Moscow appears to have underestimated its adversary this time, just as it did then
The Kremlin had banked on a quick, trouble-freedecapitation to solve the problem of a neighbor appearing to stray too far from Moscow’s orbit.
But after its vaunted army thundered across the border, very little went according to plan.
The invading troops met fierce resistance from outgunned fighters defending their homeland. International allies, including the United States, rushed to aid the underdogs. And a war that Moscow had seen as a chance to show off its might became instead a bloody and embarrassing display of weakness — one that threatened the stability of its deeply entrenched regime.
So has gone Russia’s stumbling, five-week-old invasion of Ukraine. But the same description applies to the Soviet Union’s ill-fated adventure in Afghanistan, which precipitated collapse at home and the Cold War’s end.
Now the history of that four-decade-old conflict looms over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision-making as he tries to navigate through a self-inflicted quagmire. Veterans of the Afghanistan war say he has already failed to heed some of its most critical lessons, including by overestimating his military’s capabilities and misjudging his adversaries.
“The Russians underestimated the Afghans in the 1980s,” said Bruce Riedel, who worked on the CIA’s covert program to aid the rebels. “They seem to have underestimated the Ukrainians today.”
Riedel said there’s irony in that failure: Putin, in invading Ukraine, has appeared bent on restoring the glory lost when the Soviet Union broke up, an event he has described as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
Yet, by making some of the same mistakes that haunted Soviet leaders until the day their empire fell apart, Putin has put Russian power — not to mention his own future — in doubt.
“In setting out to reverse history,” another CIA veteran of the Afghanistan war, Milton Bearden, recently wrote in Foreign Affairs, “he may instead be repeating it.”
Of course, there are vast differences between Ukraine now and Afghanistan then. To name a few: Ukraine’s government is democratically elected, while Afghanistan already had a Soviet-backed communist regime before the invasion. Today’s war is being fought alarmingly close to NATO’s front lines, rather than a battlefield seen as distant to many in the West. Russian troops have been in Ukraine for barely over a month; the Soviets lingered in Afghanistan for nearly a decade.
Yet, if anything, analysts say, this war is going far worse for Moscow.
When Soviet troops poured over the Hindu Kush Mountains and into Afghanistan on Christmas Eve in 1979, they achieved initial success. Their goal was to eliminate Afghan leader Hafizullah Amin, whom the KGB falsely believed to be having a dalliance with the CIA. Soviet paramilitaries did just that, gunning him down in his Kabul palace.
The war, it appeared, had been won.
In Ukraine, Russia analyst Anatol Lieven said, Putin was apparently hoping for a similarly quick victory, one in which “the Russians would march in, [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky would run away, and the Ukrainian resistance would collapse.”
“The difference with Afghanistan,” said Lieven, who covered the Afghanistan war as a journalist, “is that that plan failed.”
It would ultimately fail in Afghanistan, as well. But that would take longer — just as it later did for the United States’ own star-crossed intervention in Afghanistan.
In plotting to oust Amin, the Soviets had not counted on the fervor or resilience of Afghan rebels — known as mujahideen — who launched a David vs. Goliath rebellion against what was then the world’s largest conventional army.
Nor had they anticipated the cohesion of their international adversaries, who banded together to hatch a secret strategy for bleeding the Red Army.
The Kremlin had believed that the United States and its president, Jimmy Carter, would be too distracted by domestic turmoil and by recent foreign policy flops to seriously engage on Afghanistan. But within weeks of the Soviet advance, crates of U.S.-funded weapons were being unloaded in the Pakistani port of Karachi, for onward delivery to the mujahideen.
Riedel, who was working in the CIA’s operations center on the night that Soviet paratroopers began landing in Afghanistan, said U.S. policymakers had rapidly seized on the idea that “this could be the Soviet Union’s Vietnam.” Washington could help by supplying money and arms to the rebels, funneling that assistance through Pakistani partners.
“The U.S. role [in Afghanistan] was basically the quartermaster of the war,” said Riedel, who now directs the Brookings Intelligence Project. “That’s the role that Biden and company envision for the U.S. again.”
As was true in Afghanistan, Moscow appears to have been caught off-guard by the backing that Ukraine is getting from beyond its borders. Before the invasion, NATO, the European Union and the United States were all racked by internal division. President Biden had just overseen his own humiliating retreat from Afghanistan and was believed to have little appetite for confrontation.
But the West has shown unexpected unity in sticking up for Ukraine. And this time, the support is coming not in the shadows, but in the wide open.
The weaponry, too, is more sophisticated now. Much of the early assistance to the mujahideen came in the form of small arms, such as rifles, with antiaircraft Stinger missiles arriving only after years of combat.
In the case of Ukraine, the United States and NATO have supplied thousands of Stingers as well as thousands more antitank Javelins, weaponry that has dramatically raised the cost in Russian blood and treasure.
A top State Department official, Victoria Nuland, said this week that Russia has lost more than 10,000 troops — approaching the 15,000 dead that the Soviets acknowledged in Afghanistan. While the latter figure is widely believed to be an underestimate, the pace of casualties in this war is clearly much higher.
“In Afghanistan, it took nine years to wear the Soviet Union down,” said Lieven, who is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “It’s happening much quicker in the case of Ukraine.”
That’s one reason, Lieven said, that he believes Putin could seek a diplomatic off-ramp that allows him to cut his losses.
Moscow has sent mixed signals in recent days about its attitude toward negotiations, and analysts say that while an agreement is possible, it’s also conceivable that Putin opts to escalate.
That’s what Russia did in Chechnya in the 1990s. When initial Russian hopes of a lightning-fast victory faded, the military shifted to carpet bombing and besieging cities and towns. The result was a devastatingly costly war for both sides that left much of Chechnya in ruins.
In Ukraine — particularly in the southern port city of Mariupol — the Russian strategy has at times seemed to mimic the playbook in Chechnya.
When the Russian plan to seize Kyiv failed, “there was no backup plan,” said Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe, “so they resorted to a massive, indiscriminate bombardment instead.”
Those tactics have left a dismal toll: The United Nations said this week that more than 4 million Ukrainians have fled the country since the war began. The U.N. human rights agency has confirmed the deaths of more than 1,200 civilians, although it says the true count is far higher.
More than a million Afghans are believed to have been killed during the Soviet occupation; some 6 million more became refugees.
“When I see these pictures of Ukrainians leaving their country, I relate to them,” Ali Ahmad Jalali said. “I had to leave my country, traveling over the mountains with my family.”
Jalali, who had been an Afghan army officer, later returned to join the rebels.
Initially, he said, “nobody thought the mujahideen would be able to force the Soviets out. The mujahideen themselves didn’t think they would be able,” said Jalali, who became Afghanistan’s interior minister after the Taliban government was deposed and who is now a professor at National Defense University. “They didn’t care. It was the right thing to do.”
But as Moscow’s losses accumulated, he said, “it broke the spell of Soviet invincibility.”
Mikhail Minakov, as a young Ukrainian, experienced that from within. He was training in military medicine and expected to be deployed to treat Soviet troops in Afghanistan. It was a scary prospect: His professor brought in veterans to speak to the class, men who had lost eyes or legs on the battlefield.
It is not clear how much Russians today know of the casualties their side is taking, given extreme controls on the media. But Minakov said Russians can’t help but be aware of the economic toll brought on by sanctions, which are reversing Putin’s primary achievements: economic integration with the West and a rising standard of living.
“Putin has destroyed the social contract that brought him to power and kept him in power,” said Minakov, a senior adviser at the Kennan Institute.
That’s one reason, Minakov said, that he believes the Russian president — whose grip on power had long been considered unassailable — is far more vulnerable now than before the invasion began. But Putin, he said, is still dangerous and has shown he is not above dangling the threat of nuclear war.
It’s a risk, said Hudson Institute senior fellow Husain Haqqani, that cannot be taken lightly.
When Soviet troops were battling Afghan insurgents armed with U.S.-financed weapons in the 1980s, Haqqani said, both sides were careful to avoid undue escalation. The Americans stayed off the battlefield. The Soviets resisted expanding the fight into Pakistan. Pakistan’s leader, military dictator Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, talked often of keeping the war set to simmer, while never allowing it to boil over.
“The rules of the game were firmly established,” said Haqqani, who covered the war as a journalist and later became Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States. “The Soviets and Americans took the threat of nuclear conflict seriously.”
But now, he said, “Putin has upended the rules of the game.”
Adding to the peril: Pakistan was never a NATO member, but four countries on Ukraine’s border are: Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Hungary. If any are attacked, the alliance would be obliged to defend them.
As Putin’s options narrow, his unpredictability may grow, said Bearden, the former CIA officer. Less than three years after the last Soviet troops retreated across the Amu Darya River, the Soviet Union was no more. The Russian president, Bearden said, is acutely aware of that history — and will be doing all he can to avoid allowing his mistakes in Ukraine to turn fatal: “What I see Putin trying to do now is figure out, ‘How do I not let this thing bring me down?’ ”
Robyn Dixon in Riga, Latvia, contributed to this report.
In Putin’s Ukraine quagmire, echoes of Soviet failure in Afghanistan
The United Kingdom, Germany, Qatar and the United Nations are co-hosting a virtual, ministerial-level, international, pledging summit for Afghanistan, today. It aims to raise USD 4.4 billion for lifesaving humanitarian support to 22.1 million Afghans who are at “immediate and catastrophic levels of need.” Afghanistan’s Taleban government, in power since August 2021 but not recognised by any state is, notably, not among the invitees. In this report, AAN’s Roxanna Shapour and Kate Clark have been looking at what is in the Humanitarian Response Plan, and what is not there, and at potential problems hanging over the conference like last week’s Taleban ban on secondary schooling for girls, which for donors couldcomplicate the provision of aid beyond the strictly humanitarian.
This report looks at two questions in detail. Firstly: What is in the Humanitarian Response Plan? We go into some detail, bringing the highlights from this 150 page document, looking at sectoral activities, beneficiaries and noted problems with access and operational capacity. We also outline highlights from the separate bid for funding for refugees.The second half of the report looks at what is not being asked for at this conference, ie assistance beyond the humanitarian. We look at how, for donors, such apolitical aid is what they feel they can manage – and have an obligation to provide, but how Afghanistan’s more fundamental needs continue to remain largely unaddressed. These needs are acknowledged, in the Humanitarian Response Plan and in UNAMA’s Transitional Emergency Framework. However, the wider political context – donors’ antipathy towards a government which has taken power by force and against which existing US and UN sanctions applied, together with restrictions on women and girls and a crackdown on dissent and the media – make it difficult for donors to feel they can do more at this stage. The Taleban, for their part, are also not prepared to compromise on what they see as their principles and Afghanistan’s sovereignty.
What is in the Humanitarian Response Plan?
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) launched the 150-page long 2022 Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP) on behalf of humanitarian organisations working in Afghanistan in January. It requests USD 4.4 billion in assistance – the UN’s largest appeal ever for a single country – to support 22.1 million people in need, up from 17.7 million in 2021. A little over half, USD 2.66 billion, is envisioned for food security and agriculture (see breakdown by sector and population group below).
Planned Humanitarian Response by Sector
Sector
People in Need
Planned Reach
%Targeted
Cost per beneficiary (USD)
Cost per Beneficiary in 2021(USD)
Financial Requirements (USD)
Education
7.9M
1.5M
19%
108
84
162.1M
Emergency shelter and non-food items (ES/NFI)
10.9M
1.9M
18%
193
109
374.0M
Food Security and Agriculture
24.0M
21.6M
90%
123
39
2.66B
Health
18.1M
14.7M
81%
26
16
378.0M
Nutrition
7.8M
5.9M
76%
48
46
287.4M
Protection
16.2M
4.5M
28%
30
29
137.3M
WASH
15.1M
10.4M
69%
32
26
332.8M
Aviation
85.0M
Coordination
26.6M
Source: 2022 Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP)
Planned Humanitarian Response by Demographics in 2022 and 2021
Planned Response by population group
Population group
People in need 2022
Planned reach 2022
People in need 2021
Planned reach 2021
Vulnerable people with humanitarian needs
23.8M
22.1M (93%)
16.9M
13.8M (81%)
Cross-border returnees
785.4K
592.1K (75%)
714K
714K (100%)
Internally displaced people
504.4K
504.4K (100%)
705K
679 (96%)
Shock-affected non-displaced people
150K
150K (100%)
500K
450K (90%)
Refugees and asylum seekers
72.4K
72.3K (99%)
72K
72K (100%)
Persons with disabilities
2.0M
1.8M (90%)
1.5M
1.3M (86%)
Planned Response by Gender
Boys
6.8M
6.2M (91%)
5.1M
4.3M (84%)
Girls
6.3M
5.7M (90%)
4.7M
3.9M (84%)
Men
5.8M
5.2M (90%)
4.6M
4M (87%)
Women
5.5M
5.0M (91%)
4.1M
3.5M (85%)
Planned Response by Age
Children (0-17)
13.1M
11.9M (91%)
9.7M
8.2M (85%)
Adults (18-64)
10.6M
9.6M (90%)
8.2 M
7.1M (87%)
Elders (65+)
657K
591K (90%)
505K
436K (86%)
Source: 2022 Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP) and 2018-21 HRP (revised in 2021)
The response plan is an attempt to address the enormous increase in the number of Afghans in need of humanitarian assistance, including because of an unprecedented hike in acute food insecurity and decline in basic services, including health and education, which the plan says, has led to a need to:
[S]cale-up activities in nearly every part of the country, addressing both those who have been chronically in need and those whose coping mechanisms have been undermined…. [including] people facing vulnerabilities such as extreme household debt burdens; mental and physical disability; the use of dangerous negative coping strategies; and those living in households headed by women, children or the elderly whose positions in society put them at a disadvantage.
Strategic objectives of the Humanitarian Response Plan
There are three strategic objectives for humanitarian activities in Afghanistan in 2022 (emphases added):
Reduce illness and death through humanitarian assistance to all Afghans in need by providing emergency shelter (usually tents or tarpaulins and ropes), water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), health, education, psychosocial, protection, and non-food items such as blankets, plastic sheets, buckets, jerry cans, cooking pots, and soap) to 21 million people. Alleviate hunger and malnutrition through food distributions (both in-kind and cash-based) and mother and child feeding programmes to address severe and moderate acute malnutrition (SAM and MAM) for 21.56 million people. Decrease illness and death from preventable diseases, outbreaks, and trauma as well as reproductive and mental health services through WASH and health services and de-mining for 14.4 million people.
Ensure that all beneficiaries have dignified and equal access to humanitarian support regardless of ethnicity and gender and that aid workers have safe access to beneficiaries. In addition, this objective will prioritise protection from gender-based violence (GBV), sexual exploitation and abuse (PSEA) and safeguarding children through mainly community-based mechanisms because state-run protection mechanisms have collapsed.
Address the underlying causes of humanitarian need by providing livelihoods support to vulnerable households to help them become more resilient in the future, such as providing rural communities with agricultural inputs and livestock regardless of ethnicity and gender. This includes providing essential services, such as WASH and education, to internally displaced people as well as returnees from Iran and Pakistan.
Planned response by sector
Humanitarian activities will be carried out by UN agencies and NGOs organised into groups called ‘clusters’, with each cluster working in one or more of seven sectors:
Education
Emergency Shelter And Non-Food Items
Food Security And Agriculture
Health
Nutrition
Protection
Each cluster developed an annual plan after conducting an evidence-based assessment of needs called the Humanitarian Needs Overview, or HNO (see the 2022 HNO here). The HNO is then used to inform sectoral plans for the humanitarian response. The following section provides a brief overview of the planned response, sector by sector.
Education
The Humanitarian Response Plan aims to provide schooling to 1.5 million children through Community-Based Education (CBE), which sees out-of-school children, especially girls, attend classes in community buildings, houses and sometimes mosques. This includes Accelerated Learning Classes (ALCs) which offer a condensed curriculum, in this case, two school years in each calendar year, and Temporary Learning Spaces (TLS), which provide displaced children with the ability to keep up with their schooling for one academic year, or until they can re-enrol in formal education. There is also support in the plan for some government schools to repair/rehabilitate buildings, but no general support for the state education system, such as paying teachers’ salaries.
Taleban officials had promised to allow older girls to resume their education from the start of the new school year, on 23 March 2022, following the Taleban’s closure of most secondary schools for girls after they took power. This promise was made in the face of enormous pressure from parents, teachers, Afghan women’s rights activists and donors. Taleban officials have highlighted the need for international support to get the education sector (as well as other sectors) up and running. “Education for girls and women ‘is a question of capacity,’” Taleban spokesperson and deputy culture minister Zabiullah Mujahed told the Associated Press in a 15 January interview (see here). Speaking on the sidelines of the Oslo meeting (see below) on 26 January, the Emirate’s Foreign Minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, also highlighted Taleban expectations that international support would be forthcoming: “From these meetings we are sure of getting support for Afghanistan’s humanitarian, health and education sectors.” (see here).
This anticipation of support for schools came even though the Taleban have prioritised education spending in their budget and appear to have funds available. The donors, for their part, have also committed to support the Afghanistan Education Sector Transitional Framework (AESTF), a two-year programme to keep Afghan children who have been left out of school as a result of recent events, displacement or natural disasters in education, meaning that the USD 162 million requested for education in the Humanitarian Response Plan had been due to be fully funded. However, the Taleban’s abrupt decision on 23 March to keep older girls out of education after all may make donors question giving funds that could support a discriminatory public education environment, particularly where the response plan envisions support for some public schools to repair/rehabilitate buildings (see AAN’s report on the ban on secondary education for girls).
Emergency Shelter and Non-Food Item (ES-NFI)
The response plan envisions supporting 1.9 million of the 10.9 million people in need, ie 10 per cent, with emergency and transitional shelter (tents, tarpaulins and pre-fabricated housing), non-food items, shelter repairs and winterisation. However, the response plan highlights that in the past, funding for this cluster has been “sub-optimal.” In 2021, according to UNOCHA’s Financial Tracking System (FTS), the ES-NFI cluster received USD 50 million, or less than half of the USD 109.2 million it had requested (see FTS data here). Available funding has been used for “less expensive, short-term emergency responses.” For example, in 2021, only one per cent of the people who were assisted and in 2020, only three per cent received shelter repairs or upgrades. In 2022, the cluster aims to increase its activities and reach significantly to include more Afghans in need, particularly in areas that were previously inaccessible because of the conflict, including Helmand, Farah, Nimruz, Uruzgan, Nuristan, Laghman and Maidan Wardak.
Food Security and Agriculture
Afghan families are experiencing unprecedented difficulties in getting adequate, affordable food. This food insecurity is a consequence of the conflict, two years of severe drought and poor harvests, and the economic collapse in the wake of the Taleban takeover of the country. According to the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) report, which made predictions about food insecurity for the period November 2021 to March 2022, the number of people facing critical levels of food insecurity (IPC phase 3 or above[1]) was expected to reach 22.8 million, or 55 per cent of the population. That was nearly 35 per cent higher than the same period last year (16.9 million people).
This cluster plans to provide food and livelihood support to 21.6 million people who are in IPC Phase 3 or above (17.9 million people in rural areas and 4.9 million in urban areas). This will include support to farmers, herders and the landless for local food production with seeds (wheat, maize, pulses, fertilizers), animal feed and support for backyard gardens for women. The provision of seeds may be particularly important as AAN has heard (unconfirmed) reports that some farmers have used the seeds saved for planting for food, while others may not be able to afford to buy them.
There will also be support-term income support, for example, through cash for work schemes. Cash distributions to two million people are also planned either as unconditional grants to households headed by women, people with disabilities or the elderly, or as cash for work schemes to rehabilitate or build individual or community assets such as irrigation canals or watering points. There are also plans to provide people in urban areas with vocational training in carpentry, embroidery, plumbing, and computers.
Health
Since the fall of the Republic, access to health services across Afghanistan has diminished, leading to a hike in the number of people needing humanitarian health assistance to an estimated 18.1 million in 2022, up from 14.5 million in 2021 – an increase of 20 per cent. The cluster plans to improve access to primary, secondary and tertiary health care in all provinces by scaling up the delivery of the basic package of health services (BPHS) and the essential package of hospital services to 14.6 million people (a 42 per cent increase compared to 2021), including 2.9 million women of childbearing age (15-49 years old). Those tasked with providing healthcare will have to ensure that women have safe and equal access to services, including reproductive health and information to survivors of gender-based violence. In addition, the cluster aims to strengthen emergency health services, including trauma and triage, and prevent and respond to outbreaks of infectious/communicable diseases, particularly COVID-19, Acute Watery Diarrhoea, and Dengue Fever.
Nutrition
Support will be provided in all provinces to 5.9 million children and women who are pregnant or lactating through static and mobile facilities. However, some provinces will be prioritised based on existing malnutrition rates among children under five, including Badakhshan, Badghis, Bamyan, Daikundi, Ghor, Helmand, Jawzjan, Kabul, Nuristan, Paktika, Panjshir and Samangan.
Protection
The response focuses on monitoring violations of International Humanitarian Law and International Human Rights Law; supporting victims of gender-based violence; ensuring families at risk have access to child protection services; strengthening housing, land and property rights, especially for IDPs and; supporting de-mining activities. The cluster plans to reach 4.5 million people, with a focus on border areas with large IDP and returnee populations. The response will pay special attention to the most vulnerable groups, including the internally displaced, refugees and returnees, to identify persons in need of assistance and refer them to other clusters to receive support.
Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH)
Afghanistan is experiencing a water crisis precipitated by two years of severe drought that has caused grave water shortages, both for drinking and handwashing, and degraded the quality of water available to urban and rural populations, with the situation in 18 provinces classed as catastrophic, compared to none in 2020. The economic crisis and the moratorium on development funding that followed the Taleban takeover have caused a significant loss of capacity of the state entity in charge of the water supply and sewage, the Afghanistan Urban Water Supply and Sewage State Owned Corporation (UWASS). As a result, rural water supply projects have stalled and the urban water supply is plagued by a lack of electricity and chlorination and water leakages.
There have been increased reports of outbreaks of diseases such as Acute Watery Diarrhoea and cholera. The WASH cluster plans to help 10.4 million people get access to adequate water by ensuring safe drinking water supplies, for example, by providing households with chlorination tablets, solar water pumps or water purification facilities for communities, monitoring the water system to detect and repair leaks, monitoring ground water levels and ensuring quality levels are maintained by providing early warning of contamination. Finally, sanitation activities will focus on waste water and sewage management to control outbreaks of Acute Watery Diarrhoea and root out the breeding grounds of disease-bearing mosquitos.
Regional support to refugees
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has launched a separate annual appeal for USD 623 million to support 5.7 million Afghan nationals (including registered refugees and asylum seekers and projected new arrivals) mainly in Iran and Pakistan and with smaller numbers in Central Asia, as well as 1.77 million people in the communities that host the refugees and five host governments (see breakdown below and the 2022 Afghanistan Situation Regional Response Plan here).
Target Populations and Funding Requirements
Projected Afghan Refugees 2022
Targeted Undocumented Afghans
Targeted Host Community
Total Targets
Funding Requirements (USD)
Pakistan
1,427,000
800,000
1,200,000
3,427,000
258.73M
Iran
1,068,000
585,500
550,000
2,203,500
310.44M
Tajikistan
23,000
340
23,000
46,340
40.45M
Turkmenistan
2,700
100
800
3,600
3.14M
Uzbekistan
5,410
13,648
3,000
22,058
10.63M
Total
2,526,110
1,399,588
1,776,800
5,702,498
623.41M
Source: Afghanistan Situation Regional Refugee Response Plan 2022
Iran and Pakistan have long hosted large populations of Afghan refugees and undocumented Afghans who have relocated there in search of jobs or sanctuary. UNHCR estimates that an additional 1.4 million Afghan refugees will arrive in Pakistan in 2022, another one million will seek asylum in Iran and a smaller number of refugees, 31,000, will go to Central Asia. These numbers will add to the already significant population of refugees and undocumented Afghans in these countries.
This response plan will deliver humanitarian services, focusing on community-based interventions and finding long-term sustainable solutions to the needs of Afghan refugees and their hosts. The plan focuses on four primary areas: 1) Support for Afghan refugees and host communities with livelihoods activities and basic services such as health and education through the national systems where possible; 2) Support for host governments to ensure access to asylum and protection, including admission, registration, documentation and non-refoulement; 3) Provide humanitarian assistance across sectors, particularly to children and youth, women, the elderly, and persons with disabilities and; 4) Support host government efforts to ensure that emergency response measures are in place for new arrivals, such as shelter, non-food items, or registration facilities.
Financial Requirements by Sector in Iran and Pakistan (USD)
Sector
Total by sector
Iran
Pakistan
Education
72.2M
27.5M
41.4
Food Security
57.9M
22.3M
28
Health and Nutrition
119.14M
69.6M
44.4
Livelihoods and Resilience
88.3M
27M
54.9
Logistics and Telecoms
17.5M
7M
9.2
Protecting
99.2M
27.3M
64
Shelter and NFIs
77M
42.5M
23.3
WASH
91.9M
35.2M
44.9
Total by country
259M
310M
Source: Afghanistan Situation Regional Refugee Response Plan 2022
Acknowledged difficulties with access
Access to beneficiaries is a prerequisite for delivering humanitarian support and yet, there are reported troubles there. According to the Humanitarian Access Group (HAG), cited in the Humanitarian Response Plan, the number of incidents restricting NGO access nearly doubled in the first 11 months of 2021 (figures are not yet available for December): 2,016 incidents, up from 1,095 in 2020. In August alone, humanitarians logged 378 incidents (nearly twice the monthly average for the year) during the Taleban’s final push for power. These incidents included interference in humanitarian programming, active conflict, movement restrictions, road closures, robberies and threats. Active interference by the Taliban, armed criminal groups and communities (in that order) were the primary barriers to access for aid workers. The number of incidents did drop to below 100 a month in October and November, but that was at the same level as in 2020.
Humanitarians are also concerned over the lack of clarity and unified Taleban policy concerning the participation of women in the humanitarian response. This issue seems to have been resolved, for now, with partial agreements (16 provinces) and full agreements (18 provinces) in place across the country that allow for women to participate in the response. However, in light of recent Taleban policies concerning women, particularly the prohibition on women travelling without a mahram (a close male relative), this may change.
Operational capacity is another area for careful consideration. While the Humanitarian Response Plan puts the number of ‘humanitarian partners’ at 158 organisations – 78 national NGOs, 69 international NGOs and 11 UN organisations, it also says that some of those partners have had to halt or hibernate their programmes due to the conflict and in the wake of uncertainties following the fall of the Republic. Many organisations are struggling to work in the face of the banking crisis, which made paying staff and other expenses difficult. Indeed, the latest Humanitarian Response Dashboard put the number of active partners at just 68 organisations in January 2022 – 28 national NGOs, 33 international NGOs, six UN agencies and the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement. Given the short timeframe for implementing the Humanitarian Response Plan, humanitarian NGOs will have to have access to adequate resources and infrastructure to scale up operations.
What is not up for funding? Going beyond the humanitarian
Humanitarian assistance is indispensable, given the scale and urgency of the economic crisis now facing Afghans. Yet, as the Humanitarian Response Plan acknowledges, repeatedly, Afghanistan needs help with long-term development to address the underlying causes of humanitarian need. AAN has addressed these fundamental problems with the economy in in two papers, from September 2021, and Killing the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg: Afghanistan’s economic distress post-15 August, from November 2021.[2] They include: the abrupt cut to income and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) when the Taleban captured power – most aid was cut, as was funding of the security services and the money spent by foreign armies deployed to Afghanistan; far-reaching UN and especially US sanctions, which although subsequently watered down by wide-ranging waivers enacted by the US Treasury, still mean the fear of breaking sanctions is making international banks averse to dealing with NGOs, businesses and individuals in Afghanistan and; job losses, inflation, depreciation of the afghani and limited purchasing power for buying imports (Afghanistan had been importing six times more by value than it was exporting, with the deficit covered by aid and other unearned foreign income).
One acknowledgement that Afghanistan’s problems go beyond the humanitarian is the Transitional Engagement Framework (TEF), launched by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) also in January, to be “the overarching strategic planning document for the UN system’s assistance in 2022.” In other words, it is the UN’s joint appeal for funding for both humanitarian and development activities. It has three strategic objectives/outcomes:
Provide lifesaving assistance;
Sustain essential services;
Preserve social investments and community-level systems essential to meeting basic human needs.
A far shorter document than the Humanitarian Response Plan, just 20 pages, the Transitional Engagement Framework lacks the kind of depth one would expect from “the overarching strategic planning document for the UN system’s assistance in 2022,” that comes with an 8 billion USD price tag – 4.4 billion for outcome one and 3.7 billion for outcomes two and three. To put this in context, this is far more than the last budget of the Republic, USD 6.14 billion, which was for all government spending, including the spending on the military, security and police, which relied on on-budget support or the government’s own domestic revenues.
The Transitional Engagement Framework is ambitious in its aspirations, but given the political realities on the ground and the short timeframe for its implementation – just one year, it is surprisingly scant on data, detail, analysis and strategic priorities. The framework offers three outcomes if its planned activities are fully implemented (ie fully funded) – save lives, sustain essential services and preserve community systems – but does little to flesh out what this would mean. For example, the “outcome funding matrix” section provides lists of “indicative activities” which are organised by outcome but are not prioritised and nor do they give details such as the number of beneficiaries to be reached or how each activity will be designed and implemented.
It is merely a framework, as its name states, which is intended to be used as broad guidance and convey an overall vision. The fact that the humanitarian community launched its regular annual appeal in January 2022 would certainly bear out this idea. The 2022 Humanitarian Response Plan, which is the focus of the 2022 London pledging summit, provides a detailed and strategic vision for humanitarian action in Afghanistan in 2022, including costings down to the cost per individual beneficiary. It is precisely this kind of detail and strategy that would be required from development actors.
However, the problems with going beyond the humanitarian are not just to do with providing a more professionally-organised plan. They are fundamentally political. The Concept Note for today’s conference appears to refer to this, as well as to the wider economic problems and to the difficulties currently hampering the provision of humanitarian aid when it gives one of the conference’s aims as:
Raise awareness of other challenges that are also critical to the survival of Afghanistan’s people, including basic needs, the functioning of its economy and availability of basic social services, while taking into account the political realities and situation on the ground.[3]
Donors are presumed to be on board with the Humanitarian Response Plan precisely because it is humanitarian, and therefore officially apolitical. They are able to square this sort of aid with their wider political concerns over supporting a country whose government took power by force, which they do not recognise and whose senior leadership is subject to sanctions by the United States and United Nations, with several senior leaders wanted on terrorism charges. It is also feared that support beyond the humanitarian would allow the Taleban to divert resources to other activities, such as intelligence and security services, and in general stabilise and support their rule.
Since August, doubts have only increased given the Taleban’s resistance to calls from all sides to make itself more inclusive (it remains all-male and almost completely Pashtun and clerical), that continues to attack the media, detains journalists and human and women’s rights activists, has banned protests and continues to detain and allegedly disappear former members of the security services. Goodwill over doing any more than the strictly humanitarian has been further eroded by recent further restrictions on women’s rights to travel and work and their abrupt about-face on their promise earlier this year to re-open all girls’ schools. The US cancelled a meeting with Taleban officials in Doha because of the ban on secondary education for girls; the meeting, due to be held on 25 March, was to have included World Bank and UN representatives and according to US officials speaking to Reuters, was set to address key economic issues. An official said they “had made clear that we see this decision [on girls’ education] as a potential turning point in our engagement.”[4]
The World Bank has also put on hold plans to give USD 600 million from the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ATRF) in development aid to fund four projects in agriculture, education, health, and livelihoods via UN agencies. Given the Bank’s “strong focus on ensuring that girls and women participate and benefit from the support,” as stated in the press release announcing the aid, it has decided to only seek approval from ATRF donors for going ahead with the projects only “when the World Bank and international partners have a better understanding of the situation and confidence that the goals of the projects can be met” (quote via Reuters). The Bank has given no timeline for this.
Even providing humanitarian assistance, however, is hampered by this wider context. There are still, for example, problems with getting money into the country because, despite wide-ranging waivers to sanctions enacted by the US Treasury, the fear of breaking sanctions is still making international banks averse to the risk of dealing with NGOs, businesses and individuals in Afghanistan. Problems with liquidity and currency shortages mean humanitarian actors and others still face problems with withdrawing cash held in Afghan bank accounts and with transferring money between accounts within the country (see here).
In the long-term, the question remains: What path can Afghanistan take toward a functioning economy, what state institutions can donors engage with and how might this engagement be possible in light of sanctions and the absence of formal recognition. These concerns complicate donors’ ability and willingness to make significant pledges without imposing strict conditionalities. The Taleban, however, have repeatedly stated their opposition to any conditionality to the aid provided to Afghanistan; they view such conditions as an interference in the country’s domestic affairs.
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In IPC Phase 3 (Crisis) households either: have food consumption gaps that are reflected by high or above-usual acute malnutrition; or are marginally able to meet minimum food needs but only by depleting essential livelihood assets or through crisis-coping strategies
The first two aims of the conference are: “Secure scaled-up resources to address the unprecedented level of humanitarian needs in Afghanistan in 2022; Highlight the capacity and commitment of humanitarian partners to implement lifesaving assistance across the country.”
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The US Special Envoy to Afghanistan, Tom West, did however, travel to China for a meeting of the ‘Extended Troika’, the three world powers plus Pakistan. At the same time, another meeting was being held in China: foreign ministers from Pakistan, Iran, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, Qatar and the Taleban’s own Amir Khan Muttaqi.
REVISIONS:
This article was last updated on 1 Apr 2022
A Pledging Conference for Afghanistan… But what about beyond the humanitarian?
The Taleban’s abrupt decision to keep girls’ secondary schools closed, despite promising for months that they would re-open, has caused distress to girls, parents and teachers alike. The Taleban’s justification was confused, with various officials giving different reasons for the closure, from lack of teachers to inappropriate school uniforms. Eventually, a formal announcement cited the need for a “comprehensive plan, in accordance with sharia and Afghan culture.” Guest author Ashley Jackson* has been looking into what happened behind the scenes that lead to this policy reversal and argues that the ultimate cause may have had less to do with religion than the unpredictable nature of Taleban power politics.
We were in class, geography, for almost 30 minutes when a teacher came in and told us they’d been ordered to close the school… We asked them why, but they said the reason wasn’t clear…. Almost all the students were crying… Like everyone else, I had my new school uniform, my books, school bag and stationery – I’d even prepared materials to study for the Kankor [university entrance] exam… When I got home, my family had already heard the news…. My dear father was so sad and worried: it’s your last year, he told me, and this school closure could harm you. 16 year old girl in Kabul, daughter of a shop-keeper and home-maker
In the past, my daughters would arrive home from school at 12 or 1 o’clock, but on that day they were back by 10. I was shocked, worried about what might have happened to them, and then they described the situation with tears in their eyes. I felt disappointed, helpless and insulted because, despite many difficulties and economic problems, I have tried to provide for my girls so that they can study and be the future of this country… They are the wealth of our Afghanistan. If they don’t study, the country will stay backward…
Vegetable seller in Ghazni city with daughters in 7th, 10th, 12th grades (ages 12-18)
The acute grief and disappointment of older girls and their parents and teachers that girls have not been allowed to resume their studies has been all too evident. There is also fear, both for the prospects for girls under the Islamic Emirate and for what this policy means for the future of their country. The Taleban authorities speak of this as a temporary measure in place until they can put measures in place to allow schools to open, but given a plan to reopen girls’ secondary schools has been promised since the Taleban took power in August, many now do not trust that such a plan will ever be enacted. The fear that this will be an indefinite ban has led to some families now considering leaving the country, but that is not an option for the majority who are too poor to leave. “I have no plan,” the vegetable seller from Ghazni quoted above who said he cried over his girls being barred from school. “What I can do! A person in a weak economic position cannot manage to migrate.” He said his girls were now studying at home and their elders were helping them, but he thought it would be of no use; they needed a formal system and a more certain future.
Since the closure of girls’ secondary schools on 23 March, there have been a few small demonstrations (see here, in Kabul and here, in Herat), but as yet, no sign of the sort of mounting popular pressure that might influence Taleban policy on this issue. However, AAN’s recent publications looking at Taleban policy on education traced how demand for schools for boys and girls has grown and become mainstream in much of Afghan society, including among certain sections of the Taleban leadership. Closing girls’ secondary schools would seem to be an unpopular move with many Afghans, but was taken anyway. It seems important, therefore, to understand why the Taleban leadership decided to reverse policy. This is the main subject of this report. It starts with brief background on the Taleban’s policy on girls’ education since they took power in August 2021, and then explores how the Taleban’s 23 March decision came about. The report concludes by examining what might happen next. It is based on a series of interviews conducted in the aftermath of last week’s decision by the author and the AAN team. Sources included two government officials, four Afghan students and parents, six interlocutors within or close to the Taleban, and eleven diplomats and aid officials.
Background
On 23 August 2021, the Taleban’s Education Commission announced the closure of all schools following their takeover of the country. While they declared that primary schools would reopen on 28 August, they indicated that secondary schools would resume at a later date still to be determined. On 17 September, the Ministry of Education announced that “all male schoolteachers and male pupils must be present at their work” – implying, but not explicitly stating, that female teachers and students should stay at home.[1]In practice, this became a de facto ban on female secondary education. The international reaction was swift, with many Afghans, various United Nations bodies and foreign governments, condemning the decision and urging the Taleban to allow older girls to resume their schooling (see here, here, here and here.)
In fact, the Taleban’s de facto ban was not applied uniformly across the country. AAN’s analysis found that many girls’ secondary schools were allowed to keep running, either because of supportive local Taleban leadership or strong pressure by parents or teachers. Numerous private education institutions and universities also continued teaching girls, even in places where government secondary schools for girls were closed. In December 2021, Taleban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi told AP that government secondary schools for girls were open in ten of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, and private schools and universities were open for female students.[2]
To some extent, this reflected the Taliban’s pre-August 15 position as well as practice in the 1990s. While the Taleban government in the 1990s banned girls’ schooling, the authorities did turn a blind eye to some schooling in some places, especially for younger girls – although the threat of punishment also hung over pupils and teachers. The post-2001 insurgency, although at first opposed to all ‘modern’ schooling, eventually adopted an ambiguous stance in the face of parental demand for schools. Commanders typically allowed at least female primary education, but hardly any girls’ secondary schools operated in Taleban strongholds.[3] They neither encouraged nor banned female secondary or higher education. Instead, the insurgency’s education commission policy was worded in such a way as to leave the door open to permitting it under certain vaguely articulated conditions.[4] This ambiguity allowed the Taleban to accommodate contradictory opinions on this issue within the leadership, as well as on the ground among commanders and communities. It also enabled the Taleban to sidestep pressure during talks from diplomats and donors who wanted the movement to explicitly endorse female education, as well as potential resistance from those within the Taleban who would have objected.
Since the August 2021 closures, the Taleban government has faced enormous pressure to reinstate full female access to education. Taleban officials have made numerous statements suggesting that it would do so, provided certain requirements were met. Implicit in these statements has been an expectation of international support for the education sector. Taleban Acting Minister of Education Nurullah Munir and Deputy Minister of Education Abdul Hakim Hemat have underscored that the government does not oppose female education. They assured various diplomats and media outlets that older girls would return once they could “create a safe environment for girls” (see here, here, here and here). In January 2022, Deputy Minister of Culture and Information Zabihullah Mujahid told AP that the government “hopes to be able to open all schools for girls across the country” from the start of the new school year on 23 March 2022. At the same time, he emphasised the lack of capacity and the need for international cooperation. Again, the implicit message was that the Taleban, at least in these ministries, expected the donor community to provide funding for education.
In response, international donors have pledged to support the education sector and broader humanitarian response. On 22 January 2022, United States Special Representative for Afghanistan Tom West told BBC Pashto that the US government would pay all teacher salaries if the government reopened girls’ schools. In early March 2022, the World Bank announced it had secured more than USD one billion of frozen assets in the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF) to fund education, health, and other vital services. A major donor conference, co-hosted by the UK, Germany and UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), was announced for 31 March 2022. The summit was meant to help the UN raise USD 4.4 billion to meet urgent humanitarian needs – the largest amount that the UN has ever requested for a single country. Finally, there is also movement towards longer-term plans for support. The Education Cluster, a coordination body which includes UN agencies as well as Afghan and international NGOs, recently finalised a comprehensive framework for emergency education support over the next two years (the Afghanistan Education Sector Transitional Framework, AESTF). The AESTF has been endorsed by donors and includes a budget of USD 162 million.
None of this funding would go directly to the Taleban government. However, the payment of teacher salaries and parallel programming (implemented by NGOs and the UN) would keep the state education system running. It would also alleviate the need for the government to fund much of the education sector, and presumably free up money for other government activities. Education is a priority for the Taleban, receiving the largest share of resources after the security sector in the national budget.[5] It is now unclear how the Taleban’s decision to keep older girls out of school will affect donors’ promised funding for education, or indeed, the wider humanitarian response.
What happened
Piecing together what happened from interviews with local sources including within and those close to the Taleban, aid workers, donors and diplomats, it appears that several factors combined to bring about the 23 March fiasco. Cabinet members and other high-level Taleban officials had gathered for a three-day summit in Kandahar on 20 March and there was speculation, reported in Etilaat-e Roz, that a cabinet shake-up was imminent or that the meeting was called to resolve internal disputes among various factions. In fact, the meeting was meant to be the culmination of several months of discussion. Consultations – and horse-trading – had already been taking place for several weeks. Among some of the key measures agreed were an order banning the old tricolour Afghan flag replacing it with the monochrome Taleban flag and the removal of Nawruz as an official Afghan holiday. Several sources described these as token measures granted to religious conservatives so that they would back more significant measures. Many expected concrete decisions to be unveiled on several key issues, including girls’ education, also cabinet and other high-level appointments, and a sense of the Taleban’s strategy to achieve recognition. Few sources inside the Taleban government said they expected the long-promised reopening of girls’ secondary schools to be in danger of reversal.
The Taleban’s decision-making has historically been generally opaque, but all the more so with regard to controversial issues. The Taleban is typically referred to as a consensus-based movement, with the Rahbari, or leadership, Shura advising the amir ul-mumenin, Haibatullah Akhundzada, who has ultimate authority as the movement’s leader. But the balance of power is more delicate than this suggests, especially when opinion within the movement is sharply divided. Much comes down to personalities and perceptions. Unlike his predecessor, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansur, Haibatullah appears unwilling to take controversial decisions. He is widely viewed as personally opposing female education. Yet, he had been expected to act in accordance with the consensus view, which was thought to be in favour of allowing girls’ schooling. Instead, he sided with a minority who were against.
This might be a convenient narrative which lays the blame on a few unnamed ‘hardliners’ and absolves the amir. Yet there are also indications that the reversal is a symptom of the movement’s broader failure to create a clear mechanism for making national policy decisions. Exactly how the Taleban would decide the issue of female education had been debated for months. One proposed mechanism was to take the issue to the Kandahar ulema council, which already plays a key role in advising the amir. Another was to create a new national ulema council, which would then consider the issue and make a recommendation to the amir. Still another was to bring the matter to the de facto cabinet. But none of this happened, and it is not immediately clear why.
Instead, a group of ulema spoke in the Kandahar meeting against girls returning to school. It has not been possible to pin down an exact account of what occurred, but the two most credible narratives suggest a similar series of events. In one version, recounted by several Taleban and diplomatic sources, nearly two dozen influential ulema – including Chief Justice Abdul Hakim and Acting Minister of Religious Affairs Nur Muhammad Saqeb – discussed issuing a fatwa opposing the reopening of girls’ schools. It is not clear what the text of this fatwa would have been, or how they would have justified a stance which would be so contrary to the Islamic emphasis on learning. However, religious conservatives place great emphasis on the protection of female ‘modesty’, through segregation, dress and avoiding travel without a close male relative or mahram. This was also reflected in a 26 March edict to airlines from the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice banning women from traveling by plane without a mahram. There is also clearly a view among some religious conservatives that when girls reach the age of puberty, they should be secluded at home until marriage (a view shared by some non-Taleban religious conservatives). For such people, the idea of marriageable girls en masse walking to school in public view, even in hijab or niqab, is deeply disturbing and provoking social unrest.
Looking back at changing Afghan attitudes to education over the last forty years (see AAN report here), the belief that non-madrassa education is ‘western’ or ‘foreign’ or bent on indoctrinating Afghan schoolchildren weaves in and out of Afghan politics. It has driven the policy of some governments and the armed resistance of some groups. Yet, steadily, that strand of belief has become less popular and less widespread. Attitudes have changed over the last forty years within the population as a whole and also, more belatedly, within the Taleban. Even so, suspicion of schooling, especially of girls and especially of older girls, has remained in some places and some communities. Such suspicion is probably most likely to be found among southern rural ulema.
In another account, also provided by several Taleban interlocutors, including a source in Kandahar, and a well-placed diplomatic source, influential members of the leadership – again including Hakim and Saqeb – spoke out against older girls returning to schools. In both versions, few others were willing to challenge the conservative opposition. The decision then appeared to be at the mercy of internal politics and personalities: because it was left so late, and because there was no organised counterforce, and because Haibatullah was unwilling to go against the conservatives or perhaps agreed with these objections, the voice of a powerful minority decided for the majority.
Yet the opposition to girls’ schooling voiced at the meeting does not appear to be solely concerned with religion or ideology. Many religious conservatives have reportedly not felt included in the Taleban’s major decisions and so, in voicing their opposition to female education, they were voicing their displeasure at the direction of the government overall. Their power to stop the Taleban from moving ahead with something that many, if not most Afghans favour and much of their own leadership is willing to allow – reportedly including all three deputies of the movement (Deputy Prime Minister Mullah Ghani Baradar, Acting Minister of Defense Mullah Yaqub and Acting Minister of Interior Serajuddin Haqqani) – illustrates the importance of a small circle of ultra-conservative clerics in shaping policy.
Several sources blame the amir. As a widely respected, conservative religious scholar and former head of the Taleban’s courts,[6] Haibatullah, they argue, should have been able to get the ulema to endorse an issue of such political importance. However, Haibatullah has also long been seen as deferential rather than decisive, and moreover, himself religiously ultra-conservative, (even by Taleban standards). It may be that Haibatullah, while not personally in favour of female education, had expected the ulema to go along with what had been public policy, communicated by the Taleban to schools, the wider Afghan public and donors. The ulema’s acquiescence would have given him political cover. But, as with much else since August, he had simply not prepared the ground, or his base, for a key governance decision. An alternate explanation is that while Haibatullah delayed his decision, the pragmatists around him tried to create one through public statements – only to find their leader had no intention of going along with it.
Caught off guard
It is hard to pin down exactly when the decision against the resumption of girls’ secondary education was taken, but it was clearly not communicated to those concerned. Ministry of Education officials, teachers and pupils all continued preparing for the resumption of girls’ schooling after the winter break on 23 March. In many places across the country, girls in higher grades and their teachers actually came to class, before being told to go home. A mother in Ghazni described her daughters purchasing uniforms, books and school supplies in anticipation of finally going back to school, only to return home in tears. “When I saw my daughters in that situation, I cried,” she said. “I’ve tried to provide things for my daughters so that they could study and be the future of this country.” Aid officials and diplomats were also caught off guard. “We were blindsided,” UNICEF’s communications chief in Afghanistan Sam Mort told AP. “All the messages, all the actions that had been taking place led us to believe that schools were opening, and as we understand it, that’s what our counterparts in the Ministry of Education believed as well.”
As late as 21 March, the Ministry of Education was insisting that “all schools for girls and boys would be open,” according to an NGO official who attended briefings with ministry officials. A Ministry of Education official stressed to the NGO official that there would be no formal announcement of girls’ secondary schools being reopened, but that this would be implied in the announcement of all schools reopening. The lack of a clear endorsement of older girls returning did raise concerns, the NGO official said, but Ministry of Education officials “were constantly reassuring us that there were absolutely no problems and everything was on track.” One source at the Ministry of Education, however, insists that he communicated to several donors and aid agency representatives that there had been not yet been a final decision on girls’ education from the leadership.
It is hard to see this coming at a worse time, ahead of the donor pledging conference scheduled for 31 March. The decision has been widely criticised by governments and international organisations (see here, here and here). The US cancelled “planned meetings” with the Taleban on the sidelines of a conference in Doha on 26 and 27 March. According to Reuters, issues for discussion included the details of a humanitarian exchange governing hundreds of millions of dollars of ARTF funding earmarked for education.
Many diplomats and analysts are now asking themselves how they miscalculated and misread the Taleban. Some (the author included) had believed that increasing numbers of girls’ schools would open and others would not. The best that could be hoped for, in this view, was that the government would continue its strategic ambiguity. This could have been interpreted by at least some donors as a sign of progress, which would allow them to justify to themselves and to tax payers continued financial support to Afghanistan. The lure of Taleban ambiguity has long allowed many to project hope onto what might otherwise feel like a situation beyond repair. The closure of girls schools have led many diplomats and donors to lose patience with Taleban interlocutors who have long promised change and failed to deliver. Some feel that this decision has confirmed their worst fears: a minority of Taleban ‘moderates’ has once again overstepped their remit and fooled the donors into believing they could – at long last – bring the religious conservatives around. There has been a clear loss of faith among the diplomatic community which may be difficult to repair. Meanwhile, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is taking increasing funding and political attention.
Now what?
More than anything, the decision on girls’ education demonstrates that the Taleban’s leadership remains stubbornly conservative, with religious officials exerting political influence that many within the movement resent. This decision already appears to have emboldened conservatives, generating a wave of retrogressive policies, including the news on 28 March that male government employees must wear beards and ‘Islamic dress’ and a day earlier, that parks must be gender-segregated. More conservative elements may also feel they can try to block other decisions, calculating that Haibatullah is supportive, or at least unwilling to rein them in. More pragmatic officials, like those who pressed ahead on girls’ education, may now be less willing to favour certain policies for fear of being overruled.
The three-day conference in Kandahar that was meant to provide a united front has only revealed the Taleban’s divisions. There is still no permanent cabinet and no real plan for working towards international recognition of the new government. The way in which the girls’ education decision was made, and the larger tensions within the movement that have been rumoured for months, underscore more fundamental issues. The failure to cultivate consensus on key issues hints at a deeper failure to communicate a clear vision and strategy to the wider Taleban movement and to the Afghan public. In other words, this is a crisis of leadership, the growing dominance of retrogressive clerics and a movement in disarray. It is a rare instance of where internal Taleban disagreements spill out into the public domain. The about-turn on policy has also stoked the flames of power struggles that will play out over the coming weeks and months. It should have been a priority to establish a clear position on an issue so important to the majority of the Afghan population, and which is seen as a yardstick of their legitimacy in the eyes of the rest of the world.
There are already, apparently, efforts to work on some sort of internal compromise. This would entail likely informal permission for older girls to return to classes in areas where schools had been open in the autumn. A series of incremental measures might lay the groundwork for the ‘comprehensive plan’ that the government has promised would allow older girls to return to school, through more reassurances on things like dress codes, gender segregation and transportation. This, however, is the best-case scenario.
Even in places like Mazar-e Sharif, where some girls’ secondary schools are still open, the Taleban’s decision has set students and teachers on edge. One tenth-grader in the city, with hopes of becoming a doctor, said nearly half of her classmates were staying at home and they no longer had enough teachers. She said the school principal had already introduced further dress restrictions in hopes that this would safeguard the school from Taleban closure. The larger effect the Taleban’s decision will have on demand and attitudes toward female education remains to be seen. A father in Kabul said he worried that now the schools were closed, his daughters would lose interest in studying altogether. His older daughter is still attending university, but he worries the Taleban will shut university doors to her any day now.
In such a messy situation, it is hard to see where the international leverage might lie to help turn things around. Public condemnation and punitive consequences – while fully warranted – may make things worse and risk further politicising the issue. Recriminations and ultimatums may force the leadership to retrench. The more other Islamic scholars, Afghan or foreign publicly criticise the Taleban government, the more the Taleban ulema will feel the need to justify their decision. The more donors and diplomats publicly criticise, the more female education will be seen as a foreign demand. Those inside the government trying to walk this decision back then risk being seen as capitulating to outsiders, which will ultimately make their job harder. There are few good policy options left.
Some believe that Haibatullah, and the Taleban as whole, need more time to process the enormity of their miscalculation. The argument is that they simply did not understand the impact this would have on their chance for international recognition and aid, and their standing even among other conservative Muslim countries.[7] It might be difficult to imagine just how out of touch they would have to be, to be so ignorant of the consequences – but it is entirely plausible. If this is indeed the case, then private dialogue and sustained pressure is required to engage them about the far-reaching costs of this reversal. It is also important for internationals to diversify the Taleban interlocutors that they speak to.
Even if this line of reasoning proves to be overly optimistic, there are no better alternatives. Shutting down channels of communication will cede more ground to the more conservative, less pragmatic voices in the Taleban. Outside engagement may – in some limited way, as it has in the past – help more pragmatic actors to push for change inside the movement. All of which is to say: continued dialogue may not yield much progress right now, but there simply is not much else outsiders can do at present.
Under the circumstances, it is difficult to argue that donors and diplomats should exercise restraint, or that the government should not feel the full consequences of such a cruel decision. But it is ultimately Afghan citizens – not the government – who will suffer the most from international isolation, and who desperately need the world to stay engaged.
Regardless of what the Taleban ultimately decides, some Afghans girls are unlikely to give up without a fight, though such protests may be dangerous. The Taleban have responded with brutality to women protestors in recent months, but as one Afghan schoolgirl in Kabul told AAN: “Despite school closures and not letting girls go to school, I am not going to stop or surrender.” She vowed to “show them that a girl’s success is not dependent on their decisions and that they can never stop us.”
Edited by Rachel Reid and Kate Clark
* Ashley Jackson is a researcher, and author of Negotiating Survival: Civilian-Insurgent Relations under the Taliban, Hurst & Co., 2021.
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For a more comprehensive overview of this decision, see AAN’s analysis here.
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Many female pupils and teachers had been bracing for more restrictions since the Taleban takeover in August, and were devastated by the ban. One student told The New York Times, “When we think about our future, we can’t see anything.” Other protested. A 15 year old girl named Sotooda Forotan, when selected to read a poem at a religious event in Herat, instead delivered a speech pleading with the Taleban officials in the audience to allow her to go back to school. A video of Forotan’s speech posted online quickly went viral, as reported by Afghan women’s media organisation Rukhshana, and local Taleban officials subsequently announced that girls’ secondary schools would reopen in Herat.
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See the author’s previous analysis on this issue here. It is also important to stress that access to education for older girls’ was already deeply constrained before the Taleban takeover. According to a 2017 Human Rights Watch report, 66 percent of lower secondary school age girls (12 to 15 years old) were out of school and approximately 200 out of Afghanistan’s 398 districts had no higher secondary school (typically for students aged 15 and above) open to girls.
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Two articles in the policy pertained to formal female education. Article 15 reads “All young girls who are not obliged to wear the Hijab due to their young age should be provided with Islamic education in a mosque or madrasa or at the home of a reliable scholar, so that this class will not be deprived of Islamic studies. The Provincial Education Officer shall take serious measures in this regard.” Article 16, pertaining to education beyond the primary level, states: “When the ground is prepared, the Islamic Emirate, in the light of a procedure in line with Islamic principles, Hanafi jurisprudence and Islamic Emirate’s perspectives on education, shall take action to provide women with Islamic and other required sound studies.” Quoted from Rahmatullah Amiri and Ashley Jackson, Taliban attitudes and policies towards education, ODI, 2021.
For a biography of Haibatullah, see AAN’s reporting here.
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Qatar and Turkey both released statements criticising the decision (see here and here). AFP also reported that Indonesia’s Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi and Qatar’s Deputy Foreign Minister Lolwah Al Khater have already jointly met with Acting Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi to request the Taleban reconsider its decision (see here).
The Ban on Older Girls’ Education: Taleban conservatives ascendant and a leadership in disarray
Sometimes 20 years can fall away like nothing. Sometimes time telescopes into a vivid memory of a flash of red above a sea of blue.
On March 23, 2002, I was 12 years old, living in Kabul, walking into an all-girls public school for the first time in my life. The Taliban — the extremists who from 1996 to 2001 had essentially outlawed girls’ education — was gone, its regime fallen, its edicts swept away. It was the first day of the new school year.
But I remember the fear in our school courtyard that day. How it flowed around me in deep blue tides. Our school uniform was a black outfit and a white headscarf, but so many girls had chosen to cover up with the blue burqa because there were rumors that Taliban members were out there, watching, looking for girls in uniforms so they could throw acid in our faces.
That was our fear, that the Taliban members would find us and hurt us if they knew who we were. And I remember our school principal in the midst of that blue sea, standing tall and proud and composed. She wore a long skirt with a blazer, and an elegant headscarf, and bright red lipstick.
I was afraid for her. “They’ll get her first,” I thought.
They didn’t. The school year continued, and as it did, I started to understand the lesson she was teaching us that day. “You don’t have to be afraid,” she was saying. “You’re free. Times have changed. You can go back to what we used to call normal.”
And as spring became summer and summer became fall, I watched that blue tide start to turn. I watched it drain away from our courtyard, and I watched what was hidden beneath come into view: black outfits, and white headscarves, and faces, and smiles.
We were Afghan girls. And we were back.
I thought about our principal last week, on March 23, 2022, when the Taliban broke its promise to fellow Afghans and to the entire world and announced it wouldn’t allow girls to attend school beyond sixth grade.
That day, I saw girls standing in their black outfits and white headscarves. I saw them outside their school gates in tears. I heard the Taliban mouth the excuses: There are not enough female teachers available, the school uniform for girls is not appropriately modest, the time just isn’t right.
Educated girls become educated women, and educated women are independent women. This is what members of the Taliban know. This is what they accept in their own families. This is what they fear in their own nation.
What they fear wears black outfits and white headscarves, and they hope to cover their fear in a new blue tide, just like they did when I was a child, when Afghan women and girls vanished, and the world looked away.
This cannot happen again. I will do my part. My Afghan girls’ school, now in Rwanda, is recruiting new students from our nation’s refugee diaspora. We intend to enroll the largest class in our history this fall. We will educate Afghan girls, and nothing and no one will ever deter us.
To Afghan men, I say: This is your moment. Don’t let your wives and daughters and sisters protest alone. Don’t let armed men tell you what their futures must look like. To other Muslim nations, I say: This is your moment. Raise your voices. Follow the example of Qatar and Turkey. Call out the Taliban’s un-Islamic decree, and in the strongest terms.
And to the rest of the world, I say: Do not give the Taliban the legitimacy it seeks until it first seeks its legitimacy from Afghan women.
Here we stand, tall, proud and unafraid. This is the lesson we learned as girls.
This is the lesson we teach to the girls to come.
Shabana Basij-Rasikh, a Washington Post Global Opinions contributing columnist, is co-founder and president of the School of Leadership, Afghanistan.
Opinion: The world can’t allow Afghan girls to vanish from classrooms again
Some lawmakers worry Afghan refugees will be forgotten as focus turns to Ukrainians
The other refugee crisis: As President Biden moves to admit up to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees to the United States, lawmakers and advocates are urging him not to forget about the other refugee crisis facing his administration: the thousands of Afghans still waiting to be admitted to the country.
The White House says that its push to accept Ukrainian refugees — announced last week while Biden was in Europe — won’t divert resources or attention from its ongoing effort to help Afghans who aided American forces and their families come to the United States.
“Our commitment to resettling Afghans — particularly those who served on behalf of the U.S. effort in Afghanistan — remains steadfast,” a White House spokesperson said in a statement to the Early. “That commitment will not wane as we open our doors to Ukrainians.”
Some lawmakers aren’t so sure.
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) praised Biden’s decision to accept Ukrainian refugees and said he thought the administration had learned from the chaotic effort to help Afghans flee their country. Biden announced his Ukrainian refugee plan only a month after Russian invaded, Moulton noted, in contrast to the administration’s foot-dragging in Afghanistan.
But Moulton said he was concerned the Ukrainian effort would distract attention from the unfinished Afghan one.
“There are still Afghans being killed by the Taliban because we haven’t gotten them out of the country,” he said.
The administration’s steadfast commitment, Moulton added, has been mostly “steadfastly slow.”
Moulton and Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Mich.) told the Early they’ve been trying for months to help Afghan evacuees reach the United States but have been stymied by bureaucratic delays. Meijer, who served in Afghanistan, has pressed the State Department every week for more than six months to help the wife and young son of one of his former Afghan comrades, without success.
“It’s enraging to theoretically be in a position of power and to be absolutely impotent in the face of the callous bureaucratic indifference of the Biden administration,” Meijer said.
A ‘broken’ system
Some lawmakers who have pressed the Biden administration to make it easier for Afghans who aided American forces to come to the United States say they think the administration can juggle the Ukrainian and Afghan efforts.
“If they make it a priority to dedicate the resources to it, I think it can be done,” Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), one of eight lawmakers who sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas last week urging them to take steps to make it easier for Ukrainians to come to the United States, told the Early.
But the Biden administration still hasn’t finished rebuilding a refugee program that former president Donald Trump spent four years undermining, leading other lawmakers to worry about the government’s ability to process as many as 100,000 more refugees.
“It’s a legitimate concern, because our refugee resettlement system was broken during the Trump administration and has not yet recovered,” said Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.).
There are significant differences between the Afghans trying to escape the Taliban and the 3.8 million Ukrainians who’ve fled the Russian assault on their country. It remains unclear how many Ukrainians will seek to come to the United States, with many expressing a desire to stay closer to home so it will be easier to return someday. The Afghans, meanwhile, mostly don’t expect to go back.
Several Democratic lawmakers who applauded Biden’s decision to accept 100,000 Ukrainians told the Early that they wished the administration would take a similar approach to accepting refugees from the rest of the world.
Biden’s announcement last week “is the type of humane and compassionate policy response that we should equitably extend to families fleeing from humanitarian disasters in Haiti, Cameroon, and other non-European countries,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), a co-chair of the House Haiti Caucus, said in statement to the Early.
“These are the best and brightest people in Russia, and it would be overwhelmingly in our interest to make Putin’s loss our gain,” he said.
Big backlog
The administration is still working out the details of how it will use to admit the Ukrainians. One option, known as “humanitarian parole,” has a backlog of tens of thousands of Afghans who have applied, as the New York Times‘ Miriam Jordanreported last month.
But refugee advocates said that taking in thousands of Ukrainians via the same program wouldn’t necessarily slow it down.
“It’s not like there’s a dedicated group of people that are processing Afghan parole applications every day that would then be diverted to processing Ukraine applications,” said Becca Heller, the executive director of the International Refugee Assistance Project. “There’s just a pile of applications sitting there, not being processed.”
If the administration decides to admit Ukrainians through humanitarian paroles and redirects resources to help process their applications, it could actually help Afghans whose applications have languished, Heller said.
“Those same resources could be used to clear the rest of the backlog and then a rising tide could lift everyone’s boat,” she said.
Some lawmakers worry Afghan refugees will be forgotten
The opinions expressed in this op-ed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Military.com.
24 March 2022
The women. We saw them but rarely engaged. With few exceptions, their burqas enveloped them from head to toe. I was familiar with middle eastern abayas. I knew some cultures or religions required women to be covered in black fabric except for their eyes. But in Afghanistan, when I was there in 2004, their burqas included a blue mesh screen that obscured the women’s eyes.
This piqued my curiosity. I could sometimes secure permission to go outside the wire. When I could tag along on a military police mission or a supply run to Kabul, I took photos from afar, admiring the bright pop of burqa blue against the austere Afghan landscape.
While in Kabul, I found a pamphlet advertising Kabul dolls. They were beautiful dolls dressed in intricate costumes representing different Afghan ethnic groups. The cloth dolls even had individual fingers and toes. I was so impressed with the artistry that I contacted the company.
I was taken aback when they asked me to help sell them at Bagram Air Base. A man may have run the Kabul dolls company, but the business had been founded to help women, many of whom were war widows with no other options to make a living.
Several soldiers in my unit were granted permission to visit a town bordering Bagram on Christmas Day. We went into town eager to have something to do for the holiday besides eating mess hall Christmas dinner, sneaking alcohol with the Czech soldiers, or sitting in our tents. One of the female soldiers had ordered jackets and other small gifts.
The villagers received us politely but with some puzzlement. I’m sure they had heard of Christmas, but to them, it was just another day. But the women — there wasn’t a burqa in sight.
During the festivities, they invited me along with two other women soldiers into the women’s quarters of one of the residences. We took off our shoes and marveled at the honor of being allowed into this private space. We didn’t linger, well aware our presence might be viewed as an intrusion.
I worked as an interrogator in Afghanistan. I spent 12 hours a day interviewing male detainees at the Bagram Detention Facility. Then one day, I interrogated the only woman prisoner at Bagram. As far as I had known, there were no women prisoners.
At first, there was a flurry of outside interest in the prisoners, and the U.S. government made an intense effort to mine intelligence. But frequently, no intelligence was forthcoming, and they maintained their innocence. When this happened, sometimes months went by before the prisoner was judged safe to release. Some were terrorists, of course. But many had been picked up in sweeps where quantity over quality seemed to be the rule.
The exit interview was perfunctory. We sat in a small booth with a glass window and talked. She, the only female detainee at Bagram, sat before me shackled and dressed in a baggy orange jumpsuit and oversized black slip-on tennis shoes, while a bored MP stood guard. The middle-aged woman who sat in front of me did not strike me as an Afghan Mata Hari. She was open and chatty, guileless. She offered up a few words of English. I was no psychiatrist, but she appeared to have some mental health issues that detached her from reality. Intelligence gathering depended on detecting irregularities.
She seemed no more concerned that she had been sitting in a detention facility for more than a year than if she had been caught in a traffic jam. She had lost her figure since being in prison, she said. She did not mention missing her family or home, which made me wonder if her unconventional behavior had caused her family to abandon her: walking around without a male escort, speaking to American soldiers.
I attempted to make this a celebratory event. An interpreter translated while she ate the cookies and didn’t drink the sh—y tea. She accepted the food I brought — Afghan food from an officer’s going-away party, so basically leftovers.
The tea was a disaster. I had misjudged the ratio of tea leaves to liquid. I was used to dipping Lipton’s bags in hot water. The American way. Here, tea making was an art. She winced after she took a sip. We switched to bottled water.
She had suffered enough.
The verdict? Not a terrorist. Just a “high value” target our government had seen fit to keep for 400-plus days. Finally, she was being released. However, with no information about where she was from, only where she was arrested, where or what was she going back to?
When the command sent me to Asadabad, I was excited to be away from the flagpole. The post was in Kunar province, in the Hindu Kush mountains. The misty blue of the surrounding peaks, clear air, and relative quiet was a welcome respite from Bagram’s hustle and bustle.
The Provincial Reconstruction Team seemed to prioritize local women’s issues. The first event I attended was a women’s shura — a meeting — where we were presented with white headscarves to wear instead of our Kevlars.
At an International Women’s Day ceremony, we were honored as local service members helping the community. But we hoped the emphasis would remain on the Afghan women. They took the most risks by speaking out and advocating for women’s equality. We were only doing our jobs.
In Asadabad, the PRT handed out approximately $50 each to women in the community to help them buy supplies to make handicrafts that could make money for their families. Many of these women were skilled in embroidery and needlework. They had to come in person to pick up the cash.
Inevitably, the women would try to give us gifts at the end of each event. We discouraged gifts because the money distributed by the Americans was supposed to go toward bettering the community. But it was considered rude to reject the gifts.
As with any project designed to win hearts and minds, I can’t deny the money’s intent was to curry favor and give the community a good impression of the Americans. Still, some Afghan people seemed to feel actual goodwill toward the Americans. But not all: An IED exploding nearby, captured insurgents, or rocket attacks on the forward operating base could jolt us back to reality.
Before I left the PRT, a local woman honored us with a luncheon at her house. We enjoyed delicious food, and she made a point of inviting the women members of the team into the women’s quarters afterward.
I felt more comfortable in Asadabad than Bagram. We could walk in the mountains that fell inside the base, where we often encountered locals, mainly children. One time, I met two lovely young girls I took to be sisters. They reminded me of my own two daughters, whom I had not seen in many months. I still have the photograph I took. I longed to stay, but it was not up to me. Soon I was headed back to Bagram, and within a couple of months, I redeployed to the States.
I will never forget the women I met in Afghanistan: a local woman’s leader, a suspected terrorist unjustly imprisoned, the Afghan girls in my photo, villagers on Christmas day. I feel for all the Afghan people. But I feel particular concern for the women. Of course, my concern is specious. It’s a convenient way to feel like I’m a good person without doing anything. I am free to disagree with what is going on in Afghanistan from the comfort of my living room. I think that, if it were up to me, things would be different. But they wouldn’t.
When it comes to making statements about where women fit into this new version of Afghanistan, the Taliban resort to vague or evasive pronouncements. What do we do about the women? It’s a question they cannot settle. But with what we have seen so far, we know they perceive women who think for themselves and have financial autonomy as threatening. We hear them say girls will not necessarily be forbidden to attend school. But many boys’ schools have reopened since the Taliban took over. Most girls’ schools remain empty.
As military members, we go where we are told. Understanding the mission is not a prerequisite, and questioning it is discouraged. But for me, at least, my intent was to do as well as I could within the military rules I was obliged to follow. I read articles and books to try to piece together the history of a part of the world never mentioned in any of my high school history classes.
When I left, I took home some fond memories, dolls, and rugs. That was it. I wish I could have done better. I wish we could have done better.
Editors Note: This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service.
‘She Had Suffered Enough’ – I Feel for All the Afghan People, But Especially the Women
Afghans have been fighting since the 70s for the same reason Ukrainians are fighting but they have been neglected and betrayed
In January, some Taliban members in northern Mazār-e-Sharīf city allegedly gang-raped eight women in custody. These women were part of the group of people arrested while trying to flee the country following the Taliban takeover in the wake of the withdrawal of foreign troops.
The Taliban, obviously, denied this.
My friends in Kabul told me that the women who survived the gang rape were later killed by their families in the name of “honour” after they were handed over by the Taliban. The rest of the women, they said, were still “missing”.
The barriers between young women and higher education are at the highest, women are banned from most paid employment, women’s sports have been banned, and over 72% of women journalists have lost their jobs.
In their early days of power, the ministry of women’s affairs was swiftly replaced by the Taliban with the infamous ministry of virtue and vice, which later saw an array of restrictions imposed on women’s travels. Women have been beaten and abducted for peaceful protests for their right to work, education and health – more and more people now selling their daughters away for mere survival.
Yet there is a deafening silence in international media, which seems to have become bored with the plight of the Afghan people, especially women.
The life of a woman under Taliban rule is not a mystery to the outer world. Yet international media are becoming increasingly disinterested and distracted.
After the initial “winners and losers” coverage that kept newsrooms busy for a few weeks, as soon as the international troops and contractors left, international media made an exit too.
The US abandonment of Afghanistan set its people on a trajectory that prophesied a life of intimidation, terror and incarceration – human rights violations, poverty and statelessness that proved their worst nightmare true.
The absence of war is not peace.
Journalists may not be propagating war, but through inconsistent and infrequent coverage they are also not prioritising peace with the US-led coalition quitting and the Taliban ruling Afghanistan. It gives way to propaganda and misinformation to permeate through without public attention or inquiry.
On top of that, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which led to fluctuations in the global stock markets, and the surging Covid-19 infections around the world have resulted in war-ravaged Afghanistan – disenfranchised and ignored by international media – continuing to suffer silently and helplessly.
The international media spotlight on Afghanistan is fading fast.
Yet the agony of the Afghan people, especially women and young girls, is far from over – the crisis is only escalating, with the crumbling healthcare and services system caught between international isolation and hardline Taliban rule.
Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, local media does not have the freedom to raise questions, let alone investigate. Taliban control local media insofar as heavily armed Taliban fighters have been seen to accompany their leaders when they make live TV appearances.
For surviving journalists, the Taliban announced the vaguely worded “11 journalism rules” – basically their way of censoring and controlling media.
And now, with the western media broadly shelving the coverage of Afghanistan, there’s hardly anyone left to rely on with conflict de-escalatory coverage that is grounded in the frameworks of humanisation, justice and peace.
Yet, amid the threats of abduction and targeted persecution, a group of women took to the streets of Kabul on Sunday, demanding access to education and work. For these women to stand in the face of tyranny – that even the most powerful country in the world does not want to face – is an act of resilience in the most desperate of times.
It calls for robust international media coverage and solidarity.
Yes, some primary girls’ schools have reopened this month and some women have been allowed to return to work in the education and health industries, but human rights violations, hunger, poverty and sickness remain at a record high, and a predicted famine is around the corner due to economic crisis. And with people resorting to selling their daughters and kidneys in the black market for bare survival, one must recognise that there is hardly any strength left in them to stand for themselves.
These stories need to be told to shake minds and souls around the world for action.
With the era of media witnessing war and other distant crises came the age of the attention economy, where quite important issues struggle to survive in the public discourse for longer periods of time.
They need constant reminders. The continuity aspect of postwar follow-up reporting can give visibility to stories that may have been missed by the public in the first instance. The news media cycle is swift and urgency-centric. The continuity aspect keeps information alive and safe from obscurity.
We need to remember that what Afghan men and women have been fighting for since the 1970s and the Soviet–Afghan war is the same reason the Ukrainians are fighting now. The only difference is that the Afghans have been neglected and betrayed over and over again.
Peace reporting in a conflict is crucial and places a lot of responsibility on the journalists.
In the global fight between the pens and the AK-47s, the international media and journalists need to stay engaged in Afghanistan through peace journalism and not allow the latter an easy win.
The media spotlight on Afghanistan is fading fast – but the agony of its people is far from over
Many of the most severe restrictions that people expected the Taliban to impose have not yet materialized, writes Kern Hendricks.
When U.S. President Joe Biden delivered his State of the Union Speech on March 2, the eyes of the world were understandably locked on Ukraine. As he waxed lyrical about foreign and domestic successes under his administration, Biden emphasized ongoing American support for the Ukrainian people, even as nearly half a million Ukrainian refugees fled fighting in their backyard.
But there was another crisis that was glaringly absent from his address: the end of America’s two-decade war in Afghanistan, and the resulting humanitarian disaster. Although his silence on Afghanistan wasn’t surprising — the American withdrawal in August of 2021 was an optics disaster — Biden’s omission sent a clear message. The U.S., and much of the international community, has forgotten Afghanistan.
While images of Afghans falling from the landing gear of airplanes and mothers handing their babies over concertina wire at Kabul airport captivated the world for a fleeting moment, once the Taliban rolled into Kabul, the story was already on the wane for many international observers.
Broken Economy
The chaotic events of August 2021 sent Afghanistan’s already flagging economy into free fall. Inflation skyrocketed as residents in major cities across the country scrambled to withdraw their savings in cash. ATMs quickly ran dry and cash transfer services closed completely or enforced strict withdrawal limits that forced the lucky few to spend days or even weeks waiting in line to take out tiny increments of their savings. While unemployment soared, the cost of living also skyrocketed, pushing large, multi-generational families to breaking point.
When the Taliban entered Kabul on Aug. 15, 2021, the U.S. Federal Reserve froze $7 billion in assets belonging to Afghanistan’s central bank, Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB). Although this was meant to prevent the Taliban from accessing the funds directly, the result was the parting of thousands of Afghan families and business owners from their savings.
In the months following, prices continued to rise, and families continued to struggle waiting for the money to be released. Then, on Feb. 11, Biden announced that half of the frozen $7 billion would be reserved not for the Afghan people, but for settling billions in lawsuits brought against the Taliban by the families of 9/11 victims. The announcement caused uproar, even amongst some of the very families who were set to benefit from the announcement. Even now, the U.S. government has failed to clearly outline how the money will be used despite the dire needs on the ground.
Meanwhile, the international community is stuck in limbo, trying to work out how it can get money and aid into the hands of struggling Afghans without directly financing the Afghan government. Organizations like the ICRC have started to directly pay the salaries of doctors and health staff, so that hospitals and clinics can continue to function.
Although it’s been slow, some progress has been made on this front. On Feb. 25, the U.S. issued the latest in a series of “General Licenses,” aimed to “ensure that U.S. sanctions do not prevent or inhibit transactions and activities needed to provide aid to and support the basic human needs of the people of Afghanistan.” Although this greatly expands the latitude of American businesses and organizations to interact with and contribute to the Afghan economy, it does not untangle Afghanistan’s dysfunctional domestic banking sector.
Life Under the Taliban
Despite the economic upheaval, in March of 2022, life in the capital appears deceptively normal. The city’s oldest bazaar still hums with customers, and groups of young women chat as they cross the road near Kabul university, dodging taxis and motorcycles. Young kids still traverse lines of stalled peak-hour traffic, selling pens and gum to bored drivers. Bored looking traffic police wave cars through packed intersections, and ice cream sellers patrol the shuffle their carts along the sidewalks. It’s not the image many would expect.
Many of the most severe restrictions that people expected the Taliban to impose have not yet materialized. Many restaurants still play music. Women walk the streets of Kabul without burkhas or male guardians, and many men are still clean shaven — although there are certainly more stubbly chins than before. Women attend (gender segregated) classes at university, and girls’ high schools are scheduled to reopen when the school year begins in spring (although this will have to be seen to be believed). Will these developments stick? Are more severe restrictions only a matter of time? Some are sure that tighter restrictions are coming, others are cautiously optimistic.
Despite some small concessions, the outlook for women is by no means sunny. Women’s rights activists have been jailed without explanation. Several have disappeared. Although some women have returned to public life in larger cities like Kabul and Mazar-e-Sharif, others remain at home, fearful that the Taliban’s tact may quickly change.
Security across the country has undoubtably improved. Vast stretches of road that were impassable due to fighting and IEDs seven months ago are now clear. But there are signs that the respite from conflict may be short lived. If the Taliban cannot provide jobs and income for their fighters, they risk losing these men to other conflict actors with deeper pockets. This includes the Afghan offshoot of ISIS, known as Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), who claimed numerous attacks in the eastern provinces of Nangarhar and Kunar over the past seven months, including direct attacks against Taliban forces.
Looming Catastrophe
In the first week of March, Taliban security forces began an unprecedented campaign of house-to-house searches across Kabul and several other provincial capitals, moving methodically from neighborhood to neighborhood as panicked messages circulated on social media. Many searches were polite and cursory, others were violent. Although the searches were intended to seize private weapons that could be used by criminals, the operations demonstrated the government’s willingness to cast personal privacy and property rights by the wayside if they wish to.
Press freedom has undeniably been rolled back. Some Afghan journalists, both male and female, have been detained, others tortured. Although most national broadcasters are still operating, overt criticism of the current government has largely disappeared from local media.
Roughly 75 per cent of the Afghan population lives in rural districts, rather than in cities. In these areas, many of which saw constant fighting over the past two decades, peace is a welcome change. But rural Afghans are in desperate need of food, cash and other basic forms of aid. And although fighting has stopped, hunger can be just as deadly as bullets and IEDs. A UNDP study conducted in December of 2021 found that a staggering 97 per cent of Afghans may be living in poverty by the end of 2022. In January the U.N, warned that 23 million people are facing extreme food insecurity — over half of the entire population.
Short of another bloody military intervention, the Taliban will remain in control of Afghanistan in the near term, this much is clear. It is also clear that the situation is very far from ideal, especially for woman, and those who wish to chart a more inclusive and liberal course for their country. The Taliban’s treatment of woman, and ethnic minorities has, in many cases been appalling. But neither is the situation the charred hellscape that some would have the rest of the world believe. To acknowledge the realities may give a sense of moral superiority to some, but those who demand an all or nothing approach to dealing with the Taliban are seldom the ones who will pay the true cost on the ground. Many Afghans are already forging ahead, but they cannot continue if the rest of the world turns away.
Kern Hendricks is an independent photojournalist covering issues of social upheaval and the effects of long-term conflict. He has been based in Kabul, Afghanistan since 2017.
Washington’s decision to give Afghan funds to 9/11 victims is a continuation of its colonial venture in Afghanistan.
On February 11, US President Joe Biden announced the allocation of $3.5bn belonging to the Afghan people to cover lawsuits by 9/11 families. Afghanistan’s foreign currency reserves, which this money is part of, had been frozen by the US administration since August 2021, when the Taliban took over Kabul.
The move sent shockwaves far beyond Afghanistan as the country was thrown into yet another phase of the American war: the intentional starvation of the Afghan people. The range of sentiments expressed by media commentators and Afghan and non-Afghan “experts” alike vacillated between anger and shock, horror and surprise.
These reactions seemed to reflect a remarkable insistence, a refusal, to see the US for what it is – a brutal empire through and through. When an empire shows you what it is, believe it.
To be surprised at Biden’s decision to steal Afghan money is to have been invested in the image America has sold to the world: that it is a force for humanitarian good, despite the decades of destruction, the reign of terror it operated with impunity, the torture, renditions, raids, drones, extrajudicial assassinations, and now the mass starvation of an entire nation.
To be surprised means to believe the great liberal fantasy that America’s revenge war in Afghanistan was “the good war”. To be surprised means to exonerate Empire for its brutal and extended violence in Afghanistan and accept that it is simply a series of blunders, miscalculations, unintentional incidents from which there are “lessons learned”.
The ritual of surprise here is symptomatic of a delusional attachment to the idea of humanitarianism itself. Faced with the nakedness of imperial theft, commentators fumbled to explain the callousness before them.
One argument maintained that Afghans were also victims of 9/11. While acknowledging Afghan suffering, the argument centred American injury, locating Afghan victimhood only in relation to it. It also ignored the fact that Afghans were victimised well before 2001, when their country became a battleground for the Cold War between America and the USSR.
The second argument emphasised that no Afghan was involved in the 9/11 attacks. While true, it suggests that if an Afghan national had been involved, the invasion and subsequent 20-year brutal occupation of the entire country would have been justified.
Instead of pleading Afghan innocence, we need to see this act of imperial robbery within the context of the US colonial venture in Afghanistan.
To speak of American power is not simply to document its cruelty abroad, but to understand how its innocence works to return us to its original wounds, its victim status. It is to remind us of what and whose injuries ultimately matter. This is also currently made clear by the Western world’s military, political and economic support for Ukraine – a white European nation – against Russia’s ruthless invasion; it highlights the racial economy of grievability.
In 2001, US Empire launched Operation Enduring Freedom, which was supposed to not only exact revenge against the Taliban but also bring “enduring freedom” to the subjugated natives. Within a few years, success was claimed: democracy was established through elections, millions of girls and women were being educated, public health was making significant advances and nation-building was progressing.
Unlike Western Europe after World War II, which got the Marshall Plan that focused on reconstruction – of local industries, damaged infrastructure, etc – Afghanistan got a different kind of plan, one driven by what analyst Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism”.
Afghanistan was turned into a deregulated zone for corporatisation, privatisation and militarisation, which invited mobs of Western companies, contractors, NGOs, and “democracy builders” to make a killing, quite literally.
Today, the evidence of imperial-funded disaster capitalism is here for all to see. Afghanistan suffers from an aid-dependent economy ruthlessly denied self-sufficiency, crumbling infrastructure – much of it built with military operations in mind – ghost projects, and abandoned or under-resourced schools and clinics.
Under the US occupation, Afghanistan experienced what Zambian economist Grieve Chelwa describes as “pop development” – development that does not really develop. An untold amount of funds went into skateboarding schools, beauty parlours, micro-loans, and “bullshit jobs” – as American anthropologist David Graeber called them – for unemployed Afghan women and men instead of projects that could have addressed the huge infrastructural damage and social devastation caused by serial conflicts.
The billions of dollars promised for “reconstruction” went into the bank accounts of imperial functionaries and local collaborators tasked with “rebuilding” Afghanistan – most making its way back to Empire. “Reconstruction” was the lie that oiled the death machine of the war on terror, while humanitarianism and development were the epic grift through which a military occupation, war economy and a vampiric aid industry fed off Afghan victimisation.
Afghans were duped into taking their money from under their toshaks (mattresses) and putting it into a “modern banking system”. Workers were paid through bank-based electronic transfers, part of the “progress” and promise of economic modernity.
What was hailed as “progress” by organisations such as Amnesty International, which in 2012 encouraged NATO to “keep the progress going”, vapourised with the imperial withdrawal. In this context, Empire’s decision to steal Afghan money and give it to imperial citizens is really not surprising.
The announcement of the imperial theft reminded us of a scene one of us witnessed 16 years ago, while conducting anthropological fieldwork in Kabul. An international NGO had gathered Afghan widows who were beneficiaries of one of its programmes to meet two American women in their thirties, who had been widowed in the attacks on 9/11. It was not a particularly extraordinary scene given the immense presence of foreigners in Kabul during the occupation, many of whom were imported to manage Afghans. But it was telling.
Standing in the streets of Shahr-e-Naw neighbourhod, the American women addressed through a translator the Afghan women, who had lost their husbands in the preceding three decades of serial war, sharing their experiences as widows in the US. They also pointed out the oppressions Afghan widows faced that they did not – destitution, fundamentalism, and patriarchy – all seemingly indigenous Afghan harms. Then the American widows proudly announced they would be financially supporting the ration distribution and income generation programmes for the Afghan widows for the coming years.
This scene was playing out just metres away from one out of the many checkpoints manned by armed US soldiers throughout Kabul. And yet there was no mention that the Afghan widows – and the Afghan people in general – were being subject to war, an American war.
While speaking to the Afghan widows, the 9/11 widows categorically erased the violence of war and occupation by their country, failing to name it as a harm in the lives of Afghans. The attempt to obscure such an obvious fact of everyday life for any Afghan was stunning, but especially since some of the women standing before them became widows as a direct result of the American war in Afghanistan. By failing to name it, the 9/11 widows were tacitly sanctioning the violence done to Afghans by the US war and occupation. The vulnerability, pain, sheer material need, and suffering of Afghan widows – seemingly all at the hands of Afghan society – was used to establish the humanity of the 9/11 widows – and their superiority.
As scholar Sherene Razack has pointed out, the “paradigm of saving the Other” is tightly linked to the material system of white privilege. “The paradigm precludes an examination of how we have contributed to their crises and where our responsibility lies. With its emphasis on pity and compassion, it is a paradigm that allows us to maintain our own sense of superiority.”
We should not be surprised then that the 9/11 widows aligned themselves with a war effort that made widows of other women. Nor that some 9/11 victims and their attorneys feel entitled to money belonging to other victims of political violence. This combination of cruelty and compassion is the thriving paradox of Empire and is what summons white victimhood to declare whose lives matter.
Biden’s decision does not require course correction for America. This is America.
We are reminded of anti-colonial activist Frantz Fanon’s declaration half a century earlier on where victims of Empire must go when colonial fantasies about the “west is best” are shed: to turn away and look elsewhere for inspiration and answers.
In Fanon’s “elsewhere”, Afghans will discover not only a shared experience with other survivors of imperialism, but perhaps may embark on a process of identifying and articulating for themselves the ways humanitarianism and liberalism lie at the very core of the Empire that currently starves them.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Sahar Ghumkhor is an academic based in Australia. Her research focuses on political violence, psychoanalysis, law and the politics of difference.
Anila Daulatzai is a political and medical anthropologist based in California. Her research centres on serial war, militarisation, and racialization, particularly in Afghanistan and Pakistan. She is at UC Berkeley in the Department of Anthropology.
The Taleban takeover of Afghanistan delivered a devastating blow to one of the Republic’s few achievements – freedom of expression and a vibrant media sector. Since the fall of the Republic, nearly half of Afghanistan’s media outlets have closed and thousands of Afghan journalists and media workers have either left the country, lost their jobs, or are in hiding, with local media outlets and female journalists bearing the brunt of this downturn. AAN’s Ehsan Qaane reports on the damage and argues there are three principle reasons contributing the media sector’s decline: the sudden shortage of financial resources, severe Taleban restrictions on press freedoms, and a fear of violence.
Hundreds of media outlets ceased operations when the Republic fell to the Taleban on 15 August 2021. Those who survived the first days of the takeover, with a few exceptions, are still operating but the quality and volume of their content have been hugely affected, with many struggling to see a future for themselves in the new Afghanistan. Chief among their concerns are the security threats to their well-known reporters and the collateral risks these threats would pose for their other staff and, indeed, their organisation, which they view as barriers to independent journalism.
Media workers continue to leave Afghanistan, but many of those who remain are starting to go back to work. Only about 17 per cent of female journalists or media workers returned to work by early December 2021. The situation for female journalists remains precarious, because the Taleban’s policy on this matter is still unclear. In 17 of the country’s 34 provinces there are no women working in the media.
Violence against journalists is becoming systematic. The intelligence agency and the police are exerting increased control over the media and journalists. Arbitrary detentions of journalists are a warning to the media to stay inside the lines.
The lack of financial resources and violence against journalists are not new, but they have been amplified by the regime change and the collapse of the country’s economy. The imposition of severe restrictions and censorship, in addition to the removal of legal protection for journalists, are new constraints that have been introduced by the Taleban.
A soft competition appears to be emerging between the Ministry of Information and Culture (MoIC) and other government entities, particularly the Istekhbarat (the Taleban intelligence agency), over control of the media.
MoIC has stated that the Taleban would enforce the Republic’s media law and announced plans to re-establish the Commission to Review Media Violence and Complaints (the media commission). Journalist unions have welcomed both decisions. However, establishing any kind of media oversight structure could bring with it a new means of control over the media.
This report does not examine the quality or content of media outlets.
The extent of the damage: What was lost and what remains?
Nearly seven months after the fall of the Republic on 15 August 2021, it is still difficult to provide clear statistics on the number of media platforms that have ceased operations, and even harder to put an exact number on media outlets operating during the last days of the Republic, which could be used as a baseline to tally the scale of the damage caused by the Taleban takeover of Afghanistan. Nevertheless, reports published by several media watchdog organisations, whose own day-to-day activities have been severely curtailed, provide a broader picture.
The Afghanistan’s National Journalists Union (ANJU) was among the first organisations to raise the alarm on the closure of nearly two-thirds of Afghan media outlets,[1] which, it said, was based on an online survey conducted in late September. [2] This was mirrored by the Afghan Journalists Safety Committee (AJSC) in its first weekly report since the fall of the Republic on 10 October, which also said 70 per cent of media outlets had closed without providing any details. A month later, in a gathering in Kabul to review the state of the media in the first 100 days of Taleban rule, Nai, an Afghan non-governmental organisation (NGO) that supports open media, reported 257 media outlets had closed since 15 August (see Tolonews’ 23 November 2021 report). However, neither of these organisations provided statistics on how many media outlets had been operating before the fall of Kabul, which could be used as a baseline for their findings. [3]
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and its Afghan partner, the Afghan Independent Journalists Association (AIJA), published the most comprehensive report on the state of the media in Afghanistan since the Taleban takeover on 20 December 2021, providing a baseline. According to their findings, 543 media platforms were operating “at the start of the [2021] summer,” of which 231, or 43 per cent, had ceased operations since 15 August.[4]
The RSF report also reveals the scale of the damage in the provinces – from zero to 80 per cent – depending on the province. Nuristan was hardest hit, with 80 per cent of its media outlets closing (four out of five) and Kabul had the highest number of media platforms that had ceased operations, 76 out of 148, or 51 per cent of news sources in the capital.[5]
Comparing the media watchdog organisations’ reports to one another, there appear to be fewer media workers leaving their jobs or the country, but only slightly fewer than the initial surge in departures in the days following the fall of the Republic. According to Nai and ANJU, around 70 per cent of Afghan media workers either lost their jobs or fled the country from 15 August to the end of November (see Nai here and the ANJU here).[6] Neither provided a breakdown or baseline for their statistics, making it difficult to estimate the actual number of media workers and journalists affected. A month later, in December, RSF reported that 60 per cent of journalists and media workers had lost their jobs (6430 out of 10790). It explained: “Of the 10,790 people working in the Afghan media (8,290 men and 2,490 women) at the start of August, only 4,360 (3,950 men and 410 women) … were still working when this survey was carried out.” The data collection took place between 15 November and 8 December 2021. RSF added that a small number of female journalists returned to work. Though not mentioned by RSF, some new faces have emerged on TV screens, such as Tolonews, since 15 August. The 10 per cent drop in the number of those who have lost their jobs, as reported by RSF, compared to earlier reports, could come from this small development. Additionally, RSF’s findings did not include those who had left Afghanistan, while the ANJU’s did.
The exact number of media workers who have fled the country fearing persecution by the Taleban is not known, but they appear to be mainly well-known television anchors, investigative journalists, editors and executives working for large Afghan or international media outlets. For example, most journalists and other staff who worked for the leading newspapers, Hasht-e Sobh and Etilaat-e Roz, as well as broadcasters and anchors at Tolonews, the leading TV channel in Afghanistan, have left the country since 15 August (AAN interviewed people in these institutions). The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) said that it had received evacuation applications from over 2,000 Afghan journalists (see Pajhwok News’ 29 August report). While efforts by the IFJ and other organisations and individuals have seen hundreds of Afghan journalists evacuated to safety, many well-known journalists, mainly women, remain in the country, some in hiding. IFJ representatives told the London-based daily The Guardian on 14 September that they believed about 1,300 journalists (presumably from their list) remained in the country; about 220 were women, most of them in Kabul.
Journalists continue to flee Afghanistan, with many media outlets, including leading dailies Etilaat-e Roz and Hasht-e Sobh, working to evacuate their remaining staff. Their editors-in-chief told AAN that they believed their staff were at risk of harassment by the Taleban, adding that they could not freely hold Afghanistan’s new de facto leaders to account when they still had colleagues at risk inside the country. Mujib Mehrdad, Hasht-e Sobh’s editor-in-chief, told AAN on 1 February 2022 that he had decided to reduce “even his personal social media critiques” of the Taleban after his colleagues were threatened in Kabul and were told that the daily’s editorial leadership was acting against “the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA).” “My colleagues in Kabul have been summoned by Taleban intelligence and the Ministry of Information and Culture nine times,” he told AAN. “The last time [they were summoned], they told my colleague who is in charge of the newspaper in Kabul that the Taleban would soon decide how to deal with our newspaper,” Mehrdad added. According to him, Taleban intelligence actors were the main source of threats against his colleagues. “Once the intelligence agency sent a 30-page file of a few of our reports and highlighted words and sentences which the Taleban believed were published wrongfully against them,” he told AAN. A report on the Taleban’s acting Interior Minister, Serajuddin Haqqani, praising “suicide attackers” was among the stories sent to the newspaper as a warning. After these threats, Hasht-e Sobh closed its office and suspended its employees in Kabul. Etilaat-e Roz has also faced similar threats from the Taleban. Armed Taleban broke into its office in August. Since then, they have repeatedly called the newspaper asking for those in charge. “After a while, we decided not to answer the calls,” Elyas Nawandish, the daily’s editor-in-chief, told AAN on 2 February 2022. Despite the threats, both newspapers have resisted the Taleban’s guidelines, including provisions that force media outlets to call the Taleban by their official name – Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan – in their publications and programmes (more on the guidelines later).
But fleeing Afghanistan does not mean leaving journalism, at least for some. Like many of their compatriots, many Afghan journalists that have left their homes live in difficult circumstances and face uncertain futures as they continue their journeys to their final destinations. Nevertheless, many continue to work as journalists either with the same organisations they worked for before their departure or with new media outlets. For instance, five Etilaat-e Roz newspaper journalists who are currently waiting in Albania to reach their final destinations still write for the newspaper. “Since the host [government] covers our living costs, we agreed to continue our work voluntarily [without pay] with Etilaat-e Roz,” Nawandish told AAN. This is also the case for Hasht-e Sobh. Mehrdad, who continues to work for the daily while he is waiting in Albania for resettlement, told AAN that Hasht-e Sobh had not lost any of its journalists. “Everyone, including those who left the country, is still our employees,” he added. The leaderships of both newspapers are having internal discussions to decide how to continue their work on Afghanistan from abroad. Hasht-e Sobh has already submitted a proposal to its donors that would see the daily cover Afghanistan from abroad. According to Mehrdad, the donors have accepted the proposal in principle. Etilaat-e Roz is working on a similar proposal. In addition, AAN has observed a small number of Afghan anchors and journalists, who have left the country, having joined media outlets like the London-based Afghanistan international TV channel, which also has a bureau in Washington and reporters in many countries. Their continued engagement with Afghanistan, either as organisations like Etilaat-e Roz and Hasht-e Sobh or as freelancers like those who have joined other media outlets such as Afghanistan International TV, could keep the flame of a free media alive from abroad; even if the space for freedom of expression continues to close within the country itself.
A closer look at the situation of female journalists
The fall of the Republic has hit female journalists the hardest, especially those working for smaller media organisations or in the provinces. While it has not been well documented, the Afghan media sector was suddenly devoid of female journalists in the first days after the Taleban took over Kabul, with media managers fearing Taleban reprisals asking their female staff to stay home. “On the evening of 15 August, the office posted a message on a WhatsApp group with all employees in it, asking female employees to stay home until further notice,” Zahra Rahimi, a former female journalist working with Tolonews, told AAN. “Everyone was scared.” However, by 8 December 2021, 410 out of 2490 female journalists and media workers (one in six people) had returned to their jobs, according to RSF’s December report: “Fewer than 100 women journalists dared to return to work in the weeks after the Taliban arrived in Kabul and told women to stay home. Others have returned to their media outlets in the past two months.” [7] In an earlier report, published on 31 August 2021, RSF highlighted that, following the Taleban takeover, only 76 of the 510 (or 15 per cent) women working for the eight biggest media outlets had remained in their jobs, meaning that “women journalists are in the process of disappearing from the capital.”
Zahra Rahimi was one of the women who returned to work after a one-day break. “Four of my female colleagues and I decided not to surrender so easily,” she told AAN. Their return to work, however, was short-lived. After only five days, they left their jobs and then fled the country. Speaking to AAN on 6 February 2022 from Canada, where she had just arrived after a five-month journey from Kabul, Rahimi described those five days back at work as bristling with experiences she had never known in her entire career. Her account could shed light on the hardship women journalists have faced since 15 August. The pressure on her was considerable. When she went out to interview people, men on the street taunted her: “with the Taleban in power, your time is over” or “why you are still out, go home.” [8] There was always a risk of being beaten on the streets by armed Taleban. Taleban officials did not grant interviews to female journalists. One day, Rahimi went to the Ministry of Higher Education to prepare a report on what was left of the ministry, but the Taleban commander in charge of security at the ministry strongly rejected her request for an interview. “He didn’t even give an interview to my cameraman because I, as a woman, had asked him in the first place,” Rahimi told AAN. When they did grant interviews or answer questions, they spoke only to her cameraman without looking at her during the interview. Rahimi found the Taleban’s behaviour humiliating and prejudicial. “It cannot be worse than when you get a message that you are nothing because of your gender,” she added.
“If this was all, I could have continued my fight,” she said, but sadly there was more. The censorship imposed by her editors dispirited her.[9] It was difficult for her to accept the changes made to her reports so as to not “provoke” the Taleban to act against her colleagues and office, especially after she had endured so much to get the stories. The reporters were asked to choose their words with caution during live reporting and avoid using provocative words. For example, in those days, there were many reports on social media implicating Taleban fighters in car robberies and “the list of provocative words included any word that might identify Taleban fighters as being involved in car robberies,” she said. She could understand the difficult position her managers were in. Everyone’s safety was their prime concern. The Taleban had disarmed the guards at her office and instead put their own armed men in charge. Even her male colleagues did not return home for fear of being followed by the Taleban and putting their families at risk. “Despite all these preventive measures, there were reports of break-ins at the homes of my colleagues,” Rahimi said. On 25 August, one day after Rahimi left Kabul, armed Taleban from Kabul’s police district 18 went to her home and took her father and 28-year old brother. Her father had a history of working for the military under the Republic, but she believes that her former job at Tolonews was the main reason for his detention. Finally, her family members were released after putting up their house as collateral and promising to always be accessible.
AAN has not been able to verify when exactly the Taleban ordered female journalists to stay home. It could have been on 23 or 24 August 2021. Zahra Rahimi and her female colleagues last worked on 22 August. Tolonews’ Executive Director, Lutfullah Najafizada, and the head of One TV’s news programmes, Hamid Haidari, told AAN on 23 August that female staff, including journalists, were no longer coming to work. On 24 August, Mujahid announced that female journalists would be allowed to return to work ‘in a few days’. This has not been the case for women working for state-owned media outlets, including Radio wa Telvisyun-e Afghanistan, RTA (Afghanistan National Radio and Television), where female journalists have not been allowed to return to work since 15 August, though a few tried unsuccessfully. For instance, on 20 August, Shabnam Dawran, a female anchor at the national broadcaster, reported that the Taleban had barred her from entering her office on the RTA compound until further notice.
Female journalists working in the provinces or with smaller organisations have been affected to a greater degree, with no female journalists returning to work in 15 provinces between 15 August to 8 December 2021, according to RSF. In the provinces, 431 female journalists lost their jobs. [10] While Badghis, Ghazni and Zabul are three of the four provinces where no media outlets closed, 100 per cent of their female journalists lost their jobs. Kunar and Uruzgan never had any female journalists. Laghman and Sar-e Pul lost the fewest female journalists, with 52 and 53 per cent, respectively. In Badakhshan, despite conditional permission by local Taleban officials allowing female journalists to work, none had returned to their jobs in journalism. A female journalist from Badakhshan told Pajhwok news on 3 December 2021 that her reasons for not returning to work included feeling unsafe and not being paid. The restrictions imposed on female journalists include wearing the hijab, working in a separate room from their male colleagues, and having no contribution to field reporting. Zahra Rahimi, however, points out that the Taleban’s definition of the hijab remains unclear and stresses that even before the Taleban takeover, it was customary for all Afghan women, including female journalists, to wear the hijab.
AAN has been unable to ascertain when female journalists resumed their work. However, since mid-September, female journalists have increasingly appeared on television programmes, especially at the larger stations such as Tolonews and Ariana. Zahra Rahimi described the situation of female journalists that she keeps in touch with as being the same as what she experienced back in August. “Those who are still working have no other options,” Rahimi said. It takes courage for the 410 female journalists who have returned to work; apart from taking steps to make sure they do not run foul of Taleban restrictions, they are under immense pressure from various sources, including their families, but for many of them, this is no longer a fight for freedom of speech or free media; they simply need an income.
Violence against journalists
Fear of being persecuted by the Taleban was one of the main reasons for the mass exodus of many well-known journalists and media managers in the days after the fall of Kabul. This fear was partly driven by abuses perpetrated against journalists and media workers before 15 August and perceptions concerning their negative views on press freedoms.
Since 2005, around the time the Taleban re-emerged as an insurgent group, Afghanistan has ranked among the most dangerous countries for journalists on the RSF’s violations of press freedom barometer, with 50 journalists killed during that period, except in 2012 and 2015 when no journalists were killed in the country. 2018 was the deadliest year for media workers in Afghanistan, with 14 journalists killed.
A special report published by the United Nations Assistance Mission for Afghanistan (UNAMA) in February 2021 documented incidents of violence against journalists and media workers from January 2018 to January 2021. 33 journalists and media workers, including two women, were killed in this period. Both Nangrahar and Kabul were the worst provinces, with 14 murders respectively, according to the report.
Since the fall of the Republic, the experience of foreign journalists who, for the most part, have been able to report freely from Afghanistan, even from places that had been previously inaccessible, stands in stark contrast to that of Afghan journalists who continue to be at risk of violence exacted by the Taleban. There are increasing reports of torture, arbitrary arrests and beatings of journalists attributed to the Taleban. [11]
The ANJU’s Masroor Lutfi told AAN on 25 November that the Taleban had perpetrated 90 per cent of the 39 cases of violence against journalists and media workers it had registered since 15 August. [12] The cases include verbal and physical abuse as well as detention. [13] In his 28 January 2022 briefing to the UN Security Council on Afghanistan, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reported two murders, two cases causing injury and 44 cases of temporary arrest, beatings and threats to journalists documented by UNAMA since 15 August. He attributed 42 out of 44 cases of harassment to the Taleban, but neither the murders nor the two cases that caused injury were attributable to the Taleban.
Two journalists have also been killed in separate incidents, with no indication that either was specifically targeted. In October, Sayed Maruf Azad was killed in Jalalabad, Nangrahar province, when unknown armed men fired on alleged members of the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) (see Deutsche Welle Dari report here) and in November, Ariana News TV’s Hamid Saighani was killed in an IED attack against a public transport vehicle. ISKP claimed responsibility for the blast (see Deutsche Welle Dari report here).
In a February 2022 statement, the RSF said that it had recorded 50 cases of journalists and media workers arrested by the Taleban police and intelligence actors since 15 August 2021.
[A]t least 50 journalists and media workers have been detained briefly or arrested by the police or Istekhbarat. These arrests, which are often accompanied by violence, have lasted several hours to nearly a week. They usually occur when journalists are covering street demonstrations by women in the capital, Kabul, and show the important role that Istekhbarat is increasingly playing in the harassment of the media.
Other sources have also reported the growing role of the Istekhbarat. Mujib Mehrdad, the editor-in-chief of Hasht-e Sobh newspaper, cited it as the main source of threats against his colleagues. On 1 February 2022, Radio Nasim, a local radio station in Daikundi, said they had been summoned to a meeting with the province’s intelligence officials where they were given an order issued by the Istekhbarat headquarters in Kabul obliging media outlets to refrain from – among other things – broadcasting people’s complaints, airing negative content, reporting news that had not been confirmed [by the Taleban] and speaking against the Taleban administration. The order also required media outlets to obtain approval from provincial authorities in advance of publication or broadcast. The report included a video of the meeting during which Mawlawi Shamshad reads out the order in Pashto and the province’s Istekhbarat chief, Obaidullah Faizani, elaborates on the new rules.
It is often difficult to ascribe responsibility to perpetrators. The Taleban’s replies to questions about the recent arbitrary arrest of women protestors and journalists, which were attributed to the Taleban intelligence agency, points to a possible lack of coordination between various Taleban entities, such as the MoIC and the Istekhbarat. When they were asked about the women’s fate or reasons for the arrests, Taleban authorities first rebuffed the reports and later said that they were unaware of the arrests and would make inquiries to ascertain the details (for instance, see this Tolonews news service about the arrest of two Ariana news TV journalists).
The involvement of the Istekhbarat could also create a conflict of interest with the MoIC. For the most part, Taleban spokespersons are employees of the MoIC (or the Information Commission during their insurgency), and since their return to power, the ministry has been the only authorised source of communication and information with the media and the state institution that controls their activities (more on this later). Concerns over losing control of the media could be a reason for Taleban spokesperson and Deputy Minister of Culture and Information, Zabiullah Mujahid’s announcement that the IEA would enforce the Republic’s media law and re-establish the Commission to Review Media Violence and Complaints (media commission), enshrined in article 32 of the media law (see Pajhwok news report here). The media law designates the commission as the only institution with the power to deal with complaints, including criminal allegations, against journalists and media outlets. If a complaint has a criminal element, the commission is empowered to refer the case to relevant judicial institutions. The commission could prevent direct interventions by the Istekhbarat or the police into media affairs. According to Pajhwok, Mujahid’s intention was also to bar other government agencies from interfering in media affairs and give the MoIC absolute control over the media. Perhaps that building relationships with the media in line with the Taleban’s various guidelines is the most important and main activity the MoIC has at present.
The financial crisis as a more widespread challenge
Like other sectors, the Afghan media sector, including the state broadcaster RTA, has been heavily dependent on foreign funding (see this AAN report on RTA). The lack of adequate funding was challenging Afghanistan’s media sector well before the Republic’s collapse. The majority of Afghan media outlets were heavily reliant on foreign aid and never achieved long-term financial stability. This is one of the three main reasons the media sector has been hard hit by the country’s political change and the ensuing end to foreign aid, including sanctions and the freezing of the country’s foreign reserves (see this AAN report that looks at the economic situation in the Taleban-run Afghanistan).
The 2009 Mass Media Law allowed media outlets to generate income from advertisement, national and international organisations’ donations and professional services provided to legal and real persons (article 26). But only a few, mainly commercial TV channels, were able to attract some advertisements, though the income was never enough to keep them afloat without foreign financial support and most survived on funding provided for specific programmes or by selling airtime.
A lack of funds is the most common reason for the closure or downsizing of media platforms in Afghanistan, according to the AJSC’s weekly reports and AAN’s research. Sultan Ali Jawadi, a programme manager for the privately-owned Radio Nasim, which broadcasts in Daikundi and Bamyan, told AAN on 25 October that all media outlets in the two provinces (five radio stations, including the state-owned broadcaster, as well as four print publications in Daikundi) were facing financial difficulties, even before the Taleban takeover. In Daikundi, Radio Nasim mainly relied on advertising and awareness-raising programmes for polio vaccination and elections paid for by the government or NGOs. The station’s financial statement shows a monthly income of around 50,000 Afs (around USD 800) until the end of July. “In the last two months [September and October], we have had zero income,” Jawadi told AAN.
While all media outlets in Daikundi and Bamyan ceased their operations after the collapse of Nili city, Radio Nasim resumed its activities the day after the collapse. However, it has since downsized in Daikundi from five to two staff members, and in Bamyan from three to one, who are unpaid and even cover the station’s operational costs from their own pockets.
Fuel shortages have also been a contributing factor; for example, the equipment, including the three privately-owned radio stations’ solar power supply systems, were stolen by unknown people after the fall of Nili city. Around the same time, the state-owned radio also went off-air due to fuel shortages; it resumed broadcasting only in early November. The others, however, could not reopen due to a lack of funding.
The guidelines: Many restrictions and no protection
In their first press conference after the fall of the Republic, Taleban spokesperson, Zabiullah Mujahid said: “I would like to assure the media, we are committed to the media within our cultural frameworks. Private media can continue to be free and independent, they can continue their activities,” but with some caveats:
One, is that Islam is a very important value in our country and nothing should be against Islamic values. When it comes to the activities of the media therefore, Islamic values should be taken into account when it comes to the activities of the media, when it comes to developing your programmes. Therefore, the media should be impartial. Impartiality of the media is very important. They can critique our work, so that we can improve (see the full transcript of the 17 August press conference here).
This was a cause for concern among journalists, as both terms – cultural frameworks and Islamic values – are expansive and nebulous. The three subsequent guidelines issued by the Taleban have only intensified these concerns.
The Taleban have not publicly shared these guidelines on their websites or social media accounts (AAN has obtained copies of the guideline through its own sources). Instead, the guidelines were issued in Pashto and shared with a few media outlets (Please see the footnotes for the full translated version of guidelines).
The first guideline, the most general and the longest, with 11 rules, was issued on 20 September. [14]
The rules can be categorised in three sets. The first prohibits the media from broadcasting programmes and publications deemed to be against Islam, insulting national personalities, and violating national and individual privacy (four rules). The second set requires journalists and media outlets to respect the principles of journalism, including impartiality, balance in reports, and factual reporting (four rules). The third orders journalists to work closely with the Government Media Information Centre (GMIC) and avoid broadcasting or publishing unconfirmed issues.
While the first and second sets of rules are not bad as such, they are vague and open to interpretation. For instance, it is unclear who should be considered a ‘national personality’, what kind of reports would insult them, or what ‘national privacy’ means. Would criticising a member of the Taleban cabinet for his failures in discharging his duties constitute an insult to a national personality? Could leaking information about corruption in a ministry be a violation of national privacy? These are a few of the many unanswered questions, leaving space in the guideline for interpretation and the misuse of rules by the authorities.
The third set contains the more challenging rules that censor information, publication, and broadcasting. These rules stress that issues that have not been confirmed by the Taleban should not be published; media outlets should produce their detailed reports in coordination with the GMIC, using the form specially designed for this purpose. Unlike the first two sets, the third is quite clear: It prohibits the independence of journalists in their reporting and places conditions on their access to information. What is implicit in this portion of the guideline is the Taleban’s intolerance for criticism, their desire to control the media narrative about them and signals their intention to coerce the media into toeing the Taleban line.
Reporters Without Borders issued a statement, saying it was disturbed by the new rules announced by the Taliban. RSF Secretary-General Christophe Deloire said:
Decreed without any consultation with journalists, these new rules are spine chilling because of the coercive use that can be made of them, and they bode ill for the future of journalistic independence and pluralism in Afghanistan. They establish a regulatory framework based on principles and methods that contradict the practice of journalism and leave room for oppressive interpretation instead of providing a protective framework allowing journalists, including women, to go back to work in acceptable conditions. These rules open the way to tyranny and persecution.
The second guideline, which was sent only to five TV stations, including Tolonews and One TV, on 25 September, only has six rules. [15] The first five mainly echo the first guideline.[16] The sixth rule, however, is a strongly-worded demand for media outlets to call the Taleban administration by its complete name the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” and refrain from using terms such as “group” or “network” when referring to the Taleban administration, adding that the Taleban control the entire country and serve “the religion [Islam], the country and the nation.” In other words, the sixth rule compels the media to recognise the Taleban as the government of Afghanistan. Outside Afghanistan, foreign governments have refrained from recognising “the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA)” and attempts to be recognised by the United Nations have been unsuccessful. On 1 December, the nine-member United Nations Credentials Committee deferred a decision on the Taleban’s 21 September request to send their permanent representative to the UN.
The third guideline, which has eight rules, was issued on 21 November and has been widely distributed on social media and other online platforms. The rules largely focus on banning dramas and entertainment programmes, including a) dramas violating Islamic and Afghan cultural values; b) dramas damaging social morals and Afghan cultural norms; c) entertainment and programmes insulting personalities; d) dramas violating Sharia principles and human dignity; e) films and videos showing uncovered private parts of a man’s body; and f) dramas showing the face of actors playing God’s messengers and sahaba (Prophet Muhammad’s male companions). [17]
With this, for the first time since their return to power, the Taleban imposed explicit written restrictions on women in the media, requiring them to “wear Islamic hijab on TV channels [screen]” and banning the broadcast of “drama and theatre with women actors.” This guideline drew strong reactions, Associate Director of the Women’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch, Heather Barr, tweeted: “Not content with smashing up the lives of real women and girls, the Taleban set their sights on shutting up fictional women too.”
The fallout from the guidelines is far-reaching for television programming. Turkish and Indian soap operas, abundant with actresses, have been the most popular with audiences and attractive to advertisers. Banning them means reduced revenues for TV channels and a sharp drop in content to fill their on-air hours. The third guideline has been strictly imposed on broadcasts in Balkh and Takhar, with female voices banned even on radio stations in Takhar, Afghan Journalists Safety Committee reported on 12 December.
The legal status of Taleban guidelines, including the three guidelines for the media, is unclear. The Taleban have not yet defined their legal system, legislative body or legislation procedures for issuing legal documents. While some guidelines were issued by the Taleban Supreme Leader, their acting cabinet, ministries, spokespersons and even provincial authorities, their legal status is unclear. They look more like recommendations than legal documents. Almost every guideline prohibits the commission of certain acts, but says nothing about consequences for violators.
Each media guideline was issued by a separate organ of the Taleban administration: The first by the head of the GMIC, Qari Yusuf Ahmadi, the second by Taleban spokesperson and deputy information and culture minister, Zabiullah Mujahid, and the third by the Ministry of Vice and Virtue. Neither guideline appears to have been endorsed by the acting Taleban cabinet or the Taleban Supreme Leader (Amir-ul Mumineen), Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada or submitted for their approval, which could indicate that the Taleban administration is not yet a cohesive policymaking body.
Similar to other guidelines issued by the Taleban, the media guidelines are lists of prohibited items; some are carryovers from the laws of the former government, including article 45 of the 2009 mass media law. In the second guideline, which mainly echoes the first, Mujahid included five of the eight items forbidden by article 45 and omitted three: 1) insult other religions; 2) assault the social personality of victims of domestic violence and rape; and 3) violate the constitution, all of which are also criminalised by the penal code. In the third guideline, the Ministry of Vice and Virtue added two new items to Mujahid’s list: The two restrictions against women (explained earlier).
Enforcing the media law: The distance between words and actions
The Taleban’s boldest move in their efforts to regulate the media is their announcement to enforce the Republic’s Mass Media Law. Although the law supports a few items of the Taleban’s restrictions over media publications and broadcasts, it also provides a set of rights for journalists and media outlets, including the right to protection and access to information. The three Taleban guidelines did not address the issue of rights, which made them more problematic. This was cause for concern for the head of the Afghanistan Independent Journalists Association, Hujatullah Mujadadi, who believed that the new Taleban media guidelines, in the absence of a legal protection mechanism for journalists, opened the “door to censorship.”
The core protections afforded journalists by the media and access to information laws were immunity for whistle-blowers who exposed corruption, misuse of power, injustice, broke the law and committed crimes, violated human rights and caused serious damage to public security and the environment. These laws allowed journalists to refrain from revealing the identity of their sources and to sue officials who violated their rights through a fair mechanism defined by each law. [18] The other core element is the plan to establish the Commission to Review Media Violations and Complaints. This commission was made up of the information and culture minister (chair) and representatives of journalists’ unions, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, Afghanistan bar association, Afghanistan science academy, the justice ministry, filmmakers unions, women’s unions, and head of Kabul University’s journalism faculty. The commission was given the power and duty to review complaints against journalists and media outlets and prevent state institutions from interfering in media affairs.
While the Taleban’s move to uphold the media law has been welcomed, it is not clear when they will move from words to action. In a long and detailed interview with Tolonews on 18 February 2022, Mujahid promised again to push for the media commission to be re-established.
Notably, the media and access to information laws were not as good in practice as they were on paper during the Republic and the MoIC did not hold enough sway to enforce them effectively. Afghanistan ranked 122 out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2021 World Press Freedom Index, which, in light of the so-called peace talks that were underway in Qatar at the time, expressed concerns that “basic freedoms, including the freedom of women journalists, could be sacrificed for the sake of a peace deal.”
The Ghani administration tried to impose more restrictions by amending the law. For example, in 2020, the government attempted unsuccessfully to amend the article protecting sources and article 45 by adding a few more forbidden items, but the amendments were dropped after journalist organisations opposed them. The Ghani administration also tried to bar direct communications between the media and local authorities, especially provincial security personnel. The access to information bill was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it obliged state agencies to reply to all individual requests and provide information on their activities in annual reports. On the other, it restricted access to information by defining specific mechanisms for information sharing. The Ghani administration’s focus on the latter part had raised the ire of media managers and journalists.
Beyond the guidelines: Actions speak louder than words
While the guidelines have not been issued by a top decision-making body of the Taleban and resemble a set of recommendations, media outlets are cautiously implementing most of the rules.
The author made the following observations during regular monitoring of three TV channels (Tolonews, Ariana News, One TV) and one local radio station in Daikundi provincevin October and November:, and one. The biggest TV channels refer to the Taleban administration as the government of Afghanistan and use its complete and official title, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA), in their reports, in contrast to early September when they referred to the Taleban as a ‘group’. The Taleban are heavily present in talk shows and self-censorship is evident in interviews. For example, claims made by Taleban officials are not scrutinised with follow-up or challenging questions. Few programmes and news segments criticise the Taleban or their acting cabinet. A Tolonews anchor, Bahram Aman, who presents the 6 pm news and the popular political talk show Farakhabar (Beyond the News), explained the difficulty of working as a journalist under the Taleban: “you are under a lot of pressure from various dimensions. You know you are watched under a magnifying glass. You have to choose your words with caution.” Nevertheless, influential TV channels still extend the stage to the Taleban’s most ideological opponents, including Afghan politicians like Latif Pedram or Shukria Barakzai, to share their views. They also broadcast critics from the international community, including international human rights organisations.
In addition, since September, journalists in Kabul have been asked to register with the MoIC. In return, they receive an ID card signed by Mujahid. ID cards issued by media outlets or journalist organisations are not sufficient proof of a journalist’s profession. “Not having an ID card signed by Mujahid could mean no immunity for a journalist reporting in public places,” Masroor Lutfi told AAN. Additionally, journalists have been asked to interview Taleban spokespersons for official views and information and refrain from interviewing ‘irrelevant’ officials. While the first guideline asked the media and journalists to work closely with GMIC, chaired by Qari Yusuf Ahmadi, most Taleban spokespersons are members of the former information commission, which was integrated into the MoIC after the takeover. AAN was unable to confirm whether the MoIC mechanism replaces the GMIC coordination mechanism or is a parallel one that works alongside GMIC.
In Kabul, efforts by reporters to keep the torch of independent and impartial journalism alive have led to a few detrimental scuffles between the media and the Taleban, said Lutfi of the ANJU. For instance, attempts by journalists to cover women’s protests or clashes between the Taleban and the Islamic State of Khurasan Province (ISKP) in Kabul drew a strong reaction from the Taleban, who detained, tortured and threatened journalists for their reporting or highly restricted their access to the scene. They justified their actions by declaring these events “illegal” and said that journalists should not promote illegal activities by reporting them.
In the provinces, the situation is even worse. Interviews conducted by AAN show that local Taleban authorities have been harsher in their dealings with the media. Elyas Nawandish believed this was likely because local Taleban are more conservative, but also because the international oversight mechanisms are weaker in the provinces, and the journalism community is smaller and more easily recognisable in remote, less populated areas. The latter provides direct and quick access to journalists and media outlets and confounds attempts to escape or hide in provinces. This has resulted not only in more censorship by the Taleban but also in self-censorship by the media and journalists. The Information and Culture Directorate (ICD), the MoIC’s provincial branches, have effective control over media programmes and journalists. Though the level of control varies from one province to another, there are increasing reports that journalists have been asked to coordinate with the head of the ICD before producing, broadcasting and/or publishing a report. According to the AJSC in Badakhshan, Faryab, Logar and Ghor, approval of reports in advance of their publication is required by the respective head of the ICD. An interviewee from Daikundi province confirmed to AAN a similar requirement set by the former Taleban provincial governor, Amanullah Zubair, and the current provincial police chief, Sediqullah Abed. However, due to a lack of capacity, the pre-approval of reports has not come into force in Daikundi. According to the AJSC, in Nimruz, only those pre-approved by the ICD can be invited as guests on programmes. In Faryab, live programmes and those critical of the Taleban have been banned.
In the provinces, the ICD is the only official source of information. It usually takes days to receive a response, if at all, which is of little value to breaking news stories. Control and censorship are applied to all stages of broadcasting – the preproduction, production and postproduction. Local Taleban authorities are banned from giving media interviews without the ICD’s permission, according to Masroor Lutfi. In Takhar, for instance, a military commander invited a few journalists to cover a military operation without coordinating with the head of the ICD, Ansarullah Ansari, in advance; when he found out he banned the broadcasting of any reports related to the manoeuvre, Lutfi added. According to the state-owned Bakhtar news agency, in a meeting with the heads of police districts in Takhar, Ansari said: “The media is the voice of the state,” and asked participants to direct all media interviews to him instead of speaking to reporters themselves.
Additionally, journalists have been asked to broadcast programmes favouring the Taleban administration and report Taleban-sanctioned news and prepared statements, which many journalists have called ‘a mandate to report propaganda’.
In the past, media outlets broadcast paid advertisement programmes for the state, but the current demands made by the Taleban to integrate these items into mainstream news creates an ethical slippery slope that journalists and the organisations they work for must traverse. For example, a journalist working for a privately-owned radio station in Daikundi told AAN that the day after Nili (Daikundi’s provincial capital) collapsed, the Taleban forced him to reopen the radio station and announce “the victory” of the Taleban. Since then, the Taleban have regularly forced the radio station to broadcast Taleban statements, most of which are not newsworthy. “Some days, we are forced to interview one official more than once about one or more topics,” the journalist said.
The AJSC’s reports revealed that a reporter working for the Pajhwok news agency in Kunar was threatened by the province’s head of public health directorate for not quoting him in his report about the health situation in the province. After the AJSC and other journalists met with the provincial Taleban authorities, including the governor, the issue was finally resolved. The AJSC’s reports from Badakhshan and Kandahar show that local Taleban authorities informed journalists and media outlets not to carry any reports against their government. In a meeting with media representatives, the head of the ICD in Logar, Qazi Rafiullah Samim, asked them to broadcast programmes that would help bolster the Taleban regime, Bakhtar reported.
Beyond the guidelines, a lack of cooperation with the local Taleban authorities has its own consequences. Journalists have been regularly summoned, detained, interrogated and threatened because of their reports. In Daikundi, for instance, the Taleban police chief and former provincial governor summoned a journalist twice and threatened him for his reporting on the forced eviction of Hazaras from Pato and Gizaw districts, a source told AAN on 25 October. The same journalist received two more threats on the streets of Nili city from the local police chief. Three journalists in Charikar, the capital of Parwan province, were detained and interrogated because of their reports, Masroor Lutfi of the ANJU told AAN. They were released after local elders intervened and guaranteed that the “mistakes” would not be repeated. The AJSC’s report from Farah province shows that a journalist (for his reporting) and a radio station manager (for broadcasting music) had been summoned and threatened.
Conclusion
A significant number of media outlets have closed and a vast number of journalists have either left the country or lost their jobs since 15 August 2021. However, due to the absence of accurate and up to date information, it is not possible to ascertain how many, or what percentage, of Afghan journalists have left since the Taleban takeover. Overall reports by media watchdog organisations reveal that the damage to the Afghan media sector was highest in the early days after the fall of the Republic. While the damage was extensive, there are signs that this is slowing down. Hundreds of female journalists are going back to work, and a few media outlets have resumed their activities. With a few exceptions, those media outlets that survived the initial shock are still operating, though under difficult conditions.
The damage to the media sector can be attributed to three reasons, not all new, but intensified by the regime change, but not necessarily by the Taleban. First, without exception, all Afghan media outlets have faced significant financial difficulties since the Taleban takeover and the end of the foreign grants that kept them afloat. Add to this the economic collapse that followed the fall of the Republic, and it’s easy to see how many of Afghanistan’s beleaguered media organisations were forced to raise their shutters. However, two other reasons can be attributed to Taleban rule, including the burden of restrictions and censorship, the lack of protection afforded to journalists, and the swell of violence against the media.
Access to information is now severely constrained and journalists are told, formally and informally, what and how to report. In some cases, those who disobeyed were summoned, interrogated, threatened, tortured and detained. Violence against journalists continues, with the Taleban identified as the main perpetrator. The Ministry of Information and Culture is not the only state entity the only source of restrictions; intelligence actors and the Ministry of Vice and Virtue also act to restrict press freedoms, creating the appearance of a soft competition between these institutions over control of the media.
This decision was taken after critics raised the alarm about arbitrary arrests of journalists and women protesters, blaming Istekhbarat. It would certainly prevent the intelligence agency and interior ministry from directly interfering in media affairs, including the arbitrary arrest of journalists. However, establishing any kind of media oversight structure by a repressive regime such as the Taleban’s could in itself enable another means of control over Afghanistan’s media.
Edited by Jelena Bjelica, Roxanna Shapour and Emilie Cavendish
References
References
↑1
In mid-September, the BBC reported: “within weeks of the takeover … more than 150 outlets nationwide had closed,” adding that the main reasons for closure are financial problems and restrictions on media freedom. On 13 September, Tolonews reported the closure of 153 media outlets in 20 provinces and Voice of America (VoA) reported the closure of 90 media outlets, mainly in the provinces, including 12 radio stations and four TV channels in Helmand on 12 August, three days before the collapse of Kabul.
↑2
The head of the ANJU’s media unit, Masroor Lutfi, told AAN on 25 November that the information was “based on an online survey” conducted from 23 to 29 September. “Around 1500 journalists from 28 provinces responded to the 15-question survey,” he said. The survey aimed to find answers to three main questions: a) is the participant is still working; b) is the media outlets the participant works with still operational; and c) what challenges do journalists as individuals and media outlets as institutions currently face?
↑3
A former deputy culture minister, Fazil Sancharaki, told the London-based Afghanistan International TV on 15 December that more than 2,500 media outlets had registered with the ministry over the past two decades. However, the ministry database was not publicly available. The 2009 mass media law required all media outlets to register with the Ministry of Information and Culture, but there was also no mechanism for removing those who had ceased operating from its rolls, making it difficult to estimate how many were still operating when the government fell.
According to Nai, 465 media outlets including 96 TV channels, 194 radio stations and 175 print outlets were operating, but it is not clear as of when (Nai was quoted in this Media Landscape report). RSF, however, estimated that 415 media platforms, including eight news agencies, 52 TV channels, 160 radio stations and 190 print publications were operating in Afghanistan in December 2020.
↑4
This figure about 30 per cent lower than had been previously reported by ANJU and AJSC and slightly smaller than the number (257) reported by Nai. However, 231 is more than twice the number the RFS previously reported. On 31 August 2021, when it said that around 100 media outlets had closed. The discrepancies in reporting could be accounted explained for in part by the time period in which data was collected for each survey, as well as their respective baseline statistics, with earlier reports showing greater numbers. In the first four months of the Taleban takeover, several media outlets, mainly the state-owned, resumed operations, according to the Afghan Journalists Safety Committee (AJSC) weekly reports (published from 10 October to 20 December 2021), which reports data collected by the AJSC provincial coordinators and published on its website in English. For instance, the AJSC reported that Khaiber Nawesht, a privately-owned radio in Laghman, had resumed operations on 8 November as had two radio stations in Badghis on 21 October, while the RSF, which collected its data between 15 November to 8 December 2021, did not report any closures in these provinces. Additionally, the closure of Radio Heela and the opening of Radio Hussaiian, a new radio station in Laghman, were reported by AJSC on 28 and 22 November, respectively; neither were mentioned in the RSF report. On 15 November, AJSC reported the closure of 19 out of 24 media outlets in Balkh since 15 August, while on 20 December, RSF reported the closure of 17 out of 28 outlets. In other words, RSF had four more media outlets operating in Balkh before 15 August and two fewer media outlets closed since the fall of the Republic compared to what was reported by the AJSC reports.
↑5
According to RSF estimates Nuristan was hardest hit, with 80 per cent of its media outlets closing (four out of five), followed by Parwan with 70 per cent (7 out of 10), Herat with 64 per cent (33 out of 51), Bamyan with 61 per cent (8 out of 13), Balkh (17 out of 28), Daikundi (3 out of 5) and Panjshir (3 out of 5), each with 60 per cent. No media outlets were closed in Badghis, Laghman, Ghazni or Zabul. Kabul had the highest number of media platforms that had ceased operations, 76 out of 148, or 51 per cent of news sources in the capital (see the RSF report here for more details).
In its weekly reports on the state of the media in Afghanistan, the Afghanistan Journalists Safety Committee, provides numbers on media outlets that closed or re-opened in some provinces as of the end of November (closed 61, resumed 17):
Badakhshan: two out of ten radio stations closed; all three TV channels were operational, one resumed;
Badghis: Two radio station resumed;
Baghlan: Tanweer Group including Tanweer TV, Radio Aruzo-ha, Radio Sana and Selsela Weekly closed;
Balkh: Nine of 13 radio stations and ten of 11 TV channels closed, only the state-owned TV channel was operating;
Bamyan: State-owned TV, a private TV channel (Bamyan) and Nasim Radio resumed (Sultan Ali Jawid, Radio Nasim’s manager in Daikundi, told AAN that the station was still on air in Bamyan);
Daikundi: State-owned TV resumed (according to Sultan Ali Jawadi, four private radio stations closed down and Nasim Radio was the only private news outlet operating in the province. It was closed for one night.);
Eastern zone (Nangrahar, Kunar, Laghman, Nuristan): six radio stations closed, including two private radio stations in Nuristan and radio Heela, a privately owned in Laghman. Also in Laghman, one new radio station was established and another, Khaibar Nawesht Radio, resumed its work;
Faryab: Seven radio stations closed and four private radio stations (Sahat, Maimana, Tamana and Momtaz) were operational;
Ghor: Radio Sad-ye Sarhad and Firozkoh closed;
Herat: Radio Meraj resumed;
Jawzjan: Ayana TV and Batoor TV, both funded by Marshal Dostum, closed; Radio Mehraban resumed; four radio stations, one TV and two newspapers were operational;
Khost: All media outlets were operational;
Kunduz: Oranoos TV chennal resumed;
Logar: Radio Etifaq and Loger Gazette closed;
Nimruz: Two TV channels and four radio stations (Barna TV and radio, state-owned TV and radio, Radio Dost and Radio Voice of Sistan) resumed after a two-month pause;
Paktia: Three radio stations (Voice of Paktia, Voice of Women and Tahleel) and two print outlets closed. Radio Talwasa resumed broadcasting;
Paktika: Four radio stations closed; one radio station, Nejat Ghag, was newly established.
Panjshir: Radio Khurasan closed, Radio Kachakn was still on air but financially in a very poor condition;
Samangan: One state-own TV channel and two private radio stations (Haqiqat and Shahrwand) were operational and the rest closed;
Takhar: Radio Danish closed; and
Wardak: All media outlets were operational.
↑6
Before this, the Afghan Federation of Media and Journalists estimated 12,000 and Media Landscape 11,000 people working in the Afghan media sector, including 7000 working for TV channels (see RSF here and Media Landscape here). In this light, the 70 per cent reported by Nai and ANJU would amount to around 8000 journalists and media workers who have either lost their jobs or fled the country. This includes 224 journalists and media workers in 10 provinces (excluding Kabul and other big cities with a significant number of journalists) who had lost their jobs or fled their provinces since 15 August, according to the AJSC’s weekly reports.
↑7
Based on earlier RSF reporting: At least around 1,742 women, including 1,000 in Kabul and the rest in Balkh and Herat provinces, worked in the media sector before 15 August. More than a third were journalists and the rest were working in support positions.
↑8
It’s important to note that women in Afghanistan face numerous constraints, especially when pursuing an education, entering the workforce or staking a claim in public life. In light of this, the violence facing Afghan female journalists is multidimensional and includes the threat from their own family members. A 2017 RSF report cited a survey conducted by a local NGO: “53 per cent of families would have a problem with their daughter working as a journalist. In Kabul, it is 20 per cent, but in the provinces of Kandahar and Nangarhar, it is as high as 80 per cent.” The same report noted that four female journalists had been killed by relatives since 2002, saying that the women had been ”the victims of fundamentalist propaganda in favour of a ban on working women in a patriarchal society, and a lack of protection on the part of the state.”
↑9
Rahimi, who worked at Tolonews as a journalist before leaving Kabul on 24 August, was at work the day Kabul fell. Despite entreaties by her male colleagues to go home, she stayed to finish her report of the press conference she had attended in the morning. She recalls only one other woman present in the office, the others were either asked to leave earlier or asked not to come to work.
Basir Ahmadi, a representor of Ayana TV was beaten in the Makroyan residential complex close to his home on 19 November by two armed individuals; and
Gul Ahmad Almas, a freelance reporter in Ghor, was threatened and asked to leave the province by male members of a local family, after the journalist produced a report about the family’s poor financial situation.
October:
Abdul Khaliq Hussaini, a journalist working with Khama Press, was beaten on 28 October in Kabul by armed individuals;
Zahidullah Hussainkhil, Director of Radio Mahal, was arrested and beaten on 29 October by IEA in Logar;
Ali Reza, cameraman for the Iranian state broadcaster, was shot on 30 October in Kabul by unknown gunmen. He survived the incident;
A Jaaj News Agency reporter and a Tolonews reporter were beaten and their equipment was broken and thrown into the river by the IEA at Torkham Gate when they were recording reports about travellers’ experiences;
Hussain Ahmadi, a Rah-e Farda TV reporter, was arrested in Kabul by the IEA;
Sayed Maroof Sadat was killed in Jalalabad in early October;
Qazfi Mal, a Pajhwok reporter, was threatened by the head of Kunar’s public health department because he was not quoted in a report about the health situation in the province;
Wakil Sharifi, an RTA-Ghazni reporter, was insulted by a local Taleban official in a meeting at the ICD in Ghazni;
Jamal Kamarzada, Ayana TV reporter, was beaten by armed Taleban men while reporting from Shar-e Naw in Kabul;
Some media outlet managers in Farah, including Oruj radio station and Radio Neshat, were summoned by the ICD due to the content of their programming or for broadcasting music;
Zia Rahman Faruqi, Speenghar Radio’s manager, was arrested by the Taleban in Nangrahar on suspicion of having ties with the ISKP. He was released later.
September:
Murtaza Samadi, a photojournalist, was arrested and beaten by the Taleban on suspicion of organising illegal protests in Herat. He was released later.
August:
A Pajhwok reporter and a Tolo reporter were beaten in Nangrahar.
↑12
ANJU released its primary findings on 27 October. At the time, it had registered and reviewed 30 cases.
↑13
The Afghan Journalists Safety Committee has also catalogued incidents of violence against journalists in its weekly reports since 10 October, but was unable to provide overall figures. The reports show, however, that October was the worst month in the four it scrutinised (August, September, October and November) with 17 cases, including seven beatings, two unspecified threats, three short detentions, one bullying, one killing, one failed assassination and two interrogations. The reports listed four cases in August, one in September, and two in November. Nangrahar with six cases, including the only murder, and Kabul with five cases were the two worst provinces. The AJSC has not reported all cases of violence against journalists, including several cases documented by other organisations. For instance, two Etilaat-e Rozjournalists, Nemat Naqdi and Taqi Daryabi, were arrested and tortured on 8 September while covering a women’s protest in Kabul. The paper’s editor and two other journalists were also arrested on the same day when they went to the police station in the third district of Kabul to secure their colleagues’ release. Muhammad Ali Ahmadi, a journalist working with Salam Watandar, was shot and injured by an unidentified gunman in Kabul on 18 September while in a shared taxi, and three journalists were assaulted during the 21 September women’s protest in Kabul.
↑14
First guideline issued on 19 September.
No report or programme against Islam shall be published or broadcast;
National personalities shall not be insulted in media activities;
National and individual privacy shall not be insulted;
Media outlets and journalists shall not fabricate news content;
Journalists shall write in accordance to journalism principles;
Media outlets shall apply the balance principle in their reporting;
Caution shall be taken when reporting about issues which their correctness is not approved, and not confirmed by [the Taleban] officials;
Caution shall be taken when broadcasting or publishing issues which could have a negative impacts on public mindset or could damage people’s morale;
Media outlets shall stay impartial and shall broadcast/publish the truths;
The Government Media [and Information] Centre tries to stay cooperative with media outlets and journalists and provide [them] facilities for producing reports and from now on media outlets shall produce their detailed reports in coordination with this office;
He office of governmental media outlets [The Government Media and Information Centre], has developed a specific form to help media outlets and journalists in producing reports.
↑15
Second Guideline was only sent to five TV channels. A journalist who spoke to AAN on condition of anonymity said that the Taleban had asked the five TV channels not to share it with others.
Greetings:
Ministry of Information and Culture of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is a supportive organ to journalists, social media and mass media. The leadership of the information and culture ministry met some of media outlets representatives on 29/06/1400 (20 September 20210). It was an introductory meeting but some important topics were also discussed.
This organ [the ministry] preparing to organise regular meetings with media outlets representatives to discuss improvement of work, achievements and organising better programmes in future.
Therefore, we hope that you adjust your broadcasting in accordance to Islam Holy Religion and Afghanistan culture and avoid producing, broadcasting and publication of issues listed as follows:
Programmes and publications which are against Islam principles and instructions
Programmes and publications which assault legal and natural persons
Advertising and promoting of other religion except Islam
Programmes and publications damage public moral security, especially moral of children and youngster;
It should be noted that Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan rules the entire country and provides services to the religion, the country and the nation. From now on, no media outlets should refer to the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan as a group or a network. When referring to Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan the complete title should be said;
No media outlets is allowed to encourage our young people to travel abroad
With respect
Zabiullah Mujahid
Publications Affairs Deputy of the Ministry of Information and Culture
↑16
These prohibitions include broadcasting programmes against Islam; promoting religions other than Islam; insulting legal or natural persons (avoid using national personalities); negatively impacting public morality, especially children and youngsters; or programmes encouraging the young generation to leave the country.
↑17
The Third Guideline:
1: TV channels should not broadcast movies which are against Sharia principles and Afghan values.
2: Those foreign and domestic movies promote foreign culture which is against Afghan social norms and cause immorality should not be broadcasted.
3: entertainment programmes should not insult and humiliate anyone.
4: Dramas which insult religious teachings and human dignity should not be broadcasted.
5: Films and videos which show private part of a man’s body [according to Sharia definition] should not be broadcasted.
6: Women journalists in TV channels should wear Islamic hijab.
7: Dramas and theatres in which women play roles should not be broadcasted.
8: Broadcasting dramas which show faces of actors who played the messengers of God and sahaba is absolutely forbidden.
↑18
These rights are including but not limited to a) right to request, receive and transfer information, dates and opinions without interference and limitation by the state officials in accordance to the law; b) no entity including the state agencies and officials is allowed to prevent, boycott, censor or restrict the free media or to interfere, by any means, to publications and broadcasting of the mass media but in accordance to the law; c) journalists are under legal protections for their professional duties including publications of reports and critics; and d) Journalists are not obliged to reveal the sources of their information.
REVISIONS:
This article was last updated on 6 Mar 2022
Regime Change, Economic Decline and No Legal Protection: What has happened to the Afghan media?
The United Nations says aid workers are still in a “race against time” to remove rubble and rebuild after the devastating earthquake struck eastern Afghanistan last month, killing at least 2,200 people and cutting off remote areas.
The 6.0-magnitude quake on Aug. 31 was shallow, destroying or causing extensive damage to low-rise buildings in the mountainous region. It hit late at night, and homes — mostly made of mud, wood, or rocks — collapsed instantly, becoming death traps.
Satellite data shows that about 40,500 truckloads of debris still needs to be cleared from affected areas in several provinces, the United Nations Development Program said Wednesday. Entire communities have been upended and families are sleeping in the open, it added.
The quake’s epicenter was in remote and rugged Kunar province, challenging rescue and relief efforts by the Taliban government and humanitarian groups. Authorities deployed helicopters or airdropped army commandos to evacuate survivors. Aid workers walked for hours on foot to reach isolated communities.
“This is a race against time,” said Devanand Ramiah, from the UNDP’s Crisis Bureau. “Debris removal and reconstruction operations must start safely and swiftly.”
People’s main demands were the reconstruction of houses and water supplies, according to a spokesman for a Taliban government committee tasked with helping survivors, Zia ur Rahman Speenghar.
People were getting assistance in cash, food, tents, beds, and other necessities, Speenghar said Thursday. Three new roads were under construction in the Dewagal Valley, and roads would be built to areas where there previously were none.
“Various countries and organizations have offered assistance in the construction of houses but that takes time. After the second round of assistance, work will begin on the third round, which is considering what kind of houses can be built here,” the spokesman said.
Afghanistan is facing a “perfect storm” of crises, including natural disasters like the recent earthquake, said Roza Otunbayeva, who leads the U.N. mission to the country.
Afghanistan Peace Campaign
