The Evacuation of Afghanistan Never Ended

September 3, 2022 Analytical articles

By Eliza Griswold

The New Yorker

August 30, 2022

A year after the last U.S. military flights left, some Afghans who are vulnerable to retribution from the Taliban are being resettled in the U.S. But others are stuck in third-party countries, and many remain trapped in Afghanistan, at great risk.

Last month, Metra Mehran, an Afghan human-rights activist, faced a choice. Until last summer, she lived in Kabul, where she worked as a director of a U.S.-funded women’s-education program. But, in August of 2021, when the Taliban took power, she was forced to flee. Through friends from the Fulbright program at Texas A. & M., which she had attended from 2016 to 2018, Mehran secured a place for herself on a list of Afghans eligible for protection in the U.S. Her mother, father, and brother travelled on a Special Immigrant Visa, granted for her mother’s role as a civil engineer, designing and building bridges and roads for American projects. They were flown to a military base in Kuwait, then eventually brought to Falls Church, Virginia.

I met Mehran in the winter of 2021, through a network of volunteers engaged in evacuation efforts, and we’ve worked together to help Afghan women still in peril. Mehran thought that she would be able to continue that work. But recently the Taliban began to harass her colleagues still in Kabul. “Because I openly criticize the Taliban’s policies and continue to engage with women on the ground, some low-level guys were threatening them,” she told me. “They kept coming to their offices, harassing them with screenshots of my tweets and of me on TV.” She had to decide whether to leave her job or continue risking the safety of her colleagues; in the end, she quit. It stunned her that the Taliban were able to assert power from so far away. “It was painful to see that, even though I am here in the United States, the Taliban can control my freedom of speech,” she said.

Mehran, like thousands of others who tried to leave the country last August, had little desire to build a new life outside of Afghanistan, but, for her safety, she had little choice. The U.S. government set up a system to evacuate thousands of people who were vulnerable to retribution from the Taliban—activists and civil-society members, judges and prosecutors, and people who had worked with the U.S. military or American-backed projects. But the effort was quickly overwhelmed by the speed of events. (A White House spokesperson said that the Administration conducted “extensive contingency planning,” and that its evacuation efforts constituted “one of the largest airlifts in history.” A State Department spokesperson added, “We will be relentless in this effort as we stand by our Afghan allies and their families.”) Alongside formal government initiatives, ad-hoc collectives stepped up. Afghans, former American officials, journalists, aid workers, and others cobbled together charter flights to evacuate those in danger. (With friends and colleagues, I took part in one of hundreds of such efforts.) Thousands of Afghans escaped, but then, on August 30, 2021, the military left, the airport closed, and many more were left behind.

It has now been a year since the last U.S. military flight left Afghanistan. At the end of 2021, according to the United Nations, there were more than 2.7 million Afghan refugees registered worldwide. Since Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, there have been no such reliable figures. “A year later, neither we nor the U.S.G. really knows in any comprehensive way where everyone ended up or how many there even are,” Mike Breen, the president and C.E.O. of Human Rights First, told me, referring to the United States government. “To this day, there appears to be no systemic solution for accounting for all these people and getting them somewhere safe and sustainable.”

Among the luckiest Afghans are roughly eighty-five thousand who made it to the U.S. Halima Amiri, a twenty-two-year-old belonging to the Hazara ethnic minority persecuted by the Taliban, was studying to be an engineer at a military academy before Kabul fell. She spent three months being shuttled between windowless safe houses in Afghanistan, before flying to the U.S. and being resettled in Duluth, Minnesota. She arrived in Duluth last February, with three other young Afghan women, wearing matching black puffy coats and combat boots they’d received at a U.S. base in New Jersey. They were greeted by a pastor and retired professors taking part in a pilot program that allowed private citizens to help resettle refugees. It was eight degrees outside, and the women had worried about the cold. They were also, as far as they knew, the only Afghans in a city of eighty-five thousand. But they had the support of Episcopal Migration Ministries, a resettlement agency, and also of a devoted group of volunteers, who took turns spending the night with the women in a retreat center when they first arrived.

When I spoke to Amiri, by phone this month, she was working in the kitchen of a Benedictine home for the elderly; one of the other women scooped cones at Love Creamery, a local ice-cream shop. They spent the summer intensively studying English, working, and sending money back to Afghanistan. “Our education has always been the most important factor,” Amiri told me recently. In September, she will start the fall semester at the College of St. Scholastica, studying computer science and health. But stories of their families suffering in Afghanistan, where the spectre of famine caused prices to spike, has made it difficult to focus on their new routines.

When Amiri, an accomplished amateur artist, first arrived, she sketched images of the girls left behind in the safe houses. “I’m only in touch with some,” Amiri told me. The safe houses had been disbanded; no one was leaving anytime soon, and the funding dried up. “Most are still living in hiding, on their own,” Amiri added. “They always tell me that I’m lucky that I’m not in their situation, and that makes me really sad.” Almost all those she knew of were still in Afghanistan, with only four making it over the border to Pakistan.

There are also an untold number of Afghans who made it out of the country but are stuck abroad. Breen, from Human Rights First, told me, “Thousands who’d hoped to find a pathway to the U.S. are in limbo in a kind of global safe-house archipelago all over the world.” Some are in Pakistan and others are in the United Arab Emirates, where thousands are stuck in a “humanitarian city”—a place sometimes described as an international no man’s land. Thousands are in Turkey and Greece. Most were transported out of Afghanistan with promises that they would eventually be resettled in the U.S., but, for various reasons, that hasn’t happened.

During the past year, Operation White Scarves, a volunteer effort led by women, has successfully evacuated more than a thousand female leaders from Afghanistan. Nasrin Oryakhil, a fifty-six-year-old gynecologist and the former minister of labor and social affairs, escaped this past August with only a small carry-on of possessions. “Because I’m not a corrupt minister, I don’t have any money,” she told me. She is currently living in Istanbul, waiting for the United States to process her application to enter the country. “I can’t accept that the United States is offering me no support at all,” she told me. In 2014, Michelle Obama awarded her the State Department’s International Women of Courage award. This year, Oryakhil found an online contact form for the Obamas and wrote to ask for her help. “She’s a very kind person,” she said, but “I never heard back.” In Turkey, Afghan refugees struggle to be able to work, and Oryakhil is unable to pay her rent. “Even though there are so many threats against me, I’m considering going back to Afghanistan to run my private clinic,” she said. “I might be tortured, but I have to support my daughters.”

Mursal Ayar, a twenty-eight-year-old freelance journalist who worked with CNN, among other outlets, was arrested at her home, in Kabul, in January. For two weeks, she was interrogated, locked in a toilet, and beaten with a steel pipe. “They beat you until you give them names,” she told me. In June, after she was released, she fled overland to a nearby country. No nation has yet offered her family asylum. “I’m not sure what’s going to happen to me,” she told me.

Some women are living in hiding, even abroad. “I am not safe here and I hope you don’t publish where I am,” Tamana Paryani, a well-known twenty-five-year-old activist wrote to me last week, by encrypted chat. In January, Paryani live-streamed the moment when the Taliban broke into her house to arrest her. “At the moment, my camera was my only weapon,” she told me. “It was my protest.” Paryani was recently awarded asylum in the U.S., but she’s deeply ambivalent about accepting it. “To be honest, I am not interested in going to America,” she wrote. “I don’t like to seek refuge in the same government who gave our land to the terrorists.”

Despite the chaos of the evacuation from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden has touted it as an “extraordinary success.” Many of the difficulties in processing refugees, the Administration has claimed, are the result of changes that the Trump Administration made to U.S. resettlement programs. “The United States fucked it up for sure last August, and there’s no giving anyone a pass on that,” Shawn VanDiver, who founded #AfghanEvac, which coördinates relocation efforts between the U.S. government and two hundred volunteer groups, told me. “But, man, I can’t imagine what this would’ve looked like under the previous Administration.”

Although a small number of individuals inside and outside the Biden Administration have committed themselves heroically to the effort, the situation remains a chaotic mess. Currently, there are a handful of legal pathways for Afghans who want to settle in the United States. “Not one is working like it should,” Becca Heller, the head of the International Refugee Assistance Project, a nonprofit organization that works on refugee policy, told me. One option is a Special Immigrant Visa, or S.I.V., designated for Afghans in danger because of their work with the United States. A report released this month by the nonprofit the Association of Wartime Allies estimated that a hundred and sixty thousand applicants eligible for S.I.V.s still await processing for their visas, and that the Administration has issued an average of only seven hundred and twenty-five such visas per month since September of last year. (The Administration claims that the number of “full applications,” or those that are ready for approval, is much lower, and amounts to seventeen thousand.) Even more distressing, according to a report co-authored by the Association of Wartime Allies and Mina’s List: only an estimated seven to ten per cent of S.I.V. primary applicants are women. Although they are also at risk, owing to their work, they often cannot meet the United States’s eligibility requirements.

A second pathway is through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, for people including journalists and other members of civil society, but advocates say that it is also too slow. A third option, humanitarian parole, permits only a temporary stay in the U.S., during which Afghans must apply for permanent protection. As of August, of the sixty-six thousand Afghans who’ve applied, a mere hundred and twenty-three have been approved, according to the investigative outlet Reveal. (An Administration official said that the Biden Administration is dissuading Afghans from applying to humanitarian parole because of its temporary nature, and encouraging them to apply through a pathway that offers durable status, such as S.I.V. or the Refugee Admissions Program. The official also noted that, upon taking office, the Administration “substantially increased” the number of staff processing S.I.V. applications, increasing the pace of S.I.V. arrivals in the U.S. nearly eightfold between January and July of 2021.)

Compare these numbers with those fleeing Ukraine, for whom the United States has created the highly successful Uniting for Ukraine program, known as U4U. Of more than ninety-seven thousand Ukrainians who’ve applied for humanitarian parole, more than sixty-eight thousand applications have now been approved. “It’s pretty clear at this point that the U.S.G. needs to face up to the situation and create a parole program for everyone who fled the Taliban based on the lesson learned via U4U,” Breen said. (An Administration official said that U4U was created after speaking with Ukrainians in refugee camps, who “overwhelmingly” said that they plan to return to Ukraine and only seek temporary refuge in the United States.) These policy changes would begin with the passage of the Afghan Adjustment Act, currently before Congress. Among other things, the Afghan Adjustment Act would establish an interagency task force that could begin by providing a comprehensive picture of where at-risk Afghans actually are, and create a path to application for lawful permanent residency for many who now hold only temporary and uncertain status.

The American allies and activists most at risk are those still trapped in Afghanistan. “We still have ten thousand left on our list that didn’t make it out,” Horia Mosadiq, who helps lead Operation White Scarves, told me. The list includes one of Mosadiq’s colleagues who has been detained and tortured twice. There are at least three women on the list still inside Afghanistan who are under extreme threat. At least one was highly known for her work in tackling cases of violence against women, including cases committed by members of the Taliban. For those who have escaped, their families are now at risk of retribution. “Silencing exists far beyond the borders of Afghanistan,” she said.

There are still efforts to get women at severe risk out of Afghanistan, but they face steep odds. “There aren’t many flights available,” VanDiver told me. Given the demand, it’s nearly impossible to find a seat on one. Also, for many, evacuating through a third-party country is prohibitively expensive. “In a best-case scenario, we estimate that a family of five needs between twelve and twenty-five thousand dollars just to travel and stay afloat while awaiting an asylum interview,” Laura Deitz, who runs Task Force Nyx, a grassroots group helping small numbers of high-risk families evacuate and resettle, told me. “Even if they have that kind of money, they run the risk of running out and becoming homeless as they wait for processing.” When their temporary visas expire, those who make it out have been sent back to Afghanistan. “We’ve seen women deported from Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and Central Asian countries, and returned to the Taliban,” Mosadiq told me. “That’s why the speed of processing isn’t just a matter of bureaucracy—it’s life and death.”

Mehran, the activist in Falls Church, wakes many mornings in a panic that something has happened to her friends. One recent morning, she reached for her phone to find bloody images of them in her text messages. Dozens of women had met up in the former site of Kabul’s Green Zone to protest the Taliban’s first year in power. Some were caught by the Taliban and beaten with sticks and pipes between their legs. Among the women was Munisa Mubariz, who previously held a position in the Ministry of Finance. Photos showed her in a bright-green coat, screaming into the face of a Talib. “We were screaming, ‘Food, freedom, work!’ ” she told me later. “The Taliban took my phone, so I’ve gone into hiding,” she said. “I can’t even go to the doctor.” She was looking for the quickest way out of Afghanistan. “Nobody wants to leave their country,” she told me. “But I can’t survive here anymore.” ♦

Eliza Griswold, a contributing writer at The New Yorker, won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for “Amity and Prosperity.” Her latest book is “If Men, Then: Poems.”

You Can’t Choose Your Neighbors: The Taliban’s Testy Regional Relationships

September 2, 2022 Analytical articles

A year after the fall of Kabul, Afghanistan’s neighbors are engaging pragmatically with the Taliban, but still wary of what’s next.

One year after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, its relations with its neighbors remain tepid as the region comes to grips with the reality that they now own a greater share of Afghanistan’s problems and the Taliban realize that neither recognition nor financial aid are going to come from the region easily.

Around the Region

It seems that there is disappointment on all sides about what has unfolded since the Taliban’s victory.

Regional powers, particularly Iran, Russia and China, were happy to see U.S. and NATO troops go but are not in a position to replace the massive amounts of development assistance that went with them — leaving a humanitarian crisis on their doorstep with the new Afghan government lacking the capacity to run a modern state. China, which had a free ride on the regional stability NATO provided in Afghanistan, has been thrust into an unwelcome role of addressing complex political dynamics between the Taliban and Pakistan as well as trying to mitigate unrest within Afghanistan.
Regional countries tend to prioritize “stability” over rights or democracy. But even by those standards, the Taliban have under-performed. While the Taliban maintain tight security control across the country, they have excluded non-Pashtun ethnic groups from any meaningful political power, alienating their traditional patrons in neighboring states and increasing risks of future insurgencies from these marginalized groups.
The Taliban have also continued to harbor a range of terrorist groups that endanger their neighbors, including the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which threatens Pakistan; the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which threatens China; the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which threatens Uzbekistan; and ISIS-Khorasan Province, which threatens everyone (including the Taliban).
Regional countries are also concerned about drug trafficking from Afghanistan, which remains the world’s largest producer of opium for heroin and is increasingly a significant source of methamphetamine. Iran suffers from violent drug trafficking across its border and addiction of Iranian consumers. Pakistan, Tajikistan and Russia are also hurt by the flow of Afghan drugs through their territory. While the Taliban publicly announced a ban on opium cultivation, evidence from field studies suggests this is more about taking control of drug networks that were created according to the Afghan Republic’s power structures than about cutting exports.
The Taliban’s policies against girls’ education and women’s role in society are of less concern to the region than to Western powers, but nonetheless are alienating and out of step with their own domestic policies. At a recent regional summit in Tashkent, all regional powers issued statements condemning the ban on girls in high school and called for greater political inclusion.

For all of these reasons, the Taliban have not received recognition from any country, which is worse than when their rule in the 1990s was recognized by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The Taliban and Pakistan

Perhaps the most surprising regional dynamic since the Taliban took power has been its testy relationship with Pakistan. The Taliban came to power with the benefit of existential support from Pakistan. But, in power, the Taliban have done little to reward that support. Instead, they have pursued a foreign policy that can best be described as nationalistic — asserting Afghan sovereignty and focusing on their group’s own needs first. This includes harboring the TTP, which seeks the overthrow of the Pakistan government; opposing (albeit weakly) Pakistan’s efforts to fence the border between the two countries along the disputed Durand Line; and most recently threatening Pakistan over its apparent decision to allow U.S. drones to use Pakistani airspace to kill al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in the middle of downtown Kabul. For its part, Pakistan still supports the Taliban politically and gives significant technical assistance but has refrained from significant amounts of aid, maintained tight border controls and has withheld diplomatic recognition.

Adding further insult to Pakistan, the Taliban has made surprising overtures to establish friendly relations with India, which just re-opened its embassy in Kabul. This reflects a pattern of daring diplomatic gamesmanship from a regime that lacks formal international standing: In addition to courting India to gain leverage against Pakistan, the Taliban played Qatar and the United Arab Emirates against each other in competition for a contract to manage the Kabul International Airport (which UAE won) and has jousted diplomatically with Uzbekistan over the return of Afghan air force planes that pilots flew out of the country as the Taliban took over. This aggressive foreign policy demonstrates the Taliban’s strong sense of sovereignty but also its aversion to compromise with a goal of winning friends.

No Option but to Engage

Regional countries do not have the luxury of choosing whether to be Afghanistan’s neighbor and have pursued pragmatic strategies of engagement. Uzbekistan, Turkey and Qatar have all offered good offices in different ways to broker diplomatic dialogues with the international community and with Afghan political factions excluded by the Taliban. Most regional powers seek to avoid the West’s hubris of expecting the Taliban to change quickly — instead seeking incremental change over time. But just because regional countries are willing to talk and averse to imposing sanctions on the Taliban, does not mean they these countries are its ally. All of the neighboring countries would have preferred a negotiated power-sharing arrangement to the outright Taliban victory.

A positive outcome for the region in Afghanistan would be if the Taliban maintain political and security control by giving enough to other political groups to avoid facing a domestic insurgency, keep a lid on transnational terrorist groups, and at the same time opening the country to free trade across the region and profitable access to Afghanistan’s prodigious mineral resources. Traders report that arbitrary checkpoints and corrupt customs collection are dramatically reduced. The Taliban have expressed openness to international trade and connectivity, encouraging the long-stalled gas pipeline that would link Turkmenistan to Pakistan and India as well as power lines from Central Asia to Pakistan and road and rail links that would fit into China’s Belt and Road regional infrastructure initiative. It remains to be seen, however, whether international investors including China (and presumably excluding the World Bank or Asian Development Bank due to Western vetoes) will want to make multi-billion dollar bets on the Taliban’s security control and political stability.

Ultimately, however, all nations in the region are concerned that the Taliban will not be able to contain cross-border threats in the form of terrorism, migration and drug trafficking. If the Taliban can deliver on these obligations over time, recognition from the region will come. If not, one can expect regional powers will seek greater alliances with non-Taliban Afghan factions to control these threats in their own areas of influence. Followed to its logical extreme, this was the recipe in the past for an intra-Afghan civil war.

While the United States and regional powers differ on many global issues, their interests in Afghanistan are remarkably aligned — even if Washington cares much more about women’s and human rights. It is therefore important to maintain parallel diplomatic channels with rivals like Iran, Russia and China so that disagreements over issues like nuclear proliferation, Ukraine and Taiwan do not undermine opportunities to put joint pressure on the Taliban to achieve common objectives in Afghanistan. This includes the current discussion about whether to re-instate the U.N. travel ban on the Taliban and decisions about diplomatic recognition.

I have spent a year helping people flee the Taliban: failure is traumatic, success bittersweet

September 1, 2022 Analytical articles

Ruchi Kumar

The Guardian

31 August 2022

We are still trying to find ways to get visas – writing letters, appealing to governments – but the options are running out

It was past midnight on 9 August 2021, and I was immersed in writing when my phone pinged: a message from a contact at the Indian embassy in Kabul. They said the Indian mission in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif was evacuating and offered me a seat on the flight.

There were reports the city would collapse soon and fall to the Taliban. I had already left Mazar, but it was hard to imagine that this historic, metropolitan city could topple so easily. It was too well fortified, as I had witnessed during my recent reporting trip, with hundreds of Afghan forces patrolling its gates.

Concern for colleagues gnawed at me. As the US-led foreign troops were withdrawing from Afghanistan, an emboldened Taliban had been taking province after province. They captured Kabul, abandoned by its government, on 15 August and Afghanistan, and particularly its women, lost any semblance of freedom.

I checked in on a friend in Mazar – Dr Akbari, at heightened risk due to her work in reproductive rights among vulnerable women. Akbari had made enemies, in particular with a Taliban commander, by providing contraceptives to his 13-year-old bride, against his wishes.

Staying with Akbari I had witnessed the barrage of horrifying, threatening calls and messages; sometimes 10 in an evening. Yet, she would answer every unknown number, just in case it might be a woman seeking help.

“But what can I do? If I don’t answer the phone or go to work every day, who will help these women?” she said.

As the Taliban surrounded Mazar, Akbari answered one such call. It was the Taliban commander, letting her know they had entered the city and that he would kill her very soon.

In her hospital uniform, with $400 in her purse and her passport, Akbari went directly to the airport, without saying goodbyes to her family, just in time for the last flight out. The airport, she said, was filled with women trying to escape the Taliban.

The same day a young journalist left her home on foot. Much of her work had been critical of the Taliban and their fighters had been threatening to “punish” her.

As stories poured in over the next 24 hours, we tried to find support for Akbari and safe spaces for others in Kabul. Friends offered to hide women reaching Kabul. For those who had visas, we started booking tickets. One we booked was for 22 August, another 17 August – too late be of any use.

The makeshift safe house in Kabul, the last remaining bastion, was filling up as fast as the flights out of Kabul.

On 13 August, a friend in the US called to ask for a contact for a female lawyer in Afghanistan; the US government was putting together a list of Afghan women at risk and issuing them visas to leave “in the worst case scenario”.

All illusions shattered. It didn’t matter that we were bringing women to Kabul, because there was no contingency “in the worst case scenario”. We needed to mobilise, and fast.

I asked my friend to get a few more names to the US government for visas. He asked for a “list” – the first of many we would put together. We created an Excel sheet of more than 50 journalists, doctors, activists, lawyers, politicians. But we didn’t want to seem greedy, so sat down to figure out who to drop. It struck us as extremely wrong we had to decide who “deserved” their place the most. Eventually, we gave 12 names – 10 women and two men – who we believed were most at risk for their work protecting human rights. Several of those on that first list are still in grave danger.

In the next few days, there were several groups created on social media, and we learned of several “lists” being put together for various governments to get vulnerable people out. We started looking for activists, officials, parliamentarians, who could help persuade their governments to take in Afghans.

By the time the Taliban marched into Kabul, my living room was a war room. We were already working on several hundred cases – friends, colleagues, those we had met, people whose stories we had once told – all of whom faced grave risks for having dreamed of a different Afghanistan.

One of the first things we did was to ensure people could stay in communication with us and with loved ones. We sent online phone top-ups to their numbers to ensure they had internet access. Within hours, many Afghans – largely women who could no longer step outside into the chaos to get phone cards – asked for top-ups.

By the second day, we were sending out close to 200. The task grew increasingly unfeasible until the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) stepped in with financial support. Over the next two weeks, we issued phone top-ups to nearly 500 individuals, mostly women in the media on the run.

As we navigated bureaucracies, Afghans navigated Taliban checkpoints, and barricades placed by withdrawing troops. Through huge crowds, wading through muck and drains, pushing forward, at times with children in tow, we guided people to evacuation flights, sharing maps with real-time information about checkpoints gathered from crowdsourced security groups.

One close colleague tried more than 20 times to reach the airport only to be forced back by the foreign troops. He was spotted by a Taliban fighter who lashed him, injuring his eight-month-old baby. He and his wife, also a journalist, remain in hiding, waiting for asylum from any of the many countries whose governments and media they worked with.

On my phone are messages from Afghans, exhausted, frustrated, hurt, betrayed, sometimes determined, other times ready to give up – each one traumatic.

Those first few weeks, before the foreign forces and planes left, we spent every waking hour – and there weren’t enough of those – pleading and negotiating, finding any way to get people out. As news cameras remained focused on Afghanistan, we were able to attract support from governments and organisations, but as media attention panned away, so did the collective sympathy.

It felt as if we were leaving them behind, consigning them to a tragic fate in a miserable environment.

We are still trying to find ways to get people out; writing letters, appealing to governments and organisations. But if there were few options available to them in the past year, there are even fewer now.

The bulk of the work we did then, and still do, is writing letters, emails, statements, filling in forms and organising documents. I must have written more than 200 individual statements, aside from hundreds of emails pleading for support for individual cases and completing the endlessly complex bureaucratic forms. I had spent seven years living in Kabul, and many more reporting about Afghanistan. It was my second home, but it humbled me to realise the vast number of Afghans who I can confidently say were like family to me. As I sat down each day to write statements of the threat they faced, I felt the pressure of encapsulating the entirety of their experience into one page, in a way that will convey the worth of a life to warrant saving it.

It was painful knowing even a successful application meant a family leaving a life they had so carefully built, not knowing if they will return.

It can get extremely frustrating, but I’m reminded of how exceptionally brave and strong these women and men are, persisting in a society ruled by a group eager to stifle their voices. Their resilience inspires.

And what a bittersweet moment it is, when after months of work and advocacy, you wake up to a message: “I have arrived safely in [third country].”

Ruchi Kumar is a journalist formerly resident in Kabul

Why Was a Negotiated Peace Always Out of Reach in Afghanistan?: Opportunities and Obstacles, 2001–21

August 31, 2022 Analytical articles

BY: Steve Brooking

United States Institute of Peace

August 30, 2022, marks the one-year anniversary of the last US troops leaving Afghanistan. During America’s 20-year military intervention, there were several opportunities to negotiate peace among the Taliban, the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, and the United States—but these opportunities were missed, went unrecognized, or were deliberately spurned by one or more of the parties. In this important history, Steve Brooking, the first British official sent into Afghanistan after 9/11, examines why the three parties were unable or unwilling to reach a negotiated settlement.

Summary

Peace efforts in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021 required the willingness of three main parties to negotiate: the Taliban, the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (“the Republic”), and the United States. But as political and military advantages shifted, each party’s perceived and relative interests differed over time, preventing the alignment that was necessary for a genuine peace process to take root.

In the early years of the war, with the Taliban on the run, the United States and its Afghan allies chose not to include the Taliban in discussions on the country’s political future or in the new Afghan government. While the United States prioritized military operations against terrorists over statebuilding, abusive warlords and corruption undermined the authority of the fledgling Republic. The US military surge in 2010 arguably led to the kind of mutually hurting stalemate that might have encouraged negotiation, but the US policy machine was slow to acknowledge that a negotiated settlement was likely needed to end the war. By the time the US view had changed, the Taliban could see a path to military victory unobstructed by the need for serious political negotiations with the Republic.

A decisive shift occurred in 2018, when the United States appointed a special envoy to negotiate with the Taliban and enable a withdrawal. But President Donald Trump’s clear intention to leave without any real conditions weakened the United States’ and Republic’s hands in negotiations. Moreover, the Republic leadership distrusted the envoy, was concerned chiefly about its own positions, underestimated US intentions to withdraw, and overestimated the Republic’s own strength—and consequently made no concessions that could advance talks.

The United States negotiated its own deal with the Taliban, excluding the Republic. But the decision to de-link the US-Taliban deal from results in an overall peace process precipitated the speed of the Taliban victory. So, too, did President Joe Biden’s announcement of a complete US military withdrawal by September 2021. By midsummer 2021, Taliban advances across the country demonstrated that victory was within their grasp. The option of a political settlement thus became moot, and in August 2021, as President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, the Taliban took full control.

Ultimately, the three parties, as well as Pakistan, put their own short-term interests above those of the Afghan people, eliminating hopes for a negotiated, inclusive, and durable peace in Afghanistan.

About the Report

This report examines why negotiations involving the United States, the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, and the Taliban between 2001 and 2021 failed to produce a political settlement of the conflict. The report, which was commissioned by the United States Institute of Peace, draws on primary and secondary sources, interviews with participants, and the author’s firsthand experience in Afghanistan as a diplomat and adviser.

About the Author

Steve Brooking was the first British official sent into Afghanistan after 9/11; he attended the Bonn Conference in 2001 and was political counsellor and chargé d’affaires ad interim at the British Embassy in Kabul from 2001 to 2004, before working in the private sector and as a senior adviser in the Afghan government. From 2015 until October 2021, he was the United Nations’ special adviser on peace and reconciliation, leading UN efforts in engagements with the Taliban.

Why Was a Negotiated Peace Always Out of Reach in Afghanistan?: Opportunities and Obstacles, 2001–21 Report Cover

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After a Year of Taliban Rule, Advances for Afghan Women and Youth Have All but Evaporated

August 31, 2022 Analytical articles

Despite prior assurances that they had moderated their positions, the past year of Taliban rule has been marred by a disturbing rollback of women’s and girl’s basic rights as 20 years of advancements have nearly evaporated. Meanwhile, the current economic crisis has forced young Afghans out of the workforce and left them in dire financial and humanitarian straits. USIP’s Belquis Ahmadi and Matthew Parkes examine how the Taliban’s oppressive policies have affected Afghan women, girls and youth over the last 12 months and offer ways for the United States and international community to support Afghanistan’s next generation.

How have women’s lives changed since the Taliban takeover?

Ahmadi: Since returning to power last year, the Taliban have enforced restrictions on women’s access to education, employment and other economic resources, and severely limited women’s mobility generally. These restrictions have been introduced through official edicts, orders and letters at both the national and local levels.

While the landscape prior to the Taliban takeover was problematic, the World Economic Forum’s 2022 Global Gender Gap Report ranked Afghanistan 146 out of 146 for women’s education attainment and economic participation and opportunity.

The Taliban’s methods of enforcement include direct warnings, intimidation, detention and, as applicable, dismissal from government positions. According to a U.N. Women report: “In practice, restrictions on women’s freedom of movement often go beyond what is prescribed in decrees,” due to the culture of fear and intimidation associated with the Taliban.

Almost immediately after taking control of the country, the Taliban ordered women employees of government to stay home. Universities remained closed for several months, and girls in most areas remain unable to attend school beyond sixth grade.

The Taliban’s governmental reorganization included abolishing the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and replacing it with the Ministry of the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, which was an infamously oppressive ministry during the Taliban’s previous rule in the 1990’s.

The ministry soon ushered in further restrictions on mobility — and access to services like health care — by requiring women to be accompanied by a male blood relative when leaving their home. Women can no longer be issued a driver’s license. And in a development that demonstrates both the Taliban’s ignorance on women’s issues and their inability to effectively govern a modern state, the Taliban ordered women employees at the Ministry of Finance to send a male family member to replace them, regardless of the man’s qualification or education level. Taliban decisions and orders make clear the group sees women as second-class human beings, and they are very willing to try and erase women’s presence in the public square.

What are the social and psychological impacts of the erosion of women’s rights in Afghanistan?

Ahmadi: The Taliban’s behavior and subsequent policies toward women have dire consequences for women’s social status and their lifelong psychological wellbeing. Treatment of women as less of a human being or as a second-class citizen affects how society as a whole — particularly young men and boys — views and treats women at home and in public.

Coupled with Afghanistan’s already patriarchal society, it validates efforts to exert ever-increasing control over women’s mobility, education and professional choices — even their choice of what to wear, access to everyday services and their ability to exercise their fundamental rights.

It harms women’s self-worth, confidence and agency. Enforcers from the Ministry of Vice and Virtue often go in communities, gather people in markets and use radio and television platforms or mosque loudspeakers to call for the public to be their eyes and ears in ensuring women abide by the Taliban’s rules of behavior.

In terms of justice, what mechanisms are there through which women can access justice?

Ahmadi: Prior to August 15, 2021, there were laws, special commissions and family dispute resolution mechanisms that provided some level of protection and support to women. Institutions such as the Ministry of Women’s Affairs (which had a presence in every province), the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, and an ever-growing list of women’s rights groups, special commissions and NGOs have been shut down or banned.

Under the Taliban, women have also been barred from practicing law or serving as a judge, prosecutor or defense lawyer. Of the roughly 300 women judges in Afghanistan prior to the takeover, 244 of them have been evacuated from the country entirely.

The Taliban have eroded mechanisms and services that were in place to provide protection and legal counselling to women. The Taliban made the Afghanistan Independent Bar Association (AIBA) part of the Ministry of Justice. By merging AIBA with the ministry, the Taliban have deprived Afghans, particularly women, of a previously robust mechanism to access independent defense attorneys.

Predictably, the Taliban have replaced experienced judges with their own members — most of whom have no formal legal education. Courts have stopped taking cases that relate to divorce, separation or domestic violence. Many women who had pending divorce cases prior to the Taliban takeover cannot proceed with their cases. In rural areas, most family and property related cases are heard and decided by male elders and Taliban. Unsurprisingly, cases involving women are decided in favor of the male party.

All of this is forcing women victims of domestic violence to suffer their abuse in silence and often isolation. In the absence of female justice actors, combined with the Taliban’s policies that embolden patriarchal norms, women are left with no support and options for navigating the justice sector.

Afghanistan has a very young population, with over 60 percent of its citizens under the age of 25. How has life changed for them over the past year?

Parkes: The rise of a new generation of Afghan scholars, activists and civil servants was one of the greatest achievements of the past 20 years. There was hope that a new era would be ushered in as the old guard of powerbrokers were replaced with educated and reform-minded men and women.

But thousands of Afghans from this generation fled the country due to fear of Taliban persecution and decreasing opportunities. Many of those that remain struggle to find employment and keep a low profile to avoid the Taliban’s oppressive ire. Many from this new generation are experiencing immense trauma, grief and fear — a tragic consequence of the Afghan republic’s rapid collapse and an inherited legacy of long and brutal conflict.

And while there rightfully is significant international media attention on the challenges facing Afghan women and girls, young men have also faced persecution and a decrease in their livelihoods. Many young people of all genders have not had the opportunity to attend school and lack basic literacy, which can leave them more vulnerable to recruitment by the Taliban and other extremist groups due to lack of other viable economic opportunities.

In addition to the ban on secondary education for girls, the ongoing economic crisis has left many Afghan families unable to pay the modest entrance expenses to send any of their kids to school. And while girls are not prohibited from taking university courses, officials warn that the lack of a new generation of high school graduates, coupled with the economic barriers, will soon create a “de facto ban.”

The Taliban have also announced their intentions to reform school curricula at all public schools and universities to promote their interpretation of Sharia and national propaganda, which may decrease the overall quality of the education while possibly indoctrinating impressionable youth with the Taliban’s extremist beliefs. In some areas, they have already begun replacing certain lessons and faculty.

The continued decrease in employment and education opportunities for Afghan youth, coupled with the economic and humanitarian crises, will undoubtedly have drastic negative consequences on the long-term stability of Afghanistan. Some families have resorted to child marriage and labor to keep food on the table.

Given the restrictions on women’s employment and movement, the burden of feeding the family can fall on male children and adolescents. This in turn leads to lost opportunities for them to pursue their education, extracurricular activities and develop their potential.

Extreme malnourishment, which experts predict may remain endemic for the foreseeable future, will cost countless lives, and stunt the physical and mental development of countless more, putting the post-takeover generation at an even greater disadvantage while fueling further displacement throughout the region.

How can the U.S and international community continue to support the next generation of Afghans?

Parkes: The U.S and international community must continue to support educational opportunities in Afghanistan to prevent further deterioration and collapse, as well as try to persuade the Taliban and the region that an educated society is crucial to the long-term stability and prosperity of the country.

Donors should think creatively on ways to safely support and elevate young Afghan activists still in Afghanistan, giving them the tools to foster reform at both the community and national level. Providing resources through online education and community-based education initiatives can help youth close the gap caused by school closures and lack of access. Numerous universities and learning centers have already adopted online learning platforms and practices that were developed during the pandemic to ensure education can safely continue. They also should consider online courses and campaigns to advise youth activists both inside and outside the country on how to safely engage politically with authoritarian regimes.

And should the formal education system continue to deteriorate, ensuring that these initiatives can expand and sustain themselves over time will be even more critical. Additional donor funding for the formal education system should be used as an incentive for allowing all girls to return to school, and to mitigate against interference in curriculum development. Increased support for agricultural development and vocational programs can boost employment while improving community livelihoods.

Alleviating the humanitarian and economic crisis is of paramount importance to child development, preventing further youth displacement and ensuring Afghans can go back to school.

Donors should also consider funding trauma healing and psychosocial support programs for Afghans both in-country and throughout the diaspora. This will not only help improve livelihoods but will lay the groundwork for reconciliation through addressing the shared legacies of war.

Matthew Parkes is a senior program specialist for USIP’s Afghanistan and Central Asia teams.

Belquis Ahmadi on Afghanistan a Year After the Taliban Takeover

August 31, 2022 Analytical articles

BY: Belquis Ahmadi

United States Institute of Peace

A year on, the situation in Afghanistan is “looking really grim” as women and girls have lost the gains made over the past two decades and the country’s humanitarian crisis continues to spiral, says USIP’s Belquis Ahmadi. “The Taliban are trying to erase women from society.”

U.S. Institute of Peace experts discuss the latest foreign policy issues from around the world in On Peace, a brief weekly collaboration with SiriusXM’s POTUS Channel 124.

Transcript

Julie Mason: Belquis Ahmadi is senior program officer for the United States Institute of Peace. Here to discuss women’s rights in Afghanistan, and hopefully her own experiences there. Belquis, welcome back.

Belquis Ahmadi: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Julie Mason: Really good to have you. I know that you were in Afghanistan from 2006 to 2009. Seems to me that was a time of some great improvements for women.

Belquis Ahmadi: Indeed, yes. I was just talking to someone the other day; those were the days that we could just walk around in this city and go shopping and do stuff like normal people.

Julie Mason: Right, sit in a café, go to school, have a job, normal stuff.

Belquis Ahmadi: Those are considered normal stuff and very distant right now.

Julie Mason: It’s terrible to think of the advances and then the terrible setback for Afghan women.

Belquis Ahmadi: Don’t get me started on that. I can go on for hours on that.

Julie Mason: I mean, what the Taliban is doing, and of course, part of the shame of it is that the U.S. promise is unfulfilled, and well, and world promises to Afghanistan, really, unfulfilled.

Belquis Ahmadi: Yes, yes. What [the] Taliban [is] doing [is] basically trying to erase women from the society. I have been on your shows before and we have talked about the gains of Afghan women in the past 20 years, or even more, longer than 20 years. The legal rights, the fact that the constitution of the country recognized women as equal citizens of the country. So, right now, that’s gone. Family laws that provided some level of protection to women, gone. [The] elimination of violence against women law that was put in place to support and protect women, gone. That does not exist. The national action plan for the implementation of the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security does not exist anymore.

Julie Mason: Meanwhile though, the people are starving.

Belquis Ahmadi: The people are starving. Especially women because they don’t have opportunities to earn an income, do the jobs that they have prepared for so many years. If you recall, in one of the previous programs I was in, I talked about the number of judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, and police and army. Six thousand women serve in these entities, one thousand journalists – I’m talking about women alone – and more than one thousand women owned small and medium businesses that created 80,000 jobs for men and women, invested their own money, $70 million. None of those exist right now. Women served as ministers, as ambassadors, as legislators.

Julie Mason: Yeah, we were speaking on the show recently with an Afghan journalist about how perhaps the greatest metaphor for this is how in Kabul, there was like a Ministry of Women or Department of Women’s Rights, it was an agency devoted to the advancement of women in Afghanistan and achieving that, and that has been emptied, you know, stripped of all meaning, and is now the Ministry of Vice and Virtue, which enforces these terrible laws against women, even riding in a taxi with a man not a family member.

Belquis Ahmadi: That was in fact one of the first decisions [the] Taliban made to replace the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, and all their departments throughout the country, with their Ministry of Vice and Virtue. By the way, the Taliban are the only creatures on the face of the Earth who believe that there has to be a ministry dedicated to vice and virtue.

Julie Mason: And yet they can’t govern and, you know, I think what U.S. policymakers are struggling with is obviously the U.S. does have a responsibility to Afghanistan, but how do you help the people without helping the Taliban?

Belquis Ahmadi: I believe there are different ways to do that. We just have to be creative and think out of the box. And there are certain decisions that require, how should I put it in a more diplomatic way, decisive decision, such as targeted sanctions on Taliban leaders. This current sanction hurts Afghan people more than the Taliban. [The] Taliban make money. They have revenue. They are not hurt. So, my suggestion would be strongly, of course, to target sanctions on Taliban leaders. They have businesses outside the country, they have bank accounts everywhere. Freeze their bank accounts, so they feel the pinch, not the people.

Julie Mason: That’s so interesting because, you know, they seem so primitive. You never think of those guys as having foreign investments.

Belquis Ahmadi: They like to be perceived that way. But they are, at the end of the day, they are human beings. They also have needs to fulfill and they have lived, the leaders have lived outside the country for years and years. I mean, how do you survive in a place like Pakistan if you don’t have an income, and if you don’t have a bank account? They own houses. They own properties in different countries.

Julie Mason: So, there’s ways to go after them that are meaningful.

Belquis Ahmadi: That would be one of the and then reinstate [a] travel ban. Because we live in the twenty-first century, you don’t have to meet face-to-face. You don’t have to meet or travel thousands of miles – by the way, in private jets and business class – in order to go and meet with an official in Qatar or Uzbekistan or somewhere else. During the pandemic, we have been meeting, we continued living, conducted businesses through Zoom and so many other tools. Why can’t the Taliban do that? And if there is an argument that, “Oh well, certain things have to be discussed in person, and so…” Yes, do that for that specific meeting. Bring them out and then let them go back and let them travel, like, economy class. Who in their right mind would decide to send a private jet to pick up Taliban from Kabul and take them to Norway, to Qatar and other places?

Julie Mason: Okay, so where do you think the situation is heading in Afghanistan?

Belquis Ahmadi: Not well. Let’s start with the humanitarian crisis. Both man-created – by “man,” I mean Taliban-created and also by natural disasters. You heard about the earthquake a few months ago and now flash floods everywhere displaced thousands and thousands of people. It’s looking really grim. It requires out-of-the-box thinking and decisions, and Taliban sympathizers and supporters in Afghanistan [and] outside Afghanistan, they have to be pressurized. I can think of Pakistan to begin with and other countries.

Julie Mason: Of course, the return of al-Qaida, or the resumption of al-Qaida, activities in Afghanistan is worrisome as well.

Belquis Ahmadi: [This is] something that [the] Taliban denied for years and years. And there you go, an al-Qaida leader shows up under their nose. And they still deny his existence. I mean, how do you deal with people with so many lies? They are governing based on lies, basically. While in fact, I take it back, they are ruling, they are not governing because to govern, you have to have certain skills and resources. [The] Taliban have replaced every single judge in Afghanistan with their own mullahs. The majority of them have no legal background. They don’t even know the constitution of the country, which is, by the way, suspended. The Minister of Health is a mullah, the Minister of Technology is a mullah. How do you govern?

Julie Mason: You don’t. I mean, as you say, it’s not governance. It is merely rule. For governance, you have to have values. You have to have…right. There has to be more to it than just authority. But that’s all they have is authority. Belquis Ahmadi, thank you so much for joining me this morning.

Belquis Ahmadi: Thank you for having me.

Julie Mason: Good to have you.

The Real Problem With Biden’s Afghanistan Withdrawal: It Came 10 Years Too Late

August 30, 2022 Analytical articles

Daniel Davis

19fortyfive

Published 29 August 2022

Tomorrow marks the first anniversary of America’s messy and chaotic withdrawal from the 20-year war in Afghanistan. Many observers are evaluating today whether President Joe Biden’s decision to end the war was the right one. While there is no question that America’s exit could have been handled better, the bigger question is whether Biden was right to leave.

The answer is a resounding yes. In fact, he should have done so earlier.

That view is not universal, however. Some of the most famous advocates of the two-decade war in Afghanistan have been just as outspoken in claiming Biden’s order to end it was a mistake. In The Atlantic, former U.S. commander, retired Gen. David H. Petraeus, wrote that the real problems were America’s lack of commitment and strategic resolve.

John Nagl, who famously penned the military’s counterinsurgency strategy, claimed, “The failure to build a sufficient dedicated advisory force structure is among the most critical failures of the military” in Afghanistan and “contributed significantly to American defeat” in that war.

Former Army Deputy Chief of Staff, retired Gen. Jack Keane, went so far as to blame the president’s withdrawal for the Taliban’s return to Kabul. Keane claims that American withdrawal put the Taliban in charge again, allowing them to provide sanctuary to al Qaeda. What we should have done, Keane says, is maintain an acceptable stalemate.

What all of these men essentially argue is that the U.S. did not try hard enough, did not stay long enough, and did not provide enough support.

Yet as I can personally attest from having served two combat tours in Afghanistan (the last during 2010-2011, at the height of Petraeus’s Afghan surge), these proponents of continued U.S. military engagement in Afghanistan are ignoring a whole herd of elephants in the room.

The reality is that Petraeus, Keane, and Nagl were three leading voices among a broad cohort of foreign policy elite in the United States that constantly argued for more troops, more time, and more engagement. Any talk of ending the war, of withdrawing, was summarily rejected. The rejections were always accompanied by stark warnings of unspecific threats that would materialize if the U.S. military left.

But over the final 13 years of the war, there were a handful of highly qualified voices that tried to inject reality into the conversation. Matthew Hoh was the first.

In September 2009, Hoh was a senior civilian officer for the State Department, working in Afghanistan’s Zabul province. A former Marine who led a combat engineer company during the Iraq war, he resigned his post in protest. The Afghan people who were fighting against the U.S. coalition, he told ABC News, weren’t doing so “for any ideological reasons, not because of any links to al Qaeda,” but simply “because we are occupying them.”

The Afghan government, Hoh wrote in his resignation letter, demonstrated a “glaring corruption and unabashed graft; a president whose confidants and chief advisors comprise drug lords and war crimes villains, who mock our own rule of law.” The regional officials were just as corrupt, he claimed. “Our support for this kind of government,” Hoh concluded, “coupled with a misunderstanding of the insurgency’s true nature, reminds me horribly of our involvement with South Vietnam.”

One of the most consistent and accurate voices warning that our war was failing throughout was Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In a 2010 assessment, Cordesman wrote, “The lack of transparency, unity of effort, and effective (action) in each of the six areas (of President Obama’s Afghan war strategy) is now losing the war. No amount of spin, optimism, and wishful thinking can deal with any one of these challenges.”

During my second combat deployment to Afghanistan, I found that nearly everything Hoh and Cordesman had written was accurate, and in some cases understated. I lamented in a 2012 Armed Forces Journal essay that senior U.S. civilian and military leaders were systematically deceiving the American public about the war, claiming progress where there was none.

“How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding,” I rhetorically asked. The most responsible action then-President Obama could have taken would been to have ended the war in 2012, not let five more years of pointless war and sacrifice pass before handing the morass off to his successor. Trump could have ended the war during his Administration, but at least he established an end date for the war before he left office.

Despite the warnings shared by many who had direct knowledge of the failures of the war, the pro-war advocates won out for another full decade after I wrote the above. During that time, thousands more Americans were killed and wounded – hundreds of thousands would eventually suffer traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder – for a war that was militarily unwinnable.

Biden was right to end the war and stop the bleeding. Without question, the withdrawal could have been executed better, but the truth is that the rot of two full decades spent trying to cover military failure could no longer be hidden, resulting in the complete collapse of the Afghan state in mere months. To stay longer would have increased the number of U.S. casualties and delayed the inevitable.

Expert Biography: Now a 1945 Contributing Editor, Daniel L. Davis is a Senior Fellow for Defense Priorities and a former Lt. Col. in the U.S. Army who deployed into combat zones four times. He is the author of “The Eleventh Hour in 2020 America.” Follow him @DanielLDavis.

The Afghan Women Left Behind

August 27, 2022 Analytical articles

By Rozina Ali

The New Yorker

August 24, 2022

On the morning of August 15, 2021, Samira was lying in bed, drifting in and out of sleep, in a room she shared with several other people. They were in a shelter in Kabul run by Women for Afghan Women (waw), a U.S.-headquartered N.G.O. dedicated to protecting vulnerable women in Afghanistan. Samira and her roommates had found refuge there from abusive brothers, fathers, husbands. Suddenly, she was jolted awake by the voice of the shelter manager giving urgent orders: the Taliban had taken control of Kabul and they all had to get out. waw could no longer guarantee their safety. Around Samira, women started to cry. Staff scrambled to determine who could go to relatives’ homes, and handed out forms stating that clients were leaving the shelter of their own accord.

Samira panicked. She had been there for only two weeks and couldn’t return to her family. Her stepmother and half brothers hit her often, and for little reason. Once, they beat her when she cooked a meal they didn’t like. In fact, this was her second stay at waw. Two years earlier, she had lived there for nearly seven months. waw had mediated between Samira and her family members, who agreed to stop the violence, and she returned home. But, Samira told me, the beatings got worse. Sometimes her family refused to let her eat for days. Recently, the brothers—struggling farmers in Laghman Province—announced that she would be married to an elderly man, who was offering a hefty sum. Samira realized that she was being sold. She snuck out in the middle of the night and huddled at a bus terminal. When dawn broke, she took a taxi to Kabul and eventually arrived at waw.

By the time the shelter manager ordered the women to leave, the city was already transforming. Taliban fighters had entered the capital on pickup trucks and Humvees, brandishing machine guns. Local police abandoned their posts, and embassies evacuated their staff. President Ashraf Ghani and his wife, Rula, left on a plane. Some Afghans, remembering the Taliban rule of the nineteen-nineties, took precautionary measures, painting over photos of women on advertisements. waw’s leaders were convinced that the Taliban would not allow them to continue operating shelters. In the confusion, Samira made a quick decision. She signed the form, gathered her few belongings, and stepped out of the shelter’s gates and into the midafternoon sun.

Samira started walking toward the northern part of the city. U.S. military planes circled overhead, and sporadic gunfire sounded in the distance. She came to a cemetery where tents of cloth and rope had been erected. The area had been a gathering place for heroin addicts and, more recently, Afghans fleeing conflict in other parts of the country. If Samira stayed on the main streets, people would ask who she was, what she was doing. At least in a cemetery, she reasoned, there would be the safety of seclusion. Night fell, and more people arrived. Samira found two women who reluctantly allowed her to sleep near them and settled in.

Like thousands of other Afghan women, Samira thought that waw would save her from a life of abuse. However, soon after the government’s stunning collapse, and the chaotic U.S. pullout, waw, the largest women’s organization in the country, would make the decision to shutter its shelters permanently, leading many of its clients to feel abandoned, and dividing staff members over how to proceed. Several of its leaders would quietly flee Afghanistan; its founders say that the institution betrayed its own mission. As the world rushed to evacuate tens of thousands of people from the country, a daunting question hung in the air: What would happen to the millions who were not able to leave?

Waw was conceived in early 2001 by Sunita Viswanath, who was then a thirty-four-year-old human-rights activist working at the Sister Fund, a charity based in New York. She had been shocked by what she read in newspapers about Taliban rule—people stoned in football stadiums, music outlawed, women banned from public spaces—and how little attention it was getting. She and a group of other women, including Masuda Sultan, an Afghan American entrepreneur and human-rights activist, formed waw to try to help.

In the beginning, their programs mainly served Afghan communities living in the U.S. But after the American invasion toppled the Taliban government following the 9/11 attacks, waw turned its operational focus to women in Afghanistan. Gloria Steinem helped plan their first conference, in New York. In 2003, waw gathered women from across Afghanistan in Kandahar, the Taliban’s former stronghold. The attendees produced an “Afghan Women’s Bill of Rights” that they wanted to include in the country’s new constitution: access to reproductive health care, the right to marry and divorce, rights of inheritance. The constitution ultimately didn’t incorporate any of these demands, but it did recognize that men and women have “equal rights and duties before the law.”

Still, the new, Western-backed government failed to reach some of the most vulnerable populations. When waw staff visited women’s prisons, they found that many detainees were languishing there after fleeing abusive homes. (Women were incarcerated for “moral crimes,” such as eloping or having extramarital sex, even in cases of rape.) waw launched a shelter program and built support centers that cared for children who had been jailed alongside their mothers. In Afghan society, it’s unusual for women to live alone, and waw led mediations to reunite clients with their families. If a woman returned home, staffers would visit unannounced to confirm her safety. If she didn’t want to go back, waw could help her secure a divorce and find a new husband, or a job with the organization. Lawyers and counsellors were trained to root waw’s work in Islamic law and traditions.

waw’s programs and budget in Afghanistan outgrew those in the U.S. Eventually, it was operating in twelve provinces and serving more than three thousand clients annually. But, as its work became more public, it drew scrutiny and criticism. In 2010, Noorin TV in Kabul ran an “investigative series” that falsely accused shelters of being fronts for prostitution. That same year, Manizha Naderi, then waw’s executive director, brought Bibi Aisha, an eighteen-year-old girl, to the U.S. for reconstructive surgery. Bibi Aisha had run away from her in-laws; after she was found, her husband, a Talib, and his family, cut off her nose and ears. Time featured her picture on its cover with the headline “What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan.” Some felt that waw had used Bibi Aisha to justify the U.S. occupation. (Viswanath recalled a State Department official expressing the opposite concern—they thought that publicizing Bibi Aisha’s case highlighted the U.S.’s inability to keep Afghans safe.)

At times, waw struggled with the Afghan government, too. In 2011, President Hamid Karzai tried to take control of all women’s shelters in the country, nominally to quell rumors of corruption and prostitution. (The plan failed.) But, after Ghani came to power, in 2014, waw developed closer ties with Kabul. Rula, Ghani’s wife, became particularly invested in the organization, once remarking that few had been able to tackle problems facing women “with the understanding and dedication, the wisdom, and the patience” of waw. Leslie Cunningham, a member of the board and the wife of a former U.S. Ambassador, was friends with Rula, and it sometimes seemed to Viswanath that waw had to seek permission from the government to do its work. By 2018, there were new concerns. The government, rife with corruption and dependent on the U.S., was unable to hold territory—or popular support—in the peripheries of the country. The Taliban was making gains, and the U.S. had started engaging the group in peace talks. “Things are looking really bad,” Sultan told Viswanath.

In 2019, the two approached waw’s board about following the U.S.’s lead. If the Taliban was capturing large swaths of territory, they reasoned, waw would need to work with them. With help from Islamic scholars, Sultan and Viswanath put together a document that outlined religious justifications for women’s shelters. They met with academics, experts, and N.G.O.s who advised them on how to open lines of communication with Taliban leadership so that they could continue their operations. waw didn’t stop these efforts, but it didn’t support them, either. Viswanath and Sultan felt sidelined by their own organization.

According to Viswanath and Sultan, several board members, including Cunningham, worried about legitimizing the Taliban. There also seemed to be a strong desire to maintain a relationship with the Ghani administration, which had been left out of the U.S.-Taliban peace negotiations. Meanwhile, Najia Nasim—waw’s Afghanistan-based executive director—and a few other staff members simply believed that the group couldn’t be trusted. To the founders, getting stalled by these concerns amounted to a failing strategy.

waw staff declined my requests for individual interviews; Annie Pforzheimer, a board member who briefly served as the acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Afghanistan, responded on behalf of the organization. She confirmed that there were concerns that the Taliban might leverage a relationship with waw to portray itself in a more favorable light. But, she said, waw ultimately decided not to engage with the group because it believed that doing so would be ineffective and possibly illegal. (Sultan told me that the State Department knew she was pursuing meetings with the Taliban and didn’t indicate any legal concerns.)

On April 14, 2021, the Biden Administration announced that the U.S. would withdraw troops from Afghanistan by September 11th, ending the longest military conflict in American history. A team within waw—led by Nasim, Sayeb Muheballah Haqiq, the country director at the time, and Mohammad Shirzad, the head of security—put together contingency plans. If a district fell to the Taliban, the staff would destroy most documents and bring the necessary ones to a secure location. waw also started closing shelters, reuniting clients with their families, and transferring some women to the capital.

When Kabul fell, panic set in. This was the worst-case scenario that Sultan and Viswanath had feared, and waw was unprepared to deal with it. Nasim directed employees to completely halt shelter operations and to send as many women as possible back to their relatives. The abrupt decision surprised one of waw’s donors. “Suddenly, I get the news that everyone is reintegrated,” Tooba Mayel, the director of the Colombo Plan Gender Affairs Programme, told me. “We could have helped.”

Nasim, the executive director, would’ve been the one to find a way to operate under the new regime; several former staff and board members told me that, in mid-August, she seemed to disappear for weeks and did not respond to multiple urgent messages. (According to waw, she was in contact with a few people.) In New York, staff worked tirelessly on evacuations. In Afghanistan, Haqiq and Shirzad took charge, rushing to negotiate with local Taliban militias who had entered waw offices, confiscated furniture and cars, and in one instance detained some employees. Zahra, the shelter manager in Kabul, moved forty-five women and their children to a safe house, and fielded calls from other employees and clients looking for guidance. “It was mad days,” she told me, fighting back tears. Haqiq led talks with several Taliban officials to explain waw’s work. They didn’t get explicit permission to continue operating the shelters, but they weren’t attacked, either. Haqiq told me that he wished the conversations had happened before August’s chaos.

Despite these efforts, leadership in New York seemed determined not to continue. In a private conversation about how to work in the new climate, which I acquired a recording of, Nasim said that keeping shelters open would put the staff in danger. Kevin Schumacher, the deputy executive director, called the Taliban a “bunch of animals.” In early 2021, waw had been serving five hundred clients, many of whom had few options aside from returning to abusive homes or prison. After the takeover, waw permanently shuttered its women-focussed services, including the shelters and halfway houses, and evacuated many high-level employees, including Nasim, who ended up in Canada. By the end of the year, waw had let go of hundreds of staff members—defense lawyers who had once argued divorce cases in court, cooks who had worked in the shelters, personnel who had housed women at great personal risk. Like the clients, they were left behind. Pforzheimer emphasized that waw had to end its programs to protect staff and clients from danger, but Viswanath saw it differently. “Hatred of the Taliban defined the organization more than protection of women and girls,” she told me.

This spring, I travelled to Kabul and met with former waw clients and employees. We filed into an empty lounge inside a hotel in the center of the city, the gates of which are now guarded by the Taliban. Six staff members squeezed onto a sofa and a couple of armchairs, while about a dozen women—former clients—gathered around me. (Some names have been changed for their safety.)

Marwa, who wore gold-rimmed glasses, spoke softly and quickly. Like many of waw’s clients, she had transferred to a shelter from prison. She showed me photos of her face at the time: bloody cuts on her cheek and upper lip and bruises around her left eye. “My brother,” she explained. It happened after she ran away from her abusive husband. She had been with waw for eighteen months when the Taliban entered the capital. Marwa moved to a staff member’s house, but, soon, people started inquiring about the “strange women” living there, suspicions that morphed, as they often did, into accusations of prostitution. Marwa tried appealing to her father, who refused to allow her to enter his house; finally, the staff member helped her find a husband. He was a kind man, Marwa told me, but he had been part of the Afghan National Army and was now unemployed.

The women wanted to give each other the space to tell their stories, but whenever there was a pause in the conversation, they talked over each other in excitement. The staff seemed similarly impatient, often interjecting to reiterate how waw had abandoned them. At one point, the Kabul shelter manager, Zahra, who had been composed and stern, started to cry. She had worked with waw for ten years and was familiar with the weight these women carried. “What’s most hurtful is that leadership left us,” she said.

Mina, who wore a black-and-white floral hijab wrapped tightly around her face, told me that she had been a university student in Kapisa Province when she had a baby out of wedlock. She was imprisoned for several months before being transferred to waw, where she stayed for five years, working at the kindergarten in one of the halfway houses. In mid-August, she returned to her father’s home. When he finally allowed her in, he started beating her and withholding food. Her family taunts her, she told me, saying that her child should be killed. She had nowhere else to go.

It was Ramadan, and, with sunset looming, it was almost time to break the fast. Some women gave their apologies and left. Most, however, stayed, wanting to make sure that I heard what had happened. Rokhsana breast-fed her son as she told me that she and a few other women had pooled one-time payments given to them by waw (about ten thousand Afghanis, the equivalent of a hundred and twenty-five dollars, each) and, together, they had rented an apartment. Eventually, the other women left. Rokhsana was still living there; with no way to pay rent, she could be evicted at any time. Razia, who has three kids, leased a similar apartment in a squalid corner of Kabul, and hadn’t been able to pay rent in several months. Her daughter and two sons were helping her beg on the street.

Samira had not received any money from waw, and still didn’t have a regular place to live. After staying at the graveyard for three nights, she had moved to a settlement in a park. She started crying as she recalled a woman who handed her a hundred Afghanis, which she used to buy bread, her first meal that day. She spent the following months in the harsh cold, moving from park to park, she told me. She had been leered at and propositioned, and, at one point, in desperation, she befriended a group of women who gave her heroin.

Other women had faded into faraway corners of the country. Some had gone missing, and some had stopped answering their phones after sending cryptic messages. Haqiq told me about one woman who had been hurriedly reintegrated with her parents. One day, when she had left home to run errands, her husband approached and stabbed her to death. (waw declined to elaborate on the case, but told me that “we are devastated by the fact that we don’t have the tools to protect people anymore.”)

When Biden announced the pullout from Afghanistan, he promised that the U.S. would “continue to support the Afghan people.” The end of the military conflict has been a reprieve for many families, especially in rural parts of the country, but, since August, the U.S. and much of the international community have been waging a different type of war against Afghanistan, through economic might. The Biden Administration froze seven billion dollars of Afghan assets—and in February earmarked half those funds for families that lost relatives in 9/11. According to one estimate, around half a million government employees, including teachers and health-care workers, stopped getting paid. The U.S. has also imposed sanctions on the Taliban government, hampering the ability of aid groups and N.G.O.s to deliver services, and, in tandem with the asset freeze, causing a severe liquidity crunch. Before the withdrawal, foreign donors accounted for three quarters of the country’s public spending. That money has evaporated. In May, the United Nations warned that nearly half the population was at risk of starving. “We have never seen the impacts of poverty and societal breakdown on such a scale,” Anita Dullard, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said. (Last month, the World Food Program estimated that four million children are “acutely malnourished.”)

In Kabul, which is more connected to the banking system than the rest of the country, and where the population is bloated with internally displaced people, the economic crisis is visibly dire. Soon after I arrived, a man burned himself on the streets in desperation. Amid the orchestra of honks in downtown traffic, young girls tapped at car windows, begging for money. In a quiet corner of the city, women gathered outside a bakery at dusk to wait for a piece of bread. One woman thrust her son at me, holding up his thin arms; her husband had died in the war, she said, and she had been coming here to feed her family.

After the Taliban takeover, waw raised nearly eleven million dollars to help Afghans. Little of that money has actually gone to Afghanistan. Staff members in the country did not receive their paychecks through the end of 2021, and had little financial support to assist the women they once cared for. waw told me that it did provide small stipends and food to some clients and staff, using resources already in the country, but that it was unable to send more money because it was concerned about violating U.S. sanctions. Some organizations use the hawala system—an informal network of cash transfers that involve unknown middlemen—which waw deemed “too legally risky.” The organization insists that clients are still able to request ongoing humanitarian support. More than a dozen women and former staff I spoke with said that they hadn’t received anything in months.

Operating as a women’s organization under the new regime is mired in difficulties; for example, the Taliban dissolved the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, which had once been waw’s main government contact. To Viswanath, the fact that the largest Afghan women’s organization chose to focus on evacuations and refugee resettlement, rather than make plans for the twenty million women “who didn’t have luxury to leave,” reflects a moral problem. “We needed out-of-the-box, non-bureaucratic solutions for a huge crisis moment,” she told me.

The waw staff and clients I spoke with often circled back to a nagging point: the injustice of waw’s hasty withdrawal. One Saturday this spring, several dozen gathered outside the main office in Kabul to demonstrate against the leadership. One woman held up a sign that read, in English, “I was waw staff. Now I’m hungry and jobless.” They also lodged a formal complaint with the Taliban’s Ministry of Economy, alleging corruption, abandonment of clients, favoritism in the evacuation process, and failure to disburse donated money to clients and staff. In recent months, after the U.S. eased some financial restrictions, waw has paid back salaries to former staff. Haqiq and Shirzad, meanwhile, have been forced out of waw—in retribution, they believe, for speaking out against Nasim’s handling of the situation. (Pforzheimer told me that Haqiq was not performing his duties. Shirzad told me that he felt pressured to resign.)

Donors and women’s-rights activists are uncertain, and sometimes split, on how to support Afghan women under the Taliban, which has already reversed gains from the past twenty years. Despite promises to the international community, girls have not been allowed to return to secondary schools. The Taliban has also decreed that women should stay at home, hampering their ability to work. If they go out, they must be covered from head to toe in loose clothing. If they travel long distances, they must be in the company of a male relative. The rules are not enforced uniformly, or regularly, but the legal premise hangs like a cloud. Prominent activists have been harassed and detained.

In July, a report by Afghanistan Analysts Network found that aid organizations have scaled back their activities because of funding shortfalls, and that donors are concerned about the appearance of “working with the Taliban.” In fact, a split has emerged between high-level officials in Kabul, who want to engage the international community and allow girls to attend secondary schools, and the Supreme Leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, in Kandahar, who has taken a more hard-line approach. Some experts argue that further isolating Afghanistan will only undermine the moderate faction. Mayel, the waw donor, told me that humanitarian needs have to be prioritized regardless of the political leadership and that organizations should find openings where they can. “We can’t just let them die,” she said.

It occurred to me that the women I spoke with, both clients and former staff, hardly ever mentioned the Taliban. The concerns they talked about were more immediate—finding shelter and their next meal, how to avoid capture by abusive relatives. Samira was particularly vulnerable on the streets, young and alone. She has recovered from heroin addiction and continues to beg during the day; some nights, she goes to hospitals and pretends to visit patients so that she can find a place to sleep. When I asked her if she faced harassment from the Taliban, her voice was level. “Taliban is not the only threat for young women,” she told me.

The economic pressures bearing down on the country will likely lead to more abuse in households, exacerbating problems that organizations like waw had aimed to solve. According to an estimate by Save the Children, in the first eight months since the Taliban takeover, as many as a hundred and twenty thousand Afghan children may have been forcibly traded or married in exchange for financial reprieve by desperate families.

International donors and organizations have limited their support to humanitarian programs, mostly implemented through the U.N. According to one study, the number of local N.G.O.s and civil-society groups has been cut in half. In recent months, waw has begun working closely with the U.N. on children and girls’ education, but has chosen to stay away from women-focussed projects. Most of its efforts have been recentered on Afghan women in the U.S. “Over time, we would like to do more that is back to the core of what waw stands for,” Pforzheimer told me. I asked her if she believed it was possible under the Taliban. She laughed. “If we stay and do good work, and understand the landscape, maybe,” she said.

Sultan and Viswanath have both left waw, frustrated by what they described as the organization’s unwillingness to find solutions to help women in Afghanistan. Viswanath was upset, in particular, about how little of the eleven million dollars raised since the collapse has been directed to such efforts. (Half has been allotted to serve Afghans who came to the U.S.; a quarter will be used to assist with continued evacuations, humanitarian support, and children’s programs; and a quarter will be reserved for possible future operations.) They are starting a new N.G.O., called Abaad: Afghan Women Forward, which will provide humanitarian assistance and fund economic programs for women. Among its first clients will be those that waw once served.

For decades, Afghanistan has depended on N.G.O.s for service delivery, basic humanitarian aid, and projects geared toward helping the most marginalized. But being a “republic of N.G.O.s,” as one analyst called it, comes with its own problems. At its crux, an N.G.O. is beholden to donors and their ideological bent, not the communities it supports. As the scholar Faisal Devji argued after the U.S. withdrawal, “These beneficiaries possess neither political equality nor democratic power over their benefactors, however much they are consulted in the apportioning of aid or the launching of development projects.”

Women inside the country have little choice but to carve space for themselves however they can. I spoke with one female journalist who used to run a women’s media network in Kabul. She shut it down, but chose to stay in Afghanistan as an independent journalist. Last fall, a group of women gathered in the capital for a press conference on the right to education and employment. Just as waw had done over the years, the organizers drew upon the Quran to justify their demands, which focussed on a woman’s right to learn and work under Islamic law. They used Islamic history to point to how women had contributed to the fields of health care, business, government, and farming. One of the hosts recently told me that, although the political climate has worsened, the group is continuing to push the government on issues such as education.

Even in the context of women’s rights, shelters are a particularly sensitive issue, as they are often accused of being fronts for brothels. Some have chosen to take the risk. One afternoon, I travelled to one of the only shelters in the country, which has managed to obtain permission from the Taliban to operate. A few of waw’s former clients had been transferred there, and the group had grown to about thirty women and children. When I visited, they were cleaning the house in preparation for Eid. One woman was much older than the rest—she had gray hair and eyes framed by wrinkles. Another woman, who stood a few feet apart and looked on in silence, had arrived recently. She had been at a mosque by herself; I was told that the Taliban hadn’t known what to do with her and brought her to the shelter.

Sunlight streamed through the open doors at one end of the house. A group of four teen-agers moved from the staircase, where they had been chatting, to stand in the warmth. They wrapped their arms around one another, whispering fiercely, as if sharing a secret. They were giggling. ♦

Rozina Ali is a journalist and a fellow at Type Media Center.

Why the Afghan peace process failed, and what could come next?

August 27, 2022 Analytical articles

August 18, 2022

Aref Dostyar, Zmarai Farahi

Middle East Institute

After nearly two decades of U.S. presence, the Afghan conflict between the central government and the Taliban reached a deadly stalemate, taking a hundred lives a day from each side between 2018 and 2021. However sad, the international community viewed this impasse as a sign of Afghanistan’s ripeness for peace. Meanwhile, the U.S. shifted its policy from pursuing a military victory to achieving an expeditious political settlement. Yet despite multifaceted and multiparty motivations to finally end this drawn-out conflict, the peace process still failed. Why?

This article’s authors observed the peace process closely from within the Afghan government. The following identifies four interconnected factors that converged to spoil the final attempt to end the long war in Afghanistan, resulting in the Taliban unilaterally taking control of Kabul in August 2021. Additionally, the piece offers three sets of recommendations to the United States and the international community about how the lessons of the past 20 years could inform a workable peace process going forward.

Failure in shaping narratives

Aside from armed struggles over physical territory, the Afghan War was also fought on a parallel battleground: the minds of the people.

Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government, which existed between December 2001 and August 2021, had the burden to prove two narratives: its ability to provide basic services — physical security at a minimum — to the local population and a capability to advance counterterrorism efforts both at home and beyond the country’s borders.

But the Taliban’s car bombs and suicide brigades continued to speak louder than the government’s infographics proclaiming the competence of its institutions. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan described civilian casualties in May-June 2021 — on the eve of the United States’ announced withdrawal date — as the highest on record for those two months since the mission began recording such data in 2009.

The government itself, seeking sustained global support in the fight against terrorism, reported during every major international meeting that more than 20 terrorist organizations with regional and international reach enjoyed safe havens in Afghanistan under the patronage of the Taliban.

The Taliban, by contrast, defined their existence in terms of the enemy, America, which occupied Afghanistan and established a “puppet” government in Kabul. Over the 20 years of war, the Taliban used sustained offensive attacks and some short-term ceasefires to promote themselves as a cohesive military force. And foreigners interpreted that characterization to mean that if the Taliban committed to something like crushing internationally designated terrorist groups, the Taliban could deliver on it. Whether they actually would remained to be seen.

No narrative promulgated by the last Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, who garnered less than a million votes in a contested election in September 2019, could change a simple reality: the war against the Taliban was widely perceived as lost.

Failure in leadership for peace

During the last decade of America’s presence in Afghanistan, the international community and the local government came to an understanding that the way to end the conflict was through peace negotiations with the Taliban. However, the stakeholders in these talks had conflicting interests.

For Afghan technocrats, peace initially meant a full Taliban surrender. The highest leadership bodies of the government held internal discussions regarding the “reintegration” of the Taliban fighters. During these meetings, the officials offered four types of incentives:

Security in return for disarmament;
Political space to run for office or be appointed to political posts;
Economic incentives to provide jobs; and
Legal incentives to remove the Taliban from international sanctions lists and release their prisoners.

For former mujahideen factions, peace meant a division of power among influential parties. But this process of power-sharing, which would inevitably break down along ethnic lines, would leave no room for the technocrats who now held the presidency. The share of power for Afghanistan’s ethnic Tajiks would go to the Jamiat party; that for the Pashtuns would be given to the Taliban and Hizb-e-Islami; the Wahdat party would claim the Hazaras; and the Junbish party would represent the Uzbeks. Where would the technocrats fit?

Some individuals in the technocrat and mujahideen camps accepted that one way to achieve peace was to hold elections with the participation of the Taliban. However, there were disagreements around the timing of these elections, not to mention the Taliban’s total disinterest in sharing in what they believed to be an illegitimate political system imposed by the United States. President Ghani, in turn, demanded that the transfer of power be based on votes alone, but he showed willingness to hold early elections for the sake of peace. Potential rival candidates argued that no credible election could take place under a party to the conflict. These candidates pushed President Ghani to step aside and let an interim government oversee the elections, which he refused.

In the internal debates regarding peace, three important segments of Afghan society remained outside the process. Youth, women, and civil society organizations, including the media in Afghanistan, did not know what benefits peace would bring them. Apart from symbolic representation in some meetings that were held by the government or the international community, these groups did not meaningfully participate in the wider peace process.

Disagreements over how non-Taliban groups could negotiate with the Taliban were also not resolved. Ghani wanted a two-sided table — the government and the Taliban — in order to portray a united Islamic Republic. But others viewed this format as an unacceptable opportunity for government technocrats to assume leadership roles in the peace negotiations. Therefore, political opponents of the president advocated for multi-party talks in which each side could bargain based on its own interests: the government, the Taliban, political parties, and civil society.

The lack of a shared vision or clear objectives for the peace process among non-Taliban factions ultimately was another factor that contributed to the inability to achieve a settlement.

Parallel structures

In addition to leadership challenges, technical chaos prevailed over the political peace process. The High Peace Council, which later transformed into the High Council of National Reconciliation under Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, was in constant rivalry with the Afghan president and never achieved the power needed to represent the political arm of the peace process. The State Ministry of Peace attempted but failed to project itself as the technical arm of the peace talks. Others rightly viewed “technical matters” as a strategic tool to influence the process.

There were also other governmental agencies that claimed leadership, which instead only added ambiguity to the process. Chief among these agencies was the Office of the National Security Council (ONSC), which maintained a Directorate of Peace and Reconciliation Affairs. Furthermore, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs struggled to preserve its perceived status as the point of contact on peace affairs for foreign countries. Disjointed involvement from too many people and institutions in the peace process meant local Afghans and foreign diplomats had difficulty coordinating their activities with the government.

To make matters worse, rivalries, incompetence, and ideological differences led to the formation of factions within the Afghan state’s negotiations team. When the president was finally able to create a government-led team, it was divided. A former head of the intelligence agency, Masoom Stanikzai, was the lead negotiator. But the Islamist Taliban disregarded Stanikzai because of his former affiliation with parties that were known for their adherence to communist ideologies. Via the Chinese and Uzbekistani governments, the Taliban asked the central government in Kabul to keep Stanikzai out of the peace negotiations. The government responded that the Taliban did not have veto power. Parallel to the official negotiations team, a secret channel of communication between the government and the Taliban opened in Doha, according to Fawzia Koofi, one of the negotiators.

The process was further complicated by foreign interventions. In December 2018, after a year-long effort, high-level representatives from Afghanistan, the United States, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia succeeded in bringing the Afghan government and Taliban negotiators to Abu Dhabi. Even though the two Afghan sides did not meet face-to-face during that time, this quadrilateral effort saw some progress until the Americans shifted the venue to Qatar.

Two years later, there was a new team of negotiators from Kabul and a new process was underway in Doha. At this moment, the U.S. administration changed and the newly appointed Secretary of State Antony Blinken asked the sides, via a letter, to appear for peace talks in Turkey. A meeting in Istanbul never materialized, perhaps because the Qataris, with significant influence over the Taliban, opposed it. Each change of plan meant more stakeholders offended, a reshuffling of negotiating teams to adjust their levels of participation, new logistical complexities, discontinuity, and, eventually, failure.

Peace negotiations never took place directly between the Afghan government and the Taliban. Composed of a few members, a governmental contact group repeatedly met with the Taliban in Qatar; but this was the extent of the face-to-face interaction between the two sides. They worked out the principles for the talks but never succeeded in developing an agenda, let alone negotiated over it.

Reducing peace to one element of a foreign deal

The role of the United States was equally important in forestalling peace.

For many years, the overriding stated purpose of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan was to counter terrorism. And so, under the influence of this policy, the Afghan government continuously presented its peace plans as a counterterrorism strategy.

Over time, America’s assessment of the nature of the threat changed, with major terrorist hotspots appearing in other areas of the world. So, America shifted its sights toward withdrawal from Afghanistan, prioritizing the end of its protracted involvement in the region. The agreement U.S. officials signed with the Taliban in 2020 demanded security guarantees for the pull back of U.S. troops and the Taliban’s commitment to counterterrorist actions; but it encouraged the mere start of peace talks among Afghans and only included a ceasefire as a topic for discussion in subsequent intra-Afghan negotiations.

Once the U.S. was determined to depart and the collapse of the Afghan government became conceivable, negotiations with the Taliban were deemed more important than negotiating with the Afghan government. Diplomats and military generals from the U.S., Europe, and regional countries queued up to talk with the Taliban. The insurgent group viewed this string of international visitors as proof of the effectiveness of their violent movement. Now that the whole world was at their door and the United Nations had endorsed the deal they signed with Washington, they sensed it was only a matter of time before they would seize Kabul.

The Taliban, thus, encouraged the U.S. side to pressure the Afghan government into giving in without preconditions. Most notably, under foreign insistence, the Afghan authorities released more than 5,000 dangerous Taliban detainees in 2020, in return for one-fifth that number of their own prisoners. Against their pledge, these violent extremists returned to the battlefield with greater resolve for vengeance, while the Taliban leadership rewarded their time spent behind bars by appointing them as field commanders.

Conclusion and recommendations

The last political peace process failed, but the need for peace and reconciliation in Afghanistan did not disappear. In fact, conditions likely to drive armed conflict — such as political exclusion and social oppression — are growing daily under the new regime. Therefore, Afghanistan requires a new political process that aims to not only prevent another civil war but also achieve lasting peace. Afghan leaders need to develop the capability to rally the public and align all Afghan sides of the conflict around a common vision for the future of the country.

The international community, particularly the United States, should undertake three specific sets of actions to foster the conditions for such a political process:

First, the U.S. should change its pragmatic engagement with the Taliban to a more inclusive engagement with all Afghan stakeholders, including civil society organizations, political parties, armed opposition groups, ethnic and religious minorities, women, and youth. While the U.S. has no diplomatic presence in Kabul, American officials can engage Afghan actors in the region around Afghanistan as well as communicate with those inside Afghanistan virtually, through video conference calls. Finally, Washington could better coordinate its efforts with the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, which has a political office that is active on the ground.

Engagement with non-Taliban actors will have a range of repercussions. For leaders who remain inside Afghanistan, contact with the U.S. will come with security risks. Their identities should be protected; but ultimately, they must be allowed to determine for themselves whether the risks are worthwhile. U.S. interactions with the armed opposition to the Taliban can take place without providing material support to such factions. Engaging with America can still benefit armed groups as a means of exerting political pressure on the Taliban. If the U.S. administration shies away from such a policy, Congress should fill this gap.

In fact, Capitol Hill lawmakers ought to play a more active role regardless of the presidential administration’s stance vis-à-vis Afghanistan. American senators and House members should intensify their meetings with Afghans in the U.S. as well as travel to Europe and the region around Afghanistan to meet with leaders in exile. These meetings would broadcast a confident message that America stands with the people of Afghanistan in their struggle to create a peaceful and free country.

Second, the U.S. should use its leverage with the Taliban more strategically to encourage the start of a political process. For instance, the U.S. should work with the U.N. Security Council to turn international sanctions into effective tools of diplomacy rather than use them solely as punishment. Currently, neither imposed sanctions nor limited waivers are tied to specific political or accountability benchmarks and objectives. The unfreezing of Afghanistan’s assets and discussions about recognizing a new government should become conditional on progress in a legitimate political process.

Conditions and benchmarks for launching such a political process may include initiating a series of meetings between Afghan actors and the Taliban, developing a list of popular demands — from opening girls’ schools and reversing restrictive measures against women to creating a broad-based and people-centric government — and finally, delivering on these demands within agreed timeframes.

Identifying stakeholders to meet with the Taliban is complicated but not impossible. One way to group different segments of Afghan society is based on their ideological visions for the country: modernists who constitute much of the new generation of Afghan leaders, conservatives like the jihadist groups, fundamentalists such as the Taliban and their sympathizers, and moderates who have separated from or never joined the other three groups. Representation of all these ideological differences is important because not all civil society organizations, political parties, or women’s groups think alike.

Finally, Washington must revise its approach toward Afghanistan in light of the fact that al-Qaeda’s leader Ayman al-Zawahiri — who last month was eliminated by a U.S. drone strike — was found to have been sheltered in Kabul. America should, thus, take certain diplomatic steps to mobilize the region and the wider international community to ensure a political process leads to a government that does not harbor terrorists but promotes peace and stability in the world.

Al-Zawahiri’s presence only a few miles from Kabul’s Presidential Palace demonstrated that a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan can be dangerous for the region and beyond. A high-level visit from the U.S. administration or Congress to Central or South Asia in the near-term could potentially ignite momentum among regional countries to mobilize and diplomatically curb future threats that emanate from Afghanistan. The only sustainable means to achieve such an objective is to encourage the formation of a broad-based and people-centric government that is shaped by all Afghans through an inclusive political process. The fact that the Taliban continue to operate as a de facto “acting” government and have yet to announce a new constitution provides a window of opportunity for initiating such a political process.

These short- to medium-term measures by America are achievable. They could exert some pressure on the Taliban and reassure non-Taliban groups that they are not alone in their struggle. They could also mobilize the region to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a regime-run safehouse for terrorists with objectives reaching far beyond its borders. Lastly, these steps, if sustained long enough to jumpstart a potential political process and see it through to completion, could contribute to the restoration of America’s reputation after its catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Aref Dostyar is a Senior Advisor for the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc-Pulte Afghanistan Peace and Development Research Program, and former Consul General of Afghanistan in Los Angeles. He tweets from @ArefDostyar.

Zmarai Farahi is former Head of the Peace Unit at the Office of the National Security Council of Afghanistan. He tweets from @FarahiZmarai. The views expressed in this piece are their own.

The Middle East Institute (MEI) is an independent, non-partisan, non-for-profit, educational organization. It does not engage in advocacy and its scholars’ opinions are their own. MEI welcomes financial donations, but retains sole editorial control over its work and its publications reflect only the authors’ views.

A Year After the Fall of Kabul

August 27, 2022 Analytical articles

By Steve Coll

The New Yorker

August 27, 2022

For the Biden Administration, supporting the Afghan people without empowering the Taliban is the foreign-policy case study from hell.

Public anniversaries mark the meaning of the past in the political present. In Washington, one year after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, the failure of the United States and its allies is emotive and polarizing. This month, House Republicans issued a report, entitled “A ‘Strategic Failure,’ ” which is unsparing of the Biden Administration’s decision last year to withdraw all remaining American forces from Afghanistan, and of its conduct of the chaotic evacuation that followed. The White House denounced the report as “partisan” and demagogic; the National Security Council circulated a memo defending the Administration’s actions. There will be more of this, particularly if Republicans gain control of one or both chambers of Congress in November’s midterm elections. Democrats have reason, in that case, to fear Benghazi-inspired, election-driving hearings and investigations on Afghanistan, although any Republican drive to hang last year’s failures on Biden will be complicated by the central role played in the dénouement by former President Donald Trump.

The stark politicization of America’s experience in Afghanistan threatens to add one more loop of failure and self-defeat to a sad record. Accountability is vital if it can be achieved impartially and reflectively, yet the urgent question of the moment does not involve the apportionment of blame. Many of the forty million Afghans left behind last summer by evacuating troops and diplomats are being battered by severe crises of hunger and persecution. The policy choices faced by the Biden Administration and its nato allies are morally complex and excruciatingly hard. If they are fogged by partisan politics in Washington, they will be harder still.

Richard Bennett, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, joined by other rights experts from across the world, used the anniversary’s occasion to declare, “Nowhere else in the world has there been as wide-spread, systematic and all-encompassing an attack on the rights of women and girls—every aspect of their lives is being restricted under the guise of morality and through the instrumentalization of religion.”

Meanwhile, about half of the population is struggling to eat. “We’re looking at near-universal poverty,” Vicki Aken, the country director of the International Rescue Committee (I.R.C.), an aid-and-development nonprofit, told me from Kabul. When Aken arrived in Afghanistan in 2017, she said, the poverty rate was at about fifty per cent; by the end of 2022, it may reach ninety-seven per cent. “When you go into clinics and you go into hospitals, you see no medicines,” she said. “You see three people to a bed, lines out the door of mothers with malnourished children.”

Governments and nonprofits are navigating an uncomfortable tension between prioritizing human-rights advocacy and working with the Taliban to stabilize the Afghan economy. “We want the pressure” on the Taliban over human rights, Fereshta Abbasi, an Afghan-born researcher at Human Rights Watch in London, told me. “We need to let the Taliban know that we are standing with the Afghan people” and that the regime’s record must change “if they want any recognition.” Simultaneously, she added, “On the humanitarian side, we don’t want the Afghan people to be victims of this crisis and chaos.”

And Taliban repression is worsening, according to researchers, not moderating under outside pressure. “There are definitely differing views between the humanitarian and human-rights communities,” Aken said. “I have immense respect for the human-rights people,” she added, yet “the only solution to this crisis is to find a way to make the economy function.“ That requires coöperating or, at least, engaging with the Taliban.

“One of the things that I find so hard is that there are a lot of Afghan women who stayed behind, women who run their own N.G.O.s, who are attacked by those outside of the country for even hinting that it’s even possible to do that,” Aken continued. About three thousand women work directly for the I.R.C. in Afghanistan. “It’s not easy,” she said. “There does need to be a light shined on human-rights abuses, but, if we don’t stay engaged, the opportunities that remain for women and ethnic minorities might disappear altogether.”

For nato governments, the dilemma comes down to whether to release large sums of money to Afghanistan to stabilize the economy, even if doing so may strengthen the Taliban. The alternative would be to tighten sanctions and expand travel bans, and further isolate the regime’s leaders, even if this accelerates the economy’s free fall, perhaps to the point of widespread famine. This is not an either-or policy question, of course. The often subtle difficulties of prioritizing rights advocacy while engaging with authoritarian regimes to provide humanitarian aid is a familiar one. But the current Afghan case is distinctive—and unmistakably difficult.

The Taliban’s prideful restoration of gender apartheid in secondary and higher education and in many sectors of the economy is an outrage of special dimensions, as Bennett and the other rights experts noted. For the U.S. and other nato countries—champions of a modernization drive in Kabul and other major Afghan cities for two decades—the reversal of the status of women is all but impossible to countenance. “Women and girls have largely been erased from public life,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, in Washington, on July 28th. “It’s especially difficult to accept because we all remember how different it was not so very long ago.”

On July 31st, a U.S. drone killed the Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri at his hideout in downtown Kabul. The Biden Administration, like its predecessors, has identified counterterrorism as a “vital” continuing interest in Afghanistan. That the Afghan capital was Zawahiri’s haven has only deepened doubts in Washington about the Taliban’s reliability. By “hosting and sheltering” Zawahiri in Kabul, Blinken said after the drone strike, the Taliban betrayed “repeated assurances to the world that they would not allow Afghan territory to be used by terrorists.” The Taliban insisted that they didn’t know Zawahiri was present.

Even in the face of this record, development experts continue to urge the Biden Administration to release to the Afghan central bank billions of dollars in foreign-currency reserves. The issue is technically complicated. After the Taliban took Kabul last August, the Biden Administration froze seven billion dollars in reserves held in the U.S. Lawyers representing families of victims of 9/11 then asked a judge to designate those funds as compensation for their clients. (The Taliban, who never lawyered up to defend themselves, have been found liable for the attacks.) Last February, Biden issued an executive order allocating 3.5 billion dollars as potential compensation for the 9/11 families, but reserving the rest for possible future restoration to the Afghan central bank, which is known as Da Afghanistan Bank. One impediment to any future release: the first deputy governor appointed to the bank by the Taliban, Noor Ahmad Agha, has been designated as a terrorist by the U.S.

The Taliban want all of the reserves frozen in the U.S. back, and they have respectable allies. On August 10th, seventy-one economists, including the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, wrote to President Biden and the Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, urging them to immediately allow the Afghan central bank to reclaim all of its reserves. They argued that the funds are “critical to the functioning of the Afghan economy.” The Afghan private-banking system “has nearly ground to a halt,” salaries are not being paid, and businesses and individuals cannot access their savings. Repatriating the reserves would allow the central bank to stabilize the national currency and pay for food and energy imports, the economists wrote. William Byrd, a development economist formerly with the World Bank in Kabul, now at the United States Institute of Peace, argued in reply that the Afghan central bank is in no position to manage billions of dollars productively.

The Biden Administration has handed this foreign-policy case study from hell to two well-regarded mid-level State Department officials: Thomas West, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan, and Rina Amiri, the special envoy for Afghan women, girls, and human rights. West negotiates directly with Taliban leaders on aid, counterterrorism, and other subjects. He has ruled out releasing the Afghan central-bank funds as a “near-term option.”

Amiri has so far declined to attend bilateral talks with the Taliban, because of the regime’s policies toward the women and girls she is charged to defend—a split on diplomatic tactics that is a microcosm of the larger dilemma. “I support my colleagues engaging the Taliban,” Amiri tweeted recently. “Engagement on issues where there’s traction, such as economic stabilization & the humanitarian response, is necessary.” Yet, in the areas her office oversees, she continued, “robust international engagement . . . hasn’t produced meaningful outcomes for Afghan, women, girls & at-risk populations.”

This summer, the Biden Administration announced a one-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar contribution to U.N. agencies assisting Afghanistan—slightly more than half of it to address food insecurity, the rest targeting the needs of children and women, via unicef and U.N. Women. It is a significant commitment, but it cannot address the downward spiral caused by the collapse of Afghan banking or the inability of the Afghan central bank to pay for commercial food-and-energy imports.

Byrd is among those promoting a nascent plan to put frozen Afghan reserves into a trust fund that would be housed in Switzerland, perhaps to be overseen by central-banking experts—details to be negotiated with the Taliban. The State Department spokesman Ned Price acknowledged that the U.S. continues to explore “mechanisms” that would allow the 3.5 billion dollars of the reserves designated for possible release by Biden to be used “precisely for the benefit of the Afghan people . . . in a way that doesn’t make them ripe for diversion to terrorist groups or elsewhere.”

Hanging over these negotiations is America’s record of diplomatic failure in the run-up to last summer’s collapse, and during the first Taliban emirate, which reigned from the mid-nineties to late 2001. The Clinton years—when the Taliban controlled Kabul and its ministries—offer perhaps the closest parallel to the present layout. Initially flummoxed by the Taliban’s extremism, and later alarmed by the sanctuary it provided to Al Qaeda, State Department envoys pushed all of the buttons of professional diplomacy—direct engagement with Taliban ministers, multilateral peace talks, economic sanctions, travel bans, and weapons embargoes. The Taliban attended conferences, talked politely, and allowed some international aid to flow into the country, but the movement’s leaders offered no major compromises and stood by passively as Osama bin Laden and Zawahiri carried out deadly strikes against U.S. targets in Africa, in 1998, and Yemen, in 2000, meanwhile secretly plotting 9/11.

Eventually, in 1999, Clinton authorized C.I.A. covert action against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The C.I.A. funded and equipped anti-Taliban insurgents, such as those led by the legendary guerrilla commander Ahmed Shah Massoud. Today, some Afghan opponents of the Taliban and their allies in Washington advocate a rerun of covert-action strategies. But neither the Biden Administration nor other nato governments appear to have any appetite for fostering more violence in Afghanistan. In a Foreign Affairs essay this month, Ali Maisam Nazary, the head of foreign relations for the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan, a movement led by Massoud’s son, acknowledged that its anti-Taliban insurgents of 2022 have yet to receive “a drop of help from any country.”

For their part, the Taliban declared a public holiday to mark the anniversary of Kabul’s fall. On Twitter and in a round of media interviews, Abdul Qahar Balkhi, a Taliban foreign-ministry spokesman, promoted the emirate’s achievements one year on, including the resumption of commercial flights to and from Kabul, economic projects, and the accommodation of about a thousand foreign journalists who have travelled to report in the country since last summer. He also cited the Taliban’s engagement with diplomatic missions and argued that an international consensus had taken hold that there is “no alternative to [the] current government.”

It is certainly true that the Taliban have made themselves an intractable fact of life in international affairs. Five successive White Houses have failed to defeat the movement militarily or to influence its leaders to change their ideology. Yet the hardest and least politically rewarding problems in foreign policy are sometimes the most important ones.

For its own failings and those of its predecessors, the Biden Administration has a moral obligation to the Afghan population suffering today under Taliban rule. The U.S. and its nato allies also have an interest in preventing a further Afghan economic collapse that could trigger more mass migration toward Europe or foster more violent extremism. Blessed are the peacemaking, rights-promoting mid-level special envoys, but this is a crisis for Presidents and Prime Ministers. Where are they? ♦

Around the Region

The Taliban and Pakistan

No Option but to Engage

Summary

About the Report

About the Author

How have women’s lives changed since the Taliban takeover?

What are the social and psychological impacts of the erosion of women’s rights in Afghanistan?

In terms of justice, what mechanisms are there through which women can access justice?

Afghanistan has a very young population, with over 60 percent of its citizens under the age of 25. How has life changed for them over the past year?

How can the U.S and international community continue to support the next generation of Afghans?

Transcript

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