committee of the Red Cross that he was alive and in Guantanamo. “Everyone has now been released,” she said, “but not my son.”
Such petitions ask a court to rule whether a government is lawfully detaining an individual. Special Rapporteur, Ní Aoláin described how they work for Guantanamo detainees in her June 2023 report:
Regarding habeas remedies she finds it has been overwhelmingly ineffective both in efficiency of process and delivery of the remedy of actual release for detainees. Detainees have had access to habeas corpus since 2004, but most proceedings have languished in judicial pipelines undermining the requisite regularity of independent, impartial, review, and calling into question their effectiveness as a matter of international human rights law.
↑4
In talks with the Taleban before their takeover of Kabul, both the Trump and Biden administrations dealt with men who had long and enduring relationships with al-Qaeda – more than a dozen of the movement’s senior officials and commanders, now government ministers, were under United Nations sanctions because of their alleged links to terrorist groups. They include acting minister of interior Sirajuddin Haqqani, who also has a ten million dollar FBI reward on his head which says he “maintains close ties to the Taliban [sic] and al Qaeda … and is a specially designated global terrorist.”
↑5
“How come they make me admit to things in order to get out?” Rahim wrote to his habeas lawyer on 27 April 2016. “I am an innocent man. Parole comes after a trial, not before. They are holding me because I was tortured. Please give me a fair hearing, with my lawyer.” See the author’s 2021 report, ‘Kafka in Cuba, a Follow-Up Report: Afghans Still in Detention Limbo as Biden Decides What to do with Guantanamo’, p51.
↑6
The author meticulously unpicked many of the claims against the last eight Afghans to be detained, concluding that in trying to understand why they were detained, it usually made more sense to look at who had informed the Americans about them or handed them over; incentives for this could be a bounty or settling a score in a factional or personal dispute. For more on this and on US government politics ensuring the survival of Gauntanamo, see two special reports by the author, Kafka in Cuba: The Afghan Experience in Guantanamo (2016) and Kafka in Cuba, a Follow-Up Report: Afghans Still in Detention Limbo as Biden Decides What to do with Guantanamo (2021).
↑7
The family members called on the US to release Rahim, as have IEA officials. For example, IEA spokesman Zabehullah Mujahed told ToloNews:
We have discussed the Guantanamo prison with the Americans several times. There is an Afghan prisoner who has to be released. He was arrested without any crime and the other thing is that he has been there for a long time and has suffered cruelty. He should be released as soon as possible. Now, once again, we ask the Americans to release him as soon as possible. The Islamic Emirate will also try in this regard through legal means.
A Dreams Deferred (Again): The last remaining Afghan in Guantanamo loses his latest bid for freedom
As the world commemorates 16 Days of Activism to end gender-based violence, Afghans discuss their experiences under the Taliban.
Right now, women and feminist organizations around the world are commemorating the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women with the 16 Days of Activism campaign. Starting on November 25 and running through December 10, this year’s campaign calls on governments worldwide to share how they are investing in the prevention of gender-based violence.While the campaign itself is worldwide, 16 Days of Activism should pay special heed to Afghanistan. In just 28 months, the Taliban have dismantled Afghan women’s and girls’ rights — imposing draconian restrictions regarding their education, employment and freedom of movement. Any perceived violation of these oppressive policies is often met with harassment, intimidation, and verbal and physical abuse orchestrated by the Taliban’s Ministry of Vice and Virtue. And when women are detained by authorities, they have been subjected to cruel treatment, including torture.The Taliban’s anti-women policies, combined with an emboldened patriarchal system, have made Afghanistan the lowest-ranked country in the 2023 Women, Peace and Security Index. With humanitarian aid to Afghanistan drying up, the 16 Days of Activism offers a chance to renew international attention so that Afghan women and girls are not left behind.
To ensure that Afghan voices are included in this year’s conversations, USIP launched an online survey asking Afghans both inside and outside the country about their personal experiences and views about the impact of the Taliban’s policies toward women to better understand where their needs lie.
Taliban’s Policies Have Rolled Back Two Decades Worth of Gains
Almost immediately after the fall of Kabul in August 2021, the Taliban began rolling back the over two decades of gains women had achieved in politics, governance, education, health and the private sector.
Within months, the Taliban suspended the Afghan Constitution, which had obligated the government to protect and promote human rights; replaced the Ministry of Women’s Affairs with the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice; ordered professional and working women to stay home until further notice; prevented women from travelling on long-distance (72 km/45 miles) road trips without a mahram; and imposed a strict dress code on women.
Those we interviewed, both men and women, underscored the immense impact that stringent measures on women and girls have had on Afghan society. Particularly, they pointed to the prohibitions on employment and education, the mandated dress code, and the requirement for a mahram as encroachments on fundamental women’s rights.
Additionally, a number of respondents highlighted instances of public humiliation — where the Taliban’s religious police employed loudspeakers from moving vehicles or within crowds to critique women and their mahram, focusing on elements such as clothing choices, hijab styles and shoe colors.
One woman from Kabul said, “The Taliban view us as criminals. As soon as we step outside our homes, the religious police run to us to intimidate us, to scare us and to remind us that we belong at home.”
These restrictions only intensified when women interacted with government agencies, where they were subjected to degrading behaviors, harassment and insults.
In this context, women are treated as second class citizens, with no agency over decisions about their own body and life. The mental toll has been enormous — women we talked to expressed feeling suffocated, depressed, isolated and worthless. Consequently, there has been a surge in suicide attempts among Afghan women and girls, and they now account for three out of every four suicides and suicide attempts in the country.
“The Taliban have robbed us of our identity and are taking our agency away,” said a woman from Paktia. “They want us to hide behind the walls of our homes. They don’t see us as human beings.”
They want us to hide behind the walls of our homes. They don’t see us as human beings.
In the numerous responses, the Taliban were not the only underlying cause of violence against women. The widespread lack of awareness regarding women’s rights among members of the Taliban has also allowed deeply ingrained and traditional perceptions regarding gender roles to resurface in Afghan society — with the Taliban sparking a resurgence in other forms of gender-based violence.As a woman from Nangarhar noted, “The Taliban’s policies have unfortunately normalized various forms of abuse, including physical, mental and financial abuse of women.” Meanwhile, a teacher from Jawzjan expressed a sense of loss under Taliban rule: “Over the past two years, our society has regrettably regressed by several decades.”
Forced Marriages and Domestic Violence
Financial hardship further compounds the challenges faced by women, with the prevalence of underage and forced marriages on a significant uptick. The dismal state of the Afghan economy, along with the lack of education for girls, has compelled families to wed their daughters out of perceived economic necessity. Furthermore, there is a disturbing trend of marrying young girls to much older men.
The abrupt decline in women’s employment and economic standing — many women were employed teaching in girls’ schools that are now closed, or in beauty parlors that are banned — coupled with restrictions on education and freedom of movement, has taken a toll on their mental well-being. Meanwhile, soaring unemployment and poverty in Afghanistan mean families are spending more and more time within the confines of their home, fostering an environment that is often rife with distress, tension and domestic violence.
Beyond acts of physical abuse, domestic violence can also take the form of isolating women from social engagements, publicly or privately disrespecting women, ignoring their opinions, taking control of their financial affairs, and restricting financial independence.
Tragically, honor killings further compound the issue of domestic violence, and husbands who display negative behavior toward wives who give birth to girls represents another distressing manifestation of gender-based violence within familial settings.
A Justice System Steeped in Anti-Women Sentiments
For victims of domestic abuse, the Taliban’s justice system is a nightmarish ordeal. Perpetrators routinely go unprosecuted in Taliban courts (with cases involving murder an exception), allowing abusive Afghan men to no longer fear repercussions for the harm they cause women and girls.
As one woman from Jawzjan told USIP: “In the republic era, individuals facing charges related to violence against women and those avoiding legal consequences sought shelter in regions controlled by the Taliban, deeming them safe havens. Currently, the entire country has transformed into a sanctuary.”
Women who attempt to leave their marriages encounter further obstacles in exercising their legal rights. In March 2023, the Taliban invalidated numerous cases of divorce that were settled under the previous government. These women, who had once managed to secure independence, now find themselves coerced to reunite with their ex-husbands. Even those who manage to maintain their divorce face issues over child custody and the collection of alimony.
Meanwhile, the Taliban Supreme Court’s recent disclosures do not include any initiatives to reel in child and forced marriage, or the practice of Taliban officials taking multiple wives. Despite their previous claims to the contrary, it’s clear where the Taliban’s legal priorities lie regarding violence against women and girls.
The cumulative effect of these impositions is a stifling environment where women’s voices are devalued, their rights are curtailed, and their overall wellbeing is compromised. In assessing life under Taliban rule, it is crucial to address not just the external threats posed by Taliban decrees, but also how those restrictions perpetuate and worsen harmful behaviors in a domestic setting.
The Taliban have only emboldened already-existing patriarchal norms in Afghanistan. Any attempts to foster a more equitable and just society must also address these root causes so that every individual, regardless of gender, is treated with dignity and respect.
Protecting Afghan Women and Girls
Comprehensive and immediate measures to address the challenges faced by Afghan women and safeguard their rights and well-being is urgently needed.
During this year’s 16 Days of Activism, Afghan women are calling on the international community, particularly the United States and Europe, to utilize the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act and the global human rights sanctions regime adopted by the European Council in 2020 “to target individuals, entities and bodies – including state and non-state actors – responsible for, involved in or associated with serious human rights violations and abuses worldwide, no matter where they occurred.” The Magnitsky sanctions could send a message that Taliban rule cannot be normalized without addressing fundamental violations of women’s rights.
Meanwhile, the U.N. Security Council bears the responsibility of preserving international peace and security. In Afghanistan, over 50 percent of the population faces severe marginalization by the Taliban —treated as criminals for exercising what should be protected freedoms and systematically excluded from all facets of society. A commissioned report from the U.N. Security Council’s special coordinator for Afghanistan, Feridun Sinirlioglu, calls for a new U.N. envoy to lead efforts to normalize the international community’s relationship with the Taliban if the Taliban observe international rights and security norms. The U.N. Security Council should not do this, however, without clear conditions on women’s rights and women’s security that must be met for the Taliban to increase their international standing.
In the meantime, it is essential to provide robust support and resources to U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in Afghanistan Richard Bennett. He has a mandate to document and report on human rights violations, with a particular focus on the rights of women and girls. It is crucial that he is able to provide comprehensive oversight on the Taliban’s discriminatory practices to provide authoritative benchmarks for rights-based conditionality.
Outside the U.N., the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) can take more concrete steps to address human rights violations against Afghan women and girls as a way to uphold Islamic values. The Taliban’s national restrictions on education, movement and employment are unprecedented among OIC states and inconsistent with classical interpretations of Sharia. The OIC can deliver this message most forcefully in support of women’s rights.
Inside Afghanistan, religious scholars and the media have a vital role in raising awareness and educating male family members about the significance of respecting the rights of women and girls, both within households and in the broader societal context. Promoting an understanding of Islamic rights through diverse channels, including social media, conferences and community initiatives, is essential in fostering positive change. Together, these measures can contribute to creating a more equitable and supportive environment for Afghan women.
Afghanistan Peace Campaign
The Security Council adopts resolution 2721 (2023) on the independent assessment on Afghanistan. The resolution was adopted with 13 votes in favour and two abstentions (People’s Republic of China, Russian Federation). Photo by UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe, 29 December 2023.
