No Climate Change Deniers: The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan goes to COP29, as an observer

November 25, 2024

Thomas Ruttig

Afghanistan Analysts Network

The 29th UN Climate Change Conference, or COP29, which was hosted by the Republic of Azerbaijan, concluded on 24 November 2024 in Baku, with a delegation from the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in attendance. This was the first time the Emirate had participated in a UN-organised conference on climate, but only as an observer. The invitation was extended to the Emirate by the host country and not by the United Nations. The Emirate’s delegation was led by the National Environment Programme of Afghanistan’s new Director-General, Mati ul-Haq Khales. The UN, for its part, invited two Afghan NGOs and a civil society representative to participate in COP29 side events. AAN’s former co-director Thomas Ruttig delves into what prompted this invitation, as well as examining Afghanistan’s climate-related challenges and the Emirate’s words and actions on climate change.

The politics of an invitation

For the first time since it took power in August 2021, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) has taken part in a major conference organised by the United Nations,[1] the 29th Conference of the Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), or simply the COP29, which was held in the Republic of Azerbaijan’s capital Baku 11-24 November 2024. (The conference was scheduled to close on 22 November, but it overran for 33 hours because of bitter negotiations that came within inches of collapse, BBC reported).[2]

Notably, the Emirate was invited as an observer to the conference by the host country, Azerbaijan, rather than the United Nations itself, which is the COP29 organiser. Although Afghanistan is party to the 2015 Paris Agreement,[3] participation as an observer allows the IEA to take part in discussions without having the full voting rights or decision-making powers that a member state does.

For the IEA, attending the COP29 is a significant moment in its quest to end its international isolation and gain legitimacy and recognition on the world stage.

The UN cannot officially invite the IEA because the Emirate does not hold Afghanistan’s seat at the world body and — as of now — no UN member state has officially recognised the Emirate. This is despite the fact that several countries, particularly those in Afghanistan’s neighbourhood, namely Turkey, Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, most Central Asian republics and, less prominently, India – maintain more than just informal diplomatic relations (see a breakdown from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and more on India from The Diplomat). By now, many have exchanged ambassadors with Kabul.

Despite this, these countries along with all other UN member states continue to unanimously deny the Emirate a seat in the UN, which has long been a demand of the IEA. This year, the absence of an invitation to the 79th UN General Assembly session was notable, as it marked the fourth consecutive year that the Emirate had not received an invitation. In response, the Emirate protested and expressed its dissatisfaction with its continued exclusion (see ToloNews).[4]

This situation raises the question of whether a delegation from the Emirate should take part in UN conferences. It is, therefore, not only a climate policy issue but, indeed, also one of general foreign policy.

Similar to the UN’s controversial move to secure the participation of the IEA by excluding all other Afghan parties or relegating them to side events, including women and civil society actors, which led to widespread condemnations and a call from women’s rights activists to boycott Doha III (see USIP’s analysis here, MEMRI here and this DROPS video on X), the question whether to invite IEA representatives to Baku or not, regardless in what capacity, was also highly controversial. Leading civil society activists, mainly in the diaspora, and UN independent experts have decried every instance of the UN’s engagement with the Emirate, for example in this statement from 14 August 2024, signed by more than 20 Special Rapporteurs, Independent Experts and Working Groups. They argue:

There should be no move to normalise the de facto authorities, unless and until there are demonstrated, measurable, and independently verified improvements against human rights benchmarks, particularly for women and girls.

Before Doha III, other women NGO activists from inside the country stated that they found the UN’s approach understandable. In a recent online meeting the author attended, one of them said that “somehow a dialogue [with the Taleban] has to start.” However, she hoped that the UN would later bring women back into the Doha talks. She and others pointed out that their organisations, some of them still women-led, were already conducting an extremely difficult, discreet, topic-centred dialogue with the Taleban authorities. The Afghan woman quoted above said when, in advance to Doha III, UN special envoy for Afghanistan, Rosa Otunbayeva, held consultations, “the room was full” and she regretted that voices from within the country were less present in the public.[5] Even more so, those who argue for engagement were often denounced as ‘Taleban proxies’ or ‘appeasers’ by parts of the diaspora.

An invitation to observe 

Mati ul-Haq Khales, who is the Director-General of Afghanistan’s National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA) and heads up the Emirate’s three-member all-male delegation, confirmed that the invitation came from Azerbaijan’s Environment Minister Mukhtar Babayev, who is also President of the COP29 conference (see AFP). Khales, son of a prominent former Mujahideen leader, the late Mawlawi Yunus Khales,[6] said the Emirate “really appreciated” Babayev’s invitation and the facilitation of the visas by the government of Azerbaijan, according to AFP who spoke to him after he arrived in Baku.

Being an observer means the men representing the IEA at COP29 are not allowed to take part in the actual conference, have no voting rights and remain blocked from access to international funds under the UN which have already been created — or are meant to be created in Baku — intended to alleviate the effects of climate change. It can also not officially submit Afghanistan’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) — the national plan to reduce emissions and adapt to the effects of climate change — to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the UN entity responsible for convening the COP conferences. Notably, the UNFCCC’s Bureau of the COP “has deferred consideration of Afghanistan’s participation since 2021, in effect freezing the country out of the talks,” as reported by Reuters.

This, however, is not the first time the Emirate has been invited to environmental meetings, at least according to NEPA’s Director for Climate Change, Ruhollah Amin, who is also a member of Afghanistan’s COP29 delegation, who said that NEPA had been “invited to other [unspecified] environmental summits in the past but did not receive visas,” adding that “the agency has received an invitation and is working on securing visas to attend the U.N. summit on desertification in Saudi Arabia,” (as reported by Hurriyet Daily News quoting an earlier interview with AFP).[7]

Regardless of their status at COP29, Azerbaijan’s invitation put the IEA delegation in a position to “potentially participate in periphery discussions and potentially hold bilateral meetings,” as a “diplomatic source familiar with the matter” described to Reuters.

AAN has learned, from a source in Kabul who asked not to be identified, that the UN political mission in Afghanistan, UNAMA, which according to its most recent mandate, is tasked with “deepening engagement” with the Taleban may have supported or even initiated the invitation. According to a Security Council mandated report by the Special Coordinator, Feridun Sinirlioğlu, released on 8 November 2023, progress in a range of areas including women’s rights and political inclusion “would be necessary for any forward progress on normalization and recognition.” Despite UN engagement, the Emirate’s lack of progress on human rights clearly stands in the way of diplomatic recognition, as highlighted in various UN Security Council resolutions since August 2021 – not least because Afghanistan, as a UN member state, is bound by the relevant international conventions that it is signatory to.

The fact that UNAMA continues its work in Afghanistan, despite the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice announcing in September 2024 that it would cease all cooperation with the UN mission in Afghanistan as a result of “their repeated propaganda against the implementation of Sharia law,” (see Agencia EFE report quoting the ministry’s spokesman, Mawlawi Sabawoon) and that the IEA has not given any indications that it intends to cease its engagement with the UN, provides at least a theoretical basis for further talks.

There has also been speculation that the next meeting of the Special Envoys for Afghanistan and IEA representatives (Doha IV) would focus on climate-related issues, one of the three issues discussed during the previous meeting – the first of such meetings with IEA participation – on 30 June to 1 July 2024.[8] As of this writing, the future of the Doha format meetings remains uncertain and a date for the next round of talks has not yet been decided.

Afghan NGOs participate in COP29 side events 

The IEA delegation was not the only Afghan participant at COP29. The UN invited two Afghan non-governmental organisations and an individual civil society representative active in the environmental sector, which are not part of the official Emirate delegation, to participate in side events in Baku (see the list of NGOs accredited to participate in COP29 here). In addition, some individuals obtained permission to attend online sessions and there were also a few Afghan nationals who attended the meeting in Baku, but as representatives of organisations based outside Afghanistan, according to Afghan water resource management specialist (and frequent AAN contributor), Muhammad Assem Mayar, who works at the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research in Müncheberg near Berlin (see his post on X).

The two Afghanistan-based organisations officially invited by the UN were the Environmental Protection Training and Development Organisation (EPTDO) and The Liaison Office (TLO); the latter does not specialise in the environment but does run community-based environmental projects. Both organisations are based in Kabul. The third Afghan civil society participant, Marwa Alam Safa, represented Afghan youth at the COP29 side event, the UN Youth Conference. She works in the environmental sector at the Agha Khan Foundation in Afghanistan, is the country director of the international NGO EcoClimate Vision (according to her LinkedIn profile) and is part of the core team of the Climate and Environment Youth Initiative (CEYI) in Afghanistan (see One Million Leaders Asia for more information about her).[9]

In a post on the social media platform LinkedIn on 14 November, Safa wrote that she took part in Baku “with a simple but vital mission: to amplify the voices of Afghan youth, showing that we want to be part of the global climate solution and to fight for climate justice.”

Afghanistan’s climate issues

The UN and NGOs focusing on climate-related issues in Afghanistan as a way of engaging with the Emirate may seem tactical, which it certainly is, but it is also much more than that. Afghanistan is literarily feeling the heat of the climate crisis. With its estimated population of over 40 million, Afghanistan is one of the ten countries most affected by “extreme weather and severe disasters driven by climate change,” according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA). It is also the sixth most vulnerable country to climate change and fourth in overall disaster risk (see the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Resident Representative Stephen Rodriques’ interview on Tolonews, German NGO Germanwatch’s Global Climate Risk Index and this Radio Azadi report quoting the European Commission’s Inform Risk Index). At the same time, it “is one of the lowest producers of planet-heating fossil fuel emissions, accounting for less than 1% of the global total (more accurately 0.6 per cent, according to UNDP). In other words, Afghanistan’s emissions are 25 times less per capita than, for example, Germany and account for only 6.5 per cent of the global average (see Statstica).

Behind the numbers and statistics are the Afghan people who bear the brunt of the seemingly relentless climate-related calamities that strike Afghanistan (see this dossier of AAN’s extensive reporting on the environment and climate change here) –  from devastating multiyear droughts (see AAN report), to destructive floods that rumble through communities, sweeping away everything in their paths, including people, homes, harvests and arable soil, most recently in April, May, August and October 2024 (see AAN reporting here and here),[10] soil erosion and declining agricultural productivity, according to the UNDP representative in Afghanistan, Stephen Rodriques (see Arab News here). Drought precipitated by climate change, according to Mayar, reduces agricultural yields by around 30 per cent, which in turn leads to a ten per cent decline in the country’s entire economy (see his post on X here).

The international aid organisation Save the Children, citing data from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), reported in August 2024 that Afghanistan had recorded “the highest number of children [747,094] made homeless by climate disasters of any country” at the end of 2023 (see here). The report went on to say that 25 of the country’s 34 provinces are “facing severe or catastrophic drought conditions, affecting more than half of the country’s population.”

Despite the Emirate’s (albeit decreasing) international isolation and exclusion from various UN fora, the invitation to Baku may provide room to discuss ways to revive climate-related development cooperation. Some argue that Afghanistan’s population should not be punished for the impasse between the international community and its current government and certainly not for a crisis not of Afghan’s own doing.[11]

Occasions for dialogue, said Mayar, will allow the Emirate to present Afghanistan’s NDC in bilateral meetings on the margins of the conference and unofficially submit their plans to UNFCCC. However, the hope is that this will at least pave the way for negotiations. He also pointed out that money for climate projects in Afghanistan must solve “national infrastructure problems” and not be spent on small-scale projects such as livelihoods projects – which, he said, “are important but may not have the desired impact” (see his post on X here). He stressed that, over the last three years, climate impact adaptation projects for Afghanistan worth 826 million USD have been suspended as a result of the cancellation of western development cooperation. He, therefore, advocates for the “decentralisation” of climate impact financing, especially in countries affected by conflict or the consequences of conflict, such as Afghanistan (see his post on X here).

The Emirate’s position on climate change 

Pointing to Afghanistan’s climate crisis-related vulnerabilities, the IEA presents itself as a serious actor on climate issues. Its delegation in Baku struck a conciliatory and factual tone in Baku, chiming in with many COP29 participants to “deliver the message … to the world community that climate change is a global issue and it does not know transboundary issues,” the NEPA Director-General, Khales told AFP.

He also made clear the IEA positions and demands. The participants at COP29 should take vulnerable countries such as Afghanistan, which are most affected by the effects of climate change, into account “in their decisions,” he told AFP. Khales, who was a member of the Taleban negotiating team during the Doha talks between the US and the Taleban, which culminated in the 2020 Doha agreement, spoke of “climate justice” and described access to funds as his country’s “main expectation” from COP29: “Our people in Afghanistan should [be able to] access” climate-related funds, he said. Like other countries in the global south, the Taleban believe that wealthier countries, which are the greatest contributors of harmful greenhouse gas emissions, should compensate them for climate-related damages. In an apparent indirect reference to the Emirate’s contentious policies on women’s rights, Khales said that implementing climate protection projects would also be a “boost” for women.

Mayar told AAN he believed that the Emirate appointed Khales, who had been leading the Afghan Red Crescent Society (ARCS), to head NEPA “because he had already successfully raised funds and conducted negotiations there.”

In the lead-up to the Baku conference, NEPA’s Deputy Director-General, Zainulabedin Abed, called on the international community not to “relate climate change matters with politics” – a reference to the issues of contention between the Emirate and the world community. “Climate change is a humanitarian subject,” he said (see Hurriyet Daily News quoting AFP here). This can be interpreted as a willingness to negotiate, but also as a refusal to make concessions on other issues.

The IEA has not joined the ranks of so-called ‘climate change deniers’ nor has it indicated it intends to withdraw from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, which the previous government ratified. In fact, the Emirate organised an event billed as Afghanistan’s “international climate change conference” in Jalalabad (Nangrahar province) earlier this year, where it was affirmed that “climate change is real, that it’s destroying God’s work and that those in the world who reject the truth of climate change need to get on board” and asked imams in all Afghanistan’s mosques “to emphasize during Friday prayers the need for environmental protection” (see the Washington Post). A Kabul imam, Farisullah Azhari interviewed by the Washington Post at the event said: “Carbon footprints will weigh heavily on judgment day … ‘God will ask: How did you make your money? And then he will ask: How much suffering did you cause in the process?’”

Similarly, NEPA’s account on X has recently been overflowing with photos and short reports on IEA climate change events and the activities of its environmental protection programmes across many provinces, some of which reference stewardship of the environment as a religious obligation.

Afghanistan’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), a five-year plan that each country ought to prepare and submit to UNFCCC — which the IEA delegation took to Baku – has a budget of more than 17 billion USD for the period 2025-2030. Although NDCs have to be updated every five years, Afghanistan had not substantively updated its plan since it was drafted by the previous government in September 2015 (see here). The 2015 plan also required 17 billion USD , but for an entire decade from 2021 to 2030. Last year, according to NEPA, the Emirate decided to update Afghanistan’s NDC regardless of whether the UNFCCC Secretariat accepted it at COP29. In this update, the amount of funding sought in the previous plan remained the same, but the funding period halved. This, however, has no practical impact as long as the IEA is “frozen” by UNFCCC and thus lacks the ability to access global climate change funds.

On the UN side, UNDP was initially supposed to support NEPA in revising the NDC, but it backed out when it became obvious it would have to contribute to a document that would contradict the UN’s gender criteria, a source with knowledge of these discussions who asked not to be identified told AAN. Later, according to the same source, UNDP sought to fund a revision of NDC through the Afghan NGO REHA (Resilience, Environment and Humanitarian Aid; ‘Reha’ or ‘Raha’ means ‘rescue’ in Dari). This would have allowed UNDP to support the revision without being referenced in the document. NEPA, however, refused the proposal and said it would prefer to undertake the revision on its own.

A Kabul event to coincide with COP29

On the first day of COP29 in Baku, the Afghan NGO REHA held an event in Kabul titled ‘From Exclusion to Inclusion’, which according to the organisation sought to “make the voices of Afghan children, youth, women, the private sector, the ulama, local communities and experts heard” (see Mayar’s post on X here, REHA’s posts on LinkedIn and a position paper prepared by the organisation titled ‘From Exclusion to Inclusion Afghanistan’s urgent call for climate action at COP29”). In total, “over 160 representatives and officials from national authorities, UN agencies, NGOs, media, donor organisations, embassies and activists” took part in this event, according to REHA.

Among them was the Emirate’s acting Deputy Foreign Minister and former chief negotiator in Doha, Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanekzai, who blamed “NATO, America, Russia and all industrial countries” as the “general reason for the environmental problems we have in our country,” in his speech. “And today again they don’t want to cooperate with Afghanistan in order to solve the problems created by them,” he added (see his post on X here).

In conclusion, according to REHA, the participants, which were representatives from “diverse Afghan groups—academics, stakeholders, farmers, youth, & children from across the country – urged the @UNFCCC & @COP29_AZ  to re-integrate [Afghanistan] into climate finance, [and] to not ignore the severe consequences of the climate crisis in the country”(see REHA’s post on X here).

A call the Emirate is likely in agreement with.

What’s next?

Whether COP29 and the IEA’s participation in side events and bilateral meetings in Baku leads to progress for Afghanistan and helps the Emirate succeed in persuading UN member-states to reintegrate the country into the climate financing initiatives remains to be seen.

The meetings – at least those that have been made public– have not been too impressive, though, so far. NEPA published on its X account that the delegation met with the head of the South Asian Environmental Cooperation Program (SACEP); officials of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Ozone Secretariat; senior UNDP officials; the deputy head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Dragana Kojic; the Russian President’s Special Representative for Climate Change, Ruslan Edelgeriev and the Norwegian Special Representative for Afghanistan. It also participated in a meeting of “high officials” from Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, Mongolia and Azerbaijan on how to deal with climate change in mountainous areas (see NEPA’s post on X here). Apart from Norway, no representative from Afghanistan’s former major donor countries met the Emirate delegation, at least not on the record.

Apart from this, they met with members of the management boards of various UNFCCC-related multilateral funds in order to explore possibilities for access, an Afghan participant in Baku working for a third-country NGO told AAN. He was unable to say whether there was any progress. But apparently the IEA delegation said that it would support direct financing to Afghan environmental NGOs, should climate funds opt to support them.

Reuters quoted two UN officials as saying that that UN agencies were “trying to unlock” climate financing for Afghanistan. According to this report, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and UNDP were “currently drawing together proposals they hope to submit next year to shore up nearly $19 million in financing from the U.N’s Global Environment Facility (GEF), part of the financial mechanism of the 2015 U.N. Paris Agreement on climate change.”[12]

“We’re in conversations with the GEF, the Green Climate Fund, the Adaptation Fund – all these major climate financing bodies – to reopen the pipeline and get resources into the country, again, bypassing the de facto authorities,” UNDP’s Rodriques reportedly said. A Taleban spokesperson did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment. “If successful, this would be the first time new international climate finance would flow into the arid, mountainous nation in three years”, the agency concluded. It remains to be seen whether Afghanistan’s former major donor countries would agree to these moves.

For its part, the IEA was firmly looking to the future: “We are very interested to be as a party in the COP30 in Brazil,” said NEPA Director-General Khales (see Arab News here).

Edited by Roxanna Shapour and Jelena Bjelica

References

References
↑1 In the past two years, senior IEA officials have taken part in various forums in Russia, China and Central Asia, and the Emirate took part in the third UN-organised meeting on Afghanistan in Doha (Doha III), which was held on 30 June- 1 July 2024. They also made an appearance at the 2nd World Local Production Forum, as reported by Voice of America (VoA), organised by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in the Hague in November 2023. Before COP29, the Emirate had tried to establish relations with the BRICS countries, including Brazil which is slated to host COP30 in November 2025. It lobbied unsuccessfully for an invitation to the BRICS summit in Russia in October this year, according to Amu TV.
↑2 Azerbaijan opened its first-ever embassy in Kabul in February 2024 and sent an ambassador who had already been appointed in 2021, but resided elsewhere (see Radio Azadi). Foreign ministry spokesperson, Abdul Qahar Balkhi,  announced on X that the Emirate would also be expanding its presence in Baku. However, this does not appear to have happened and the Emirate is still represented in Azerbaijan by a chargé d’affaires, according to the IEA embassy in Baku’s website.
↑3 The Paris Agreement is a legally binding international treaty on climate change. It was adopted by 196 Parties at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris, France, on 12 December 2015. It entered into force on 4 November 2016.
↑4 The 79th session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA79) opened on 10 September 2024. The Credentials Committee, appointed at the beginning of UNGA sessions, is expected to address the issue of who holds Afghanistan’s seat at the UN at a designated session later this year – usually in December. That decision was deferred last year, on 6 December 2023, for the third time since the Emirate’s re-establishment. AAN’s Thomas Ruttig wrote in December 2023 about the deferrals in a report which also scrutinised UN procedures, intra-Republic rivalry as to who should represent Afghanistan at the UN and the impasse facing the IEA in its search for recognition.
↑5 She wished to remain anonymous because of the topics sensitivity.
↑6 See this the Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point 2013 report on the life of Yunus Khalid published on Jstor here.
↑7 The sixteenth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP16) of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) is scheduled to take place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on 2-13 December 2024.
↑8 The other two topics were counternarcotics and the private sector.
↑9 CEYI’s vice president, Naman Sajad, is also an Ozone specialist at NEPA, indicating that the initiative cooperates with the agency. See also CEYI’s report ‘Impacts of Climate Change on Afghan Women, Youth, and Children’, which also contains general information on the environmental situation in Afghanistan.
↑10 Afghanistan, up to the first half of the 1980s, used to have two predictable ‘rainy seasons’ per year, one of about two weeks in spring and one of about one weak in November.
↑11 See for example this opinion piece co-authored by Afghan and non-Afghan experts and published recently by Al-Jazeera: “Afghanistan: Caught between climate change and global indifference”, or this op-ed by leading Afghan media entrepreneur Saad Mohseni.
↑12 FAO “hopes to get support for a project costing $10 million that would improve rangeland, forest and watershed management across up to four provinces in Afghanistan, while avoiding giving money directly to Taliban authorities.” UNDP, meanwhile, “hopes to secure $8.9 million to improve the resilience of rural communities where livelihoods are threatened by increasingly erratic weather patterns, the agency told Reuters. If that goes ahead, it plans to seek another $20 million project.”

REVISIONS:

This article was last updated on 24 Nov 2024

TAGS:

Doha Talks clime change COP29

AUTHORS:

Thomas Ruttig

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No Climate Change Deniers: The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan goes to COP29, as an observer
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The Other in Me, The Other in You: Beyond the Burqa

November 22, 2024

By Sola Mahfouz

Middle East Center

Wilson Center

November 21, 2024

Sola Mahfouz reflects on representations of Afghan women in Western media and discourse. She argues that engagement with Afghan women’s full and complex lives is necessary for effective policymaking.

If the suffering of Afghan women is real and harrowing, then the global response often feels surreal, like a performance disconnected from the reality it claims to address.

To approach the Other “is to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I,” as Emmanuel Levinas wrote. The Other is not just a stranger that we encounter but is also a part of ourselves that defies full understanding. For me, the Other is both the self that I left behind at 20 and the version of myself imposed by Western narratives—the Afghan woman cloaked in a burqa, seen but never heard.

The burqa, while a potent symbol, has been overused to flatten the identities of Afghan women into a singular narrative of victimhood. But what lies beyond the burqa? To truly understand the Other, we must look past the veil of simplicity and engage with the layers of contradiction, agency, and resilience that define Afghan women’s lives, and, by extension, the infinite complexity of all Others.

Who is the Other?
When I moved to the United States, I encountered a new Other. It was not someone outside me, but a version of myself that existed only in the imaginations of others. My 20-year-old self, who had lived freely and without explanation, was replaced by the “Afghan woman” envisioned by Western audiences: oppressed, silent, and cloaked in a burqa.

This narrative was not mine, yet it followed me everywhere. My identity had been overwritten by a global script that reduced Afghan women to symbols of suffering and was used to justify interventions that seldom asked for our voices.

The burqa became the centerpiece of global narratives about Afghan women, used to project a singular image of oppression. TIME Magazine’s 2010 cover featuring Aisha, an Afghan woman mutilated by the Taliban, encapsulated this approach. While it drew attention to the horrors Afghan women faced, it reduced them to symbols of victimhood and sidelined their agency and roles in shaping Afghanistan’s and their own future.

In 2001, the Oprah Winfrey Show featured a theatrical performance involving the burqa. In the aftermath of 9/11, Oprah and her team featured models parading in burqas to dramatize the suffering of Afghan women. The show invoked gasps of horror from the audience, as though the garment itself encapsulated the entirety of Afghan women’s suffering. The performance was devoid of nuance, context, or any meaningful engagement with the lives of Afghan women. Instead, it was a spectacle that centered the Western audience’s feelings of pity and righteousness instead of the voices of the women it claimed to advocate for.

As if the absurdities of life under the Taliban weren’t enough, Afghan women must also endure the well-meaning but tone-deaf interventions of Western celebrities. Meryl Streep’s recent comments at the UN General Assembly offered a stark illustration. In a speech meant to highlight the plight of Afghan women, she declared: “a female cat in Kabul has more freedom than a woman. A bird can sing, but a girl cannot.”At first glance, these words might seem poetic, even compassionate, but they ultimately serve to obscure rather than illuminate. Instead of engaging with the lived realities of Afghan women, Streep’s metaphor reduces them to voiceless creatures, trapped in a narrative that exists more to elicit pity than to reflect their full humanity.

These spectacles of advocacy have turned Afghan women into objects of pity rather than subjects of their own stories, erasing their voices in the process. However, Levinas reminds us that the Other is infinite. It exceeds any attempt to define them.

Engaging with the Other

Afghanistan is a land of contradictions. The very allies that were ‘promoting women’s rights’ celebrated the warlords responsible for atrocities as champions of democracy. To understand the Other in Afghanistan is to confront these contradictions, not dismiss them as ‘cultural.’ The Other is not a fixed identity but a dynamic, evolving presence shaped by layers of history, politics, and personal experience. To approach the Other ethically, we must resist simplifying these contradictions and instead embrace the complexity they represent.

If the suffering of Afghan women is real and harrowing, then the global response often feels surreal, like a performance disconnected from the reality it claims to address. Advocacy, in many cases, has become a spectacle of symbolic gestures.

To truly engage with the Other, we must go beyond the burqa, the symbols, and our own need to feel like saviors. Afghan women are not waiting for poetic metaphors or viral campaigns. They are risking their lives every day to resist oppression. Ethical engagement requires humility, action, and, above all, a recognition of their agency.

“To have the idea of infinity,” Levinas writes, is to recognize that the Other exceeds our understanding at every moment. For Afghan women, this infinity lies beyond the burqa, beyond the symbols used to define them. It is found in their contradictions and their agency.

The views represented in this piece are those of the author and do not express the official position of the Wilson Center.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sola Mahfouz
Global Fellow;
Co-Author, Defiant Dreams

The Other in Me, The Other in You: Beyond the Burqa
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‘Bread & Roses’ Review: A Spirit of Resistance

November 21, 2024

The New York Times

Bread & Roses
Directed by Sahra Mani
Documentary
A woman in a head scarf holds up the palm of her hand, on which a message written in pen says: # stand with women in Afghanistan.

The documentary “Bread & Roses” follows the lives of three Afghan women in the wake of the Taliban’s return to power.Credit…Apple Original Films

When the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan three years ago, one of the group’s first orders of business was to systematically erase women’s rights. Girls’ schools shuttered, women were barred from public spaces and female professionals were told not to return to work.

“Bread & Roses,” which follows the lives of three Afghan women in the wake of the Taliban’s return to power, does not communicate these prohibitions in voice-over or title cards. Instead, the director, Sahra Mani, makes the deliberate choice to clear the way for her subjects to reach the audience directly, in their own words.

Through cellphone footage captured on the fly, the documentary zeros in on three subjects defying their loss of freedom: Sharifa, a former government employee stuck at home because of restrictions to being out in public; Zahra, a dentist taken by the Taliban after protesting for her rights; and Taranom, an activist sheltering in a safe house in Pakistan. Intercutting among scenes of these experiences, the film illustrates the effective options for women living under Taliban rule: house arrest, prison or exile.

As the three stories veer off in different directions, the film struggles to coalesce around a clean narrative. It doesn’t help that we often only receive snippets of episodes, with the contexts hazy and the relations among those onscreen uncertain. But while the immediacy of the storytelling may blur out precise details, it excels at building stakes. When, in one memorable scene, young girls address the camera to demand brighter futures, the movie’s message and ongoing mission are thrown into sharp relief.

Bread & Roses
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+.

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Afghanistan: Caught between climate change and global indifference

November 21, 2024
Andreas Stefansson
Al Jazeera
Published On 21 Nov 2024

The world is facing a climate crisis, and few nations are feeling its impact more acutely than Afghanistan. It is currently ranked seventh on the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Index of countries most vulnerable and least prepared to adapt to climate change. Afghanistan’s population is caught in a vicious cycle of floods, droughts, cold and heatwaves, and food insecurity. For a country with the 11th lowest contributions per capita to global carbon emissions, the scale of the consequences it faces is a tragic injustice.

In 2024, Afghanistan experienced severe flooding that devastated vital agricultural land in the northern provinces, and hundreds of people were killed. Before this, the country was ravaged by drought for three consecutive years. Crops were destroyed, leaving millions of people without their primary source of income and food. And yet, despite the increasingly visible impact of climate change on the Afghan people, the country has been excluded from representation under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – the primary mechanism for global climate cooperation – since the Taliban takeover in August 2021. Major sources of funding for climate adaptation have also been suspended.

At the UN Climate Change Conference COP29, the country is once again excluded from the negotiations. However, in a positive step towards inclusion, Afghanistan’s National Environment Protection Agency has been invited as a guest of the host country and will hopefully be given the opportunity to present Afghanistan’s updated climate action plan. The country is also represented by delegates from two Afghan civil society organisations accredited as observers.

To withhold climate assistance is to punish the Afghan population for the acts of its leaders. The consequences are being borne by the people, not the de facto authorities. Afghanistan is being denied access to the Green Climate Fund, a crucial source of financing for developing nations to adapt to the effects of climate change. This exclusion strikes directly at the most vulnerable in Afghanistan and occurs at a time when international support to Afghanistan in general is rapidly decreasing.

The need for intervention is urgent. A total 12.4 million people are experiencing acute food insecurity, and four million people, including 3.2 million children under five years old, are suffering from acute malnutrition, according to the World Food Programme (WFP). Farmers need sustainable irrigation systems and more resilient crops, and communities need stronger disaster preparedness. Without these investments, poverty will deepen, and millions of people will face an even more severe humanitarian crisis. Women and children who are already bearing the brunt of food insecurity will suffer the most. Agriculture employs more women than any other economic sector in the country, and by excluding Afghanistan from climate financing, the international community is in fact punishing those it has vowed to protect.

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The reluctance among predominately Western governments to engage with the Taliban should not come at the expense of the Afghan people. Experts and NGOs have proposed concrete strategies to ensure that climate funding reaches the Afghan people without legitimising the Taliban, e.g. through partnerships of international and national NGOs. The international community must listen to their recommendations and commit to finding constructive, long-term strategies to provide support.

The science is clear: if nothing is done, Afghanistan’s problems with drought and flooding will only worsen. Afghanistan had the highest number of children displaced by extreme weather in 2023, more than 700,000, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. Just last month, the WFP warned that the persistence of La Nina weather patterns through winter 2024 will likely lead to less rain and snow in Afghanistan, jeopardising the next wheat harvest and pushing even more people towards hunger.

Climate change knows no borders, and the international community must demonstrate solidarity with the most vulnerable. We cannot afford to turn our backs on Afghanistan. Every day of inaction deepens Afghanistan’s climate disaster.

Andreas Stefansson is Secretary General of the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan.
Afghanistan: Caught between climate change and global indifference
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‘I just felt desperate to do something’: Jennifer Lawrence and Malala on their film about the Afghan women fighting back

November 20, 2024
Emma Jones
BBC News
19 Nov 2024

Malala Yousafzai and Jennifer Lawrence tell the BBC about their new documentary Bread & Roses, which highlights the stories and voices of Afghan women resisting the Taliban.

It’s being called “gender apartheid” by the UN. In August 2021, the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan. A generation of women who had new opportunities to work, study and hold public office under the previous government, found their lives overturned. Girls are refused formal secondary and university education, women are banned from most work sectors, and from using parks and gyms. Beauty salons have been closed. Now female voices are even forbidden to be heard in public. The Taliban has said the new laws are accepted in Afghan society, and in accordance with Islamic Sharia law.

Bread & Roses is a documentary filmed from within Afghanistan by women who have resisted these restrictions on their lives. “I am taking a video, do not call me,” Dr Zahra Mohammadi tells a caller in the film, as she runs downstairs to her workplace.

Dr Mohammadi is a young dentist who celebrated her engagement just before the Taliban reached Kabul, a few weeks before the video is taken. She expresses hope to the audience that she can still work under the new government. “Up until now the Taliban have not bothered doctors, although they’ve just ordered me to remove my name upon the sign,” she tells the camera.

It was important for us to get eyes inside Kabul because that’s exactly what the Taliban did not want – Jennifer Lawrence

Dr Mohammadi puts her office sign back up in a prominent position on the street, with her name still on it. It’s also a sign of the courage she displays throughout the film.  Soon her dental practice is a secret hub for female activists, as the Taliban’s restrictions closes secondary and university education opportunities for girls. As the film continues, female resistance is met with arrests, prison sentences, and disappearances.

Filmed without a narrator and made in the Afghan languages of Dari and Pashto, Bread & Roses (the title is taken from a political slogan adopted by 20th Century suffragettes) is a mainly fly-on-the-wall documentary that relies upon the main protagonists to film themselves. Which they do, at demonstrations where they demand “bread, education and freedom”. They film when they’re arrested at the protests, when they’re sprayed with tear gas, and as their doors are being kicked down by the Taliban. “Girls educated up to 12th grade are stuck at home,” says one older protester of the situation. “They had dreamed of being doctors, engineers and teachers. It’s tragic. They had dreams.”

Jennifer Lawrence and Malala on their film about Afghan women

The film may be directed by an Afghan film-maker living abroad, Sahra Mani (also the maker of a hard-hitting 2018 documentary about the rape of Afghan girls, A Thousand Girls Like Me) but Bread & Roses is backed by Hollywood. It’s produced by Oscar-winner Jennifer Lawrence, and executive produced by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning activist, Malala Yousafzai, herself once the victim of a Taliban shooting.

Lawrence tells the BBC that it was watching the news after the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan, and what she saw unfolding for women, that spurred her into action as far back as 2021. “I just felt desperate to do something,” she says. “And cameras help with helplessness.”

Lawrence says that she wanted to know if anyone was filming what was happening to Afghan women and girls from within the country. “It was important for us to get eyes inside Kabul because that’s exactly what the Taliban did not want,” she says. “So when we reached out to Sahra, as we were already familiar with her work, we found that she was already collecting footage from girls on the ground in Kabul.”

The women in the film were taught how to use cameras, and how, if possible, not to get caught. “I spent time on the border of Afghanistan, to be able to be close to my team and to collect the material,” Mani tells the BBC. “We built a team to train our protagonists how to film themselves and to do it in a safe way, so if their cell phones were checked by the Taliban, they don’t find out about it.”

Making women’s voices heard 

Lawrence isn’t the first high-profile Hollywood celebrity to condemn the erosion of Afghan women’s human rights. In September, Meryl Streep told a UN General Assembly event that a cat had more rights than a woman living in Afghanistan, because a cat may go out “and feel the Sun on her face”.

But Lawrence’s activism follows other famous women who’ve put their names to documentaries highlighting recent experiences of Afghan women. Hillary and Chelsea Clinton were two of the producers on the 2022 film, In Her Hands, about Afghanistan’s youngest ever female mayor, and the turmoil she experienced in the months leading up to the Taliban’s takeover.

I think that film-making is how I deal with life. It’s my artistic process and that’s how I also process – Jennifer Lawrence

The Clintons and Lawrence have now also executive-produced a documentary on women’s rights closer to home – Zurawski v Texas (2024), about women who were denied an abortion despite life-threatening circumstances and sued the state of Texas. As some women in the US say their rights over their bodies are being eroded, while others support more restrictive stricter abortion policies, does Lawrence use film-making for what she considers to be good causes?

“I think that film-making is how I deal with life,” she replies. “It’s my artistic process and that’s how I also process. And in a lot of ways, it’s my only weapon when I’m watching something play out and you feel that impotent rage. Zurawski v Texas was extremely timely, as abortion was on the [US election] ballot.

Apple TV+ Bread & Roses is a mainly fly-on-the-wall documentary that relies upon the main protagonists to film themselves (Credit: Apple TV+)
Bread & Roses is a mainly fly-on-the-wall documentary that relies upon the main protagonists to film themselves (Credit: Apple TV+)

“Women are dying because Roe v Wade was overturned, and the dialogue in America around abortion is just so fraught,” Lawrence says. There’s just such a disconnect on what Americans even think abortion is, and so that was really important to lend my voice to.

“Bread & Roses was more born from just a necessity, just watching it happen in the moment and just needing to do something.”

Malala thinks that the very act of filming was these Afghan women’s own way of dealing with the heavy restrictions on their lives.

“It’s a very powerful way of resistance for Afghan women to make their voices loud and clear and to make themselves visible against the Taliban, when they are using everything they have in their power to silence women,” she tells the BBC. “In essence it’s systematic oppression that they’re imposing, they’re controlling literally anything to do with a woman’s life.”

To resist them, we have to do all that they don’t want us to do. Women have to be in those rooms. Women’s rights have to be on the agenda – Malala Yousafzai

Malala points out that since the documentary was made, Afghan women face even more challenges. A recent decree by the Taliban forbids a woman’s voice from being heard in public, which the Taliban says is based upon their interpretation of Sharia law. They cannot be heard singing or reading aloud from within their own homes. They must be veiled in public, including their faces.A Taliban spokesman told the BBC at the time that this edict is in accordance with Islamic Sharia law and that “any religious scholar can check its references”. They also said they are “working on” the issue of female education.

However, a psychologist working with Afghan women told the BBC this year that they were suffering from a “pandemic” of suicidal thoughts. “You closed the universities and schools, you might as well kill me now,” shouts one woman in Bread & Roses, when told by an official to “shut up, or I will kill you right now”.

“You have brought us horror instead of safety,” screams another woman at them in the documentary.

Although Dr Mohammadi opines in the film that “the Afghan woman is first oppressed at home by her father, brother or husband”, a striking feature of Bread & Roses is the number of supportive men and boys in these women’s lives, usually with their faces blurred for their safety. When the camera is focused on a night-time shot of the city of Kabul, female voices ring out shouting, “education is our right!” After a moment, a male voice is also heard clearly, joining in.

Malala tells the BBC she believes public pressure can ultimately force the Taliban into concessions. “They don’t want women to even be in talks that are happening with different countries’ representatives, they do not want women’s rights to be on the agenda,” she says.

“To resist them, we have to do all that they don’t want us to do. Women have to be in those rooms. Women’s rights have to be on the agenda, we have to call out gender apartheid and codify it into treaties, so that perpetrators like the Taliban are held accountable for the crimes that they’re committing against Afghan women.”

Such demands may feel far off. The BBC reported this year that female-led protests have stopped due to the reprisals, although some still post videos online with their faces covered. Sahra Mani says that with “safety as our main priority” when making the film, her main protagonists left Afghanistan before the film was released and their faces were shown.

Mobile phone footage, in a moving epilogue to the film, shows an older woman in hiding, teaching a group of young women in English. “Now this is useful for university entrance exams,” the woman says, as if nothing has changed.

The message of Bread & Roses is summed up in the words of one activist who has to flee, taking a last look at her home country.

“May history remember that once upon a time, such cruelty was permitted against the women of Afghanistan,” she says, as she crosses the border into Pakistan.

Bread & Roses is released on Apple TV+ from 22 November

‘I just felt desperate to do something’: Jennifer Lawrence and Malala on their film about the Afghan women fighting back
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How Can the West Handle the Taliban?

November 15, 2024
By , , and 
Foreign Policy Magazine

Regional engagement shows the possibilities—and obstacles—in Afghanistan.

Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid arrives to attend a press conference in Kabul.
Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid arrives to attend a press conference in Kabul.
Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid arrives to attend a press conference in Kabul on July 3, following the third Doha meeting.

  

With Donald Trump’s return to the U.S. presidency, the United States and the West face renewed opportunities and challenges in their approach to Afghanistan. His former envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, saw the election as an opening to fully implement the Doha Agreement, moving toward normalized relations, while the Taliban themselves have urged Trump for a “new chapter” in U.S.-Afghan relations.

Yet Trump’s new national security advisor, Mike Waltz, a decorated Afghanistan veteran, criticized the previous agreement, arguing that Washington had “unconditionally surrendered” and called for renewed U.S. fighting against the Taliban during the 2021 withdrawal. As the U.S. president who brokered the Doha Agreement, which set the stage for the complete withdrawal of all foreign troops from Afghanistan—and who once engaged in the controversial overture of inviting the Taliban to Camp David—Trump in his second term has a unique opportunity to build credibility with the Taliban to avoid past mistakes.

Trump will inherit a nearly deadlocked U.S. relationship with the Taliban, amid a waning Western focus. While Afghanistan’s neighbors are essentially moving toward de facto recognition, the recent closure of Afghan embassies in Europe and the quiet discontinuation of the position of the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan are signaling an increasing diplomatic decoupling between Kabul and the West. This has diminished the importance of formal recognition for the Taliban, eroding one of the West’s key leverage points.

The United States and its European partners have four key interests in Afghanistan: counterterrorism, counternarcotics, migration control, and the safe return of detainees held by the Taliban. Advancing these is fraught with challenges. Complicating matters further is a fifth, overarching concern—a moral obligation to protect human and women’s rights and preserve the gains from NATO’s 20-year intervention. Although promoting human rights was never the original aim of the U.S. intervention, and only part of European engagement, it has now become central to both genuine concerns and domestic political maneuvering.

For both the United States and Europe, the most pressing threat is the growing influence of the Islamic State-Khorasan Province (ISKP), a terrorist group that has established a foothold in Afghanistan and Pakistan. While the potential for this threat to be exaggerated exists, and alarmism should be avoided, ISKP has proved its capabilities, claiming responsibility for attacks that killed more than 200 people in Iran and Russia this year. Western intelligence agencies reported several foiled ISKP plots in Europe, including planned attacks at the Paris Olympic Games and a Taylor Swift concert in Austria—highlighting the group’s ambition and reach.

Navigating these complexities requires committed and coordinated U.S.-European diplomacy outside and inside Afghanistan. Just as they fought together, they must now present a united front in diplomatic efforts. While direct engagement with the Taliban remains controversial, positioning it as part of a broader trans-Atlantic effort makes it more politically viable. Instead of issuing ineffective demarches or hoping to fracture the Taliban from within, the West should accept Afghanistan’s current reality, engage where interests align, and practice strategic patience. The Taliban’s reclusive emir, Hibatullah Akhundzada, won’t live or lead forever, but the United States and Europe haven’t yet built ties with Afghanistan’s other key figures.

Demonstrating respect and granting legitimacy, such as formal recognition, are not the same. Since their first emirate in the late 1990s, the Taliban have sought international recognition, a U.N. seat, and diplomatic engagement, but more crucially, they have sought respect. Today, many senior Taliban leaders have spent years living abroad and have a stronger grasp of diplomacy than in the 1990s, spurred by the experiences, networks, and negotiating skills derived from the long process leading to the Doha Agreement in 2020. For the Taliban, de facto engagement and displays of diplomatic respect—such as Chinese President Xi Jinping personally receiving their ambassador—are far more significant than the de jure legitimacy of an international order they consider illegitimate.

There’s no shortage of engagement with the Taliban by non-Western powers. Aaron Zelin of the Washington Institute has meticulously tracked all Taliban diplomatic meetings since August 2021, nearly 2,000 in their first three years in power, with meetings accelerating year on year. When Uzbek Prime Minister Abdulla Aripov completed a formal visit to Afghanistan in August, it all seemed very “normal,” marking the highest-level visit since the Taliban took power. Hands were shaken, and trade deals were signed—and there was no mention of the Taliban’s policies toward women and girls or lack of inclusivity in government.

Countries such as China, Uzbekistan, and the United Arab Emirates are hosting Taliban ambassadors while avoiding the label of formal recognition or raising human rights concerns—a convenient diplomatic maneuver that the United States and European countries cannot replicate due to their own regulations and domestic politics.

However, while regional engagement enhances the Taliban’s legitimacy, it has yet to influence their behavior or prompt any meaningful compromises. Pakistani officials, for instance, are currently grappling with a surge in Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) attacks, which have claimed the lives of thousands of soldiers and police. Pakistan should have leverage in its relations with the Afghan Taliban, given that many senior Taliban leaders were educated in Pakistani madrassas, sought refuge in cities such as Quetta and Karachi after the 2001 U.S. invasion, received support during the war, and still have family in Pakistan today. Yet this leverage seems absent.

Pakistan does not need to rely on culturally alien diplomats using translators to engage with the Taliban. It has a direct line through a rotating cast of envoys, both formal and informal, such as political leader Fazlur Rehman—a Pashtun and graduate of the same Darul Uloom Haqqania seminary as many Taliban leaders—and Muhammad Taqi Usmani, the most revered living Deobandi cleric. Usmani has urged them not only to curtail support for the TTP but also to allow girls to attend school. Yet even these pleas from figures within their own tradition have been soundly ignored. If the Taliban are ignoring Usmani, they certainly won’t respond to Western criticism, which is often more performative than practical. Similarly, they are also unlikely to heed Islamic leaders or scholars from traditions far from theirs.

After all, the Taliban are victors, and victors are not inclined to listen. They are also ideologues, which sets clear limits on their pragmatism. In September, during a ceremony in Peshawar, the Taliban’s consul general theres refused to stand for the Pakistani national anthem because it featured music. This act of defiance sparked more outrage in Pakistan than the countless TTP attacks that the Taliban have enabled. This highlights a point often overlooked in U.S. and European diplomacy, not just in Afghanistan but across the region: Perceptions of respect—or disrespect—carry immense weight, even in the face of deep-seated conflicts. The Taliban’s refusal to stand was more than a snub; it was a reminder of their ideological intransigence, even toward their former hosts.

If regional engagement is yielding few results, why shouldn’t the United States and Europe keep their distance? Because disengagement offers even less. Up until now, the Biden administration has maintained an international consensus on withholding formal recognition of the Taliban, leveraging it as a potential bargaining chip. However, as regional players are prioritizing realpolitik over ideology, with increased regional engagement—approaching de facto recognition—a Western strategy of nonrecognition is no longer an effective coercive tool. More importantly, the illusory promise of recognition does not offer a meaningful way to compel the Taliban. Instead, it has led to a prolonged stalemate between the international community’s principles and the Taliban’s rigid, exclusionary policies, leaving the Afghan people trapped in the middle of this impasse.

In Western diplomacy, engagement is often viewed as a form of leverage, a key component of transactional negotiations. In Afghanistan, sitting with your adversary is simply the necessary starting point, not a sign of concession. By being present in Afghanistan, regional countries have leveraged aspects of the Taliban’s own values—rooted in its specific version of Pashtun culture, ideas around hosting outsiders, and religious sensibilities—to their advantage. If the West were to adopt a similar approach, it could help secure the release of detainees and address more difficult issues, such as terrorism or migration.

As Pakistan has learned, engagement is not a cure-all for the challenges posed by the Taliban. The West’s predicament is different, and its interests in Afghanistan are more straightforward and less entangled. Abandoning Afghanistan completely may be tempting, but it would echo the mistakes of the 1990s, which ultimately led to the events of 9/11. Rather than sticking to value-based or transactional diplomacy, clinging to ideals it cannot enforce on the Taliban, the West must adapt its approach to protect its interests. Disengagement or inaction risks losing influence and the ability to advocate for a more inclusive and stable Afghanistan.

For NATO states involved in the Afghanistan war, the legacy of two decades of conflict, compounded by the Taliban’s resurgence, has made it a “toxic issue” to revisit. Proactively and directly engaging with the Taliban is a serious political liability for Western leaders. As a result, meaningful diplomatic efforts have been stifled by domestic political concerns and the fear of legitimizing the Taliban government.

In October, Tom West stepped down as the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan without a successor. His responsibilities now fall on John Mark Pommersheim, the deputy assistant secretary of state for Central Asia, and Chargé d’Affaires Karen Decker in Doha. The lower-profile Afghanistan Affairs Unit in Doha could adopt a quietly proactive approach, out of the spotlight. Any meaningful progress will require political and bureaucratic backing, as well as strong leadership from whoever eventually takes over these roles. At some point, U.S. engagement with the Taliban will need to be conducted openly and within Afghanistan itself. Despite the fears of another Benghazi, Washington must find a way to deploy its diplomats, as it did in Cuba in the 1970s and in dangerous outposts today. Without a cohesive approach, it is likely that U.S. engagement with Afghanistan will become fragmented, with various agencies acting independently and ineffectively.

The West still has real interests in Afghanistan, with the growing threat of ISKP, which has proved its capacity for global reach. While the Taliban cannot be fully trusted, they can serve as limited counterterrorism partners against this shared threat. Afghanistan’s migration crisis poses a pressing issue for Europe. More than 100,000 Afghans made first-time claims for protection in the European Union in 2023 alone, making them the second-largest group of asylum-seekers. Driven by rising right-wing populism, even once welcoming nations such as Germany have adopted harsher migration policies.

The West cannot meaningfully influence Afghanistan’s future from a distance. This makes Western diplomacy inherently transactional when it needs to be personal and pragmatic, especially with a group such as the Taliban. Maintaining an arm’s-length approach will breed distrust and suspicion toward any Western efforts to benefit from future changes in the Taliban’s power structure or leadership. This distance also alienates Western countries from the Afghans who live within Afghanistan. Relying on a U.N. envoy is unlikely to change that.

Instead, the United States and Europe could move beyond occasional engagement in Doha and sporadic meetings in Kabul to take a long-term approach by meeting with the Taliban and the Afghan people inside Afghanistan. This approach must be coordinated, coherent, and grounded in personal diplomacy. Having a presence in Kabul is not a mere gesture of goodwill; it is a diplomatic necessity. By following the example of regional states in demonstrating respect through dialogue, Western diplomats can leverage the power of face-to-face interactions, recognizing that effective diplomacy is rooted in building personal relationships.

For the West, being present in Afghanistan could eventually pave the way for pragmatic progress, whereas maintaining distance only ensures failure. Trump should leverage his unique credibility with the Taliban, as the architect of the Doha Agreement, to pursue a forward-looking diplomacy, rather than return to the mistakes of the past.

Jens Vesterlund Mathiesen is a special consultant at the Centre for Stabilisation at the Royal Danish Defence College.

Adam Weinstein is deputy director of the Middle East Program at the Quincy Institute.

Galina Mikkelsen is a research assistant at the Centre for Stabilisation at the Royal Danish Defence College.

How Can the West Handle the Taliban?
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How Afghanistan’s Economy Can Survive Shrinking Shipments of U.N. Cash Aid

November 15, 2024

BY: William Byrd, Ph.D.

United States Institute of Peace

Thursday, November 14, 2024

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • U.N. cash dollars for humanitarian aid also buttress Afghanistan’s balance of payments and inject liquidity.
  • A cash squeeze could destabilize a fragile economic equilibrium.
  • With good policies, the Afghan central bank and external donors can mitigate risks posed by dwindling cash flows.
Afghanistan’s precarious economy is facing a new set of multidimensional risks as humanitarian aid — delivered in massive shipments of U.S. cash dollars — shrinks rapidly amid competing demands from other crises around the world. The dollar inflows, moved under U.N. auspices, have helped stabilize the Afghan economy, cover its mammoth trade deficit, and inject monetary liquidity into commerce. With much smaller cash infusions, in line with a general reduction in aid, the suffering of Afghanistan’s poverty-stricken population is likely to increase.
Minimizing the potential economic damage will demand sound macroeconomic management by the Taliban regime. Among other measures, the country’s economic policymakers will need to organize a gradual depreciation of the excessively strong exchange rate and ensure that there are adequate amounts of Afghani currency notes in circulation.

Despite strongly disapproving of the Taliban’s destructive policies on gender, other countries and international agencies can play a supportive role by facilitating production of more Afghani banknotes as needed and allowing investment income from the Afghan Fund in Switzerland (comprising part of Afghanistan’s frozen foreign exchange reserves) to be used for macroeconomic stabilization. This can be done without turning any funds directly over to the Taliban.

Other countries and international agencies can play a supportive role … without turning any funds directly over to the Taliban.

How did Afghanistan arrive at this point?

After the severe economic shock that accompanied the final withdrawal of U.S. troops and the Taliban’s takeover in August 2021, international humanitarian aid ramped up and helped stem a months-long economic freefall. Humanitarian aid funding totaled $3.8 billion in 2022.

With normal international financial transactions blocked and some $9 billion of Afghan central bank reserves frozen after the American pullout, much of the aid had to be delivered in shipments of U.S. cash to a private Afghan bank. The bank, in turn, made the funds available to U.N. and other aid agencies to run their programs, pay salaries and distribute assistance. The cash shipments totaled $1.8 billion from December 2021 through 2022.

From a macroeconomic perspective, the deliveries replaced pre-2021 Afghan central bank (Da Afghanistan Bank, or DAB) imports of U.S. cash of a similar size. But serious technical and programmatic problems are associated with the cash shipments, including high costs from fees and overhead charged at each stage and risks that include potential security failures.

A Steep Decline in International Support

Previous advocacy for a gradual, pre-programmed reduction in humanitarian aid was belied by a sharp drop in assistance after 2022. Funding fell by half in 2023 to $1.9 billion and remains low this year, having reached only $1.2 billion by mid-November. By all indications, the U.N. cash shipments remained high last year, reflecting the pipeline of undisbursed assistance and the lag time between funding commitments for aid and actual delivery. But their level is falling now, probably by at least half in line with the decline in overall aid.

Various observers as well as this author have expressed concerns that the waning of cash injections, which have financed part of Afghanistan’s large official trade deficit, will destabilize the economy. The balance of payments issue is only part of the story, however; U.N. cash shipments also play an important monetary role.

Key features of the situation:

  • The Afghan economy functions largely on cash, with very low bank deposits as a share of GDP and little financial intermediation. Cash and hawala (informal money exchanges and transfers) are king.
  • The economy is also heavily dollarized, with U.S. currency circulating freely and used for sizable transactions. (The Taliban seem to have made progress in curtailing the use of Pakistan rupees and Iranian currency in the west and south respectively, but not so much with respect to the U.S. dollar nationwide.)
  • The Afghan banking system is largely dysfunctional, still suffering from the public’s loss of trust after the Kabul Bank disaster in 2010. Much of it is mired in bad loans, depositors are withdrawing funds within DAB-imposed limits. Furthermore, the system is hobbled by international banking restrictions that are due more to perceived reputational risks than to sanctions per se.
  • DAB faces great difficulty in implementing macroeconomic policy, having lost access to its substantial foreign exchange reserves, and perhaps continuing to encounter obstacles in printing domestic Afghani currency banknotes.
  • Finally, the large and growing official trade deficit is financed in part with humanitarian aid.

These economic characteristics leave U.S. cash comprising a core part of Afghanistan’s money supply and providing the liquidity needed to lubricate business and personal transactions. Indeed, the injections of U.N. cash shipments are akin to a central bank augmenting the money supply. Especially in the kind of recessionary situation Afghanistan finds itself, a too-constrained money supply is likely to exacerbate the economic downturn and may result in harmful deflation (i.e. price declines), which Afghanistan has been experiencing.

The U.N. cash shipments also have supported the exchange rate. In particular, DAB from time to time conducts foreign currency auctions — selling U.S. dollars that have accrued to it indirectly from the U.N. shipments — in exchange for Afghani currency. By injecting dollars and removing Afghanis from circulation, these auctions strengthen the exchange rate (the Afghani appreciated by some 25 percent against the U.S. dollar in the three years since the Taliban takeover, with some further appreciation since then).

Policy Options for Afghanistan’s Economy

The normal policy response to the balance of payments shock from declining humanitarian aid and U.N. cash shipments would be a gradual depreciation of the Afghani currency. That would help balance the demand and supply of foreign exchange while potentially stimulating exports and curbing imports by making both more expensive when valued in domestic currency.

A managed depreciation could be brought about by reducing the amounts and/or frequency of DAB’s foreign currency auctions. If that results in excess dollars, accumulating them as in-country dollar reserves in DAB would be beneficial for macroeconomic management in the future. However, this will be challenging to manage if DAB does not have U.S. dollars in vault to flexibly deploy in foreign currency auctions to ensure a steady, gradual depreciation.

It is crazy to let the vagaries of humanitarian aid and the ups and downs of the U.N. cash shipments serve as a de facto instrument of monetary policy. The shipments fluctuate from month-to-month depending on program needs, and strong seasonal elements such as preparing for winterization are also involved, so they may have little relationship with the liquidity needs of the economy.

It is crazy to let the vagaries of humanitarian aid and the ups and downs of the U.N. cash shipments serve as a de facto instrument of monetary policy.

The desirable direction over the medium term is to move away from both dollarization and the cash-based economy, which will obviate the need for sizable inflows of U.S. cash.

In the short run, DAB could encourage or pressure the U.N. and other agencies operating in Afghanistan to use only Afghani currency in transactions, not U.S. dollars. Most expenses such as cash aid and staff salaries are paid in small amounts, so using Afghanis would be appropriate.

Boosting Local Currency

Withdrawing cash dollars from deposit accounts and then turning them over to the informal hawala money exchanges to convert into Afghanis or for other purposes is unnecessary and harmful. So, when cash withdrawals are made from private bank deposits created by the U.N. cash shipments, they should be in the form of Afghanis converted at the market exchange rate. Making payments through electronic transfers or digital currency transactions should be encouraged wherever possible. Similarly, if U.N. or other agencies transfer funds electronically to Afghan banks, any cash withdrawals of those funds should be in Afghani currency, not in cash dollars.

These measures would require DAB to have sufficient Afghani currency in its vault. Printing banknotes faced difficulties earlier, and if there are still shortages of Afghani notes, more should be printed. Any obstacles emanating from the international side that hinder printing of more Afghani banknotes, such those related to sanctions, need to be urgently addressed.

Another attractive option is to begin to deploy the investment earnings of the Afghan Fund in Switzerland — cumulatively approaching $400 million and accruing about $150 million annually — to support exchange rate stability. This would be a normal, well-justified use of the foreign exchange reserves for the benefit of the Afghan people by helping with macroeconomic stabilization. The Afghan Fund’s board of directors should make a decision to move in this direction, and then commission technical work to determine specifically how this can be done.

The Afghan Fund needs to avoid providing any financial resources directly to the DAB, which some board members would likely find objectionable. Moreover, such an action might well provide ammunition for U.S. plaintiffs seeking access to the other $3.5 billion of Afghanistan’s foreign exchange reserves that remain frozen in the United States, protected so far from the litigants. Workarounds could be explored, such as commissioning a reputable third-party entity to conduct foreign currency auctions using some of the foreign exchange belonging to the Afghan Fund. The fund could also consider ways to facilitate international financial transactions and trade. Both of these options would be fully consistent with the goals of the fund.

How Afghanistan’s Economy Can Survive Shrinking Shipments of U.N. Cash Aid
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Taliban offered its congratulations to the American people for “not handing leadership of their great country to a woman.”

November 13, 2024

The day after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Afghanistan’s Taliban offered its congratulations to the American people for “not handing leadership of their great country to a woman.”

Taliban leaders expressed optimism that Trump’s election would enable a new chapter in the history of U.S-Taliban relations. They noted that it was Trump who suggested a new international order when he inked the February 29, 2020, Doha Agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban. That deal cut out the Afghan government and committed the U.S. to leave Afghanistan by May 2021, closing five military bases and ending economic sanctions on the Taliban. This paved the way for the U.S. evacuation of the country in August 2021 and the return of the Taliban to power.

The Taliban prohibits girls’ education past the sixth grade and recently banned the sound of women’s voices outside their homes.

In Russia, Russian thinker Alexander Dugin explained the dramatic global impact of Trump’s win. “We have won,” Dugin said. “The world will be never ever like before. Globalists have lost their final combat.” Dugin has made his reputation on his calls for an “anti-American revolution” and a new Russian empire built on “the rejection of [alliances of democratic nations surrounding the Atlantic], strategic control of the United States, and the rejection of the supremacy of economic, liberal market values,” as well as reestablishing traditional family structures with strict gender roles.

Maxim Trudolyubov of the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan foreign affairs think tank, suggested Friday that Putin’s long-term goal of weakening the U.S. has made him more interested in dividing Americans than in any one candidate.

Indeed, rather than backing Trump wholeheartedly, Russian president Vladimir Putin has been undercutting him. He did not comment on Trump’s election until Thursday, when he said that the power of liberal democracies over world affairs is “irrevocably disappearing.” Although Ellen Nakashima, John Hudson, and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post reported that Trump and Putin had spoken on Thursday, Putin denied such a call as “pure fiction.”

Exacerbating America’s internal divisions and demonstrating dominance over both the U.S. and Trump might explain why after Trump became president-elect, laughing Russian media figures showed viewers nude pictures of Trump’s third wife, Melania, taken during her modeling career.

In an interview, Putin’s presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev said today: “To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.” Meanwhile, U.S. and Ukrainian officials report that Russia has massed 50,000 soldiers, including North Korean soldiers, to reclaim territory in the Kursk region of Russia taken this year by Ukrainian forces.

Trump claims to have talked to about seventy world leaders since his reelection but has declined to go through the usual channels of the State Department. This illustrates his determination to reorganize the federal government around himself rather than its normal operations but leaves him—and the United States—vulnerable to misstatements and misunderstandings.

The domestic effects of Trump’s victory also reveal confusion, both within the Republican Party and within national politics. Voters elected Trump and his running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, but it’s hard to miss that billionaire Elon Musk, who backed Trump’s 2024 campaign financially, seems to be “Trump’s shadow vice-president,” as Nick Robins-Early of The Guardian put it. Sources told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that Musk has been a constant presence at Mar-a-Lago since the election, sitting in on phone calls with foreign leaders and weighing in on staffing decisions. Yesterday at Mar-a-Lago, Musk met with the chief executive officer of the right-wing media channel Newsmax.

Exactly who is in control of the party is unclear, and in the short term that question is playing out over the Senate’s choice of a successor to minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). In the new Congress, this Republican leader will become Senate majority leader, thereby gaining the power to control the Senate calendar and decide which bills get taken up and which do not.

Trump controls the majority of Republicans in the House, but he did not control Senate Republicans when McConnell led them. Now he wants to put Florida senator Rick Scott into the leadership role, but Republicans aligned with McConnell and the pre-2016 party want John Thune (R-SD) or John Cornyn (R-TX). There are major struggles taking place over the choice. Today Musk posted on social media his support for Scott. Other MAGA leaders fell in line, with media figure Benny Johnson—recently revealed to be on Russia’s payroll—urging his followers to target senators backing Thune or Cornyn.

Rachael Bade and Eugene Daniels of Politico Playbook suggested that this pressure would backfire, especially since many senators dislike Scott for his unsuccessful leadership of the National Republican Senatorial Committee that works to elect Republicans to the Senate.

Trump has also tried to sideline senators by demanding they abandon one of their key constitutional roles: that of advice and consent to a president’s appointment of top administration figures. Although Republicans will command a majority in the Senate, Trump is evidently concerned he cannot get some of his appointees through, so has demanded that Republicans agree to let him make recess appointments without going through the usual process of constitutionally mandated advice and consent.

Trump has also demanded that Republicans stop Democrats from making any judicial appointments in the next months, although Republicans continued to approve his nominees after voters elected President Joe Biden in 2020. Indeed, Judge Aileen Cannon, who let Trump off the hook for his retention of classified documents, was approved after Trump had lost the election.

All this jockeying comes amid the fact that while Trump is claiming a mandate from his election, in fact the vote was anything but a landslide. While votes are still being counted, Trump seems to have won by fewer than two percentage points in a cycle where incumbents across the globe lost. This appears to be the smallest popular vote margin for a winning candidate since Richard Nixon won in 1968.

While voters elected Trump, they also backed Democratic policies. In seven states, voters enshrined abortion rights in their constitutions. Two Republican-dominated states raised their minimum wage to $15 an hour; three enshrined mandated paid leave. In exit polls last week, sixty-five percent of voters said they want abortion to remain legal, and fifty-six percent said they want undocumented immigrants to have a chance to apply for legal status.

The gap between what Trump has promised MAGA supporters and what voters want is creating confusion in national politics. How can Trump deliver the national abortion ban MAGAs want when sixty-five percent of voters want abortion rights? How can he deport all undocumented immigrants, including those who have been here for decades and integrated into their communities, while his own voters say they want undocumented immigrants to have a path to citizenship?

Trump’s people have repeatedly expressed their opinion that Trump was stopped from putting the full MAGA agenda into place because he did not move quickly enough in his first term. They have vowed they will not make that mistake again. But the fast imposition of their extremist policies runs the risk of alienating the more moderate voters who just put them in power.

In September, as the Taliban enforced new rules on women in Afghanistan, they also began to target Afghan men. New laws mandated that men stop wearing western jeans, stop cutting their hair and beards in western ways, and stop looking at women other than their wives or female relatives. Religious morality officers are knocking on the doors of those who haven’t recently attended mosque to remind them they can be tried and sentenced for repeated nonattendance, and government employees are afraid they’ll be fired if they don’t grow their beards. According to Rick Noack of the Washington Post, such restrictions surprised men, who were accustomed to enjoying power in their society. Some have been wondering if they should have spoken up to defend the freedoms of their wives and daughters.

One man who had supported the Taliban said he now feels bullied. “We all are practicing Muslims and know what is mandatory or not. But it’s unacceptable to use force on us,” he said. Speaking on the condition of anonymity because he feared drawing the attention of the regime, another man from Kabul said: “If men had raised their voices, we might also be in a different situation now.”

—

Notes:

https://www.distractify.com/p/did-the-taliban-congratulate-trump

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/16/afghanistan-child-brides/

https://tec.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/aleksandr-dugins-foundations-geopolitics

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/us-right-wing-media-embrace-russias-far-right-ideologue

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/11/07/russia-putin-reaction-us-election/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/11/10/trump-putin-phone-call-ukraine/

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/11/kremlin-denies-reports-of-trump-putin-call-about-ukraine-invasion

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/kremlin-was-hoping-division-america-not-victory-one-candidate

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/09/elon-musk-trump-administration

https://www.politico.com/playbook

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/10/trump-rick-scott-senate-cornyn-thune-mcconnell/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/10/us/politics/russia-north-korea-troops-ukraine.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/22/afghanistan-taliban-restrictions-men-beards/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/11/trump-victory-red-wave/

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Taliban offered its congratulations to the American people for “not handing leadership of their great country to a woman.”
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Opium Cultivation in Badakhshan: The new national leader, according to UNDOC

November 13, 2024

Jelena Bjelica • Fabrizio Foschini

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Although the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’s (IEA) ban on opium cultivation continues largely to hold, the area under poppy did increase in 2024, by almost a fifth, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) annual survey. Even with that increase, however, this year’s cultivation was negligible compared to pre-ban levels. What is more noteworthy is the shifting of the geographic centre of cultivation from Helmand in the south to the northeastern province of Badakhshan. More than half of the country’s total cultivation was grown there in 2024, said UNODC. The Emirate disputed these findings, saying that UNODC report did not take into account its eradication efforts. AAN’s Jelena Bjelica and Fabrizio Foschini have taken a closer look at historical opium cultivation trends in Badakhshan and probe why the IEA’s ban has not worked in this remote province, which borders Tajikistan, Pakistan and China.
Last year, there was an absolute decrease – in the order of 95 per cent – in opium cultivation nationally. This year, the new UNDOC’s survey of Afghanistan, released on 6 November 2024, has found a reversal:[1] across 14 of Afghanistan’s provinces, farmers sowed an estimated 12,800 hectares with poppy,[2] an increase of 19 per cent compared to 2023, when an estimated 10,800 hectares were cultivated. This year’s opium poppy cultivation is still a fraction of pre-ban levels: in 2022, Afghans cultivated an estimated 232,000 hectares of land with poppy. The dramatic drop in cultivation during the 2023 season was a direct result of the April 2022 IEA ban, which came into force that autumn. It meant poppy cultivation was virtually eliminated across much of the country (see AAN reporting here and here).[3] This year’s increase in cultivation has also come with a shift in where most poppy is grown, reported UNODC:

The south-western provinces of the country have long been the centre of cultivation up to and including 2023. In 2024, this changed and now 59 per cent of all cultivation took place in the north-east, particularly in Badakhshan.

This is actually an underestimate of Badakhshan’s prominence. The only other province in the northeast to plant more than 100 hectares of opium poppy was Takhar and its contribution was only about two per cent of the regional total.[4] As will be seen below, the IEA believes that UNODC has got its data wrong and that the poppy that was sown in Badakhshan was completely eradicated before the 2024 harvest.

Also of immediate interest in the latest report is data on opium prices. These have now stabilised after steady upward shifts following the Taleban takeover. The long-running pre-ban average was 100 USD per kilo. By August 2023, said UNDOC, they had reached “a twenty-year peak” of 408 USD a kilogramme, surpassing even the price hike following the first IEA ban in 2000/2001. Yet, prices continued to climb. In December 2023, Afghan opiates expert David Mansfield reported they had reached as high as 1,112 USD per kilogramme in the south and 1,088 USD per kilogramme in Nangrahar (see this tweet). Only in early February 2024 did prices start to decline. In June 2024, they were back down to an average of 730 USD, which is still far higher than before the ban, or before the Taleban capture of power.

The extremely high farm-gate prices have produced windfall profits for those who have continued to grow and harvest poppy. The same is true for those who had opium stocks to sell because the IEA did not immediately target traders, although the April 2022 ban also covered trade. In March 2023 (a year after it announced the ban), according to Hasht-e Subh, the IEA issued a 10-month deadline to traders to export opium out of Afghanistan, waiving export taxes. The stated goal of the IEA, they reported, was to end the opium trade in Afghanistan by liquidating all remaining stocks and discouraging future poppy cultivation. However, according to UNODC, trade was continuing in 2023 and Mansfield and Alcis also reported, in April 2024, that:

[O]pium is openly traded in markets across the country even in those areas where there has been no crop since the 2022 harvest; and Afghanistan’s neighbours, including Iran, Tajikistan, and Pakistan, consistently make large seizures of opiates, even arguing that a drug ban is not in place. Evidence shows that the reason that drugs are still being trafficked cross-border is the substantial inventory of opium that remains in Afghanistan.  

While traders and richer farmers able to store opium have made huge profits because of the ban on cultivation driving prices up, for land-poor farmers, and the labourers who used to rely on opium for paid work, the ban has been catastrophic. That inequity, between those benefitting from the ban and those hurt by it, could yet give rise to tensions, within or between regions.

All eyes will now be on Badakhshan, the new national leader in opium cultivation, in the coming months, including the Emirate’s. The focus of the rest of this report will be on that province, as we look both at the history of opium there and why many farmers have still been able to continue to grow it, unlike their counterparts elsewhere.

A brief history of opium in Badakhshan

In a major AAN report published in 2016, ‘On the Cultural History of Opium – and how poppy came to Afghanistan’, we quoted researchers like Katja Mielke who suggested that in several parts of Afghanistan, but especially Badakhshan, the “cultivation of opium poppy with the aim to produce raw opium for self-consumption had a long tradition.” It was used, for example, to counter pain, such as from snakebites, and to quell hunger. She and other sources do not say exactly how long ‘long’ may have been, but Jonathan Goodhand, from London University’s School of Oriental and Asian Studies, writes that poppy was introduced to Badakhshan from China and Bukhara via the silk route.[5]

Historically, opium cultivation played a crucial economic role in the province. After the British-Chinese agreement of 1907 had gradually eliminated the century-old trade of Indian opium towards China, Badakhshi traders took the initiative to exploit the large market for opium there, carrying the opium grown in their home province through the Pamirs to Kashgar and Yarkand.[6] However, Badakhshis not only traded in opium, they also grew it. A 1949 UN report mentioned two opium producing areas in the country, “one in western Afghanistan, adjacent to Khorasan province of eastern Iran [which may have been Herat or Farah], and the other in eastern Afghanistan, near Kashmir [probably Badakhshan and Nangrahar].” While the western zone would likely have been oriented towards the Iranian market, where the use of opium as a recreational drug was relatively widespread at that time, the eastern area had certainly developed in order to supply China. Even though that same year, the Chinese borders were closed after the victory of the Communist Revolution, production in Badakhshan continued and exports re-oriented to the rest of the region.

According to Adam Pain’s research on opium cultivation in Badakhshan, “by the 1950s opium poppy was an essential component of the crop repertoire along with wheat and patak (Lathryus sativus) [a legume grown to feed livestock].”[7] The long history of opium cultivation in Badakhshan, along with tradition, brought some to consider its opium to be of the highest quality in Afghanistan (Badakhshi cannabis enjoys similar fame; see AAN reports here and here).

Badakhshan’s opium farmers were, however, to receive a blow in 1958, when the central government made a concerted effort to wipe out opium cultivation, a response to international pressure to do so. However, the country-wide ban, instituted by the king’s prime minister, Daud Khan, was only enforced in Afghanistan’s most northeasterly province. At that time, Badakhshan had 3,000 farmers licensed by the king to grow opium, as Afghanistan in the 1940s and early 1950s was attempting to get an international licence to grow it legally for the pharmaceutical industry. The country’s frequent pleas for the licence at the United Nations had all been denied. Even so, wrote James Bradford, a scholar of drug policies under the Afghan Musahiban dynasty:[8]

The opium ban went into effect on March 21, 1958, stopping all opium cultivation on the nearly 3,000 small opium farmers in the districts around Faizabad, Jurm, and Kishim. All farmers who were licensed by the state were forced to transition to wheat and barley, and unlicensed farmers were being forced to transition as well.

Other provinces were growing opium as well, but were not subject to enforcement. Bradford said the Afghan government singled out Badakhshan in order to make a powerful statement, despite its marginal agricultural economy being quite heavily dependent on the narcotic crop:

In choosing Badakhshan, the Afghan government targeted the one area where opium played its most significant role. It was common knowledge at this point that opium was a staple crop in Badakhshan. Previous decades of trade had raised awareness to the superior quality of Badakhshan opium. Symbolism aside, this prohibition was a serious challenge for the state, not only because of the limitations of state power, but particularly because of the unique challenges the province provided.

For Kabul, keen to make a show of force directed at both internal and international audiences, Badakhshan was perfect. Famous as the centre of Afghanistan’s opium production, it was also very remote with limited state penetration and influence – until the ban, that is. Also, the local inhabitants mostly belonged to minority groups without the potential to lobby within or pose a military danger to the state, as Pashtun tribes had done until the 1940s.

Daud chose Badakhshan because it was inhabited by ethnic minorities who presented less of a threat to the stability of the state. … given the general reluctance of Musahiban leaders to provoke the Pashtun tribal base, Daud chose Badakhshan because it was inhabited by ethnic minorities who presented less of a threat to the stability of the state.[9]

The move devastated households’ food security, indicating the crop’s critical role in the province’s economy. Suddenly, tens of thousands of seasonal workers who had relied on opium harvesting, found themselves jobless. The New York Times reported on 16 June 1958 on the plight of Badakhshi residents:

[T]here [in Badakhshan] 100,000 persons, prohibited by law from growing the opium that has sustained them and their ancestors for centuries, are threatened with destitution … unless the loss of revenue from the highly remunerative opium crop can be at least partially offset.

The 1958 ban did not manage to stamp out opium production from Badakhshan completely. In the following years, as the five-year plan devised by the Afghan government with the help of the UN to provide residents with food aid and alternative livelihoods proved slow in materialising, some farmers resumed cultivation.[10]

The more recent history of opium in Badakhshan

Massive, illicit cultivation of opium in Badakhshan started up again in the 1990s, as elsewhere in Afghanistan, in the context of state dissolution and civil war that characterised Afghanistan during that decade. In the 1990s, Badakhshan also became self-sufficient in terms of drug processing, an important development, given that the province is enclosed by three international borders with China, Pakistan and Tajikistan.[11] As the only province that entirely escaped Taleban control during the first Emirate, it was not affected by the Taleban’s 2000 opium ban. That year, cultivation flourished: in 2001, Badakhshan contributed 79 per cent of the area under poppy cultivation nationally, a sharp increase from the three per cent of 2000.[12] In 2003, when opium production rebounded nationally, Badakhshan remained a top producer, second only to Helmand.

In the decades that followed, Badakhshan remained prominent in opium cultivation: it comprised an estimated 15 per cent of the total national area under poppy in 2003, compared to less than 5 per cent during much of the 1990s (see Graph 1 below, showing opium cultivation levels in Badakhshan province between 1994 and 2024).[13] The UNDOC and World Bank’s 2006 report ‘Afghanistan’s Drug Industry: Structure, Functioning, Dynamics and Implications for Counter Narcotics Policy’ commented:

Isolated, mountainous Badakhshan, where the Taliban were never able to consolidate their control, was relatively unaffected by the drought, and profited from the Taliban ban that affected the rest of the country. Despite a three-fold fall in farm-gate prices, opium poppy cultivation rose again in 2003/04, only to fall by 50% in 2005. Indeed, the increase in Badakhshan and the reductions in Helmand were so pronounced in 2003 that the district of Keshem in Badakhshan was listed as the district cultivating the largest area of opium poppy in Afghanistan. (page 50)

Graph 1: Opium cultivation levels in Badakhshan province between 1994 and 2024. Source of data UNODC Opium Surveys. Graph by AAN.

Badakhshan was almost poppy-free in 2008 (meaning it was close to cultivating less than 100 hectares of poppy), thanks to a number of factors – low yields brought about by poor weather and insufficient rotation of crops, development agencies’ assistance programmes and increased counter-narcotics law enforcement in the province. Cultivation eventually picked up though, a pattern shared with much of the rest of the country; it reached 8,300 hectares by 2017, just over half of the 2004 historical high of 15,600 hectares.

This year, opium cultivation has almost reached the levels of 2017, but is still only about half of the historic peak of 2004. This then, is the background to the latest attempts by the central government to ban opium and the reasons why Badakhshan is bucking the national trend.

The IEA’s ban and why its application in Badakhshan has been limited

The IEA’s April 2022 ban on poppy cultivation has been implemented to different degrees across the country and that variation has been the main factor in the changing geography of poppy cultivation. In 2023, the amount of land under poppy in Badakhshan was down, but far less than other provinces, a drop of 63 per cent, compared to drops of 99.99 per cent in Helmand, 97 per cent in Balkh and 90 per cent in Nangrahar (UNODC figures here). Most provinces saw further reductions in poppy cultivation in 2024, or tiny increases. The bounce back in Badakhshan in 2024 was unmatched.[14]

The peculiar situation of the province has pushed the persistence of Badakhshan’s poppy cultivation. Its farmers are poor, typically engaging in subsistence agriculture on small and often otherwise unproductive landholdings. When the ban was introduced, there was no high-yielding alternative crop they could grow, and they also lacked stockpiles of opium, which could have acted as a safety net. The sudden abandonment of opium production was utterly unfeasible. That might also have been the case in other provinces, for example, land-poor farmers in parts of Nangrahar. However, in Badakhshan, the local Taleban authorities, many of whom are connected to farmers through family and social ties, appear to have recognised the looming hardship and been encouraged to show a degree of tolerance (although this has obviously not been officially acknowledged). However, the differing local IEA attitude to enforcing the ban in Badakhshan is also based on other reasons.

Elsewhere, enforcement of the poppy ban has been based less on repressive action but rather mainly on persuasion as to the rightness of the ban and an expectation that rules would be obeyed, with messages conveyed from the pulpits of mosques and by the authorities enjoining local elders to uphold the ban.[15] That method depended heavily on the existence of a strong network of long-time supporters and allies of the Taleban. In Kandahar and Helmand, the IEA has also banked on the support and trust of the major local poppy planters, who moreover, benefited greatly from the ban-induced hike in the value of their large opium stockpiles. In Badakhshan, on the other hand, the insurgency had been far weaker and the IEA found itself trying to enforce a ban in a province where its networks inside rural communities were relatively few, and weak (see AAN’s themed report about IEA governance in the northeast)

When the ban was announced, local IEA officials in Badakhshan – former Taleban commanders who had usually not enjoyed mass community support during the insurgency – were still struggling to expand their influence. This was a region that had never previously experienced Taleban rule and which hosted significant remnants of the old anti-Taleban mujahedin networks. The new authorities were suspicious of the old local elites, who are largely of a Jamiat-e Islami background, considering them susceptible to being enticed to join the armed opposition – which is still active in parts of the province. During the first couple of years of IEA rule, some co-option strategies were put in place in order to win locally influential people over to the Emirate’s side. Local Taleban commanders, for example, were generally left in control of their home districts rather than shuffled around the province or even outside it – which is common practice elsewhere in the Emirate – in order to help them consolidate their local power bases. Moreover, veteran ‘tier 1’ Taleban leaders who hail from Badakhshan, like Chief of Staff Fasihuddin Fitrat, despite holding top-ranking positions in the IEA at the central level, have also been depended upon to solve problems and supervise policies and appointments in the province.

This comparatively secluded provincial political life contributed, at least for a time, to sheltering Badakhshan from the full enforcement of the opium ban and – together with the pressing economic needs of the residents of this poor mountain province – has allowed for a continuation of poppy cultivation in the province. Remarkably though, poppy growing in Badakhshan increased as a percentage share of the land area nationally under cultivation between 2023 and 2024 at precisely the time when the central government was bringing governance of the province more into line with the rest of the country.

Eradication in 2024

At the end of 2023, a reshuffle of the provincial authorities brought outsiders to govern Badakhshan for the first time. This coincided with the realisation or acknowledgement that, unlike the rest of the country, Badakhshis were still sowing and harvesting poppy. That posed a challenge to the IEA’s credibility and risked undermining adherence to the ban elsewhere. It spurred the government into pushing for greater eradication efforts in spring 2024. The newly-appointed provincial governor, Muhammad Ayub Khaled and his entourage, all men from Kandahar, found the local Taleban district authorities unwilling or unable to cooperate with the eradication campaign: in May 2024, Taleban troops from Kunduz and other nearby areas were brought in and tensions with the local farmers arose, leading to violence.

Farmers protesting in the districts of Argu and Darayem were met with violence, with some shot and killed in early May 2024 (see reports by Pajhwok and CIR), while a few days later, an IED attack (claimed by the Islamic State Khorasan Province, ISKP) killed three members of the IEA security forces sent to support an eradication mission (read AP reporting here). Eventually, the IEA’s unofficial plenipotentiary for Badakhshan, Fasihuddin Fitrat, arranged mediation and managed to defuse the situation. Eradication carried on in full swing for a few weeks and then continued sporadically throughout the rest of the spring and early summer; the protesting farmers obtained a minor but significant concession, that only local Taleban troops were to engage in it.

Faced with the need to cancel the impression that Badakhshan was being allowed to get off lightly from the ban on narcotics, it is no wonder that, contrary to UNODC reporting, the Emirate has been adamant that the 2024 eradication campaign in the province was carried out thoroughly and successfully. For example, in a response to the UNODC survey, the Ministry of Interior insisted that:

According to your report, the highest cultivation is in Badakhshan province. However, our regional reports indicate that the cultivation is concentrated in the districts of Argu, Khash, Jorm, Darayem, and Shahr-e-Bazarg, where the fields have been completely eradicated. The issue of eradication has been a major concern across all provinces where opium poppy is being cultivated.

Unfortunately, the UNODC office did not mention the eradication of opium poppy fields in its 2024 report. As you are aware, security forces in all provinces have taken serious actions against opium cultivation, compelling farmers not to grow poppy on their fields.

Our regional information indicates that approximately 16,000 hectares of opium poppy have been eradicated since the end of 2023 until now. Of these, around 6,000 hectares were measured using GPS technology. All GPS data has been shared with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). However, after reviewing the GPS data, it was noted that some GPS points were recorded multiple times on the same date due to GPS devices being left on, which resulted in inaccurate data collection. In some instances, barren land and other crops were mistakenly classified as poppy fields. While there may be discrepancies in the GPS data, this does not invalidate all the figures.

If opium poppy eradication efforts in Badakhshan province had been conducted with the technical cooperation of UNODC, it is likely that accurate GPS data for more than 7,000 hectares would have been recorded. The lack of cooperation from the UNODC office has negatively impacted these eradication efforts.

…

In Badakhshan, all opium poppy fields have been eradicated and your data should accurately reflect the situation, considering that the eradication process is ongoing, and images may have been taken before this was completed.

The IEA claim that the eradicated area equalled the totality of poppy cultivation in Badakhshan contrasts, however, not only with UNODC but also satellite imagery provided by Alcis and reports by locals. According to villagers from the main poppy-growing districts of Badakhshan of Argu and Darayem interviewed by AAN, eradication in 2024 was not full-scale, but rather ended up targeting mostly easy-access areas such as the outskirts of cities and stretches along the main roads, or those areas where farmers and landlords had no connections inside the provincial government to resort to who could help to save at least part of their crop. Locals also alleged the involvement of local officials involved in counter-narcotics operations in influencing which poppy fields were selected for destruction, keeping the eradication teams away from their own turf and even directing teams against their rivals – something also seen under the Islamic Republic.

The current sowing season – autumn 2024, and spring 2025

After last season’s eradication campaign, carried out on the crop that was harvested in late June/early July 2024, all eyes were on Badakhshan to see whether farmers would again defy the law. In this province, there are two main times of poppy cultivation. Autumn sowing (tirmai) usually happens in October, with the poppy seeds then staying in the ground under the snow through winter. Farmers will wait for a couple of good autumn rains before sowing, but if it does not rain, they can afford to wait even until mid-November to sow. This type of sowing is usually practised in higher-elevation areas. The second type of sowing, bahari, takes place as the name implies in late winter/spring and is more common in lower-lying and warmer areas where the snow melts earlier and poppies grow more quickly, allowing for an earlier spring sowing compared to higher area. Bahari also brings lesser yields; the main harvest centres around tirmai sowing.

According to locals interviewed, tirmai sowing is certainly now taking place in a majority of Badakhshan districts. The increased risks of opium cultivation, as shown by the eradication efforts in 2024, have not outweighed the incentives provided by high prices and a growing interest in Badakhshan’s produce shown by opium traders from other Afghan provinces. Also, the acquiescence of many local Taleban officers and the farmers’ ability to stand their ground, although at the cost of violence, in front of the eradication campaign, or at least to reach compromises through the mediation of powerful figures at the central IEA level, might have played a role in their decision to sow again.

Moreover, locals complain of the lack of alternative crops and government funding for them, despite promises they say were made at the time of the eradication campaign and more recent attempts to promote the cultivation of the cash crop, hing (asafoetida), a spice used in the Indian subcontinent.[16] Hing is actually not a good alternative to poppy in the short run because, like orchard crops, it takes several years to produce a return – unlike poppy which is an annual.[17] Interviewees said the lack of an alternative was why, in the higher areas of Argu, Darayem, Khash and Yaftal, farmers had already sown poppy. AAN also heard from locals that no action had been taken against the sowing so far: local Taleban officials have relatives or associates in the villages sowing poppy, we were told, and will not stop them. Also, as reported by locals, a number of farmers hit by past eradication have struck deals with district or provincial authorities in order to ensure next year’s crop will not be destroyed – in exchange for part of the profits.

Only in a few districts, where eradication was carried out more massively and many farmers lost the capital they had invested or barely regained what they had spent, does local behaviour appear more cautious. In poorer and less connected areas, such as the upper reaches of Jorm district, farmers hit by eradication simply do not have the relevant connections at the provincial or national level, or the money to bribe themselves out of trouble when and if eradication starts. Hence, according to locals interviewed, many have refrained from sowing the tirmai crop.

However, even this successful intimidation could turn sour: rugged and secluded valleys in this area, such as the Khastak Valley, have regularly offered shelter to anti-government groups. Already selected as a redoubt by the Taleban during the insurgency, the area has lately come to host ISKP sympathisers. Left without choices, the local villagers could turn to these armed opposition groups to protect their poppy crops from the central government, again, something also seen under the Republic.

The resilience of the drug economy

Badakhshan might represent an exception across an Afghanistan, where poppy cultivation is still at historical lows, but in the context of the rather integrated Afghan opium economy, the fact that poppy growing continues there is a matter of interest for all Afghan opium traders and the markets in neighbouring countries. Although Badakhshan, first and foremost, remains the key supplier for the illicit drugs markets and the traders in Tajikistan for trafficking onwards through the former Soviet republics,[18] in the past two years, informed locals told AAN, the major drug traffickers from Helmand and Kandahar have entered the Badakhshan market and struck deals with local producers (read also this report by the International Crisis Group). Farmers from southern Afghanistan might have complied with the narcotics ban, out of old alliances and respect for the IEA, but traders from there have been earnestly exploring ways to secure continued supply to their clients, without fully depleting their stockpiles. Thanks to their better connections inside the IEA, the ‘Kandaharis’ (as all Southerners are labelled in the north) have fewer problems circumventing police controls and transporting drugs across the country. According to locals interviewed, the Kandaharis initially tried to access Badakhshi producers directly and cut off local traffickers, for example, by having them arrested. However, after some violence was traded between the two groups, the Kandaharis gave up the idea of completely swaying the Badakhshi market and included the local traffickers, who have their own separate smuggling routes and contacts for taking opiates to Tajikistan – as intermediaries in the deals. Moreover, the higher prices of opium allow for an additional tier of middlemen to fit in without hurting profits.

As a province, Badakhshan is particularly vulnerable to the loss of income associated with the poppy ban. Its economy, always fragile and previously dependent on seasonal labour migration to other parts of the country and to Iran – both options now reduced by Afghanistan’s contracted economy and border closure – would be seriously harmed by a full implementation of the ban there. However, the ban has had consequences everywhere, as we explored when we heard from poor farmers in Helmand in the spring. Persistent high prices and lack of economic alternatives make it increasingly difficult for the IEA to achieve a full, nationwide implementation of the ban – in fact, other poor and peripheral provinces such as Badghis also seem ready to resume poppy cultivation (see footnote 13). That means the major political fallout likely to proceed from the ban on cultivation remaining fully in force might not be limited to provinces where the IEA traditionally faced opposition, such as Badakhshan. Where it leads, other provinces might follow: so far, opium farmers with large landholdings from Kandahar and Helmand have been benefiting from stockpiles, but once these are depleted, the IEA risks alienating many even from that area, which always constituted its major support base in the country.

Edited by Kate Clark 

References

References
↑1 ‘Afghanistan Drug Insight Volume 1 – Opium Poppy Cultivation 2024’ is the first of three in the annual series of UNODC reports on opium cultivation, production, trafficking and consumption in Afghanistan and it is a rather short report that shows data collected by UNODC through remote sensing techniques and rural village surveys, as well as through global data collection on drugs (the UNODC Annual Report Questionnaires and UNODC Drugs Monitoring Platform).
↑2 The 14 provinces were Kunar, Laghman, Badakhshan, Takhar, Balkh, Faryab, Jowzjan, Helmand, Kandahar, Uruzgan, Zabul, Badghis, Farah and Ghor. For an estimated hectarage for each province, see the table on pages 10 and 11 of the UNODC survey. Poppy-free provinces are provinces with less than 100 hectares in cultivation. The national total includes opium poppy found in poppy-free provinces.
↑3 Alcis, a company that also monitors illicit crops in Afghanistan, has provided slightly diverging estimates. However, as it is currently revising its data for Badakhshan based on a more refined method, we have not included its estimates in this report. For the latest Alcis estimates for Badakhshan, see here.
↑4 For UNODC, the northeast comprises four provinces: Badakhshan, which had 7,408 hectares of land under poppy in 2024; Takhar, with 165 hectares after being poppy-free in 2023; and Baghlan and Kunduz, both classed as poppy-free, ie planted with less than 100 hectares of poppy.
↑5 Katja Mielke ‘Opium as an economic engine: Drug economy without alternatives?’ in Wegweiser zur Geschichte: Afghanistan, Potsdam: MGFA, 2007, 207; Jonathan Goodhand, ‘From holy war to opium war? A case study of the opium economy in North Eastern Afghanistan’, Central Asian Survey, 2000, 19(2), 270.
↑6 Fabrizio Foschini, ‘Heretics or Addicts: The Ismailis of Afghan Badakhshan caught in the middle of the opium trade’ in ‘Uyun al-Akhbar. Islam, Collected Essays, Bologna, 2010, 241-263.
↑7 Adam Pain. ‘Between necessity and compulsion: opium poppy cultivation and the exigencies of survival in Badakhshan, Afghanistan’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2023, 51:4, 902-921, DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2023.2216145
↑8 James Bradford, ‘Drug Control in Afghanistan: Culture, Politics and Power During the 1958 Prohibition of Opium in Badakhshan’, Iranian Studies, 2014, p14, 19. doi:10.1080/00210862.2013.862456. The article explores the process leading to the Afghan government’s decision to implement a prohibition and eradication of opium in the northeastern province of Badakhshan – why Daud chose Badakhshan, the impact of the opium ban on the people of Badakhshan and the future of opium production and trade, as well as the evolution of drug control in Afghanistan under the Musahiban dynasty. See also his PhD dissertation, available here.
↑9 James Bradford, ‘Drug Control in Afghanistan’, 19.
↑10 James Bradford, ‘Drug Control in Afghanistan’, 18. Ultimately, the economic marginalisation suffered by Badakhshan in the 1960s and 70s was a primary factor behind the development there of a political movement, Sazman-e Enqelabi-ye Zahmatkashan-e Afghanistan (the Revolutionary Organisation of Afghanistan’s Toilers (usually known as Setam-e Melli or “National Oppression”) which criticised Pashtun hegemony and advocated an economic and political emancipation of the northern minorities.
↑11 Paul Fishstein, ‘Evolving Terrain: Opium Poppy Cultivation in Balkh and Badakhshan Provinces in 2013’, Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU), 2014; Doris Buddenberg and William A Byrd, eds, ‘Afghanistan’s Drug Industry: Structure, Functioning, Dynamics and Implications for Counter Narcotics Policy’, UNDOC and World Bank, 2006.
↑12 Paul Fishstein,’Evolving Terrain: Opium Poppy Cultivation in Balkh and Badakhshan Provinces in 2013’, Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU), 2014.
↑13 For an in-depth study on opium cultivation in Badakhshan in early 2000, see a report by David Mansfield, ‘Coping Strategies, Accumulated Wealth and Shifting Markets: The Story of Opium Poppy Cultivation in Badakhshan 2000-2003’, the Agha Khan Development Network, 2004.
↑14 UNODC reported opium cultivation in Badghis as also up, by 241 per cent to 1,255 hectares, and Helmand, up by 434 per cent to 757 hectares. However, these amounts are both dwarfed by Badakhshan’s 7,408 hectares.
↑15 As AAN reported in March 2024 about opium cultivation in Helmand:

An interviewee in Greshk district said that, last November, during the poppy sowing, the IEA had arrested some people and imprisoned them for between one and three months. He thought this was intended to frighten other farmers into not growing poppy.
↑16 It is an interesting historical fact that hing was mentioned as alternative crop to opium poppy in the 1958 New York Times article about Badakhshan quoted earlier in the text.
↑17 Asafoetida is deep-rooted plant from the carrot (umbelliferous) family, which produces a pungent spice widely used especially in Pakistani and Indian cooking. A wild plant, it is now increasingly cultivated, but unlike poppy, which is an annual, it needs several years to mature and produce an income. Harvesting involves tapping the roots to extract the gum, which usually kills the plant. Typically grown on rain-fed or waste ground, hing is also not an alternative to poppy in terms of land use.
↑18 Neither the seized amounts nor the frequency of seizures on the Tajik-Afghan border in the last two years indicate that any change has happened in the legal regime on drugs in either country, according to the Paris Pact Initiative data.

 

Opium Cultivation in Badakhshan: The new national leader, according to UNDOC
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The Daily Hustle: The day labourer and his wife who took in a widow and her six children

November 12, 2024

Ali Mohammad Sabawoon • Roxanna Shapour

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Some tales of generosity and compassion, of tragedy, heartache and life-changing decisions, span the generations. One such story is Ruzi Khan’s, a day labourer from Helmand province, who has opened his home to a destitute widow and her six young children. While the widow is his distant cousin, her late husband was the son of a Hindu boy who moved to Khan’s village in the 1960s with his mother and step-father and later converted to Islam. Ruzi Khan has spoken to AAN’s Ali Mohammad Sabawoon for the latest instalment of The Daily Hustle, and tells how, faced with a family in distress, he and his wife, while struggling to feed their own children, decided they could not stand idly by in the face of the suffering of others.

I’m not a man of means. I’m a 35-year-old father of five – three daughters and two sons – who works as a day labourer. Putting food on the table for my family isn’t easy. When there’s work, I earn enough to provide for them, but it’s difficult to make ends meet when work is scarce. Fortunately, my wife is a skilled manager of our finances and puts money aside to help us get through the lean times. This past summer, my wife and I decided to take in a poor family of seven, even though we barely have enough to care for our own children.

The Hindu who came to the village

To tell you about how we ended up taking this family into our home, I must start from the beginning. It’s a story that spans over sixty years and three generations, a story marked by life-changing decisions, family ties, tragedy and events beyond our control – from the challenges faced by immigrants in search of a better life to the displacement of refugees and the spirit of communities who come together to help those less fortunate.

It began when a man from our village went to India in search of work in the 1960s and came back with a Hindu wife and her son from a previous marriage. Later, his step-son, now a Muslim, married a woman from Paktika province and was blessed with a son of his own. But despite the respect the family received from their adopted community, the echoes of their heritage as Hindus from India continued to linger in the background. To this day, behind their backs, people call them the Hindu Bacha (the son of the Hindu) family.

About 14 years after the grandfather returned to our village with his new family, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. By this time, the man and his wife had passed away. The step-son (Hindu Bacha) and his family, like many other Afghans, fled to Pakistan. They settled in a refugee camp in Quetta, where they opened a small but successful grocery store to support themselves. But tragedy struck when the man’s wife suddenly passed away. Not long after, Hindu Bacha also died leaving their young son alone and without kin.

This is where my family comes into the picture. The young man, now completely alone in this world, turned to the camp community to help him find a wife so that he could start a family of his own. With help from community elders, he married a distant cousin of my father’s. He and his wife went on to have six children – three girls and three boys.

Tragedy strikes again

The young man continued running the family business, but the camp’s once-bustling community dwindled as families moved back to Afghanistan. This took a toll on his shop, which gradually lost many of its customers. The business declined until it became impossible for the shop to earn enough money to support the family. Just when it seemed things couldn’t get any worse, the young man was diagnosed with cancer. Faced with mounting medical bills, he tapped into the family’s dwindling savings, seeking treatment in the hope of a miracle. He died destitute, leaving behind a family struggling for survival without any support or resources. Finally, when the widow’s extended family moved back to Afghanistan, they brought her and the six children along with them.

When there is no hope

This past August, when I went back to the village for my uncle’s funeral, I asked after the Hindu Bacha family. People told me that the community was doing its best for them, but the villagers are all very poor and there isn’t much to go around these days. Despite their best efforts, they were finding it impossible to support them.

The widow and I had known each other since childhood and I was concerned about her wellbeing. So I asked one of my relatives to take me to see the family. I wanted to give them some money and see if I could help in some way. I was shocked to see the conditions they were living in. She looked frail and broken as she welcomed me into her impoverished room. The children were in an abysmal state, spindly and malnourished. I was really shaken. I didn’t give them any money. I could see that the little bit I could afford would only be a sticking plaster. I went back to my uncle’s house, lost in thought.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. The image of the widow and her children living in such distress kept haunting me. How could we allow such a tragedy to unfold? What will we say to God on Judgement Day if we disregard this suffering? Surely, we have a moral responsibility to prevent such hardships, especially for innocent children.

Desperate times call for desperate measures

When I got back home the next day, the situation of the widow and her children was still playing on my mind. My head kept telling me I had enough to worry about with keeping a roof over my own family’s head, but my heart kept asking that if I didn’t feed them, who would?

Finally, that night, I talked it over with my wife and we agreed we’d bring the family to our home and support them. I discussed it with the extended family and told them that if they agreed I’d bring the family to my house and take care of them, same as I do with my own family. I then asked the widow if she’d be open to living with us. I told her she’d be good company for my wife. She could help with chores around the house and her children would grow up in my home with my own.

All you have to do is open your heart

Our family has now doubled in size and we have seven additional mouths to feed. These days, jobs are increasingly hard to come by, but I leave the house every day hoping to find work and come home with enough to get us through another day. My wife and the widow have started a small vegetable garden and we’re also raising chickens, which provide us with eggs and occasionally meat. When I took this family into my home, I promised to treat the children as my own. So at the start of the school year, I enrolled my oldest son and the widow’s eldest boy in the local school. Since the school is too far to walk, I bought them two second-hand bicycles.

The arrival of seven children – eldest is a 12-year-old girl and the youngest a son of three –  into our household has not been without its challenges. The house is certainly noisier these days. There’s still a lot to get used to and the kids are still getting to know each other and finding their place in our now expanded family. Still at night, I can put my head down and rest easy knowing that when I was called upon to act, I found it in my heart to open my home to a family in need.

***

Ruzi Khan’s actions exemplify the essence of a poem by Saadi, which celebrates the kind of compassion that is the cornerstone of Afghan identity and culture:

Human beings are members of a whole
In creation, of one essence and soul

If one member is afflicted with pain
Other members uneasy will remain

If you’ve no sympathy for human pain
The name of human you cannot retain

Saadi

بنی آدم اعضای یکدیگرند
که در آفرینش ز یک گوهرند

چو عضوی به درد آورد روزگار
دگر عضوها را نماند قرار

تو کز محنت دیگران بی غمی
نشاید که نامت نهند آدمی

سعدی

Edited by Roxanna Shapour and Kate Clark

The Daily Hustle: The day labourer and his wife who took in a widow and her six children
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