The Taliban have barred us from the workplace, cut our access to healthcare and closed schools to us. Must we struggle alone?
We suddenly all woke in the middle of the night. A piercing cry came from the corner of our room. It was my teenage sister, sobbing in the little room we rent in London. She always used to sleep in the same bed as my mother – until the fall of Kabul.
She wasn’t used to sleeping alone. That night, early in spring, she sobbed until dawn. Her pain was obvious: separation from my mother and a longing that became chronically painful for us all. Since our exile, I have been playing the role of mother, thousands of miles from our parents.
Afghanistan’s fall was not just the takeover of a country, but the separation of its people, including thousands of teenagers like my sister. The fall is also the story of a mother’s comfort, now missing for my sister and me. We miss her arms and the bed we could share, the food she cooked.
When I see my mother’s face, I can’t hold back tears at the deep lines that have settled on her face,
When the Taliban took over again in Afghanistan, countless lives were transformed in horrible and distressing ways. We were catapulted to another country, with a culture and language so different it felt like another planet.
Although being away from parents is exhausting, I still reassure my sister that, as Hazara girls and women, we are the lucky ones who now live in a safe and free country. There are young girls who were forced into marriages inside Afghanistan, and millions of girls have been deprived of basic rights.
Migration is a path that leads to a new world, one full of challenges and opportunities, but it comes at a cost. The feeling of loneliness and distance from family and friends does not leave you for a second.
On 24 August 2021, when I was forced into exile, I had never thought about the difficulties of living away from home and family. I didn’t have time to think because we were all so confused about what had just occurred.
But now, two years into exile, I am only in touch with my mother through WhatsApp; it’s a strange thing but it has become a familiar practice now. When I see my mother’s face, I can’t hold back tears at the deep lines that have settled on her face. In those wrinkles, I see the pain and suffering of the separation of a mother from her loved ones. I weep afterwards.
How did the Taliban manage to create the first gender apartheid system in front of the world?
Reviewing two years of Taliban rule in Afghanistan is full of despair and darkness. The first question is how the Taliban managed to create the first gender apartheid system in front of the world. How was this possible? Why have the women of Afghanistan been abandoned? What happened to those promises that the international community touted all the time?
Today, millions of school-age girls are deprived of education by the Taliban, made possible by the infamous peace deal that the US agreed with the Taliban in Qatar. Today, the universities are closed to women and girls. The opportunity to work has been taken from tens of thousands of women who were breadwinners and heads of their families. Women’s access to health centres is limited, and the heavy burden of poverty and hunger is backbreaking.
The Taliban have excluded women from public life. Can you picture 50% of the population completely isolated in every sense? Why do we Afghan women pay the price for the Taliban’s return?
Afghanistan’s women now have to fight for something basic: the right to leave the house, to go to school and to parks, to get a job. When I founded Rukhshana Media, I never imagined such a dark day. I feel hopeless – not because I don’t have the will to fight, but when I try to describe and draw attention to this exceptional human condition.
During these two years of Taliban rule, I have received images of mutilated bodies of women and men tortured and killed by the Taliban forces. I could never have imagined such violence.
In these two years, we at Rukhshana have written and reported on the pain of protesting women who were flogged by Taliban fighters. We have written about the murder and disappearance of policewomen who, with the support of the west after 9/11, fought against inequalities in a patriarchal society and made room for themselves in the system.
In these past two years, it seems that the vast majority of Afghan men support women’s education, but this consensus has never been utilised as a means of mobilising people against the unacceptable situation under the Taliban. Women are left alone in their fight against the Taliban.
The Taliban regime does not look at women’s situation as a national issue, and international human rights institutions do not take action beyond publishing statements and reports.
As part of our research at Rukhshana Media, we examined the devastating effects of shutting schools to girls. Our findings showed girls suffering severe psychological problems. Suicide, femicide, forced marriage and domestic violence have increased drastically. It is hard to understand the depths of this darkness, and international human rights organisations seem oblivious to these issues.
We live in a turbulent world. War, violence, natural disasters, fear and anxiety have become integral to our lives. From the earthquake in Turkey and the devastating floods in Pakistan to the war and violence in the Middle East and Ukraine, life has become bitter and unbearable for many. The number of displaced people in the world increases every day; hunger and economic crisis lurk even in the world’s largest economies.
However, women in Afghanistan are fighting a full-scale and unequal war. We need your support, just as the people of Ukraine want your support in their battle against the Russian invasion. Please do not leave Afghan women to suffer and fight alone.
Women in Afghanistan are fighting an unequal war. We need your support
In the second of our mini-series on Taleban publications, this report examines what may be the fullest and most authoritative account yet of what the Taleban believe an Islamic state should look like. In his book, ‘Al-Emarat al-Islamiya wa Nidhamuha’ (The Islamic Emirate and its System of Governance), the Islamic Emirate’s Chief Justice, Abdul Hakim Haqqani, lays out his vision and the rationale for it. He delves into the legitimacy of an Islamic state, what he believes should be the political role of Islamic scholars, parliament, the judiciary, education system, what he sees as the proper place of women and why an Islamic state cannot be based on ‘man-made laws’. The book is written in Arabic, which makes it accessible to many scholars in the Islamic world, but limits its readability among Afghans. AAN, therefore, asked John Butt*, a journalist and broadcaster who was based in Afghanistan for several decades and is also a graduate of the Darul Uloom Deoband seminary in northern India, to read and review this important text.
The book cover of ‘Al-Emarat al-Islamiya wa Nidhamuha’ (The Islamic Emirate and its System of Governance) was written by the Islamic Emirate’s Chief Justice, Abdul Hakim Haqqani. Photo: John Butt, X (formerly Twitter), 1 September 2023.You can preview the report online and download it by clicking the link below.
The Islamic Emirate has been described by one scholar as “a highly underspecified and under-theorised political system.” It is notable that since re-taking power, the Taleban have been ruling without a constitution. Even before that, unlike similar armed opposition groups, the Taleban never had an aligned political party to promote their policies or politics (see AAN discussion here). In their previous incarnation in government (1996-2001), they did have a manifesto of sorts, written in Pashto, ‘Taleban: Da jihad atalan da fasad dushmanan’ (Taleban: Champions of Jihad, Enemies of Corruption), but it was scarcely known to the outside world. This is why the Chief Justice’s book, with its endorsement by Emirate Supreme Leader Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, is so significant.
This report takes a close look at the Chief Justice’s book, which reads like a work of jurisprudence (fiqh) on Taleban policies, jurisprudence being the theory or philosophy of law. One can say that the book amounts to an exposition of what Haqqani sees as Islamic political theory, a vision of what he believes a truly ordered Islamic state should look like.
Edited by Kate Clark
* John Butt came to journalism and broadcasting from a traditional madrasa education. For the last thirty years, he has been responsible for setting up radio serial dramas – storytelling in a contemporary setting – in various countries, particularly Afghanistan: ‘New Home, New Life’ in the 1990s and more recently a cross-border radio drama called Da Pulay Poray.
The first publication in this mini-series looked at the decrees, edicts and instructions issued by theTaleban’s supreme leader, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada. The orders themselves can also be read in their original Pashto and Dari, as well as AAN’s unofficial English translation.
You can preview the report online and download it by clicking the link below.
When the United States freed Afghanistan from the first Taliban government in 2001, everything in my homeland seemed to change overnight.
My father, a businessman, retrieved his cherished television from its hiding place in our home in Kandahar, where he had stashed it for years after the Taliban banned TV, along with music and cinema, as un-Islamic. Dusting it off, he placed it in a prominent spot in our living room, as if he were reclaiming a part of his own identity. People sang songs of liberation from Afghanistan’s past, and we hoisted high the new tricolor national flag that reflected our nation’s hopeful trajectory: a black band for the dark past, a red band signifying the blood shed for liberation and a green one representing optimism for the future.
It was as if a smothering veil had been suddenly lifted, revealing a world of color and sound that I, then a young girl regularly confined to our home because of Taliban edicts, had not seen or heard before. Even the sky seemed brighter and wider.
None of us could have dreamed that two decades later the Taliban would be back in power. That fate was finally sealed two years ago Wednesday, when the last American military forces were pulled out and, overnight, we lost our freedom again.
Since then I have come to ask myself: What is freedom, exactly? In other countries, particularly in the West, the answer may seem straightforward. But for Afghans, “freedom” is a word with many faces, a fleeting and fragile thing that passes from one hand to another, each claiming its own version of it. It is a word that I have learned not to trust.
Afghanistan has suffered from a succession of supposed liberators. The Soviets invaded in 1979 to prop up the Communist government at the time, which had vowed to free Afghans from feudalism, backwardness and inequality. The Soviets and their Afghan puppets were opposed throughout the 1980s by the mujahedeen, who were themselves hailed as “freedom fighters” by their backers in the United States. The Taliban later came along, promising to free the country from foreign ideas and the chaos of the nearly 10-year Soviet-Afghan war and civil war that followed. They seized full power in 1996.
President George W. Bush, of course, invoked freedom in justifying the military action that overthrew that first Taliban regime after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, saying of Osama bin Laden and his Taliban protectors: “They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”
The U.S. invasion later that year brought us some of these freedoms. The democracy that ensued was a flawed experiment riddled with corruption. But millions of Afghans, rich and poor, men and women, nonetheless rejoiced in the idea of voting in democratic elections.
I can recall other things as a little girl, like suddenly being able to walk with my mother to shop at the bazaar without fear of being lashed by Taliban whips for appearing in public without a male escort. Most exciting, girls were allowed to attend school again. My mother could finally speak openly to me and my siblings of her own college days before the Taliban, when she became a chemistry professor at Kabul University. She was giddy that her three boys and three girls would grow up educated. I stepped into a classroom for the first time at the age of 7, in my new uniform of a black frock, white trousers and a scarf, a bundle of nervous pride tightly clutching the pencils that my father had given me.
In 2016, I left to pursue an education in the United States and watched from afar two years ago as control of Afghanistan swiftly fell to the Taliban again.
As the final American pullout neared in August 2021, my cousin in Afghanistan told me by phone how he had witnessed an elderly woman, her face wet with tears of joy, welcoming triumphant Taliban fighters. She embraced and kissed one young fighter, thanking him for helping to liberate the country from the “heartless, evil” Afghan and American forces that she blamed for killing her three sons in a military raid. Some people showered the Taliban with sweets, a gesture of welcome and reverence in Afghan culture. I was stunned by the contrast between my own family’s fear and despair and that woman’s relief. But how could I blame her? One person’s freedom is another’s oppression. As Albert Camus wrote, “Absolute freedom mocks at justice.”
Now back in power, the Taliban have silenced dissent, enforced their strict brand of Islam and erased Afghan women from public life, education and the workplace. The Taliban have applied a doctrine they call fekri jagra, or “war of thoughts,” to purge Afghanistan of the ideas they say have been imposed on the people by foreign powers.
In America, I thought that I would finally learn what freedom really was, and I did feel free at first. I could speak my mind, question and challenge others, ride a bicycle and wear whatever I chose to wear.
But even here, it’s not so simple.
Former President Donald Trump has attacked and incited violence against some of the foundations of American freedom — the press, Congress, truth itself. In doing so, he is no different from the other authoritarians and fascists around the world who appeal to mythical or selective notions of freedom that threaten to erase all others.
A growing push by American conservatives to remove books from libraries and public schools on grounds of morality or contested history, or to supposedly free children from the “woke agenda,” reminds me of when I was 11 and Taliban sympathizers came to our home to tell my father that if my sisters and I returned to school, we would have acid thrown in our faces. This was a few years after the Taliban had been driven from power, yet parts of the country were still under their sway. For the next nine years, books and a slow dial-up internet connection were my only window to the world beyond the four walls of my home.
We should be wary of those who speak of freedom as if it were self-evident and universal. We must look closely at our freedom, as if it were a beam of light passing through a prism, to discern its true colors. We should ask ourselves: Are we really free, or do we live in someone else’s idea of freedom, one driven by religious or nationalist myths? Does my freedom to stay ignorant deny your place in history, your identity? Do my rights diminish yours? No matter where we stand politically or geographically, we should weigh the freedom that we seek against the moral cost that we pay to achieve it.
I feel more like an observer of American freedom than a true participant. Freedom is not only a physical or intellectual state; it is emotional. The Taliban takeover has devastated and scattered my family and enslaved my homeland. I will only truly feel free when I can do in Afghanistan the same things that I can do in America.
Sola Mahfouz is a quantum computing researcher at Tufts University and the author, with Malaina Kapoor, of “Defiant Dreams: The Journey of an Afghan Girl Who Risked Everything for Education.”
By the end of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, President Joe Biden was sure he made the right decision after watching the events unfold in the Situation Room.
“Biden didn’t have time to voraciously consume the news, but he was well aware of the coverage, and it infuriated him. It did little to change his mind, though,” Franklin Foer writes in his upcoming book, an excerpt of which was released Tuesday. “In fact, everything he’d witnessed from his seat in the Situation Room confirmed his belief that exiting a war without hope was the best and only course.”
“So much of the commentary felt overheated to him. He said to an aide: ‘Either the press is losing its mind, or I am,’” Foer writes.
The chaotic and violent withdrawal from Afghanistan is well-known, but in his new book “The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future,” Foer recounts an unflinching look at the previously untold timeline of events leading up to the withdrawal and the aftermath of it. The book, which is set to be released next week from Penguin Random House, recounts the first two years of the Biden presidency, ending with the 2022 midterm elections. Foer is a staff writer at The Atlantic and former editor at The New Republic.
When National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan relayed the news to Biden that former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, he writes, Biden exploded in frustration and said, “Give me a break.”
“Only after the plane had lifted into the air did the crew discover its place in history,” Foer writes. “When the pilot couldn’t fully retract the landing gear, a member of the crew went to investigate, staring out of a small porthole. Through the window, it was possible to see scattered human remains.”
Multiple people were killed during the U.S.-led airlift from Kabul International Airport. The withdrawal received heated criticism, especially from Republican lawmakers who have called for investigations surrounding the departure. Within days of the withdrawal, Biden’s poll numbers went down, with a majority of Americans disappointed in his handling of the withdrawal.
When former ambassador to Afghanistan John Bass touched down in Afghanistan after the plane’s departure to lead the evacuation effort, he toured the gates of the airport where he was greeted “by the smell of feces and urine, by the sound of gunshots and bullhorns blaring instructions in Dari and Pashto.”
“Dust assaulted his eyes and nose. He felt the heat that emanated from human bodies crowded into narrow spaces,” Foer writes.
Biden would shower Bass with ideas to evacuate more people.
“The president’s instinct was to throw himself into the intricacies of troubleshooting,” Foer writes. “‘Why don’t we have them meet in parking lots? Can’t we leave the airport and pick them up?’ Bass would kick around Biden’s proposed solutions with colleagues to determine their plausibility, which was usually low. Still, he appreciated Biden applying pressure, making sure that he didn’t overlook the obvious.”
“In total, the United States had evacuated about 124,000 people, which the White House touted as the most successful airlift in history,” Foer writes. “Bass also thought about the unknown number of Afghans he had failed to get out.”
Upcoming Biden book recounts untold timeline of Afghanistan withdrawal
August has already seen two days of national public holidays in Afghanistan and will see a third this week, celebrating the anniversary of the departure of the last United States troops on the 31st. That follows the celebration of Taleban forces’ entry into Kabul on 15 August 2021, which sealed the fate of the Islamic Republic and saw the re-establishment of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA). 19 August was also commemorated as the anniversary of the end of the Third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919; it has for decades been commemorated as Afghan Independence Day. In the century between Afghanistan’s oldest and newest public holidays, there has been a long list of victories, revolutions and other momentous occasions, some of which have been designated as national holidays – for a time at least. AAN’s Fabrizio Foschini has compiled a list of them, pondering on the divided memory they leave.On 15 August (24 Asad in the Afghan calendar), the IEA celebrated the anniversary of their takeover two years earlier, in 2021. That day, the Taleban captured Kabul and took the world by surprise by sweeping back into power, after two decades spent fighting the Islamic Republic and its international supporters, primary among them the United States, which had ended their first emirate in 2001. What the IEA has called The Conquest of Kabul Anniversary has understandably become its main national holiday (read the official statement on the occasion here). This year, the occasion was marked by extensive celebrations in all Afghanistan’s main cities, except Kandahar, where Taleban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada reportedly “called off the parade himself so as not to disturb the public.” By contrast, many Afghans now in exile named it a day of national mourning and held public demonstrations against the Emirate in the countries where they now live (see for example here).
Given the various economic and diplomatic obstacles the IEA faces, the anniversary of their victory provided an opportunity for a display of euphoria. The symbolic value of military parades and motorcades was apparent, as was their importance in reinforcing the cohesiveness of a militant movement and rejuvenating enthusiasm among the rank-and-file with the day’s re-enactment of the Taleban’s triumphant entry into Kabul. However, such a celebration, in the wake of a bloody conflict whose scars have not yet healed, was very much a day for the victors.
However, throughout their two-decade-long struggle for power, the Taleban have repeatedly shown themselves to be aware of the need for crosscutting references to reach the broader population (see this AAN report on Taleban ideology), including marking events which underpin nation-building sentiments. For example, in their propaganda war against the Republic, they routinely used the symbolic arsenal of Afghan patriotism drawn from the Anglo-Afghan Wars of the 19th century. They compared President Hamid Karzai (and later Ashraf Ghani) to Shah Shuja, the puppet ruler installed by the British in 1839, and their own leader, Mullah Omar to Dost Muhammed, the king who was ousted by invaders, struggled to resist foreign occupation and eventually returned to the throne in a liberated Afghanistan. It was, therefore, logical that once in power, they would adopt some of these holidays as signifiers of national identity, at least those against which have no ideological objections.
19 August, Independence Day, marks the signing of the Treaty of Rawalpindi at the end of the Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919, which granted Afghanistan the right to conduct its foreign relations policies independent of the British Empire (read the author’s previous report on the Third Anglo-Afghan War and its outcomes here). Independence Day has been the mainstay jashn (celebration) in Afghanistan for over a century (read an AAN report detailing a century of Independence Day celebrations here). As the paramount symbol of national pride and freedom as well as resistance to colonial, non-Muslim attempts at conquest or control, the 19 August holiday has proved an evergreen. It has been celebrated by governments of very different political leanings, by the kings, communists, mujahedin, the Republic and the Emirate, both now and during its first period of rule (see for example this AAN report about Independence Day under the First Emirate here and the IEA celebrations last year here).
The Taleban do observe Independence Day, but its coincidental proximity to the Taleban takeover led to incidents in 2021, as the newly victorious Taleban clashed with locals celebrating the occasion in Jalalabad. Arguably overlooking one of the core meanings conveyed by the 19 August celebration, Taleban soldiers had forcibly replaced the traditional national tricolour flags – closely associated with the continuity of an independent Afghan statehood, as well as, more recently, the Islamic Republic – with their own white flags. The resulting clashes left several local youths dead or injured (see Al-Jazeera reporting here).
Thus, two weeks in August have come to include the oldest and the newest of modern Afghanistan’s political events as national holidays. The list of other national holidays is long and twisted, mostly consisting of anniversaries of violent takeovers. The following summary will help to explain why some have been retained but most dropped and why nearly all have failed to account for and include the Afghan population in its entirety.
A calendar crowded with takeovers
Before the staple national celebrations grew to include anniversaries linked to one faction or personality snatching power from another, Independence Day was the main celebration throughout Zaher Shah’s long reign (1933-1973). However, even then, there was already a taste of what was to come. The anniversary of the restoration of his Muhammadzai monarchy, after Habibullah Kalakani’s short stint as monarch in 1929, was celebrated every year at the end of October at least throughout the 1930s.[1]
A date that did not become a public holiday was 9 March 1963. It could be taken as the start of the so-called Constitutional Period (1963-1973), also termed the New Democracy (Dimukrasi-ye Naw) when Zaher Shah began, effectively, to reign. He had been proclaimed king following the death of his father, Nader Shah, in 1933, but had ceded power to a succession of older and more powerful male relatives, two uncles and then his cousin Sardar Daud. Daud’s decade-long authoritarian premiership ended in 1963, to be replaced by the Constitutional Period. It has been idealised by many Afghans as a time of progress, characterised by a new constitution, Afghanistan’s first elections and greater civil and political rights, including for women.[2] However, this turning point never acquired the status of an official holiday, possibly because the transfer of power had been peaceful.
Another day that did become a national holiday for a long time was Pashtunistan Day. This holiday had more to do with the discordant relationship between nation-building and state boundaries than it did with the competition for power. The day asserts the unity of Pashtuns (and Baluch) on both sides of the Durand Line[3] and hints at Afghanistan’s territorial claims on the areas forming Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, its North-Western Frontier Province (renamed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2010) and Baluchistan. Pashtunistan Day was fervently celebrated all over Afghanistan with the support of the state’s machinery, every 31 August from 1949 onwards, especially during the decade 1953-63, which saw Sardar Daud as prime minister.[4] Its importance was much reduced in 1976, when Daud, this time as president, found himself relying increasingly for economic and political support on the Shah of Iran. In the regional diplomatic balance of the time, Daud had to accept Tehran’s entreaties for reconciliation with Pakistan and an end to Afghanistan’s claims to territory on Pakistan’s side of the Durand Line.
Over the decades, the commemoration of Pashtunistan Day has been revived periodically, first, under the communist governments in the 1980s and then during the post-2001 Islamic Republic, though with much less emphatic state sponsorship. It seems unlikely that Pashtunistan Day will persist, if for no other reason than because 31 August has joined the Emirate’s crowded August calendar of festivities as the day when the last US troops left Afghanistan (see France24 report here).
The first date to be noted in Afghanistan’s calendar of temporary national holidays involves Sardar Daud again, but this time at the other end of the transfer of power. On 17 July 1973, while Zaher Shah was on holiday in Italy (a ‘holiday’ that was to last 30 years), Daud wrenched power from his cousin in an almost bloodless coup d’état and with the support of factions in the royal establishment and some progressist and leftist groups. Styling himself President, Head of the Cabinet and Foreign Minister, he proceeded to proclaim the first Afghan Republic – and a single-party state. The coup was termed a ‘revolution’ at the 1977 Loya Jirga and the day (26 Saratan in the Afghan calendar) was celebrated as Jashn-e Jomhuriat (Republic Festival). Three days of events at the Chaman-e Huzuri, a sports grounds in downtown Kabul, included competitions of equestrian tent-pegging. However, that holiday was not to last long, indeed only the few years that Daud’s Republic existed.
What had at first looked to many observers as just another power shift within the Musahiban family, that had held onto power since 1929, was actually the presager of unrest and an unparalleled downward spiral into violence. Daud’s seizure of power came at a time of social and economic change and increasing external tensions in the region. New players, such as the communist organisations, had been brought into the business of ‘kingmaking’ by Daud. Up till then, it had been the preserve of royal clans and tribes. However, he violently rejected them afterwards. The growing ambitions of these outsiders, who included the Islamist organisations, to ‘court politics’, coupled with police repression, radicalised politics. The end of Daud’s reign was, however, marked by a national holiday for more than a decade.
The post-1978 holidays
The next shift in power – and its resulting public holiday – came in another coup d’état, known as the Saur Revolution of 27 April 1978 (7 Saur in the Afghan calendar). (See the AAN dossier on the Saur Revolution and its consequences here.) On that day, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) and particularly the Khalq faction, which had strong support among the armed forces, attacked the Presidential Palace in response to the arrest of its leadership by the government. Daud and most of his family were killed, along with dozens of others from both sides, and two days later, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was born (see this AAN report for details).
The new government erected a monument to the revolution and its ‘martyrs’ in front of the Presidential Palace and for many years, 7 Saur was celebrated in all government-controlled areas. What followed the coup, however, was a guerrilla war, waged by the mujahedin against government forces and later also, the Soviet army, which invaded Afghanistan on 24 December 1979 to support its ally in Kabul. As the war caused increasing military and political difficulties for the government, the celebration eventually assumed more subdued tones. In 1986, for example, PDPA General Secretary Babrak Karmal, soon-to-be-replaced at the behest of Kabul’s Soviet patrons, failed to attend it altogether. The policies of his successor, Najibullah, aimed at distancing the Kabul regime from communism, further eroded the date’s significance in the following years. Yet, all official references to the Saur Revolution were dropped only in mid-1991 (as mentioned by Barnett Rubin in his The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, 1995, p154). Subsequent Afghan governments have all condemned the Saur Revolution as the root of all evil in Afghanistan.
A date from that period which is still remembered and celebrated to this day, is 15 February 1989 (corresponding to 26 Dalwa in the Afghan calendar), when the last Soviet troops left the country, crossing the Friendship Bridge over the Amu river (see AAN report here). The Soviet withdrawal has been celebrated as Liberation Day by the mujahedin governments, the Islamic Republic and the Islamic Emirate in both its incarnations. It may appear to resemble Independence Day and to vindicate the old colonial view that would have the quarrelsome Afghans able to unite only against an external foe. However, unlike the independence of 1919, the withdrawal of the Soviets did cast a whole segment of Afghan society in the role of losers, to bear the consequences of the political defeat of communism. Also, it did not usher in an era of peace, let alone prosperity.
The most obvious celebrants of 26 Dalwa were the mujahedin organisations which had fought the Soviets. However, a separate date marking their conquest of Kabul on 28 April 1992 has proved a more controversial celebration. This is not only because, as with all violent accessions to power, it also signified the downfall of another party, but also because the victorious mujahedin factions proved incapable of forming a united government and very soon began to fight each other in what led to a vicious civil war in the capital and elsewhere across the country (1992-1996). Victory Day (Ruz-e Piruzi), also called the Islamic Revolution Day (Ruz-e Enqelab-e Islami), was retained as a national holiday by the post-2001 government, largely at the behest of the mujahedin parties which had become constituent parts of the Republic. The celebrations would take place across the country, especially in major cities such as Herat and Mazar-e Sharif where former mujahedin parties still held considerable power. The main celebrations would take place in Kabul and usually consisted of a military parade which ended with speeches by those in the highest echelons of the state at the Chaman-e Huzuri near the Old City of Kabul. Ironically, it was one of the city neighbourhoods that had suffered the worst destruction during the mujahedin infighting.
Celebrating a day that marked the beginning of a new brutal chapter of the Afghan conflict was questioned by other Afghans on many occasions. One of the rare instances when this strife was made evident to external observers was when MP Malalai Joya was attacked and ostracised for condemning the protagonists of Victory Day in parliament in 2006 (see Reporters sans Frontières’ (RSF) report here); fellow MPs from mujahedin parties were so incensed at her repeated denunciation of warlords and war criminals in the chamber that they eventually had her suspended from parliament in 2007.
The Taleban, many of whom were among the mujahedin fighting in the 1980s jihad, have been keen to still commemorate that victory over communism, during both their first and the current emirates. Conveniently, also, it comes on 8 Saur (27 April), thereby helping to erase the ‘stain’ of the Saur Revolution on the 7th. (see thispost on the Pixstory). They referred to it during their decades-long struggle to regain power and likened their fight against the Republic and NATO forces to the one against the Afghan government and Soviet army of the 1980s. In 2013, for example they timed the launch of one of their major spring offensives with the 8 Saur anniversary (see Khaama Press report here).
The same does not apply to another mujahedin-centred remembrance day, Ruz-e Shohada (Martyrs’ Day) that was established as a public holiday by the Afghan parliament in 2012. The date chosen, 18 Sonbola in the Afghan calendar, linked it to the anniversary of the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massud on 9 September 2001, which had already been commemorated by the state before 2012.
The day was supposed to honour all martyrs who had lost their lives fighting for their country. However, the choice of the date of Massud’s death was not universally popular and the character of this commemoration, which came to be known also as Hafta-ye Shahid (Martyr’s Week) or simply Massud Day, was transformed into something entirely different. This was especially the case after 2014, with the worsening military situation and growing political tensions between the various factions in the Republic.
Many of the former commanders from Massud’s Shura-e Nazar network within Jamiat-e Islami, especially those from the Panjshir and Shomali, who had initially obtained high-ranking positions in ministries or the armed forces, started to resent what they perceived as their having been sidelined from power (see this AAN report).[5] Building on the frustrations and fears of their community constituencies, they started to mobilise their networks to hold demonstrations on Massud Day. The commemoration was thus turned into a means for them to reassert their cohesion and power with friends and foes alike. From a state-organised commemoration of martyrs, the occasion grew increasingly out of government control, with motorcades and gatherings of armed men in and around Kabul coloured by intimidating political and ethnic connotations (see ToloNews here).
Once in power, the Emirate did not allow this celebration to continue. In early September 2021, as the Taleban were still trying to quell an armed resistance in Panjshir, they ruled out Martyrs Day celebrations in the name of security (see Pajhwok here). They removed the celebration from the calendar of public holidays in 2022 (see Pajhwok here). It is unclear whether they will cancel Martyrs’ Day altogether or select another calendar date for this purpose. That would allow the Emirate to honour Afghanistan’s martyrs, while at the same time delinking it from their former foes and denying their political opponents a highly symbolic date around which to rally.
Celebrating which past? Lost occasions under the Republic
What about those other major turnabouts in recent Afghan history, the fall of the first Taleban Emirate and the coming into being of the post-2001 institutions? Could 13 November 2001, when after weeks of US bombings, the Taleban fled Kabul, have been picked to mark such a change? Or would the UN-sponsored Bonn Agreement of 5 December 2001, when the Afghan factions who had opposed the Taleban, either within the country or in the diaspora, came together to establish a future government have been chosen? Or possibly, the Emergency Loya Jirga of 11-19 June 2002, or the establishment of the new constitution, ratified on 26 January 2004, could instead have offered occasions for a national celebration?
The Islamic Republic, however, was content to keep celebrating the 1919 Independence Day, the Soviet withdrawal and the mujahedin’s entry into Kabul, while adding the commemoration of the martyrs only. By refraining from commemorating an inception date of its own, the Republic in a way admitted the very disparate nature of the social and political groups constituting its elites, whose many internal differences were seldom worked out and more often subsumed under a tenuous set of common interests. The possibility of deciding on a new, comprehensive national day was blocked by many factors, not least the ongoing conflict and the new tensions it created, but also by the overly cautious and timid approach by the Republic’s cultural and political institutions towards the country’s recent history.
Born and developed with strong external input from foreign powers, the new institutions appeared, on the one hand, to lack the national legitimacy to proudly inaugurate a completely new chapter of the Afghan political life without being accused of being foreign puppets, so they always tried to refer to a few widely accepted old symbols or to national ‘forefathers’. On the other hand, the post-2001 institutions were still scarred by the violence caused by the internal ethnic or ideological strife that had devastated Afghanistan in the past decades. Leaders appeared unwilling to open a debate that would have put on the table and eventually account for – and maybe even heal the scars left by – the innumerable and conflicting lived experiences of various Afghan communities through the multiple decades of conflict. These experiences were obscured by a veil of silence and the communities cowed into begrudgingly accepting the (latest) winners’ version as the only mainstream narrative. In the end, the fault lines of fear and distrust left beneath the surface of the Republic’s façade were one of the weaknesses that brought about its collapse. Maybe this is a lesson that every government in power could benefit from.
Edited by Jelena Bjelica and Roxanna Shapour
References
References
↑1
The Muhammadzai are the branch of the Barakzai Pashtun tribe that had ruled Afghanistan since 1823, when Dost Muhammad Khan wrested the Kabul throne from the Popalzai, Ayoub Khan Durrani, who was the last in a line of kings stretching back to 1747 when Ahmad Shah Durrani founded his eponymous dynasty. Muhammadzai rule was interrupted for around nine months in 1929, when the unrest stirred by modernist reforms led to King Amanullah’s abdication and the throne was occupied by a rebel of lower social standing, a Tajik from the Shomali plain north of Kabul, Habibullah Kalakani. Muhammadzai rule was restored in October 1929 by Nadir Khan, then head of the Musahiban family, a distant paternal cousin of Amanullah and father of Afghanistan’s last king Muhammad Zaher Shah.
↑2
To this day, this brief but intense period is commonly idealised by observers as the brightest example of ‘normalcy’, if not of real prosperity or democracy, that Afghans can look back and aspire to. After decades of war and turmoil, this holds true also for many segments of the Afghan population, except for the most ideological among the mujahedin organisations, who have not abandoned their old anti-monarchy stance, and for the Taleban. Irrespective of their various political ideals, many Hazaras also do not idealise the kings’ time. Once the reformist experiments of Amanullah had derailed, Hazaras remained – except for a handful of urbanised civil servants or intellectuals – de facto second-class citizens in the Sunni-centric, Pashtun-dominated Afghan monarchy and languished at the bottom of the economic and social ladder, even during that eventful decade.
↑3
The Durand Line was established as a demarcation between the respective spheres of influence by British India and the Kingdom of Afghanistan in 1893 during the reign of Abdul Rahman Khan and eventually came to form the border between Afghanistan and present-day Pakistan. The line is a source of controversy, particularly for Afghanistan, because it runs through territory traditionally inhabited by Pashtuns, who have been split in two since it was established.
↑4
Muhammad Daud Khan was often styled ‘Sardar’ (chieftain) because of his royal lineage.
↑5
2014 saw the completion of the so-called ‘security transition’ from NATO to the Afghan security forces, which led to military and territorial gains by the Taleban (read AAN dossier ‘Looking back at transition’). Moreover, a political transition which would have seen the incumbent Hamid Karzai stepping down after more than twelve years and a new president being elected proved particularly difficult and divisive, with elections stalling into a tense stalemate solved only through an unhappy power-sharing deal between the two contenders, Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah, brokered by the US (see this AAN dossier on the 2014 elections).
Extensive but not Inclusive: Afghanistan’s growing list of national holidays
It’s the small things that find you, and they can come without warning.
Not too long ago I was in Turkey, at the airport in Istanbul. My husband had gone to get us food, something to eat before our plane boarded. He brought it to where we were sitting in the departure hall: a simple plate, white rice and some beans. I had a bite, and I started crying.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, concerned.
“It’s Kabul,” I said. “It tastes like Kabul, like afternoons there. I’m in Kabul right now. I’m home.”
Two years ago today, Aug. 15, 2021, the Taliban swept into Kabul and the Afghanistan I knew disappeared. By the end of the month, the School of Leadership, Afghanistan (SOLA), my Afghan girls’ school that I’ve dedicated my entire adult life to operating, was in exile. We were in Rwanda, reestablishing our operations, all of our students safe, all of our girls free to learn.
But I can’t go back to Kabul. None of the Afghan women at SOLA can. None of the girls at SOLA can, these teenage girls and girls even younger, Afghan girls whose parents have entrusted us with their care.
And none of us know when that might change.)
The small things are the words of a SOLA student in Rwanda, a girl among her classmates.
We were together, these girls and I, talking about a beautiful hill in the countryside where we will build our new campus. We were getting ready to take a trip so they could see the land for themselves, and I was telling them about what would stand there one day: a school for Afghan girls where education will always be possible and where sisterhood will always exist.
This girl was part of the conversation, an enthusiastic participant. But in a quiet moment, as we all sat together under a clear sky, she asked: “When do we…?”
She didn’t finish the question. She didn’t have to. I knew what she was asking. All of us knew. And she knew we knew.
Home. Where women have been turned to ghosts, shrouded beneath the blue burqa. Where girls have reportedly been told, just this month, that there is no need for them to attend school past the age of 10.
The small things are things of honesty, and of truth.
“I don’t know,” I said, and paused.
“It’s not the answer you want. It’s not the answer any of us want,” I continued. “But it’s the reality. And so is this: The hope your parents have, and you have, and I have — that’s what we’re going to build on here.”
It was a sunny day. Peaceful and still. The hills of Rwanda rose all around us. We were Afghan women, together. Our voices, our faces, our tears.)
What does hope look like?
It looks like Afghan girls studying math and science and learning how to code. It looks like Afghan girls reading the Quran and world literature, writing stories and poems and creating works of art.
It looks like Afghan girls in school, whether they’re in diaspora communities or attending secret lessons at private homes in Kabul and in the provinces. Because every day these girls are in school, they chip away at the darkness that fell across Afghanistan two years ago.
Every day these girls are in school, they build the possibility of a different future. For themselves and for so many other girls, so many other sisters they’ve never met.
It’s been two years, and still, inside the sadness, inside the anger and the honesty, I choose to find the hope.
Shabana Basij-Rasikh is co-founder and president of the School of Leadership, Afghanistan.
The Taliban is snuffing out hope in Afghanistan. It will fail.
Mahnaz Akbari was supposed to be one of the lucky ones.
The former commander of an Afghan military all-female special ops team, Akbari was among the 77,000 U.S. allies successfully evacuated to the United States when the Taliban retook her country. An additional 200,000 or so are trappedabroad, awaiting processing by the U.S. government.
But her place in the country that took her in is precarious.
“I’m in a legal limbo,” she says. That’s because, almost two years after the United States withdrew its last forces from Afghanistan, Congress has failed to deliver on the promises made to our allies in America’s longest war.
The U.S. government pledged to protect those who aided our military and diplomatic interests. But it never fully developed the legal and administrative capacity to do so. Most of those we hastily evacuated from Afghanistan ended up coming here through a sort of short-term workaround measure, full of temporary and uncertain extensions, called “humanitarian parole.”
This means that people such as Akbari have no direct path to permanent legal status, leaving them unsure about their ability to stay and work in the United States. Akbari fears what might happen if she gets booted back to Afghanistan, and remains guilt-ridden over the family members she left behind, who are now in danger thanks to her work aiding U.S. interests.
Akbari had worked as a calligraphy teacher and supply-chain manager. Then, in 2011, she was recruited to accompany U.S. and Afghan forces on night raids against the Taliban, the Islamic State and other terrorist targets. During such actions, she and her fellow Female Tactical Platoon mates handled the terrorists’ wives, mothers, sisters, children — people who were often the keepers of SIM cards and other sensitive information, but whom, for religious and cultural reasons, Akbari’s male military counterparts were not allowed to touch.
Akbari’s work was critical to U.S. national security interests. It was also dangerous. Two American female soldiers were killed on such missions, she says, and six Afghan female colleagues were wounded. Akbari remains immensely proud of her service to her country. She is eager to resume serving by joining the U.S. military but cannot do so until she gets a green card.
Which, for the foreseeable future, is unavailable.
Like many other Afghans who entered through parole, she has applied for asylum — a separate, convoluted and notoriously backlogged process. It’s supposed to be expedited for Afghan parolees, but only a tiny sliver of Afghan applicants have been successfully adjudicated, with the rest stuck in what could bea years-long queue.
Akbari fears that, by the time her asylum application is settled and she subsequently becomes eligible to apply for a green card, she will be too old to serve in the U.S. military.
In the meantime, she says she’s grateful for opportunities she has been granted in the United States, including many facilitated by U.S. service members she once worked alongside. But she finds it difficult to plan a future, because many prospective employers are reluctant to hire someone whose ongoing work eligibility remains uncertain.
This bill would, among other things, allow Afghans in the United States to apply for permanent legal status after undergoing additional vetting. This would be on top of the extensive vetting this population already endured when entrusted to protect U.S. service members’ lives in Afghanistan, and then again when paroled into the United States.
A version of the legislation wasintroduced last year and went nowhere. It was reintroduced last month, sponsored by a bipartisan group of lawmakers, and with modifications intended to address some Republicans’ stated concerns about security screening. Yet some GOP lawmakers, such as Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.), are still attempting to politicize the issue by tying Afghan evacuees’ legal status to unrelated immigration measures.
The Afghan Adjustment Act has the backingof a wide variety of groups. Human rights advocates and religious leaders support it because theyworry about what happens to Afghan evacuees — particularly women and dissidents — who lose their legal status. National security experts fear that, failing this measure, we might struggle to recruit allies in the future. Local officialswant the Afghan neighbors contributing to their communities to be able to stay.
But perhaps the loudestsupporters are veterans’ organizations. They argue that our failure to patch this legal issue injures not only brave allies such as Akbari but also the U.S. service members whom they aided. Some veterans are distraught by the abandonment of their friends and comrades.
“Members of Congress keep coming back and saying, ‘Hey, thank you for your service. We appreciate you. We value your commitment to this country,’” says Chris Purdy, director of Veterans for American Ideals. And yet when it comes to our shattered duty to our allies, he says, Congress “won’t do what it needs to do to pick up the pieces.”
Catherine Rampell is an opinion columnist at The Washington Post. She frequently covers economics, public policy, immigration and politics, with a special emphasis on data-driven journalism. Before joining The Post, she wrote about economics and theater for the New York Times
She was lucky to escape Afghanistan. Two years later, she’s stuck in limbo.
Since coming to power, the Taleban authorities have issued many edicts, decrees, declarations and directives limiting, restricting, suspending or banning basic freedoms for women and girls. Afghan women are no longer free to go to public parks, gyms and other public spaces and are banned from boarding planes and leaving the country on their own; they cannot attend university and secondary schools for girls have also closed their doors; national and international NGOs and the United Nations have been instructed not to employ Afghan women. The AAN team has spoken to eleven young women who were either working or studying before the bans to find out how they are living and surviving in this suddenly, highly-restrictive environment. AAN’s Jelena Bjelica summarises what they told us about their everyday lives since the Taleban came to power. Introduction
Women make up almost half Afghanistan’s population (49.5 per cent according to the World Bank estimate). Yet, they have lost almost all of their basic human rights and freedoms since the Taleban took control of the country two years ago. A joint report published on 15 June 2023, by the two United Nations independent experts, Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Afghanistan Richard Bennett and Chair of the Working Group on Discrimination against Women and Girls Dorothy Estrada-Tanck, said that between September 2021 and May 2023, more than 50 orders were issued, but it listed by the date and content only 13 (see also this interactive timeline on the Taleban gender-related orders published by United States Institute for Peace). According to the report, “the edicts are believed to be primarily issued by Amir-ul-Momineen [Taleban Supreme Leader Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada] to relevant administrative entities, who then issue them to the public” in a multitude of ways – “official instructions… by central and provincial authorities, in speeches by officials and via social and mainstream media.” (see footnote 1 for a list of the orders).[1]
Among so many restrictions that suspend or severely limit the rights of women and girls to education, work and freedom of movement, the Taleban’s Supreme Leader issued only one decree affirming some rights. It stressed that “a woman is not a piece of property, but a genuine human being” in the context of her right to marry and inherit.[2]Taken together, the bans limit women’s active engagement in society and confine them largely to roles within the family. The recent UN joint report, assessed the bans to be “violating girls’ and women’s rights to education, work, freedom of movement, health, bodily autonomy and decision-making, freedom of peaceful assembly and association, and access to justice,” and amount to “gender persecution” (see this AAN report for a discussion of this term). They reported:
Women have described the continual announcement of restrictions as “day by day, the walls close in”, feeling “suffocated”, and the cumulative effect leaving them “without hope”. A journalist monitoring the announcement and implementation of restrictions since the Taliban came to power explained that “at early press conferences, we asked ‘what is your intention for women and girls?’ We were told, ‘wait, wait, you will understand our position on women.’ Initially, we thought this meant that a few small things would be changed, and we could continue to work, go to school, etc. But over time, we have come to the realization it was their intention to slowly erase women.”[3]
Unlike the 1990s, the Taleban have not issued an outright ban on paid employment for women. However, their many restrictions on where women can work outside the home has hit the female workforce hard. In addition, indications are that the economic crash hit women workers and business owners harder than their male counterparts. According to a World Bank report from November 2022, nearly half of women previously employed in salaried work had lost their jobs since the takeover.[4] Since then, the bans on women working for NGOs and the UN have further dented women’s right to paid employment. In another recent blow, the order closing beauty salons across the country, issued on 24 July 2023,[5] cost an estimated 60,000 jobs, according to the BBC. At the time the Emirate suspended the right to higher education for women until further notice, in December 2022, over 100,000 female students were enrolled in government and private higher education institutions, according to UNESCO estimates. It reported that the number of women in higher education had increased almost 20-fold between 2001 and 2018, and before the suspension, one out of every three young women was enrolled in universities. It also estimated that since the Taleban takeover, 1.1 million Afghan girls and young women were without access to formal education. Although not all Afghan girls were sent to school and indeed, not all Afghan children (boys or girls) had schools to go to, “by August 2021, 4 out of 10 students in primary education were girls,” UNESCO said.
Taleban officials do not always implement orders comprehensively; in some places, there is room for manoeuvre locally, on schooling, work, dress and movement, although in others, officials apply restrictions more onerously than official orders require. Even so, the overall trends are clear: there are now fewer women in paid employment, far fewer girls going to secondary school and none to university.
Afghans, generally, have seen basic freedoms diminished: since taking power, the Emirate has increasingly clamped down on freedom of assembly, of protest and of speech, including by detaining and ill-treating demonstrators and others accused of dissent, a trend widely documented by the United Nations Special Rapporteur for human rights and UNAMA. Yet, for women the new restrictions have been particularly heavy-hitting. Previously, some had public roles – in government, parliament, the civil service and as teachers in universities. Now, they are ruled by a government which believes that women should live lives largely confined to the home.
A day in the life of a young Afghan woman
While millions of Afghan girls and women face new restrictions on their lives, those who had been studying or working before the Taleban takeover have been particularly hard hit. They had a social life outside the family, regularly travelled to university or a workplace, frequently met with peers and dreamt of a life very different from the one the Emirate now has mapped out for them.[6] To understand how these women are coping with their new predicament, we approached 11 women aged 20 to 26 who had either studied and/or worked until recently with a questionnaire consisting of eight open-ended questions.[7]
A 23-year-old who was in her final year at Kabul University’s Psychology Faculty before the ban said that:
Before the Taleban, I was going to university, teaching freely and comfortably. There was motivation for work and life, and I was thinking about a better future. Now, my days are boring. Although I’m still teaching maths secretly, I’m unhappy because I can’t study anymore.
Another young woman, a 24-year-old high school graduate who has lost her job at a private company said:
My average day is very boring because I stay at home and I have no job. There’s not much to do except household chores, not only for me but also for most girls and women. We don’t even have [the right to] a recreation or a pastime. The Taleban have imposed a lot of restrictions on us.
Most of the interviewees said they were much more anxious now that they live in a restricted environment and are unhappy and depressed because of being confined to their homes.
I feel desperate because I can’t foresee my future. Even if I read or do something useful, I can’t see my place in the future. For instance, in the past, we [girls] could finish our schooling, participate in the kankor [university entrance exams] and enter a faculty that would help us find our place in the future. But now, no one’s place is definite, whether we study [at school] or at home [on our own]. Besides my madrassa studies, I do the simple chores that housewives do. For example, I do the washing-up and cleaning. Sometimes, when there’s no work at home, I move the furniture around to cope with the mental stress.
(A 20-year-old madrassa student)
My days are filled with worries. Every day there is a new restriction. My days are so different now. I was going to university, I was happier, I was able to meet my friends and I had freedom. Now, there is no freedom. I miss my university so much. Whenever I pass my university, only God knows the pain in my heart. I am asking what our sin is that we can’t go to university, but boys can go easily and study…. The boys who were my seniors have graduated, but we girls can only watch them finish their studies. I miss studying at university in the summer heat and the cold of winter, [I miss] being hungry and thirsty there.
(A 25-year-old who was in her 4th semester at Kabul Medical University before the ban)
Our interviewees reported that they were now meeting with their peers online. The UN Special Rapporteur’s report highlighted that women face difficulty meeting in public with other women: “Groups of more than three or four women are routinely dispersed by officials, arguing the need to prevent protests.” Some of our interviewees said they did leave the house occasionally, but always in the company of a male family member. One described how even family picnics, a favourite Afghan pastime, have been subject to inspections and directives by Taleban officials:
We don’t enjoy going out anymore because there are so many restrictions. For example, they tell us where [we should] and where we should not go. They tell us not to go where men are [present] in places like Qargha or Paghman [favourite picnic spots on the outskirts of Kabul]. Both places are restricted for women [on their own] …This is why I prefer to stay home. About a month ago, I went to Qargha with my family; we were in the car when the Taleban told us to go to a place where there were no men. It’s the same with restaurants. Most of the time, they enforce restrictions so that families must eat in a dark and secluded place inside the restaurant.
(A 23-year-old who studied engineering at Kabul University’s Polytechnic Faculty before the ban)
Passing the time and meeting friends online
Confined to their homes, the interviewees described their social life as having moved far more online. They reported spending between half an hour and several hours a day on the internet chatting with friends and family in Afghanistan and abroad. Most of them use online communication platforms and/or messengers.
When I don’t read books or watch movies, I spend some time online every day. In fact, I am online more thanbefore. I chat with my friends and classmates and stay in touch with them.
(A 21-year-old student at Kabul University’s Faculty of Language and Literature)
I spend almost two hours online every day. I meet and chat with my friends online. I WhatsApp them or chat with them on Facebook Messenger. I also talk to one brother in Turkey and another who works in Iran.
(A 26-year-old high school graduate who lost her job at a private company)
When I am done with the household chores, I spend some time online every day. When I feel unhappy, I visit social media and chat with my friends and classmates.
(A 20-year-old midwifery student)
However, scrolling through their social media accounts is not the only thing these young women do in their free time. Most of our interviewees said they read or watch television in their free time, if they have electricity. However, a 20-year-old former law student pointed out that all that she does feels like just passing the time.
I read, but not as much as before because I’ve lost my place in society. What can I do even if I read? Now, I watch more movies than before without knowing why I’m watching them. I just know that by watching movies, I can pass the time.
(A 20-year-old former law student)
One interviewee, a 25-year-old, who was in her 4th semester at Kabul Medical University before the ban, was still trying to learn. She volunteers two or three times a week at a hospital in the city:
I go to the hospital from nine to three o’clock, two or three times a week. I work as a volunteer to learn from the doctors. I tried to join online classes but couldn’t [afford to] continue studying online. I also wanted to get a job, but I can’t because I don’t have a university degree. I am not hopeful that the universities will reopen [for women]. I have heard that the Taleban have closed them for girls permanently.
(A 25-year-old student of medical sciences)
For such young women, the sudden end to their hopes, dreams, freedom of movement, social status and ability to earn a living is a calamity, but as the Special Rapporteur’s recent report underlined, the consequences for the nation as a whole will also be catastrophic. He cited, for example, a visible shortage of first-year interns in a maternity hospital in Kabul:
[T]he experts noticed the absence of first-year interns. It was a stark reminder of the longer-term prospects for women’s health care if the ban on education for girls continues. As girls and women can be provided care only by female doctors, unless the restrictions are reversed rapidly, there is a real risk of multiple preventable deaths, which could amount to femicide.
There is a long tradition of Afghan women trained in the medical sciences and working to aid their compatriots. The first Afghan girls’ primary school graduates from the Queens Soraya school, established in 1921, were sent to Turkey in 1928 to a high school for nursing. Trained nurses were needed for Afghanistan’s first women’s hospital, which opened in the late 1920s.[8] Today, we may be witnessing an end to this century-old tradition of educating Afghan women to help other women maintain and improve their health.
Déjà vu with a twist
If the Taleban’s restrictions on women and girls today feel like déjà vu, a return to the strict conditions placed on society during the first emirate (1996-2001), it is worth returning to one of the sharpest analysts of that time, Nancy Hatch Dupree, to try and understand what is going on. In a journal article[9] from 2004 about the Afghan family during times of crisis, she argued that Taleban restrictions on women – namely enforcing the wearing of burqas (chadari),excluding women from educational institutions and places of employment, inhibiting women’s movement in public except when accompanied by a mahram and rigorous segregation of men and women under all circumstances – could be seen as political acts. She contended that the restrictions were a means of controlling society and that they had a deep impact on the Afghan family, which she saw as the backbone of Afghan society. She wrote:
Taking advantage of the deeply embedded attitudes toward the centrality of women in the social concepts of family and honour, Taliban policies wrapped entrenched customary practices and patriarchal attitudes in the mantle of Islam. They were then manipulated to maintain power. By imposing strict restraints directly on women, the new rulers sent a clear message of their intent to subordinate the personal autonomy of every individual, and thereby strengthened the impression that they were capable of exercising control over all aspects of social behaviour. These policies were among the most potent instruments of their rule.[…] Women eventually learned to cope, but beneath their burqas emotions boiled. At home, mental stress disturbed family harmony. Stricter seclusion curtailed the normal social interactions that formed an integral part of their daily lives, creating a sense of isolation.
The more than 50 orders aimed at controlling women and girls issued by the Taleban since re-taking power suggests they are using the same strategy. Yet, unlike the 1990s, there are today many more Afghan women are who are educated and have had salaried employment, as well as millions of girls who have grown up believing they could contribute to society beyond household and motherhood. The statistics on schooling alone are striking. In 1995, just before the Taleban came to power last time, around 29 per cent of girls were enrolled in primary school by 1999, that percentage had dropped to only four percent of girls enrolled in primary school, according to the World Bank estimates. In 2019, 85 percent of Afghan girls were enrolled in primary schools.[10]
The young women we interviewed, as one put it, used to have a place in their own futures. For now, at least, they are reduced to trying to pass the time, without enjoyment or little to make them feel useful. As Dupree reported, during the first emirate women did eventually learn to cope, but at great cost to their mental wellbeing and that of their families. This time, our interviewees at least are still wondering how they are going to get through these days. As one 20-year-old former law student put it:
As our mothers say, when your heart is broken, nothing can be done, but if your legs are broken, you can still do everything.
This in turn raises the question: What, this time, has been broken?
Edited by Roxanna Shapour and Kate Clark
References
References
↑1
The list below is based on that given in the June 2023 joint report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of women and girls in Afghanistan and the Working Group on discrimination against women and girls, along with a timeline by the US Institute of Peace and AAN’s own reporting and monitoring of the Afghan media and coverage:
27 August 2021: female employees of the Ministry of Public Health only told to report to work; most other female government employees have never been asked to return to work/told to stay at home (see this AAN report);
18 September 2021: schools not opened to girls beyond grade six (see this AAN report);
20 September 2021: ordered professional working women to stay at home until further notice (see USIP timeline)
23 December 2021: (male) drivers instructed not to accept female passengers who are not wearing what the Taleban consider to be hijab, or, for journeys greater than 72 kilometres, do not have a mahram (close male relative acting as a chaperone);
2 March 2022: women banned from entering health centres without a mahram (see USIP timeline)
13 March 2022: enforcement of segregation of women and men’s offices (see USIP timeline)
23 March 2022: girls secondary schools do not open or are quickly closed for the new school year following a last-minute, high-level order from Kandahar (see this AAN report);
27 March 2022: women banned from boarding domestic and international flights without a mahram;
7 May 2022: women ordered to observe hijab, defined either as a burqa or a black gown with face covering (niqab), or best of all, not to leave home without good reason (“the first and best form of observing hijab”) (see this AAN report);
21 May 2022: female television presenters required to cover their faces;
1 June 2022: all girls in fourth to sixth grades required to cover their faces while commuting to school;
23 August 2022: female moral police department under the Ministry for Preventing Vice and Promoting Virtue established (see USIP timeline);
25 August 2022: ban on women going to parks where park authorities cannot ensure segregation between men and women (see USIP timeline);
29 August 2022: female university students ordered to cover their faces in classrooms (see USIP timeline);
10 November 2022: women prohibited from using gyms and parks (see USIP timeline);
20 December 2022: the right of women to attend university is “suspended”;
22 December 2022: girls beyond grade 6 banned by Ministry of Education from attending private courses (see USIP timeline);
24 December 2022: NGOs instructed to “halt the work of all female employees… until further notice” (with subsequent unofficial exemptions for women working in the health and primary education sectors – see this AAN report);
3 January 2023: Taleban closed blind girls’ schools in Nangrahar and Kunar. (see USIP timeline);
12 March 2023: Taleban banned the issuing of transcripts and certificates for female university graduates (see USIP timeline);
4 April 2023: the United Nations and embassies told not to employ Afghan women (see AAN reports here and here);
24 July 2023: closure of all beauty salons across Afghanistan.
↑2
A Taleban decree concerning the “rights for women” (number 83/ Vol 1) published in the Official Gazette (see here) says that the consent of an adult woman is necessary for nikah [marriage] and that “a woman is not a piece of property, but a genuine human being. No one can trade her for peace in a bad [marriage, ie to assuage a blood feud]”. It also says that “a widow cannot be remarried to her brother-in-law or anyone else” and that “receiving a dowry is a widow’s Sharia right.” The decree says that “women have a fixed inheritance right when it comes to the property of their husbands, children, father and other relatives” and that “No one can deprive them of this right based on either fardiyat [primary heirs] or asabiyat[residual heirs]. As well as that, “those with multiple wives are obliged to give their wives their rights according to the rules of Sharia and to observe fairness among them.”
Interestingly the Taleban only published the above-mentioned decree in the Official Gazette. Other orders that limit or suspend women’s basic rights have not been published in the Official Gazette.
↑3
The quotes come for interviews with 79 Afghans (67 women and 12 men) and focus group with 159 women participants on the survey results in 11 provinces. A survey of 2,112 Afghan women across 18 provinces was conducted in March 2023.
↑4
The World Bank reported in November 2022 an increase in women’s participation in the labour force, as families try to maximise income in the face of economic difficulties. However, that participation is not generally as salaried workers: “Many who previously identified as housewives are now working, mostly as self-employed workers on the farm, tending to livestock, or engaging in small-scale economic activities from home, for example as seamstresses or mending or sewing clothes. Among women previously identified as students, approximately one-half have entered the labor force.”
↑5
In the first instance, Taleban authorities imposed some conditions on women’s beauty parlours in Herat province on 18 June 2023 when the provincial Amr bil-Maruf (the virtue and vice ministry) sent a letter containing 14 points regulating the work of women beauty parlours, as the news website Etilaatroz reported. These regulations included prohibition on the hair extensions and the eyebrow removal because they are seen as against Sharia, it also instructed women to perform ablution before applying make-up, and the makeup to avoid using substances that break the ablution. However, on 24 July 2023, the main Amr bil-Maruf issued a new order which said that the supreme leader had ordered the closure of all beauty parlours in Afghanistan.
How do you spend your days? What your average day looks like?
Do you help more than before with the house chores?
Do you read more than before? Do you watch more movies than before?
How often do you go out of the house?
Do you miss being on the University campus/going to work?
How much time do you spend online?
Do you meet with your friends online?
Have you started any alternative online/in presence course or activity to make up for the lost (study/job)?
↑8
For little-known and interesting historical details about Afghan women, see Nancy Hatch Dupree’s timeless “The Women of Afghanistan,” published in 1998 by the Office of the UN Coordinator and available in an online archive of the Afghanistan Centre at the Kabul University (ACKU).
↑9
“The Family During Crisis in Afghanistan” by Nancy Hatch Dupree, published in Journal of Comparative Family Studies, Vol. 35, No. 2, (Spring, 2004), pp. 311-331.
It is more than three years since the United States signed its peace deal with the Taleban and almost two since the last American soldier left Afghanistan. Yet the US still insists that the last Afghan it holds in relation to that war – at its prison camp in Guantanamo – would be a threat to its national security if freed. Muhammad Rahim from Nangrahar, held by the US since 2007 and tortured at a CIA black site, awaits his latest Periodic Review Board hearing, when US officials will decide to release him or keep him detained. During the Donald Trump presidency, the Board authorised just one detainee for release, but since Joe Biden took office, it has cleared more than a dozen detainees for transfer, raising hopes for Rahim, especially as he now has a lawyer in Guantanamo for the first time. Possibly, this time, he will also have a Pashto rather than an Arabic translator. Meanwhile, writes Kate Clark, a lacerating report by the first independent United Nations investigator to visit the camp has detailed the arbitrariness and abuse that characterises life in Guantanamo, and how the resulting harm continues to affect former inmates, of whom the largest national group are Afghans.Introduction
In total, the US rendered 780 prisoners to its detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, of whom 225 were Afghan. Out of that number, 221 have been released, among them Taleban military and civilian officials, but also shepherds, taxi drivers, shopkeepers, tribal elders, anti-Taleban leaders, abused boys and old men with dementia. Three Afghans died in Guantanamo. One remains.
Muhammad Rahim was the last Afghan to be taken to the prison camp, indeed the last detainee of any nationality to be rendered there, and the last man known to have passed through a CIA black site. The torture he endured was documented in a 2014 report by the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence into the CIA’s use of rendition and torture.[1] The fact that the US has kept this individual for so long and has wanted to detain him even after ending its war in Afghanistan is, as this report will show, mystifying. Rahim is currently waiting for a Periodic Review Board hearing, when a group of military, intelligence and civilian government officials could decide to release him or continue to detain him (or a third, largely theoretical possibility at this stage, send him for military trial). The hearing was scheduled for May, but was abruptly cancelled at the last minute and rescheduled for 15 August.
Before looking at Rahim’s case and his prospects at the upcoming Periodic Review Board hearing, the author first considers the report of the first independent UN investigator to visit Guantanamo. The report is replete with details of the “horror and harms” done to the hundreds of Muslim men and boys who were rendered to Guantanamo in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the US, and has implications for both Rahim and the other Afghans taken there.[2]
The “horrors and harms” of Guantanamo
Special Rapporteurs are appointed by the Human Rights Council but serve in their personal capacity. This is evident in the direct language of this report by the Irish academic lawyer, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism. She writes of how detainees were “rendered across borders, forcibly disappeared, held in secret detention, and subject to egregious human rights violations” by the United States in the years after the 9/11 attacks. The “vast majority” she notes, were “brought without cause and had no relationship whatsoever with the events that took place on 9/11.” They were subject to:
[W]aterboarding, walling, deprivation of food and water, extreme sleep deprivation, and continuous noises while in detention…. violently slapped, shaken, subject to mock executions, kicked, thrown to the ground, and held in solitary confinement for months … told that multiple serious harms would befall their family members including physical violence, economic distress, and social shaming … [and were] subject to sexual violence, including anal penetration.
Ní Aoláin writes that: “Every one of the 780 Muslim men [and this author would add ‘and boys’][3] who was held at Guantánamo Bay” lived or still lives “with their own distinct experiences of unrelenting psychological and physical trauma of withstanding profound human rights abuse.” Detainee families, she says, have also “suffered immeasurably.”
The rendition, secret detention, torture and ill-treatment at multiple sites and at Guantanamo Bay was, she says, “structured, discriminatory, and systematic.”
The US government, she writes, “authorized and justified, and personnel enabled and sustained [the detainees’] torture.” Ní Aoláin underscores that the prohibition on both torture and arbitrary detention are jus cogens, one of several absolute principles of international law from which no state can exempt itself, nor make ‘legal’ through domestic legislation. Up to now, she emphasises, “there has been no adequate accounting of the international law violations including violations of jus cogens norms that occurred from September 11, 2001 onwards.” She underscores that the US government has “an ongoing obligation to investigate the crimes committed at Guantánamo, including an assessment of whether they meet the threshold of war crimes and crimes against humanity.” As part of that investigation, she says the US government is under a continuing obligation to:
[S]anction those responsible [for any violations], provide appropriate redress and reparation to all victims and adopt effective guarantees of non-repetition, such as legislative, administrative, judicial, and other measures to prevent and punish such violations going forward.
Ní Aoláin insists that: “The world has and will not forget. Without accountability, there is no moving forward on Guantánamo.” However, as things stand, it is impossible to see a US administration compensating victims of Guantanamo or apologising to them or prosecuting its own officials. Up to now, the US has only investigated individuals accused of using unauthorised interrogation techniques and even then, investigations have been administrative, rather than criminal, and into low-ranking officials, with any punishments limited to disciplinary actions, even when detainees were killed. Those ordering and sanctioning the breaches have remained untouched by the law.[4] Indeed, ahead of the publication of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s 2014 report into the CIA’s ‘detention and interrogation programme’, while Barak Obama acknowledged, for the first time by an American president, that the US had used torture, he also downplayed it, effectively ruling out prosecutions:
It’s important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had. And a lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots.[5]
As to non-domestic forums for accountability, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, has decided to ‘de-prioritise‘ the alleged war crimes of the CIA and US military in relation to the war in Afghanistan, along with those of the forces of the Islamic Republic, and instead focus on accusations against the Taleban and Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISKP) (for more on what AAN called his creation of a ‘hierarchy of victims’, see our report from 11 November 2022). The move by the prosecutor followed a period of significant intimidation of court staff by the United States under President Trump, as well as a long history of US belief in its exceptionalism, when dealing with the International Criminal Court.
The Special Rapporteur has much to say in her hard-hitting report about what could be done to make the regime in Guantanamo less unbearable for its current 30 inmates, whom she insists “must be treated with humanity and respect for their inherent dignity in line with the U.S. Government’s international legal obligations.” Recommendations range from better facilitation of communications with families to improving medical care, including treating ongoing medical conditions resulting from torture, to calling detainees by their names rather than their Serial Internment Numbers. However, as one detainee explained to her, “the conditions of confinement” have already improved since they were first brought to Guantanamo, but “the legal conditions are worse than ever.”
Ní Aoláin’s conclusions on the various judicial and administrative review mechanisms are, indeed, excoriating. On the Periodic Review Board, which decides the fate of detainees (transfer, continue to detain or send for military trial), she says:
The Periodic Review Board process lacks the most basic procedural safeguards, including because the process is a purely discretionary proceeding that is not independent and that is subject to veto by the political officials on the review committee. Further, the fact that 16 men have been cleared yet remain trapped in the Guantánamo detention facility is indicative of the Periodic Review Board process’ disconnect from any actual release and the arbitrariness of the cleared men’s ongoing detention.
On detainees petitioning courts on the US mainland for habeas corpus – when the government has to convince the court that the detention of an individual is lawful, or release him or her, she says:
Regarding habeas remedies she finds it has been overwhelmingly ineffective both in efficiency of process and delivery of the remedy of actual release for detainees. Detainees have had access to habeas corpus since 2004, but most proceedings have languished in judicial pipelines undermining the requisite regularity of independent, impartial, review, and calling into question their effectiveness as a matter of international human rights law.
As to the ongoing trials by military commissions, she points to their “fundamental fair trial and due process deficiencies,” noting that:
[N]ine men involved in the military commission process are still in the pretrial phase after experiencing countless delays. As one detainee interviewed expressed with exasperation, the system is paralyzed but their only option is to engage. The defendants in the September 11 case were arraigned in May 2012, with pre-trial hearings suspended through at least early 2023. The endless delays in their cases, and the U.S. Government’s failure to even move past the pre-trial phase clearly fail to meet the “undue delay” threshold. She further expresses serious concern that the military commission hearings have been inundated with an array of procedural obstacles and legitimacy challenges, ranging from issues with interpretation –including due to alleged bias and lack of independence and impartiality – and significant technological failures in the courtroom, to abrupt prosecutor and judge retirements and resignations and conflicts of interest.
In every aspect of life at Guantanamo, the Special Rapporteur reports of “cumulative and unrelenting” arbitrariness, uncertainty and the powerlessness of detainees. The longer a situation of detention lasts, she says, the higher the likelihood that the prohibition of torture, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment has been breached. In this, the case of the last Afghan held in Guantanamo, now waiting for his latest Periodic Review Board hearing, is illustrative.
Rahim’s case
Muhammad Rahim is one of three men still held in Guantanamo whom the US has not sent for military trial but continues to hold in indefinite detention because it deems them a risk to US security. He was detained by the Pakistan intelligence agency, the ISI, in 2007 and handed over to the CIA, which held and tortured him at a black site in Afghanistan before rendering him to Guantanamo in 2008.
Rahim, an Arabic speaker, has admitted to working with Arab fighters before and just after 2001. This was not in itself unusual or pointed necessarily to any shared ideological stance; getting paid employment was much sought after in this very poor country. The US military had previously claimed the job of another Afghan detainee, Abdul Zahir, for example, who had worked as a chokidar (doorman) and occasional translator for an Arab commander, was sufficient to detain him from 2002 to 2015, a position later overruled by a Periodic Review Board. When it was finally decided he could be released, the review board said he “was probably misidentified as the individual who had ties to al-Qaeda weapons facilitation.” (For detail on Zahir’s case, see pages 30-33 of the author’s 2016 special report, Kafka in Cuba: The Afghan Experience in Guantanamo.)
The US asserts – and Rahim denies – that he also cooperated with al-Qaeda beyond the immediate post-2001 era. The CIA told the press when it announced his detention that he was one of Osama bin Laden’s “most trusted facilitators,” “a tough, seasoned jihadist” who was “best known in counter-terror circles as a personal facilitator and translator” for bin Laden. It has asserted that Rahim was an al-Qaeda courier who personally transported “tens of thousands of dollars” for the alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, travelled to Iran to help the leader of Hezb-e Islami, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar come back to Afghanistan and coordinated “the movement of bin Laden’s wives and families.”
These claims have never been independently scrutinised or robustly questioned, for example, by an independent court of law. Moreover, they are difficult to square with what was revealed in the Senate’s 2014 report on the CIA’s use of torture, which revealed that the CIA’s interrogation of Rahim had “resulted in no disseminated intelligence report.” It suggested that the only information it had about him were the ISI’s allegations and nothing useful was ascertained from the interrogation.[6] Documents released in Rahim’s habeas petition also point to the basis of US accusations being hearsay, including ‘double hearsay’, ie what someone claimed someone else said about Rahim, testimony from detainees obtained under torture or duress, and unverified and unprocessed intelligence reports. Research by this author into other similar claims against other Afghan detainees point to a continued pattern of accusations that are fantastical, nonsensical and lacking in factual basis (see the ‘Kafka in Cuba’ report cited above and the detailed investigations into the cases of the last eight Afghans held in Guantanamo, including Rahim, for more on this).
The US classes Rahim as a ‘high-value’ detainee, as it does all the men who were held in CIA black sites, rather than detained by the US military.[7] Over time, it has become clear that this classification was given not because of their supposed high risk or high intelligence worth, but to protect the CIA: the label ensured detainees were kept in secrecy, segregated from other detainees, and for many years in solitary confinement.
According to the US’s own allegations, Rahim was, at most, a translator and facilitator for al-Qaeda. The US rationale, whether on intelligence or security grounds, for bringing him to Guantanamo and then detaining him for so many years is not obvious. However, once a person ended up in Guantanamo, getting released proved to be difficult. This was especially the case after Republicans gained a majority in the House of Representatives during the first Obama presidency and began blocking transfers (which they had not objected to when Obama’s predecessor, the Republican, George Bush, was president).
To leave Guantanamo, a detainee must first convince the Periodic Review Board that he is no longer a threat to the US and it is safe to transfer him to another country. The Board assumes the government’s accusations against a detainee are true and he must prove them false or – a more successful tactic – that he has turned a corner, is remorseful and no longer poses a threat. All this must be accomplished without access to normal legal mechanisms – including access to evidence or witnesses.
Rahim’s prospects from his 15 August Periodic Review Board hearing
Rahim, who has had three previous full reviews – in 2016, 2019 and 2022 – said at his last hearing that the Board had never given him the opportunity to have a lawyer present (transcript here; documents for this and other hearings for Rahim and the other detainees can be read on this webpage). Rahim does now have a lawyer at Guantanamo[8] to represent him on August 15, which raises his chances of being cleared for transfer considerably. This was certainly the case of the penultimate Afghan held in Guantanamo, Asadullah Harun Gul who finally secured his release last year (AAN reporting here).[9]
In her report, Special Rapporteur Ní Aoláin stresses that the right to legal counsel is well settled under international human rights law and international humanitarian law and is “vital to ensuring that the rights of all persons deprived of their liberty are respected.” It serves as a fundamental safeguard against torture and ill-treatment, arbitrary detention, and other breaches of fundamental freedoms and human rights and an entitlement on the part of all detained persons that attaches from the moment a person is detained. For Rahim, that right is finally being honoured 15 years into his detention.
What is also clear, however, from the transcript of Rahim’s last full review by the Periodic Review Board in April 2022 that not having a lawyer was not his only problem. The Board had employed an Arabic translator for Rahim. Even though he is an Arabic speaker and has at least some grasp of English, one would expect the Board to have provided a translator in his native language, which is Pashto. His responses do read as garbled and at times nonsensical: this may have been a language/translation issue. It is not clear, but that may be why the Board concluded he had shown “unwillingness to discuss pre-detention activities and beliefs,” and this prevented it from “assessing whether he has had any change in mindset or level of threat.” Even given that the set-up of the Periodic Review Board is fundamentally unjust and arbitrary, Rahim appears to have been treated particularly unfairly – expected to argue his case without legal advice and denied the opportunity to express himself or understand the Board’s questions properly.
The result was that the Board fell back on its default position of keeping him detained. It claimed he posed a “continuing significant threat to the security of the United States” and that it considered he was “a trusted member of Al Qaeda who worked directly for senior members of Al Qaeda, including Usama bin Laden.” Moreover, it asserted this “extensive extremist connection… provide[s] a path to re-engagement.”
It is unclear where it thought Rahim could “re-engage,” given the US no longer has a military presence in Afghanistan.
The Periodic Review Board under Biden
As well as now having a lawyer, the general environment for getting a decision from the Board to transfer is also more favourable since the advent of the Biden presidency. While Donald Trump was in power, although he never explicitly ruled out anyone leaving Guantanamo, the political drive to reduce numbers seen in the last year of Obama’s term ended abruptly. During his presidency, the Periodic Review Board judged just one person safe to be transferred, a Saudi Arabian citizen, Ahmed al-Darbi, who was repatriated and incarcerated in his homeland on 1 May 2018 (media reporting here). Since Biden came to power on 20 January 2021, 13 detainees, many of them held since the earliest years of the detention camp, have been cleared for transfer.
Rahim has already had one hearing during the Biden era when the Board decided against his release. However, this was also the case for some of the 13 men who it has subsequently cleared for transfer, so is not necessarily an indicator of what might happen this time. More problematic is that label, ‘high-value’: Rahim has always contended that the US has continued to detain him not because of anything he did, but because of what was done to him, that is, the CIA torture.[10] This accusation was echoed by Special Rapporteur Ní Aoláin, saying she was concerned that
[C]ontinued internment of certain detainees follows from the unwillingness of the authorities to face the consequences of the torture and other ill-treatment to which the detainees were subjected and not from any ongoing threat they are believed to pose.
She stresses that neither international humanitarian law nor international human rights law “countenances concealing evidence of prior misconduct by the detaining authority as a reason for continued detention.”
However, in one hopeful sign, the Board recently cleared one other high-value detainee for transfer, Guled Hassan Duran, a Somali national whom the US had incarcerated since 2006. Even more significant is the fact that the first ‘high-value’ detainee was actually released from the detention camp earlier this year. Majid Khan, a Pakistani national, who was born in Saudi Arabia, was transferred to Belize in February 2023 (see media reporting here).
If cleared for transfer, however, the fates of the 16 men before Rahim, all cleared and still detained, would then loom large. Being labelled as safe to transfer out of the detention camp is only the first hurdle: finding a country willing to take a detainee that he feels safe to go to and that the US believes will keep him secure and not torture him is the next.
Muhammad Rahim pictured at Guantanamo in recent years.
The other route to freedom – habeas corpus
Rahim is pursuing a writ for his habeas petition in the US courts and is currently waiting for the court to rule on his Motion for Order of Immediate Release, filed 18 months ago, on 24 November 2021 (digital copy with AAN), an example of how petitions, in the Special Rapporteur’s words, “languish… in judicial pipelines.”
Rahim’s argument is that, in Biden’s words from 31 August 2021, “the United States [has] ended 20 years of war in Afghanistan — the longest war in American history” and therefore, as a prisoner of war, he should be released. The motion argues that “[t]here is no longer a battlefield for Rahim to return to.” The motion cites other statements from Biden, including this from 21 April 2021:
War in Afghanistan was never meant to be a multigenerational undertaking. We were attacked. We went to war with clear goals. We achieved those objectives. Bin Laden is dead, and al Qaeda is degraded in Iraq — in Afghanistan. And it’s time to end the forever war [emphases in original].
Hopes were raised for Rahim when the penultimate Afghan held in Guantanamo, Harun Gul, successfully petitioned for habeas corpus in 2021: it was the first successful petition in ten years. However, the court accepted Harun Gul’s petition because he was a member of Hezb-e Islami, which had signed a peace deal with the Ghani government. It ruled against his second argument that he should be released because the war in Afghanistan was over.
Instead, the judge accepted the US government’s position that, even though Biden had said the war was over, it was not. It accepted that the US’ authority to detain was not limited to the ground war in Afghanistan and that hostilities with al-Qaeda and its associated forces continued in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The judge said the court had to “afford the utmost deference to the Executive’s position on that question.” This was especially so, he said, in the absence of any declaration by Congress terminating the war.
The Kafkaesque contortions involved for the judge in accepting that a war could have been ended and still continue is, unfortunately, par for the course. Judges dealing with habeas petitions from Guantanamo detainees have proved supine in the face of an executive arguing its case on national security grounds.[11]
Indeed, the US Department of Justice has always fought habeas petitions tooth and nail. This has been the case whether the president was Republican or Democrat, and even while Obama and Biden had a declared policy of wanting to shut the camp down. The Department of Justice has argued for using secret evidence as well as ‘testimony’ and ‘confessions’ obtained from torture victims, has presented contradictory, discredited and worthless evidence and used procedural issues to delay the legal process for years. For administrations wanting to close the camp, the obvious way to bypass Congressional blocks on releasing detainees would be to reign in this fight by the Department of Justice against habeas cases.[12] Yet this is not a path that either Obama or Biden chose to take. Looking into the reasons for this, in her second special report on the Afghan experience in Guantanamo, the author concluded that not opposing habeas writs would mean recognising that detaining individuals outside a system of law is wrong.
Muhammad Rahim (centre back, wearing parol) teaching in a refugee school in Peshawar in the 1980s.
Another anomaly
The strangeness of the Department of Justice and the Periodic Review Board both wanting to keep detaining this one last Afghan despite America’s war in Afghanistan being long over is not the only perplexing aspect of the US stance. They deem Rahim a threat because of his supposed al-Qaeda connections. Yet, as Trump and then Biden pushed to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan, they showed virtually no concern about the actual threat from al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
In talks with the Taleban, both administrations dealt with Taleban who had long and enduring relationships with al-Qaeda – more than a dozen of the movement’s senior officials and commanders, now government ministers, were under United Nations sanctions because of their alleged links to terrorist groups. They include acting minister of interior Sirajuddin Haqqani, who also has a ten million dollar FBI reward on his head which says he “maintains close ties to the Taliban [sic] and al Qaeda … and is a specially designated global terrorist.”
Trump was content to get only the slightest of concessions from the Taleban on al-Qaeda and other foreign internationalist jihadi groups in Afghanistan as part of his February 2020 deal to withdraw US troops (see AAN reporting here). Also, that deal involved Trump agreeing that the Afghan government would release thousands of Taleban prisoners and then his officials pressurising an unwilling President Ashraf Ghani to do so. Yet, during all this time, the supposed risk from Rahim, one prisoner, detained for 16 years away from his homeland, tortured and abused, has apparently been viewed as a greater threat.[13]
Conclusion
Ní Aoláin writes that she “accepts and affirms the positive engagement [from the Biden administration] that enabled her visit.” She recognises that Biden is dealing with a situation he inherited and acknowledges that “[f]ew countries take meaningful steps to address egregious past human rights violations or undertake action to undo the most shocking of harms.”
In response to her very hard-hitting report, the Biden Administration has stressed its welcome of her visit and its openness to scrutiny. It noted that it had:
[M]ade significant progress towards responsibly reducing the detainee population and closing the Guantanamo facility. Ten individuals have been transferred out of Guantanamo since the start of the Biden-Harris Administration – one-quarter of the population we inherited – and we are actively working to find suitable locations for those remaining detainees eligible for transfer.
The far greater number of detainees cleared for transfer by the Periodic Review Board since Biden took office does show his willingness to at least minimise the ‘Guantanamo problem’. Yet the White House also said: “For those few [detainees] not yet eligible for transfer, we conduct periodic reviews to determine whether continued detention under the law of war is warranted.”[14]
The Biden administration continues to assert its right to detain men like Rahim without trial and indefinitely, and under what are actually highly questionable legal grounds.[15] In the case of the last Afghan held in Guantanamo, the US has wanted to keep detaining Rahim even after it pulled all its troops from his homeland and ended its war there. He now awaits his hearing on 15 August, to see if the Board will prove any more favourable to clearing him for transfer than in the past.
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin’s 23-page report, ‘Technical Visit to the United States and Guantánamo Detention Facility by the Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism’ (14 June 2023) is in three parts. The first deals with the victims of the 9/11 attack, part of what Ní Aoláin says is mandated by her “abiding commitment to a human rights-based approach to victims of terrorism as victims of international human rights law and international humanitarian law.” The second deals with the Guantanamo detention facility and the third with resettlement of detainees and reparations.
↑3
At least 15 of the detainees were under-18s. They included two 14-year-old Afghans, Asadullah and Naqibullah, who had been kept and raped by a US-allied, anti-Taleban commander, who created so much mayhem and criminality that the US eventually detained him in Bagram. It sent the two abused boys to Guantanamo, eventually releasing them, with this justification:
Though the detainee may still have some remaining intelligence, it’s been assessed that that information does not outweigh the necessity to remove the juvenile from this current environment and afford him the opportunity to “grow out” of the radical extremism he has been subject to.
For more on the lack of accountability, see the author’s 2017 report into the civil case against the two psychologists who designed and oversaw the implementation of the CIA torture programme, which detailed cases.
↑5
For Obama’s comments, see Press Conference by the President, 1 August 2014, here. Reading this transcript in retrospect, what is interesting is that a journalist was able to ask a follow-up question, but chose not to.
↑6
The Senate report said:
The summary documents of the CIA’s interrogation emphasized that the primary factors that contributed to Rahim’s unresponsiveness were the interrogation team’s lack of knowledge of Rahim, the decision to use the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques immediately after the short “neutral probe” and subsequent isolation period,… the team’s inability to confront Rahim with incriminating evidence, and the use of multiple improvised interrogation approaches despite the lack of any indication that these approaches might be effective. The summary documents recommended that future CIA interrogations should incorporate rapport-building techniques, social interaction, loss of predictability, and deception to a greater extent. (p167)
↑7
Other detainees may have been held by the CIA briefly, but not for long periods of time at black sites before arriving in Guantanamo.
↑8
Rahim has had lawyers working pro bono on his petitions for habeas corpus, but none previously at Guantanamo. His former lawyer Carlos Warner wrote a castigating description of trying to represent a high-value detainee. He was legally gagged from speaking about most aspects of his case (which would reveal classified information) or even why he considered his client innocent. He said the government could say whatever they liked about Rahim, but he could not even discuss the government’s allegations with his client, let alone tell the outside world why he thought he was innocent. He says to his readers:
Imagine trying to get to the bottom of a bar fight that resulted in a death. I can’t tell my client who was killed or why the Government says he’s involved. I can’t even tell him when the assault occurred or in what bar the assault took place. I certainly cannot interview or cross-examine his accusers. Moreover, I can’t visit the bar or talk to any other witness to the fight. I am also prohibited from speaking with the coroner or any of the investigating officers. Sometimes, the Government will say “we have important evidence about your client regarding our allegation, but we can’t tell you what that evidence is.” Sometimes, the Government just tells the judge without telling or notifying me at all. All of my communications with my client are observed and recorded. All of my legal correspondence is read and inspected by the Government. Guantanamo has been referred to as “Kafka-esque,” and that reference is right. “Catch-22” also aptly describes the legal malaise that is currently called Guantanamo habeas corpus. Nothing in my legal training prepared me for this endeavor.
Harun Gul finally got a lawyer just a few days before a Periodic Review Board hearing in 2016 and a relatively favourable assessment: the Board hinted that if he had had representation earlier, it might have deemed him safe to release. However, he was only cleared for transfer after Trump left office, at his first hearing during the Biden presidency, on 8 October 2021. That same month, on 21 October, Harun Gul also successfully argued that he should be released through a petition for habeas corpus: it was the first successful petition by a Guantanamo detainee in ten years (AAN reporting here).
“Careful judicial fact-finding [in habeas cases],” one 2012 study by the Seton Hall University School of Law found, has been “replaced by judicial deference to the government’s allegations,” with the “government winning every petition.” Following the denial of seven habeas appeals in 2010, The New York Times on 13 June 2012 described the development of “substantive, procedural and evidentiary rules” as “unjustly one-sided in favor of the government.” It said the rejected appeals had made it “devastatingly clear” that the current court system in the US “has no interest in ensuring meaningful habeas review for foreign prisoners.” For more detail on the habeas petitions of some of the last eight Afghans held in Guantanamo, see the author’s special report for AAN, ‘Kafka in Cuba: The Afghan Experience in Guantanamo’, November 2016.
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This was proposed in a piece for Just Security by Hina Shamsi (Director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project), Rita Siemion (Director, National Security Advocacy at Human Rights First), Scott Roehm (Washington Director, Center for Victims of Torture), Wells Dixon (Senior Staff Attorney, Center for Constitutional Rights), Ron Stief (Executive Director, National Religious Campaign Against Torture), Colleen Kelly (co-founder, September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows), ‘Toward a New Approach to National and Human Security: Close Guantanamo and End Indefinite Detention’, 11 September 2020:
[T]he executive branch can expedite transfers by not opposing detainees’ habeas cases. There is no requirement in law or in practice that the government contest detainees’ habeas petitions. [T]he foreign transfer certification requirements don’t apply when a detainee’s release or transfer is pursuant to the order of a U.S. court or competent tribunal that has jurisdiction over the case.
A fundamental obstacle for these men is that they have been castigated as the ‘worst of the worst’. The phrase, used by US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld in early 2002 and repeated endlessly, created monsters in the public imagination of all the detention camp’s inmates. When Obama took office, and Guantanamo became a political football, the gap between the actual and the perceived – or portrayed – threat posed by the detainees widened yet further; Republican members of Congress who had been unconcerned about transfers suddenly strived to block them after Obama took office. In the absence of any proper scrutiny of allegations and evidence, there has been nothing to reduce these imagined monsters down to size or create a space to deal with them rationally. After scrutinising the files of all eight Afghans featured in this report in-depth, nothing suggested they were especially dangerous individuals. Yet, this is how the US state has treated each one, by default, and without regard for facts or evidence.
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The statement went on to say: “Separately, the military commissions process continues for those detainees subject to criminal prosecution.”
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That assertion that detainees are being held under the law of war is strongly contested, especially given that President Bush decided to house the detainees in Guantanamo so that they would not enjoy rights that might accrue from them being on the US mainland. Obama’s first Special Envoy for Guantanamo Closure, Dan Fried, for example said that: “Guantanamo was neither grounded in the laws of war nor in criminal justice.” His contention was that, “once you have established a system outside of either international or US law, which this was, then it’s very hard to reintegrate it back into a legal framework. (Quote from page 5, Kafka in Cuba, a Follow-Up Report: Afghans Still in Detention Limbo as Biden Decides What to do with Guantanamo). For more on the legal discussion and background, see Chapter 3: Sources of Information and the Shifting Legal Landscape (p16-21) in Kafka in Cuba: The Afghan Experience in Guantanamo.
The Last Afghan in Guantanamo: Pressure mounts on US to deal with the remnants of its ‘War on Terror’
Since the takeover around two years ago in August 2021, the Taleban have sought to overhaul and reinvent Afghanistan’s higher education. They have put their affiliates in charge at the ministry and many public universities, created new bodies to promote religious institutions and incorporate them into the higher education system and reshaped curricula with a focus on religious studies. They have undertaken to monitor conduct and imposed strict rules on appearance and behaviour on both male and female students, before banning women from higher education altogether in December 2022. This report, based on research by guest author Said Reza Kazemi* details this steady process of Talebanisation, theocratisation and instrumentalisation, fuelled by the Taleban concept of the fekri jagra, or ‘war of thoughts’, and explores its wide-ranging impact on students, lecturers and staff. It concludes that the Taleban-defined university, where reorientation is enforced from the top and unquestioning obedience is required, has already emerged, but questions about its (near) future are far from settled.You can preview the report online and download it by clicking the link below.
A close reading of relevant sources and statements indicates that the Taleban believe they are engaged in a fekri jagra, a war of thoughts, which, in their view, has been imposed on Afghanistan, as part of a long historical process. This has sparked a series of swift and radical changes aimed at overhauling and reinventing post-2001 higher education and characterised by the enforcement of a top-down reorientation and unquestioning obedience. The little and fragile space for freedom and diversity that had developed in the period 2001-2021 has thus fast been disappearing in the emergent Taleban-defined university. More urgently, the full ban on women in higher education – and on girls’ education beyond the sixth grade – is rupturing the continuity, sustainability and meaning of all remaining education at any level.
While the Taleban have not dismantled higher education, they are seeking to make it an extension of their movement by theocratising and instrumentalising its structure and curricula and surveilling the people involved – all in the service of rationalising and strengthening the second emirate.
The Taleban authorities will likely continue to entrench this university in the foreseeable future. However, whereas the shape and direction of the changes are clear, questions remain about the (near) future of higher education in the country, including what a fully-fledged and articulated Taleban concept and structure of higher education would look and feel like. Most foundational is the question of what will happen as the Taleban continue their top down reorientation and expect unquestioning obedience in the context of an existing university that still embraces, in some way, both Taleban and non-Taleban.
Edited by Martine van Bijlert
* Reza Kazemi is a visiting researcher (September 2021-August 2023) of the Philipp Schwartz Initiative of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation hosted at the Institute of Anthropology, Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies, Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg. He previously worked as a researcher at AAN.
You can preview the report online and download it by clicking the link below.
Afghanistan Peace Campaign
The book cover of ‘Al-Emarat al-Islamiya wa Nidhamuha’ (The Islamic Emirate and its System of Governance) was written by the Islamic Emirate’s Chief Justice, Abdul Hakim Haqqani. Photo: John Butt, X (formerly Twitter), 1 September 2023.You can preview the report online and download it by clicking the link below.
