Six days on a small boat in rough seas: my terrifying, death-defying escape from the Taliban

Between the crowd and the entrance to the airport, Pordale could see a Taliban checkpoint, where heavily armed men were holding lists in their hands and checking people’s documents. Pordale, whose father had until that morning held a high-ranking position in the democratic government, knew that their chances of getting to the airport and on to an evacuation flight were blown.

Pordale turned to tell his father that they had to get away, but he had disappeared, vanished without a trace into the crowd. “At that point I didn’t know I’d never see him again,” he says. “But I did know that I was now on my own and it was up to me to find a way of getting out of Afghanistan.”

The Taliban’s advance across Afghanistan in the chaotic days before the withdrawal of US and UK troops had been so fast and everything had unravelled so quickly that Pordale says he and his father had not thought of an escape plan. “My mother and my siblings were already in Turkey and I’d stayed in Kabul to help my father, but in those days when the provinces were falling to the Taliban, my father just couldn’t accept that this could happen and everything we’d been working towards would disappear,” he says. “It was only that morning of the 15th, when we woke up and realised that [President] Ashraf Ghani had fled, that we came to our senses.”

Sam Pordale with Coventry’s former lord mayor and lady mayoress, Jaswant Singh Birdi and Krishna Birdi
Sam Pordale with Coventry’s former lord mayor and lady mayoress, Jaswant Singh Birdi and Krishna Birdi. Photograph: Courtesy of Sam Pordale

Pordale’s life to this point had been spent in the highest circles of status and wealth in Afghanistan, thanks to his father’s positions in the military and government. But the huge security risks that came with his father’s work had also meant that his childhood was isolated and lonely. “Me and my siblings only really had each other because we weren’t allowed to go out and play. We only left the house to go to school and we changed schools all the time, so we didn’t have friends,” he says. “My mother would never let us sleep anywhere near a window, so we’d have our beds in the corridors because the house could come under attack. And my father was always facing assassination attempts. By the time I was a teenager I’d survived two suicide bombing attacks on different schools.”

Looking back, Pordale says that the isolation from everyday life had also made him arrogant and entitled. “We really had no contact with the outside world,” he says. “If we did leave the house, we would go with an armed escort. We grew up just accepting that our family had a lot of power.” Then all that wealth and power vanished overnight. “That morning the government fell, we called everyone we’d been working with in the US and UK governments to ask for help, but nobody answered,” he says. “All these powerful allies and friends were gone in an instant.”

Getting closer to the checkpoint, Pordale knew he had to flee. He shouldered his way through the crowd and ran through the streets of Kabul before he found shelter in a shop. “I had nothing: no money, no luggage. We’d gone to the airport in such a panic,” he says. “The only person I could think to call was this dodgy guy who was connected to everyone, including the Taliban, but our family had helped his mother when she was sick. He was the only one who answered the phone to me that day.”

Pordale was told to wait, and after an hour someone turned up and said they were there to take him to Iran. He took a bus to the border, then crossed into Iran hidden in a compartment under the floor of a minivan.

In Iran, he was put under the floor of another bus, compressed into a small space just a few feet above the road for a journey that lasted nearly two days. Trapped in the dark, with the heat and the pain, he kept trying to locate parts of his body to make sure he was still alive. “It was like nothing existed outside the inside of the bus,” he says.

When he finally made it to Istanbul, he turned up dishevelled and filthy at his mother’s front door. “They hadn’t heard from me since Afghanistan fell,” he says. “So it was a shock to them all.” The family were reunited, but because Pordale had crossed into Turkey illegally he didn’t have the paperwork he needed to work or stay in the country. In 2022, a few months after he had arrived, Turkey began an aggressive deportation of illegal Afghan migrants back over the border into Afghanistan. “Many people I knew who had stayed in Afghanistan or who had got sent back were getting arrested or just went missing,” says Pordale. “I knew people who had been killed. I was terrified of being sent back.”

Like many other Afghans who had fled to Turkey, he felt that the only thing he could do was to move on towards Europe. Pordale called the people who had got him into Turkey and they told him to go to a market in the centre of Istanbul. “It was like a shopping centre for people smugglers,” says Pordale. “People would just be standing there outside shops yelling in multiple languages offering different packages to get you to Europe.”

Pordale was told that the cheapest route was overland through Bulgaria, with prices starting at £1,500. The most expensive, at about £8,000, was the sea crossing to Italy. He managed to get together the money to go to Italy and prepared to leave. The smugglers took Pordale and a group of about 60 others, mostly Afghans, to İzmir on the Turkish coast, and one night they did a long night trek in silence to a deserted beach to meet their boat. “When we saw the boat I thought, I’ve made a big mistake, because it was just this little fishing boat. It couldn’t have been more than 14 metres long,” he says. “People were sitting literally on top of each other, piled up. There were parents trying to keep hold of babies. I managed to sit on a small kitchen sink, sort of crouching on top of it but my legs were bent underneath me.”

Pordale is now co-president of Warwick Student Action for Refugees
Pordale is now co-president of Warwick Student Action for Refugees. Photograph: Courtesy of Sam Pordale

They were told the journey would take three days; in the end it took six. “On the third day everyone ran out of food and the sea was so rough that the water started coming in the boat,” he says. “We were all soaking wet and terrified. People were going crazy. One guy just started screaming, ‘We’re all going to die,’ and at that moment I did just want to die so this could be over.”

On the sixth day at sea, they were spotted by an NGO rescue boat and taken to Sicily, and then, after being processed, to a reception centre. After a few days there, Pordale decided to keep moving towards the UK. “My family had worked a lot with the British government and I felt this sense of brotherhood,” he says. He also spoke fluent English. “I experienced such bad racism in Italy that going to the UK felt like my only chance to be accepted and do something useful.”

He walked most of the way from Italy to France with another group of refugees. “Most of the time I was just putting one foot in front of the other but sometimes it would just hit me, what had happened in Afghanistan and how not just me but also hundreds of thousands of other normal people had been reduced to something that felt less than human. There were moments on that journey when I thought, if I die here, nobody will know what happened to me. I’m nobody, nothing. I barely exist.”

He describes his time in the migrant camps in Calais waiting to cross to the UK as “the most degrading, humiliating experience you could imagine”. He says there was no violence inside the camps from the Kurdish smugglers running the place, “but once you start the journey to the boat, that is when it starts”. He says that on his first attempt at crossing the Channel, the boat was in such a bad condition that the smugglers were beating people to make them get onboard. “I paid them £1,800 for the crossing and it took nine attempts to get to the UK.” He doesn’t remember much about the journey itself, “because by that point I didn’t care if I lived or died. It felt like just another thing that was happening to me.”

Sam Pordale, seated and smiling, on the University of Warwick campus
‘In Afghanistan it never would have occurred to me to do something purely to help someone else, but I discovered volunteering was something I loved.’ Photograph: Fabio de Paola/The Guardian

When he finally arrived in the UK (he says he has no idea where he landed) on 16 April 2022, eight months after he had escaped Afghanistan, Pordale says he was treated “like a human being for the first time in months. But when I spoke to my mother I just wanted to get off the phone. I had caused them all these financial problems and all this worry. They were alone in Turkey, and I had failed them.”

He was taken to an asylum hotel in Coventry, “where water was running down the walls and the toilets were broken”, he says. “After the first month I just felt myself slipping into this deep depression. I thought, this can’t be my life.”

At his asylum accommodation, Pordale had come into contact with the Red Cross, and he started walking three hours back and forth each day to one of their drop-in centres to volunteer as an English teacher. “In Afghanistan it never would have occurred to me to do something purely to help someone else, but I discovered volunteering was something I loved,” he says. “Just to feel active and useful and part of something, it brought me alive again.”

He also knew that his fluent English was the reason he had been treated so humanely by the immigration officials he had met since he got off the boat. “I could express what I’d been through. I could form a connection,” he says. “I wanted to help other people to do that too.”

His manager at the Red Cross put him forward for an interview for an academic research programme looking at the barriers that refugees faced accessing higher education. He was shocked to learn that he was allowed to apply to study at UK universities, so he applied for five undergraduate courses across the country.

Meanwhile, he was moved by the Home Office from Coventry to Stockton-on-Tees, where he started volunteering at Citizens Advice, helping local people navigate problems with benefits and jobseeking. “I would sit there and local people would tell me it was all the immigrants’ fault that they couldn’t get a job, and they should all go back to where they’d come from. I would say, ‘Well, I’m a refugee,’ and they’d say, ‘Oh not you, the others.’”

Pordale was profoundly shocked by the poverty and desperation he saw in Stockton. “Many people were living in worse conditions than people in rural Afghanistan,” he says. “So much poverty! Some people would sit and cry because they hadn’t eaten in three days. They felt that nobody cared about them and they were right.”

When protests kicked off in Middlesborough over the summer, Pordale watched the TV coverage of people attacking buildings housing asylum seekers and recognised some of the people he had helped get universal credit or housing benefit. “They were only believing what they’d been told, but they were angry with the wrong people, and the damage the riots have caused to the mental health of many refugees is huge.”

At the beginning of 2023, he was told he had been awarded a full scholarship to study politics and international studies at the University of Warwick. It was “the most miraculous thing that has ever happened to me”, he says. He started university in September 2023 with “no money, no clothes, no suitcase”, but now the campus feels like home. “I know everyone here,” he says. “From the lecturers to the cleaners, everyone is my family.” He intends to stay at Warwick to get a PhD and then spend his life trying to open up higher education opportunities to refugees and asylum seekers.

The first week he enrolled he also joined the university’s Student Action for Refugees group and is now the president. “I went back to the same asylum hotel I was first taken to in Coventry, but this time to teach English,” he says. Sometimes he thinks back to his life a few years ago and can’t believe what he has been through. “The idea I could become a refugee overnight would have seemed crazy,” he says. “But laws, governments, your rights, they can all disappear in a second and all you’re left with is yourself. I just want to make the best of every chance I have to live a good life.”

Six days on a small boat in rough seas: my terrifying, death-defying escape from the Taliban
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Cricket must challenge gender apartheid in Afghanistan

Mike Stein would like the ICC to have the moral and political courage to lead a multilateral boycott

Two additional points come to mind. First, England acted alone in 1968 in cancelling their tour to South Africa after the prime minister, John Vorster, banned the team for including the “mixed-race” player Basil D’Oliveira. England’s decision put pressure on the International Cricket Council, which introduced a moratorium on all international tours in 1970, resulting in South Africa’s exclusion from international cricket until Nelson Mandela walked free from prison in 1990.

Second, as Liew suggests, India is the key player, holding both the cricketing and economic cards that represent major barriers to effective action: the former as a consequence of the individualisation and privatisation of cricket through the Indian Premier League, weakening players’ country ties, and the latter as a result of India’s economic self‑interest in Afghanistan.

The only hope would be if the ICC had the moral and political courage to lead a multilateral boycott, as it did in 1970, and the member states were prepared to back them. But that seems unlikely, as the England and Wales Cricket Board and other participants are refusing to take part in a boycott of an international competition. Gender apartheid remains unchallenged by cricket in 2025.

Mike Stein
Pudsey, West Yorkshire

Cricket must challenge gender apartheid in Afghanistan
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Why is Afghanistan part of the great extractives race?

Global Initiatives

Treasure Hunt

Afghanistan’s mineral resources harbour great untapped potential. The country sits on an estimated 2.2 billion tonnes of iron ore, 60 million tonnes of copper, 183 million tonnes of aluminium, and vast reserves of rare earth elements such as lanthanum, cerium and neodymium. In a world where access to these minerals is a matter of national security, there is a geopolitical race to secure control of critical mineral supply chains. While China currently leads, the USEU, and others are seeking to establish and secure independent mineral supply chains.

Afghanistan is one of the theatres in which this race is being played out. The country’s resources are not just a matter of foreign economic interest – they are a potential for domestic economic development and growth. But they can also become a source for conflict and repression, depending on whether they are managed with the long-term welfare of the Afghan people in mind. The mining sector in Afghanistan is controlled by the Taliban, and it is unclear where the revenues end up.

Undermined

The new Taliban de facto authorities sought to capitalize on Afghanistan’s mineral resources after their return to power in 2021. Since then, they have awarded at least 205 mining contracts to more than 150 companies, and in September 2023 they announced new mining deals worth more than US$6.5 billion. In May 2024, the Taliban-controlled Ministry of Mines and Petroleum (MoMP) said that the group had secured investments worth more than US$7 billion from China, Qatar, Turkey, Iran and the UK. The details of these contracts remain undisclosed.

The Taliban inherited many of the Republic-era challenges in the country’s extractives sector, particularly the lack of a comprehensive regulatory framework and an effective oversight body. According to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, these challenges also include the country’s inability to reform mineral policies and regulations, corruption, unregulated artisanal and small-scale mining, and lack of infrastructure and security. The Taliban are navigating through outdated institutional structures, making changes along the way, while working on a complete overhaul of the extractives policy.

Although the MoMP claims to have taken steps to curb illegal mining, these measures lack a formalized structure with independent oversight. Workers can be subjected to exploitation in mining operations, including child labour. In addition, unregulated mining is often carried out in unsafe working conditions and can cause serious environmental damage.

Afghanistan’s suspension from the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative in June 2024 points to the problems around transparency and accountability mechanisms in the country’s extractives sector. Failure to follow clearly defined mining regulations prevents the equitable distribution of the country’s mineral wealth. With limited transparency around international mining contracts, the international community should consider the risks these pose for Afghanistan’s mineral sector, ranging from exploitation to monopolization by foreign actors.

Geopolitical relevance

Afghanistan’s reserves of copper and lithium, among other minerals, are crucial to the global shift towards renewable energy and reliance on digital technologies. China has shown a keen interest in securing access to Afghanistan’s resources and has invested heavily in its mining industry, signing multi-billion-dollar contracts for projects such as the Mes Aynak copper mine, one of the largest copper deposits in the world.

The investment is not only driven to secure critical minerals, but also by Chinese strategic considerations linked to its Belt and Road Initiative designed to enhance the country’s global influence and project its power. Taking advantage of the power vacuum created by the collapse of the previous government and the US withdrawal, China is becoming a valuable partner to the Taliban. China’s contracts and investments in Afghanistan’s mining sector are a sign of how it is seeking primacy in the region, which could deter other international actors from entering the sector. Afghanistan’s economic future could become increasingly tied to Chinese interests, reducing the country’s bargaining power and making it more difficult to establish trade relations with other countries.

Although China is leading the race, other countries, including Russia, are jockeying for access to critical minerals. The recent visit to Kabul by Sergei Shoigu, secretary of Russia’s National Security Council and former defence minister, sends a clear signal to the G7+ countries about which bloc has the most influence in the country.

An opportunity not to be missed

For Afghanistan to truly benefit from its resources, there needs to be a multilateral approach to mining, involving different international actors to ensure transparency and fair competition. Investment in Afghanistan’s mining sector could help develop the country’s infrastructure, creating roads, railways and facilities that would benefit the economy and enable resource extraction. This could provide jobs and strengthen capacities of Afghan workers, as well as a more stable revenue stream for the country.

The UN-led engagement with the Taliban in Doha is a potential opportunity to shed light on the sector and strategize on how the extractives sector could improve the economic situation for Afghans. The talks are designed to help Afghanistan integrate into the global community, with a focus on fostering dialogue between the Taliban and international stakeholders. So far, however, the process has yielded little other than a commitment by all countries to continue such discussions and the appearance of the Taliban on the international stage. While discussions have touched on security and political stability, the issue of natural resource management, particularly mineral extraction, has not been addressed. As natural resources play a central role in financing the Taliban, shaping power dynamics and post-conflict rehabilitation, linking resource management to social and economic development seems a potential area of mutual interest.

As the country navigates an uncertain path forward, its mineral resources should be treated as key elements in a broader strategy for stability, ensuring that resource wealth benefits all Afghans. If critical economic assets such as minerals are ignored in ongoing engagement strategies, they can become a force driving conflict or obstructing post-conflict rehabilitation. If left unaddressed, this pattern risks being replicated in Afghanistan. The country’s resources need to be more than just assets buried in the ground – they need to be an active part of the dialogue about Afghanistan’s future.

Why is Afghanistan part of the great extractives race?
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View from Pakistan: Discomfort over India’s meeting with Afghan Taliban

AAKASH JOSHI

Indian Express

Jan 12, 2025
Pakistan’s restive western border and Delhi’s outreach invited comment and analysis in the country’s press Aakash Joshi

Afghanistan, once seen by the Pakistani military and intelligence establishment as an instrument of its “strategic depth” against India, has become an albatross around Rawalpindi’s neck. For long, it propped up the Taliban in the hope of a proxy regime in Kabul.

The recent cross-border attacks by Pakistan – ostensibly to target the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan’s (TTP) infrastructure – in which civilians, including women and children, were killed show just how far ties have soured. The Taliban regime in Kabul reportedly responded to the strikes as well.

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In this context, the meeting between Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri and Amir Khan Muttaqi, acting foreign minister of the Taliban regime, has invited both comment and concern. Beijing, too, seems to be trying to open avenues with Kabul.

Dawn, in its editorial on January 11, writes, “The Indians have reacted cautiously with the Taliban, but matters are proceeding nonetheless. The Taliban also maintain significant links with China and Russia.”

“These developments,” the editorial argues, “should concern Pakistan, and make its policymakers revisit their Afghan strategy. The stark fact is that while the Afghan Taliban may be difficult customers, Pakistan cannot afford a hostile neighbour to its west.” It suggests a practical engagement with the Taliban, including the leaders in Kandahar, from where the “real power flows.”

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“The Taliban are welcome to keep the TTP, as long as they pose no harm to Pakistan,” Dawn says, and concludes, “As others are making diplomatic inroads with the Afghan Taliban, including unfriendly governments, Pakistan must reassess and readjust its strategy.”

Shazia Anwar Cheema, writing in The Express Tribune on January 10, writes, “We [Pakistan] used to blame (former Afghanistan president) Ashraf Ghani for being a stooge of New Delhi… while the Afghanistan Taliban had been called ‘brothers and friends’.” She argues that the situation seems to have reversed now and that Washington and New Delhi are acting in concert to make their presence felt in Kabul.

If this scenario is indeed coming to pass, argues Dr Cheema, Pakistan must act. “The reports of Pakistan’s first-ever friendly contact with the so-called Northern Alliance, which is made up of non-Pashtun Afghans can be a step towards this. Pakistan has been blamed for the fall of Panjshir Valley and its handover to the Afghan Taliban as well.”

Najm us Saqib, a senior Pakistani diplomat, takes a broader view of his country’s external orientation in an opinion article for The Nation: “The recent wave of terrorism—Afghanistan’s adamant stance on the Khawaraj (TTP) and the like; Washington’s total neglect of its erstwhile ‘strategic’ partner’s economic and security concerns; the region’s volatile predicament, particularly in the face of the ongoing Middle East crisis; and the West’s overall policy of leaving Afghanistan to its own devices—paints a grim picture for Pakistan.”

His argument, in essence, is that Pakistan now seemingly lacks a foreign policy and the country’s economic woes make matters worse. Unfortunately, “The economic crunch and the ongoing political uncertainty do not leave the present government with many options. Crisis management—as opposed to conflict resolution—seems to be the order of the day.”

aakash.joshi@expressindia.com

View from Pakistan: Discomfort over India’s meeting with Afghan Taliban
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Don’t Underestimate the Enduring Power of ISIS

Dr. Stern is a research professor at Boston University and an author of “ISIS: The State of Terror.”

The New York Times

On New Year’s Day, a confused, disgruntled and indebted veteran drove into a crowd of joyful celebrants in New Orleans, killing 14 and injuring 35 more. The assailant said shortly before the attack that he had joined the Islamic State, the brutal terrorist movement that at one point controlled an area in the Middle East the size of Britain.

In its heyday, ISIS marketed itself as offering what one fighter called a “five-star jihad,” promising recruits a paradoxical mix of religious authenticity and material rewards, from free housing to a glamorous new identity to access to wives. At its height, it was the wealthiest terrorist organization in modern history.

Today, while the ISIS caliphate is gone, the group has cells and affiliates scattered across Africa, Southeast Asia, Afghanistan and Syria. It maintains an active online presence and is still a threat: With the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, the authorities are concerned about a potential resurgence by ISIS there, while an offshoot in Afghanistan, ISIS-K, claimed responsibility for a significant attack last year in Russia and is believed to be behind another in Iran.

But the twisted heart of the utopia ISIS was trying to build, and all that it claimed to offer, no longer exists. So why would the group’s extreme ideology — rejected by the overwhelming majority of the world’s Muslims — appeal to a down-on-his-luck American veteran five years after the caliphate’s fall?

Most of us, as adults, live in a state of spiritual confusion and uncertainty. We rarely get to choose between good and evil but often face a frustrating choice between actions that lead to marginally better or worse consequences. Rewards for good behavior are often ephemeral, and punishment for bad decisions is mostly of our own making.

To some, ISIS offered a seductive alternative: moral certitude, backed by brutal enforcement. From 2013 to 2019, an estimated 53,000 fighters from 80 countries traveled to ISIS-held territories in Syria and Iraq to be a part of what the group sold as an idealized Islamic state. An estimated 300 individuals from the United States either made their way to ISIS-held territory or tried to. Some foreign fighters became notorious for perpetrating the caliphate’s worst atrocities.

For sympathizers unable to make the journey, the chief spokesman for ISIS,’ Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, called for supporters around the world to attack nonbelievers at home. In a September 2014 speech, Mr. al-Adnani said that if you were unable to bomb or shoot the enemy disbeliever, you should “smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car.” ISIS sympathizers began undertaking such vehicle attacks, including a truck assault in Nice, France, in 2016 that killed 86 people and injured 450. It was followed by many others.

In the last few hours before his suicidal rampage in New Orleans, the attacker, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, posted about his plans on Facebook. Perhaps the most telling recording was his confession that he had considered harming his family. “I don’t want you to think I spared you willingly,” he said. But Mr. Jabbar apparently worried that if he hurt only his family, news headlines might not focus on the “war between the believers and disbelievers” that he thought was taking place.

In my work, I have found that self-recruited, lone-actor terrorists are often motivated at least as much by personal grievance as their claimed ideals. In one recent study, many former violent extremists said that underlying social and emotional distress was as strong a factor in their radicalization as intellectual or religious adherence to extremist ideologies. Most reported having a history of mental health problems, such as depression, and suicidal ideation was common.

Obviously, most people experiencing a mental health crisis do not become lone-actor terrorists. But there is often so much distress in individuals carrying out attacks on their own that it is reasonable, in my view, to think of lone-actor terrorism as a crime of despair.

There is no single pathway into violent extremism, but many of the risk factors I’ve observed in my research seem to apply to Mr. Jabbar. He was a veteran who appeared to be having difficulty adjusting back to civilian life. He had been divorced for the third time. He had run-ins with the law. He may have been deeply distressed over his financial burdens. Revenge against his family — and a world that had disappointed him — appears to have been a significant part of his underlying motivation, with his allegiance to ISIS providing a perverse spiritual gloss.

The persistent appeal of ISIS in America was evident in a disturbing series of alleged plots in the last year alone: the arrest of an Afghan in Oklahoma accused of conspiring to commit an attack on Election Day; the arrest of an Arizona teenager accused of planning an attack on a Pride parade using a remote-controlled drone armed with explosives; the indictment of a Houston man on charges of attempting to provide material support to ISIS; and the arrest of an Idaho teenager accused of plotting to attack churches on behalf of ISIS. In December, the F.B.I., the National Counterterrorism Center and Department of Homeland Security warned law enforcement that pro-ISIS messages were calling for attacks at large holiday gatherings, pointing out the previous use of vehicles to ram victims.

Years after its zenith, ISIS has demonstrated remarkable adaptability. As an organization, it may yet grow stronger. After its territorial defeat in 2019, stated U.S. military strategy shifted its focus from counterterrorism in the Middle East toward nation-state adversaries, notably China and Russia. But the underlying conditions that first enabled ISIS’ rise in the region persist: Weak states, unstable governments, large populations of underemployed youth, and religious and ethnic conflicts all continue to create fertile ground for extremism.

Perpetrators of targeted violence often “leak” their intentions ahead of time to family, friends, social media and even to the authorities, creating the opportunity for communities to step in to help people who are at risk. One approach to preventing violence like the attack in New Orleans builds on public health models that aim to reduce the rates of suicide, domestic violence and drunken driving. For it to prevent terrorist attacks, the authorities have to educate the public about the importance of bystander reporting and “off ramps” from violent radicalization.

The New Orleans attack serves as a grim reminder that the ISIS digital caliphate is still able to transform personal crises into public tragedy. The alarming reality is that many other people remain vulnerable to similar paths of radicalization.

Don’t Underestimate the Enduring Power of ISIS
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What We Wrote, What You Read in 2024: Reflections on our coverage of an evolving Afghanistan

2024 was another busy year for AAN as we tried to make sense of developments in Afghanistan. Our 51 publications ranged from snapshots of daily life – the Helmand labourer who, with his wife, took in an impoverished widow and her children, or the female student coming home for the holidays for the first time since the fall of the Islamic Republic – to in-depth reports, such as the effect of Pakistan’s fencing of the Durand Line on cross-border communities, or the place of poetry in Islamic Emirate propaganda. We also have exciting plans for 2025. Here, AAN’s Kate Clark looks back at 2024 – what we wrote and what you read – and introduces some of our research agenda for the coming year.

What we wrote in 2024

In 2024, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) pushed onwards with consolidating its rule over Afghanistan, with new rules governing the lives of its citizens, women and girls in particular, and efforts to manage the economy and improve relations with the neighbours. We followed all these trends, often taking a sideways look at developments. So, for example, we fleshed out a major report on the macro-economy with interviews with businessmen and women on how they were navigating what the World Bank called a “stagnant economy.” We used the IEA ministries’ own reporting on their work to delve into how the Emirate wants to be perceived. In a report on the hugely consequential subject of remittances, we ended with a look at the social ramifications of younger men from Loya Paktia earning such good wages in the Gulf that it gave them greater power within the family, helping drive progressive change. We looked at the Emirate’s limiting of employment for female teachers through the lens of one district in Badakhshan, poor and isolated Shughnan. Its decades-long export of male and female teachers and literacy to other districts and to provinces is now severely curtailed, with huge consequences for the district’s economy and the well-being of many of its women.

Part of what we hope to bring to any research on Afghanistan is context, including providing a ‘long view’. In 2024, we marked a hundred years since the Khost Rebellion, when Pashtun tribes and mullahs sought to overthrow Amir Amanullah in what became a bloody contest between ‘traditionalists’ and ‘modernisers’ that continues to this day. Our first publication of 2025 partly followed the same theme with a look at the PDPA, founded 60 years ago, and how that same contest of ideas spawned a decades-long armed conflict, which was internationalised by the Soviet invasion and Western and other support to the mujahedin.

In 2024, we surveyed the various accountability mechanisms which could give some satisfaction to the victims of war crimes and crimes against humanity that all governments and armed opposition groups have perpetrated since the PDPA’s 1978 coup d’état. We also looked at the various international legal instruments women’s rights activists hope to deploy against the Emirate (for example, in this report).

Also notable in 2024, was the publication of an updated edition of the Afghanistan Analyst Bibliography, compiled by Christian Bleuer. This is an invaluable resource for those studying and researching contemporary Afghanistan, particularly the post-1979 period. It now covers some 8,000 titles.

What sort of reports were prominent in 2024?

Individual researchers at AAN generally focus on what interests them in the hope that this keeps our publications lively and fresh. At the same time, we try to cover a broad range of topics, aiming to cover eight thematic categories:

  • Culture and Context
  • Economy, Development and the Environment
  • International Engagement
  • Migration
  • Political Landscape
  • Regional Relations
  • Rights and Freedoms
  • War and Peace

As can be seen in the table below, which shows how many reports in 2024 fell into each of our eight categories, War and Peace – which topped the list in 2021, when two out of every five reports fell into this category, as did 14 of our 20 most-read reports that year – has quite fallen away as a topic. We published nothing in this category in 2024. Instead, reports about Rights and Freedoms and those tackling the Economy, Development and the Environment were at the fore.

Publications by Thematic Category
Rights and Freedoms 12
Economy, Development, Environment 10
Context and Culture 8
International Engagement 6
Migration 6
Political Landscape 5
Regional Relations 2
War and Peace 0
Resources (a bibliography of Afghanistan) 1
Dossier (of reports on international relations and aid) 1
Total 51
What you were reading in 2024

As to what you, our readers, were interested in, publications on women’s lives and possible international legal actions against the Emirate featured strongly in the list of AAN’s twenty most-read reports (see below). Also in our top-twenty were reports that delved into IEA thinking: ‘New Lives in the City: How Taleban have experienced life in Kabul’, by Sabawoon Samim from 2023, was again among the most-read reports. His interviews with five former fighters now living in the capital were a surprisingly positive read. They liked the modern facilities and cleanliness of the capital, its ethnic diversity and people’s devotion to Islam, but found office life dull. They longed for the freedom of the ‘jihad’.

Scrutiny of the Emirates’ international relations, including the various meetings and summits aimed at, but typically failing, to strengthen engagement, were widely read (for example here and here), as were some important reports on climate change, including a detailed and practical look at how to mitigate the risk of flooding. Publications from previous years have also proven evergreen: two reports on the cultural history of hashish in Afghanistan, on its production and consumption, both published in 2019, were in our top twenty, as were two reports from 2016 – on the origins of ISKP and the Afghan practice of ‘paying’ for wives.

As for readers of our reports in Dari and Pashto, a rare look at the portrayal of Afghanistan’s Uzbeks again topped that most-read list (English version: ‘From ‘Slavers’ to ‘Warlords’: Descriptions of Afghanistan’s Uzbeks in Western writing’), while a scholarly article on Afghanistan’s largest standing Buddhist stupa, at Topdara just north of Kabul, was popular with both Dari and English readers (again, see the list at the end of this report).

The year ahead

Readers wanting to better understand Taleban thinking will (hopefully) be pleased that we will be publishing a full translation of the Emirate’s 45,000-word-long Law to Promulgate Virtue and Prevent Vice (a basic translation was one of the twenty most-read publications in 2024), as well as a commentary by Islamic scholar John Butt. His 2023 report, the IEA’s Chief Justice’s theory of jurisprudence, about the key Emirate text (written in Arabic), Al-Emarat al-Islamiya wa Nidhamuha (The Islamic Emirate and its System of Governance), was our seventh most-read publication last year. We also hope to publish a review of Taleban narratives about themselves, writings in Pashto about their fight with the foreign forces and Afghan army, their time in prisons and the impact of the insurgency on fighters’ families.

We will continue to carry out research on the lives of women and girls, including publishing a major report about what Afghan men think of IEA restrictions on women and a new dossier bringing together all our reports on women since July 2021. That 2021 dossier, published three weeks before the re-establishment of the Islamic Emirate, topped our 2024 list of most-read publications – interest in Afghan women is undoubtedly still strong, and we hope to keep exploring new developments. One current piece of research, for example, is on women’s inheritance rights, which are explicitly laid out in the Quran and promoted by the Emirate, but blocked by cultural norms which consider it shameful for a woman to ask for her rightful inheritance.

In 2025, as in 2024, it seems inevitable that reports falling into the categories of Economy, Development and the Environment, and International Engagement (or non-engagement) will feature in our attempt to make sense of Afghanistan. Global warming is increasingly endangering Afghan lives and livelihoods, while Afghanistan is shut out of much of the help available to mitigate the climate crisis for the poorest countries. At the same time, the level of international aid – so crucial to many families, as well as the macro-economy – is only likely to diminish further and to remain focussed on humanitarian needs. A new American president comes into office this month. Whether Donald Trump turns out to be active or indifferent to Afghanistan, there will be consequences – for good or ill. Analysis of internal dynamics, such as how the Emirate raises and spends revenue, will also remain crucial to understanding the impact of the Afghan government on its citizens’ lives.

However complex the subject, we will continue to try to present topics, at least partially, through the experiences of individuals, whether via the first-person accounts of The Daily Hustle series, or as integral elements of our longer, in-depth research. Watch out for forthcoming reports on blood feuds, mining, the Emirate’s ban on begging and how the lives of village mullahs have changed over recent decades.

Finally, at the start of January, we wish all our readers – and Afghanistan – a very happy 2025.

AAN’s 20 most-read reports in 2024 in English

Dossier XXX: Afghan Women’s Rights and the New Phase of the Conflict, AAN team, 29 July 2021

What Do Young Afghan Women Do? A glimpse into everyday life after the bans, Jelena Bjelica and AAN team, 17 August 2023

“We need to breathe too”: Women across Afghanistan navigate the Taleban’s hijab ruling, Kate Clark and Saeda Rahimi, 1 June 2022

The Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice Law, translated into English, John Butt, 31 August 2024

New Lives in the City: How Taleban have experienced life in Kabul, Sabawoon Samim, 2 February 2023

The Myth of ‘Afghan Black’ (1): A cultural history of cannabis cultivation and hashish production in Afghanistan, Jelena Bjelica and Fabrizio Foschini, 7 January 2019

The Bride Price: The Afghan tradition of paying for wives, Fazal Rahman Muzhary, 25 October 2016

The Myth of ‘Afghan Black’ (2): The cultural history of hashish consumption in Afghanistan, Fabrizio Foschini, Jelena Bjelica and Obaid Ali, 10 January 2019

Whose Seat Is It Anyway: The UN’s (non)decision on who represents Afghanistan, Thomas Ruttig, 7 December 2023

10 The State of Research on Afghanistan: Too many poor quality publications and some real gems, Christian Bleuer, 28 April 2024

11 The Climate Change Crisis in Afghanistan: The catastrophe worsens – what hope for action?, Muhammad Assem Mayar, 6 June 2022

12 The Pastures of Heaven: An update of Kuchi-Hazara disputes as spring approaches, Fabrizio Foschini and Rama Mirzada, 24 February 2024

13 The Largest Standing Stupa in Afghanistan: A short history of the Buddhist site at Topdara, Jelena Bejlica, 8 January 2020

14 No Food For Hope: Afghanistan’s Child Malnutrition Dilemma in 2023, Fabrizio Foschini and Rohullah Sorush, 7 July 2023

15 UN Security Council Resolution on Afghanistan: Just another ‘much ado about nothing’?, AAN team, 31 December 2023

16 Before the Deluge: How to mitigate the risk of flooding in Afghanistan, Muhammad Assem Mayar, 15 May 2024

17 Afghanistan in Front of the World Court? What can be expected from a legal challenge to the Emirate’s violations of women’s rights, Rachel Reid, 3 October 2024

18 The Daily Hustle: The ancient art of making surma, Sayed Asadullah Sadat and Roxanna Shapour, 5 May 2024

19 The Islamic State in ‘Khorasan’: How it began and where it stands now in Nangarhar, Borhan Osman, 27 July 2016

20 From Doha to Doha: The contest over a UN Special Envoy lingers as discussions and disagreements drag on, Roxanna Shapour, 1 March 2024

AAN’s five most-widely read reports in 2024 in Dari and Pashto

From ‘Slavers’ to ‘Warlords’: Descriptions of Afghanistan’s Uzbeks in western writing, Christian Bleuer, 17 October 2014 (English version here)

The Afghan Economy since the Taleban took power: A dossier of reports on economic calamity, state finances and consequences for households, Kate Clark, 14 May 2023 (English version here)

The Largest Standing Stupa in Afghanistan: A short history of the Buddhist site at Topdara, Jelena Bjelica, 8 January 2020 (English version here)

The Durand Line and the Fence: How are communities managing with cross-border lives?, Sabawoon Samim, 21 April 2024 (English version here)

The Long Winding River: Unravelling the water dispute between Afghanistan and Iran, Muhammad Assem Mayar and Roxanna Shapour, 20 November 2023 (English version here)

 

What We Wrote, What You Read in 2024: Reflections on our coverage of an evolving Afghanistan
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Dignity and humanity of Afghan women must be worth more than game of cricket

The Guardian
Tue 7 Jan 2025
The Taliban uses the success of its men’s team as propaganda – cricket’s powerbrokers should pursue a collective boycott

“There’s all types of lines you can draw. We’ve drawn a line.” So explained Mike Baird, the chair of Cricket Australia, last month in explaining the governing body’s stance on playing against Afghanistan, the country that has just banned women from looking out of windows.

According to a new decree from the Taliban government, new buildings must not be constructed with windows through which women can be seen. Existing buildings with windows must be walled up or covered. “Seeing women working in kitchens, in courtyards or collecting water from wells can lead to obscene acts,” said Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesperson for the government.

Afghanistan faced England at the 2023 men’s World Cup, winning by 69 runs in Delhi.
ECB urged to boycott Afghanistan game in Champions Trophy by UK politicians

At present Cricket Australia – in common with the England and Wales Cricket Board – are refusing to schedule bilateral series against Afghanistan out of concern for “the deterioration of basic human rights for women in Afghanistan”. But, confusingly, both countries are perfectly happy to play them in global competitions – Australia at last year’s Twenty20 World Cup, England at next month’s Champions Trophy.

Which, however you square it, is a weirdly precise place to draw your moral line. Our concern for the women and girls of Afghanistan apparently kicks in at 1.5 cricket matches. Two or more games in a single sitting: an unconscionable act of collusion in a murderous, misogynist, medieval death cult. Fewer than two: all right lads, crack on.

At which point, we run into the equivocation and realpolitik of the cricketing establishment, arguing against a sporting boycott of Afghanistan on the grounds that it would extinguish the hope and joy generated by the men’s team over the past two decades, while achieving little tangible benefit.

“I don’t think it would make a jot of difference to the ruling party there to kick them out,” the outgoing International Cricket Council chair Greg Barclay said last month. Which, you have to say, is a pretty high bar to set for sporting activism. Fair enough, wave your banners. But until you’re actually capable of literally overthrowing the Taliban, then stop wasting our time.

We are warned not to punish the richly gifted men’s team for the sins of their government, as if the dignity and humanity of 20 million Afghan women were simply acceptable collateral damage against the wider backdrop of Rashid Khan’s availability for the next T20 World Cup. We are reminded that Afghanistan had little culture of women’s cricket before 2021 in any case, with the implication that – basically – the erasure of an entire international team is no great loss in the grander scheme of things.

To be blessed with this kind of benign adult wisdom! And yet, even to address this argument on its own terms is to subject it to greater strain than it can remotely handle. The very existence of the men’s team – pretty much the only representative side given official blessing – is evidence enough of its propaganda value.

High-ranking Taliban officials have posted photos with the team at official functions, called senior players to congratulate them after wins, allowed games to be shown on big screens in public parks to a grateful male-only audience. This is politics: how could it not be? Cricket is uniquely popular among the young Pashtun men who form the backbone of the Taliban’s appeal. This is the only reason the fun police have allowed it to continue: this team is now essentially a client outfit, a PR offensive, a form of cricketing diplomacy.

And of course the easy targets here are the empty shirts at the ECB, Cricket Australia and the ICC, trapped between two forms of countervailing cowardice. Cancelling a loss-making bilateral tour costs nothing. Boycotting a big tournament game has significant implications for broadcasters, sponsors and future commercial value.

But of course the ICC is basically an events management company now, a governing body that has largely given up on governance. The ECB and Cricket Australia are peripheral figures here, merely underlined by the response from the former’s chief executive, Richard Gould to calls for a full boycott. The centre of gravity in this issue, as with pretty much everything in cricket these days, is India. And so the relevant question here is less what “should” happen than: what is the realistic range of possibilities that Jay Shah, the new ICC chair and acolyte of Narendra Modi, will allow to happen?

Officially, the Modi government does not recognise the new Afghan regime. In reality, the past couple of years have seen a pragmatic rapprochement, in defiance of the cultural and religious divides between the two countries. Diplomatic ties were restored in June 2022. Meanwhile, the Afghan embassy in Delhi and its two consulates in Mumbai and Hyderabad are said to have passed quietly into the control of pro-Taliban officials.

Driven by an ever-present fear of Chinese influence, and encouraged by a slight frosting of relations with Pakistan, the Modi government has spotted an opportunity to build bridges. Naturally, cricket has played a prominent role in diplomatic ties: Afghanistan play their home matches in Greater Noida just outside Delhi, India invited them to play a white-ball series in January, and when Afghanistan reached the T20 World Cup semi-finals last summer they issued a statement thanking India for their “continuous help in capacity-building of the Afghan cricket team”.

And so, if India are overly perturbed by the disappearance of women’s rights under the Taliban, let’s just say it’s not immediately apparent. Afghan players continue to staff the Indian Premier League. Afghan men’s teams continue to be welcome to tour India, to use Indian facilities and draw on Indian expertise. The Afghan economy has collapsed since 2021 and is in desperate need of new trade partnerships. Anyone want to connect the dots here?

None of which is to argue against the power of the sporting boycott. But to focus on unilateral gesture at the expense of collective action is essentially to acquiesce to the status quo. To oppose the iron age misogyny of the Taliban must also be to oppose the structures of capitalist power that keep it in place, from the commercial cowardice of sporting administrators to the cynical collaboration of the Modi government. Too much? Too hard? Too radical? Then, like the factotums who run the game, you’ve also chosen to draw your line in an entirely pragmatic place.

Dignity and humanity of Afghan women must be worth more than game of cricket
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A long time under the snow for the women of Afghanistan

By Shabana Basij-Rasikh

Shabana Basij-Rasikh is co-founder and president of School of Leadership, Afghanistan (SOLA).

The Washington Post

January 6, 2025

Especially for girls, hope is difficult to come by. But it has not been extinguished.

This past December marked two years since women could attend college in Afghanistan. March will mark three years since girls could go to school past sixth grade. And only a few weeks ago, the Taliban barred women from studying to become midwives or nurses.

For a long time, Afghanistan was the country with the highest rate of maternal mortality. That’s no longer the case — that awful distinction is now held by South Sudan. But Afghanistan’s rate remains the highest of any nation outside Africa. And that’s only on the national level. Certain remote regions of Afghanistan see a maternal mortality rate that’s much higher than the national one, particularly regions such as Badakhshan in the northeast.

A few weeks ago, I talked to a 13-year-old girl in Badakhshan over Zoom.

She was telling me about her parents. Both are nurses. Her mother was no longer permitted to work in a clinic, but she could see patients at their home, and she saw many of them. These home visits inspired the girl.

“I want to be an OB/GYN,” she told me. “Women die here when they give birth. So many women die here. If I become a doctor, I can serve my people and I can change that.”

“If I don’t find a way to study, I’ll have a dark future here,” she said. “I’ll keep trying. Failure is a part of life. I have lots of plans. I will make them happen. I’m going to build a clinic in this village someday.”

“I want to study. I want to go to school. I’m living in a place that is two seasons under the snow,” she said. She’s right. Winters last a long time in Badakhshan.

Two days after the girl and I spoke, the Taliban issued their decree forbidding women to become nurses like the girl’s mother.

A different 13-year-old girl told me that she dreams of leaving Afghanistan to study. She said she sees many girls her age hoping to find some way out of their homeland, too, though via a different path. They are looking to find Afghan men living overseas to whom they can offer themselves as wives. Thirteen-year-old girls.

Some girls reach for the humor in anger. They bitterly mock the Taliban in private. One girl told me how proud she was to already be a graduate, which means she made it through sixth grade. What an accomplishment. And now a whole world of opportunity awaits.

Others keep working to get out despite the obstacles. One girl told me she was taking online classes to learn to code when she realized they wouldn’t help her get into any international university, as she still lacked some sort of widely accepted credential. Which is why she and a small group of her friends are working with a teacher online to get their GEDs, the U.S.-based high school certification.

I’ve spoken to girls who climb up on the roofs of their homes every day to get a usable cellular signal. One girl from the provinces would even climb into the hills so that she could be alone and speak freely.

As parents of older teens in the United States will know, it’s early decision and early action season for college acceptances. Recently, an Afghan high school student I had come to know, a girl enrolled outside of Afghanistan, invited me to virtually join her and her family on the morning she would learn whether she had been accepted to the college of her choice. There was a lot of excitement and plenty of nerves. The morning came and there I was online with this girl and her family who were dialing in from Badakhshan.

I saw her father, mother and siblings by the illumination of a solar-powered light. They were gathered near a sawdust-burning stove. There was a little girl there who looked quite young. I learned later that she’s 4, and she’s the student’s little sister. The sisters have seen each other in person only once ever.

Silence for a moment and then jubilation. She was laughing. We all were. I saw her father’s and her mother’s faces so clearly: They were crying. Happiness. Pride. She’d gotten in. She’d done it.

It’s easy to say there’s not much hope to be found in Afghanistan today. And there’s not. But hope is not extinct. It exists only in small bursts, in hidden places, under the snow. It exists in the relentless spirit of girls on winter rooftops. It exists in the faces of a father and mother in the Badakhshan cold, sitting by a sawdust stove, warmed and illuminated by a girl and a dream that she made real.

It’s rare and precious. But it exists.

A long time under the snow for the women of Afghanistan
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Analysis: Why have Pakistan’s ties with the Afghan Taliban turned frigid?

By

When the Taliban seized power in Kabul in August 2021, Pakistan’s Interior Minister Sheikh Rasheed Ahmed delivered a triumphant news conference at the Torkham crossing with Afghanistan.

He claimed that the Taliban’s swift ascendance to power would create “a new bloc” and the region would reach great global importance. Imran Khan, Pakistan’s prime minister at the time, equated the Taliban’s return to power with Afghans having “broken the shackles of slavery”.

For nearly 20 years, the Afghan Taliban fought a sophisticated and sustained revolt, confronted – at one point – by a United States-led coalition of more than 40 countries in Afghanistan. In that period, Taliban leaders and fighters found sanctuary inside Pakistan across the regions bordering Afghanistan. Taliban leaders also formed a presence in, and links with, major cities in Pakistan such as Quetta, Peshawar and later, Karachi.

Many Taliban leaders and many fighters are graduates of Pakistani Islamic religious schools, including the Darul Uloom Haqqania, where Mullah Muhammad Omar, the founder of the Taliban movement, reportedly studied. In Pakistan, the Taliban found an ecosystem fostering organic relationships across the spectrum of Pakistani society, enabling the group to reorganise and initiate a lethal uprising that began around 2003. Without Pakistan’s support and sanctuary, the successful uprising by the Taliban would have been highly unlikely.

Given this background, what explains the recent deterioration of bilateral relations, with the Pakistani military conducting air strikes inside Afghanistan this week – only the latest evidence of the tensions between Islamabad and the Afghan Taliban?

Historical and current factors

Afghanistan has a complicated history with Pakistan. While Pakistan welcomed the Taliban in Kabul as a natural ally, the Taliban government is proving to be less cooperative than Pakistan had hoped, aligning itself with nationalist rhetoric to galvanise support from the wider Afghan society. Taliban leaders are also eager to transform from a fighter group to a government, ostensibly an ongoing endeavour, and forging relations beyond heavy reliance on Pakistan.

The Durand Line, a colonial-era boundary dividing the regions and communities between Afghanistan and what is now Pakistan, has never been formally recognised by any Afghan state after Pakistan’s establishment in 1947. The Durand Line is internationally recognised as a border between the two countries, and Pakistan has fenced it almost entirely. Yet, in Afghanistan, the Durand Line has become an emotive issue because it divides Pashtuns on the two sides of the border.

The Taliban government in the 1990s did not endorse the Durand Line, and the current Taliban regime is following its predecessors. In Pakistan, this is seen as a nuisance and a challenge to the doctrine of Pakistan’s ‘strategic depth’ in Afghanistan.

With the Taliban’s success in Afghanistan, the armed rebellion arena has seemingly shifted to Pakistan. There has been a significant spike in militant attacks on Pakistani security and police forces since 2022 – particularly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces.

Most of the attacks are claimed by Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the so-called Pakistan Taliban. TTP and Afghan Taliban carved symbiotic relations for years, sharing sanctuary, tactics and resources, often in Waziristan and other Pakistani regions bordering Afghanistan.

Pakistan treated the Afghan Taliban as ‘friends’ after 2001, partly to weaken any sense of cross-border Pashtun nationalism and hoping to leverage its influence on the Taliban in developments within Afghanistan and in relations with the US. In 2011, Michael Mullen, the US military chief at the time, stated that the Haqqani Network – a key component of the Afghan Taliban – was a “veritable arm” of the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI), Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency. Analysts predicted, as it was feared, that Pakistan’s support for the Taliban to seize power in Afghanistan would lead to a ‘Pyrrhic victory’ with Pakistani fighter groups and other violent nonstate actors feeling emboldened, not weakened, as a result.

The significance and implications of tensions

It is unlikely that the Taliban would accept any Pakistani demands for action against TTP leaders in Afghanistan’s border areas with Pakistan. Crucially, such action would disrupt the Taliban’s equilibrium with TTP and open space for other more extreme groups such as Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP).  The Taliban leaders are deploying the same logic that Pakistan used for nearly two decades, dismissing demands by the former Afghan government and the US to curb Taliban activities inside its territories. Like Pakistan then, the Taliban now argue that the TTP is an internal Pakistani issue and that Islamabad must resolve its problems domestically.

The Pakistani army will most likely continue bombing the Afghan territory with impunity, faced only with minor international condemnation. There is a growing international precedence, unfortunately. Countries such as Israel conduct cross-border air strikes, claiming security threats. In addition, the Pakistani army, as the long-term guardian of security in the country, is under tremendous pressure to demonstrate tangible action in countering militancy and protecting the country’s infrastructure, including Chinese-invested economic projects in Balochistan. Attacking Afghan territory allows for political messaging to the Pakistani population to centre on an externally enabled ‘enemy’. It also insulates the state from engaging with the growing domestic demands for political and socioeconomic empowerment, especially by Pakistani Pashtuns.

Meanwhile, the Taliban government in Afghanistan lacks resources, an organised army and any meaningful international partnerships to push back against Pakistan’s assertiveness. In March 2024, a senior Taliban military leader stated that the US maintained control over Afghan airspace, explaining the occasional appearance of US drones in Afghan skies.

While the Taliban leaders have promised ‘retaliation’, it is unclear how they can do that against a militarily powerful neighbour that also happens to be their long-term strategic supporter. Pakistan also maintains other levers of influence against the Taliban: Most trade into landlocked Afghanistan flows through Pakistan, and Pakistan has hosted millions of Afghan refugees for decades.

However, Pakistan’s military action inside Afghanistan will fuel anti-Pakistani sentiments among the Afghan population and further alienate Pakistani Pashtuns. As the Afghan case demonstrates, insurgencies feed on societal resentment, deprivation and youth disillusionment.

Solutions require leaders to illustrate boldness to address long-term grievances. A reactionary show of force might make newsworthy momentary gestures, but achieving peace is usually an art of wisdom and patience. Ironically, Pakistan and Afghanistan offer workable pathways for regional economic integration, connecting Central Asia and South Asia regions. Sadly, the lack of political will and vision among leaders for a generation and the securitisation of bilateral relations have hindered prosperity for more than 300 million people in both countries.

Source: Al Jazeera
Analysis: Why have Pakistan’s ties with the Afghan Taliban turned frigid?
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America, Afghanistan and the Price of Self-Delusion

By

Mr. Sopko has been the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction since 2012.

The New York Times

January 2, 2025

The collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan on Aug. 15, 2021, revealed what little American lives and money had purchased over 20 years there. It also laid bare a gaping disconnect between reality and what senior U.S. officials had been telling Americans for decades: that success was just around the corner.

As the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction since 2012, my staff and I have audited and investigated U.S. programs and spending to rebuild Afghanistan — a mission that, it was hoped, would turn the theocratic, tribal-based “Graveyard of Empires” into a modern liberal democracy.

In hundreds of reports over the last 12 years, we have detailed a long list of systemic problems: The U.S. government struggled to carry out a coherent strategy, fostered overly ambitious expectations, started unsustainable projects and did not understand the country or its people. American agencies measured success not by what they accomplished, but by dollars spent or checklists of completed tasks.

As our own agency winds down and we prepare to release our final report this year, we raise a fundamental and too rarely asked question: Why did so many senior officials tell Congress and the public, year after year, that success was on the horizon when they knew otherwise? For two decades, officials publicly asserted that continuing the mission in Afghanistan was essential to national interests, until, eventually, two presidents — Donald Trump and Joe Biden — concluded it was not.

The incoming Trump administration, Congress and the long-suffering American taxpayer must ask how this happened so that the United States can avoid similar results in Ukraine, Gaza, Syria and other war zones.

We should start with what “success” in Afghanistan was ever supposed to mean. I believe many Americans who worked there over the years wanted to not only achieve important U.S. strategic interests — such as eliminating a haven for terrorists — but also secure a better future for the Afghan people.

But a perverse incentive drove our system. To win promotions and bigger salaries, military and civilian leaders felt they had to sell their tours of duty, deployments, programs and projects as successes — even when they were not. Leaders tended to report and highlight favorable information while obscuring that which pointed to failure. After all, failures do not lead to an ambassadorship or an elevation to general.

They also aren’t good business for the contractors on which the U.S. mission relied to manage and support programs and projects. For contractors, claiming success, whether real or imaginary, was vital to obtaining future business. So spending became the measure of success. (The same, of course, is true in Washington, where unspent allocations are tantamount to failure, leading to budget cuts.) Accountability for how money was spent was poor. One general told us that he faced a challenge: How to spend the remaining $1 billion from his annual budget in just over a month? Returning the money was not an option. Another official we spoke to said he refused to cancel a multimillion-dollar building project that field commanders did not want, because the funding had to be spent. The building was never used.

As one former U.S. military adviser told my office, the entire system became a self-licking ice cream cone: More money was always being spent to justify previous spending. Old staff departed, new staff arrived with “better” ideas, and new iterations of the same old solutions were repeated, for years. At the same time, many of the problems the U.S. programs faced were simply beyond our control. The sudden collapse of the Afghan government and rise of the Taliban showed that the United States could not buy favorable Afghan perceptions of the country’s corrupt leaders and government, or of America’s intentions.

Yet over two decades — and even as Afghan provinces fell like dominoes in the summer of 2021 — I do not recall any senior official telling Congress or the American people that failure was a real possibility.

Our final report will detail what many experts and senior government officials now say to us, with hindsight: that these entrenched, fundamental challenges doomed any real possibility of long-term success. Some argued that decisions made as early as 2002 — such as partnering with warlords and refusing to include the Taliban in discussions about Afghanistan’s future — set a course for inevitable failure. Others blamed poor interagency coordination, rampant Afghan corruption, ignorance of local culture and the distance between U.S. goals and Afghanistan’s realities.

There were key moments when American officials could have come clean. Before the United States began, in 2014, to transfer responsibility for security to the Afghans, a succession of U.S. generals and officials made optimistic claims that Afghan forces would be effective in fighting the Taliban, that corruption and human rights abuses were contained and that Afghan elections were democratic and fair — assessments that did not align with my agency’s reporting to Congress or basic reality. In 2013, one senior official even suggested that Afghanistan might prove to be the most successful reconstruction effort over the last quarter-century.

The fall of Kunduz in 2015 — which represented the first time since 2001 that the Taliban regained control of a major city — should have punctured the delusion that Afghan forces could hold their own. But building those forces had been the cornerstone of the U.S. reconstruction effort, whose success would pave the way for eventual U.S. withdrawal. The rosy narrative had to be maintained.

The reality was that Taliban fighters with Cold War-era rifles and dirt bikes often outperformed Afghan government forces with state-of-the-art equipment and backing from U.S. air power. The Taliban were religiously motivated to rid the country of foreign invaders and what they perceived as a puppet government installed by Washington. The members of the Afghan military — beset by low morale, chronic logistical problems and pervasive corruption — were often motivated solely by their salaries, though they, of course, also suffered hugely in the fight.

Official statements across successive U.S. presidential administrations were, in my view, often simply untrue. Just six days before the Afghan government collapsed, the Pentagon press secretary declared that Afghanistan had more than 300,000 soldiers and police officers, even though the special inspector general’s office had been warning for years that no one really knew how many soldiers and policemen were available, nor what their operational capabilities were. As early as 2015, I informed Congress that corrupt Afghan officials were listing “ghost” soldiers and police officers on rosters and pocketing the salaries.

Important information for measuring the success of initiatives was — at times deliberately — hidden from Congress and the American public, including USAID-funded assessments that concluded Afghan ministries were incapable of managing direct U.S. financial assistance. Despite vigorous efforts by the U.S. bureaucracy to stop us, my office made such material public.

Special interests are a big part of the problem. President Dwight Eisenhower once warned of the growing influence of a “military-industrial complex.” Today, there are multiple complexes: development and humanitarian assistance, anti-corruption and transparency, protection for women and marginalized people, and many others. These are all good and noble causes, to be sure. But when it came to Afghanistan, organizations under these umbrellas, whether because of altruism or more selfish motivations, contributed to the overly optimistic assessments of the situation to keep the funds flowing. Self-serving delusion was America’s most formidable foe.

That delusion continues today. According to data provided to my office by the Treasury Department, since 2021 the United States has funneled $3.3 billion to Afghanistan through public international organizations, mainly United Nations offices, for humanitarian purposes. Some of this money helps the Afghan people, and some goes to the Taliban. In response to a congressional request, my office reported this year that between the American withdrawal in August 2021 and this past May, U.S.-funded partners paid at least $10.9 million in taxes and fees to Taliban authorities. In July, we reported that two out of five State Department bureaus were unable to show that their contractors working in Afghanistan in 2022 had been vetted sufficiently to ensure their work was not benefiting terrorist organizations.

Today, most aid to Afghanistan and other war-torn countries flows through United Nations offices that my agency has identified as having weak oversight. If we are to continue providing taxpayer dollars to these organizations, it must be made conditional on U.S. oversight agencies having full access to their projects and records to make sure funding reaches the people it is intended to help.

In Afghanistan, the office of the special inspector general was often the only government agency reliably reporting on the situation on the ground, and we faced stiff opposition from officials in the Departments of Defense and State, USAID and the organizations that supported their programs. We were able to do our work only because Congress granted us the freedom to operate independently. Inspectors general for the military, State Department and USAID, however, do not enjoy such autonomy. If we are going to fix a broken system that puts bureaucrats and special interests ahead of taxpayers, the first step is to make all federal inspectors general as fully independent as my office has been.

Ultimately, however, if we do not address the incentives in our government that impede truth-telling, we will keep pursuing projects both at home and overseas that do not work, rewarding those who rationalize failure while reporting success, and burning untold billions of dollars. American taxpayers deserve better.

John F. Sopko has served as the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction since 2012; he was appointed by President Barack Obama and served under the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations. He has been a prosecutor, congressional counsel, law partner and senior federal government adviser.

America, Afghanistan and the Price of Self-Delusion
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