Afghanistan: lest we forget

Three years ago, my August summer holiday was severely disrupted by events in Afghanistan when the NATO forces making up the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) abruptly departed the country. There was no time to organise a proper security transition with the Afghan government led by President Ashraf Ghani – who himself fled the country – nor to train and equip the Afghan army sufficiently to enable it to hold the Taliban insurgents at bay. Instead, the precipitous departure of the international forces was driven by the determination of US President Biden to end the American presence in Afghanistan. As the US provided many of the critical enablers for the NATO-led ISAF mission, such as air cover, helicopters, logistics, communications and intelligence, the European participants felt that they had no option but to withdraw as well, despite the worries of many about what would happen next in the country and a brief discussion about the possibility of a European force continuing the mission without the Americans. Given that the ISAF force had been in Afghanistan for almost 20 years and was led by a major Western institution (NATO), the lack of planning and preparation for the military departure surprised many observers. The shock piqued the attention of the media, which gave the withdrawal blanket and largely negative coverage; hence my phone ringing in my Tuscan holiday hideaway. There were scenes of chaos at the airport with Afghan civilians desperately trying to get on flights out of the country, running alongside departing aircraft on the runway and in some cases clinging to their wings and wheel bases. Meanwhile, US soldiers guarding the airport had to push back many of the fleeing Afghans, suffering in the process a terrorist attack at the Abbey Gate entrance to the airport, which killed 13 US service members and around 170 Afghan civilians. In the chaos, not all the Afghans who had worked for the international forces and agencies, and thus who feared Taliban persecution, were able to be evacuated. Thousands of others spent months in camps in the Middle East and the Balkans before they could be processed for emigration to the United States. Within days the Taliban were triumphantly entering Kabul, showing off their captured American equipment, and retaking the reins of power, 20 years after being deposed by the US in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist strikes against New York and Washington. Two decades of reconstruction and democracy-building efforts costing the lives of 4,000 ISAF soldiers and almost a trillion US dollars had come to nothing. The one notable success was dismantling the Al–Qaeda structures of terrorism in Afghanistan, but with the Taliban now back in control, who could guarantee that these would not re-emerge in the course of time?

Afghanistan is the biggest failure of a Western peace-building intervention in modern times. If Russia had not annexed Crimea in 2014 and sent its troops into the Donbas, thereby obliging NATO to refocus on its core mission of collective defence, the alliance would have had to conduct a much more thorough investigation into the reasons for this failure, and identify the multiple lessons to be learned. But Afghanistan engendered a mood of ‘never again’ when it came to nation-building in faraway places. And sending troops and tanks to their eastern borders gave the allies the perfect excuse to put a cursory stop to the lessons–learned exercise that they had started. Although the Taliban were back in power, the assumption was that they had learned their particular lesson from the past and would not be so foolhardy to play host to Al–Qaeda (or other jihadist groups like ISIL) again. Henceforth, their focus would be on domestic ideological control, not the Islamic revolution abroad. The fact that the Taliban were completely isolated, being recognised by no one, and cut off from the foreign aid that provided 90% of the budget of the previous Afghan government, seemingly made it unlikely that they would have the resources to act outside the country. It was convenient to believe too that the Taliban had come to understand that their previous harsh rule had been largely self-destructive. Depriving girls of education and excluding 50% of the population (the female part) from the workforce, as well as repressing Afghanistan’s non-Pashto minorities, was hardly conducive to economic growth or technological progress. The Taliban sent out some initial signals that they would give women more access to secondary and university education and open up more sectors to female employment, particularly in health and education. In abandoning Afghanistan to its fate, it was comforting for the allies to believe that the Taliban would be more pragmatic and that some of the gains that the international presence had been able to secure, for instance in GDP per capita, public health, child mortality and life expectancy, would be maintained.

The August anniversary of the termination of the ISAF mission – which, after 2014 had been renamed Resolute Support to stress the increased emphasis on the training of the Afghan army – would be a good opportunity to refocus on Afghanistan, and to debate what the international community can do to help the poor, suffering Afghans, even if today from over the horizon. But the war in Ukraine and, over the past 12 months, the escalating conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon have diverted attention and towards the most immediate crises. Thus, progressively, Afghanistan has sunk into the Bermuda Triangle of oblivion. International aid to the country has slumped by over 70% as many aid agencies and NGOs refuse to help a Taliban regime, which refuses to recognise the rights of women or to allow aid agencies to operate freely within the country. Many NGOs in any case left Afghanistan when the international military forces departed due to the deteriorating security situation in the country. Today, 50% of Afghans need outside help to survive. Yet the UN Humanitarian Appeal for Afghanistan has received less than 20% of the requested funding. The UN World Food Programme has repeatedly warned about famine in northern and western districts of Afghanistan due to the fall off in aid but also the impact of the extreme weather events and flooding that have reduced crop yields. Under the previous government, about half a million Afghan farmers worked on poppy production for the drug trade. But the Taliban have clamped down on this relatively profitable activity and the farmers have not yet switched to the cultivation of more traditional crops such as wheat, maize and rape seed. Women’s employment, already very low in this traditional society, has fallen by 25%. Many Afghans have tried to flee the country but now that the Taliban control all the territory, and the borders, this has become more difficult. The initial hints of a revamped Taliban 2.0 have proven predictably to be false. Afghanistan has reverted to being a theocracy under the command of the Taliban’s Supreme Leader, Sheikh Hibatullah Akhundzada, operating from his stronghold in Kandahar. He holds the kind of absolute authority wielded by the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and every Taliban official interviewed by the international media describes a situation of delay and paralysis while they are waiting for the Supreme Leader to take up an issue and give his guidance. But what is clear is that the Taliban version of Sharia Law is being imposed on the population step by step.

In late August, the Taliban introduced a new package of religious laws taking the country back to the situation in the late 1990s when the movement of student Islamic zealots first defeated the warlords and took control of Afghanistan in 1996. Henceforth, women are banned from speaking in public or reciting verses from the Koran in public. They are not allowed to look at a man other than a husband or relative or to ride in taxis without a male escort. They have to cover their faces fully. This means that fewer women now venture outside the home, which further reduces female employment opportunities. The Taliban have also reneged on their promises regarding female education although women can study midwifery or attend a religious school. Not much use when it comes to learning computers, science or languages. So, the new religious code builds on previous restrictions when women were not allowed to organise or participate in demonstrations, attend beauty parlours or congregate in parks or women-only spaces. They have also been barred from most professions, with some exceptions for female interpreters or nurses where the regime simply cannot do without them. This has led to some international officials, like Richard Bennett, the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Afghanistan, to speak of “gender apartheid” and to say that this should be declared a crime against humanity. That could lead to indictments of Taliban leaders to go before the International Criminal Court in The Hague if a country applying universal jurisdiction would be willing to take the lead. Admittedly, with international attention being displaced elsewhere, and some major powers, like China, courting the Taliban, such a step seems unlikely in the foreseeable future. In the meantime, Taliban spokesmen, like the Afghan UN ambassador, try to play down the significance of the measures against women claiming misunderstandings or that the restrictions are principally targeting women performing in public. But the stories of women demonstrators being mistreated in detention and in some cases sexually abused have made both Afghan women and outside observers deeply sceptical.

This is not to say that all developments in Afghanistan are uniformly catastrophic. The Taliban have enforced security throughout the country in a way that the pre-Western governments of Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani signally failed to do. Roads are once more usable and corruption – endemic in the former Afghanistan where according to the UN each Afghan adult paid on average $1,400 in bribes each year – has sharply diminished. This is appreciated by the local population. Anti-Taliban groups, like the National Resistance Front, which grew out of the old Northern Alliance, and which promised back in 2021 to fight on after the departure of the foreign forces, have had little impact. A group pledging loyalty to ISIL, known as ISIL-Khorasan, has carried out a series of bombings including in Kabul, but does not seem to have the structure and numbers to seriously challenge the Taliban regime in the immediate future. The economy has also stabilised. The IMF calculates zero GDP growth for this year, which means that the decline into negative growth has at least been halted for now. The country is managing to export traditional things like nuts and pomegranates and mining is restarting, particularly in the Mes Aynak copper mine, which was bought by China decades ago but not exploited before now. The currency has also stabilised. The economy would improve further if the community of wealthy Afghans who fled with their money to Qatar and other Gulf states in 2021 would return home. But they don’t trust the Taliban and their wives and daughters are understandably dissuading them from contemplating such a move. The Taliban nonetheless have proved adept at muddling through and are hoping that they will break out of their isolation in the fullness of time and that countries will recognise them. They are prepared to talk to anyone willing to talk to them. Already they are invited to meetings in the Asia region and China has taken up their cause. In his speech to the UN General Assembly last Saturday, the Chinese Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, called for an international reconstruction fund for Afghanistan. The country is very rich in minerals and rare earth deposits as a study by the US National Geological Survey showed during the time of the ISAF mission. So, the Taliban can negotiate recognition and aid as they grant mining concessions. They are also seeking to include Afghanistan in regional transport and energy links, particularly connecting China to Pakistan and Central Asia to India. Yet given the unpredictability of the Taliban’s foreign policy, the US and its Western allies are holding back and leaving the field to the Asian powers. Washington was not impressed when, despite its assurances not to support international terrorism, the Taliban provided sanctuary to the Al–Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri. He was killed on his apartment rooftop in Kabul in a US drone strike in July 2022.

The US and its allies may not object if ISIL is fighting the Taliban in a fratricidal battle within radical jihadism. And be content to observe all this from a safe distance. But a mission failure does not absolve the NATO countries from their responsibility for the future of Afghanistan. Or allow them to draw an easy line under 20 years of nation-building efforts. During these 20 years, innumerable press conferences and briefings by political leaders, military force commanders and spokespersons extolled the benefits that ISAF had brought to Afghanistan: a quarter of the parliament made up of women MPs, women as doctors, lawyers, teachers and TV presenters, girls in school and relatively free and fair elections for both parliament and the presidency. Afghanistan is a deeply traditional society but an effort was made to find a balance between the patriarchal countryside and the more liberal cities. A multi-ethnic police force and army were set up and the judiciary reorganised, although never to be free of chronic inefficiency and rampant corruption. Hospitals were built, agriculture made more efficient and public administration modernised. Life expectancy which had hovered around the mid-forties shot up to the mid–fifties. It was all a work in progress of course and an effort of at least 50 rather than 20 years, but when departing the Western allies declared that they were not abandoning the Afghans but would continue to work for their human rights and prosperity. This was, of course, somewhat disingenuous as even a half-successful ISAF force providing consistent security to 50% of the country allowed millions of Afghans of all ethnic groups to live in freedom and improve their lives. A lack of total success does not mean no success at all; and most Afghans would undoubtedly prefer the fragile security of the ISAF period to what they have today. In retrospect, it is still debatable whether the NATO mission needed to be ended so totally and so abruptly. Their casualties were low as the Afghan forces were doing the brunt of the fighting. During an 18-month period overlapping the Trump and Biden presidencies, not a single US soldier was killed in action. Given the small size of the ISAF/Resolute Support mission towards the end, it would have been possible to maintain the mission, giving more time to properly train and equip the Afghan army and work out a genuine power-sharing formula with the Taliban, backed by Afghanistan’s neighbours. Yet the Afghan government was never invited to the secret negotiations in Doha on the transition between the Trump administration and the Taliban. So, it was always in a weak position to defend the interests of the Afghan people and its own.

Afghanistan still has its uses in US domestic politics. In an election year, the Republicans in the House have produced a one-sided report criticising the Biden administration for its chaotic withdrawal from Kabul and in particular for failing to prevent the terrorist attack at the airport. Trump has brought up this issue too in his attacks on Kamala Harris. The House Republicans have threatened Secretary of State Antony Blinken with contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before a House committee of enquiry. Yet Afghans deserve better than to be a political football in the relitigation of old domestic policy disputes. Instead of waiting for the Taliban to reverse course and respect human rights before engaging with the regime in Afghanistan, the Western allies need to change their approach and decide on a new engagement policy now – not to let the Taliban off the hook, but to apply a package of pressure and incentives to make them take a more moderate line. As NATO is busy with Russia and Ukraine, the G7 framework and the EU-US dialogue would be the best fora for this discussion. Unfortunately, the opportunity to put Afghanistan on the international agenda last month at the 79th UNGA meetings in New York was lost as Gaza and Lebanon dominated the debate. Even the world’s worst humanitarian crisis – in Sudan – did not receive the attention it sorely needed. But a new EU leadership and a potential Harris administration in Washington more willing to focus on humanitarian relief and human rights protection could offer a fresh start.

The first leg of a new strategy could be to rebuild a diplomatic presence inside the country (for instance an EU mission) to monitor more closely the situation on the ground and to establish more regular contact with the Afghan leadership. As formal embassies require diplomatic recognition, special envoys can be appointed and offices, staffed by other government officials such as international development experts, established for the purpose of humanitarian aid coordination. This on the ground presence can help to identify the more moderate forces within the regime and to see how they can be encouraged and assisted to prevail against the hardliners. It can also work out the best way of getting the UN agencies, especially the World Food Programme, back into Afghanistan. Agriculture experts can help Afghan farmers with drought resistant seeds and better water and fertiliser use to convert from poppy cultivation to wheat, maize and rape seed crops. Irrespective of the nature of the Taliban regime, the international community has an interest in relieving famine in Afghanistan as well as helping the government to increase the country’s resilience to climate change by tackling water, irrigation and critical infrastructure challenges. Afghanistan has been hit hard in recent times with severe drought extending for over a decade as well as severe flooding last year. Food insecurity and climate refugees will only exacerbate the crisis of illegal migration as more poor and desperate Afghans head toward Europe. So, fully funding the UN’s humanitarian appeal for Afghanistan would be the place to start and a strong incentive for the Taliban to allow a minimal international presence inside the country.

A second area of potential cooperation is in counter-terrorism. The US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, has just announced a special fund of $148mn to improve border security and counter-terrorism measures in Central Asia and Africa. ISIL is the target of these measures and, as noted earlier, is active with its Khorasan group inside Afghanistan. If ISIL is the common enemy of both the US and the Taliban, there could be some scope for some limited and cautious cooperation, for instance in intelligence sharing. This may sound counter-intuitive to those of us who lived through the terrorist attacks on 9/11 in 2001, which were carried out by Al–Qaeda, aided and abetted by the Taliban. But today, preventing a resurgence of ISIL after the demise of its caliphate in Syria and Iraq in 2017, has to be the highest priority for Western counter-terrorism. Limited cooperation with the Taliban might be easier, and more effective, if it is conducted in a regional framework involving Pakistan, India and Afghanistan’s Central Asian neighbours in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Now that the international military forces have departed Afghanistan, Pakistan in particular may have a greater interest in such cooperation now that it no longer has to play one side off against the other to maintain its influence in Afghanistan. It will also want to avoid the spillover of terrorism and jihadist networks from its northern neighbour onto its own territory. So a regional counter-terrorism body, involving the US and the principal European countries concerned by ISIL, might at least be worth exploring.

A new strategy must also connect with those elements of Afghan civil society that fled the country in 2021 and are now living in exile in the US, Canada, the UK and France and Germany, for the most part. There are thousands of them including many women MPs from the old parliament, journalists, educators, members of the Afghan security forces and diplomatic service, business leaders and entrepreneurs and human rights and civil society activists. They need help and funding to organise and to stay in touch with family, friends and supporters inside Afghanistan. They can help to expose and publicise the abuses of the Taliban regime and maintain international pressure on it to moderate its stance. These people need to stay visible in the Western media and to constitute a diaspora of professionals who could return to Afghanistan to help rebuild the country should the Taliban evolve into a more pluralistic and representative government. Admittedly the prospects look bleak at the present but faced with international sanctions, diplomatic isolation and a collapsing economy the Taliban may need to change course in the future and open up. Keeping a semblance of civil society alive in Afghanistan through the activities of the outside community in exile will encourage positive change, even if only at a snail’s pace.

Finally, diplomatic recognition of the Taliban regime could be linked to a series of progressive steps that the regime could take. A kind of tit for tat process whereby relations and technical and financial support programmes are normalised gradually if the regime makes specific concessions; for instance in rescinding religious laws, abolishing the morality police or removing the political commissars currently placed in all Afghan ministries and who ensure that all public administration conforms to rigid and paralysing interpretations of Sharia laws. It would be a process of trial and error as we wait and see which incentives work best on the Taliban and how fast and how far they can be pushed. But it is probably a more productive policy than passively waiting for the Taliban to cave in and change their spots entirely before diplomatic recognition can move forward. It is not pleasant talking to the Taliban, but we talk to all manner of unpleasant regimes in our own self-interest and it is always more important to influence our adversaries rather than our friends.

The international agenda always grabs our attention with new crises. But the credibility of the West lies in keeping its promises and not abandoning those who share our values and fought – whether politically, militarily or at least rhetorically – alongside us. We have a moral duty to the Afghans and it is time to make more than a gesture of resignation to redeem it.

The views expressed in this #CriticalThinking article reflect those of the author(s) and not of Friends of Europe.