Afghanistan experienced two worlds in 2021. In the first half, it was a quasi-democracy and its peoples enjoyed many of the freedoms that can be found in many other countries across the globe. Beginning August 2021, however, Afghans began losing most — if not all — of those freedoms at a fast pace.
The Taliban took control of the entire country on Aug. 15, 2021, following the hasty exit of its president. The scheduled pullout of Western forces was completed some two weeks later, leaving Afghans on their own to deal with their new leaders, who were now calling the former Islamic Republic of Afghanistan an Emirate.
Until now, however, the international community has yet to recognize the country’s de facto regime. In the meantime, the crackdown on humanitarian aid accounting for 43 percent of the country’s GDP and a freeze on assets worth US$7 billion has further pushed Afghanistan’s economy toward total collapse.
There have been repeated calls to the international community by the Taliban to provide necessary aid to the cash-strapped country and release its funds to kickstart the economy.
“The Western governments must unfreeze Afghanistan’s capital and help the country with the economic and humanitarian needs of the Afghan people,” says Bilal Karimi, deputy spokesperson for the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. “The world needs to separate humanitarian aid from politics.”
But the international community may be tough to convince since the Taliban took over the government by force. Most also still remember the Taliban of the 1990s, which was a non-inclusive homogenous group that enforced a strict interpretation of Islamic law, and among other things, stripped women of their civil liberties and rights by imposing restrictions on every sphere of their lives.
Amnesty International struggles to verify ground reports as their local contacts have evacuated.
A “new” Taliban?
The Taliban has been trying to project a kinder, gentler image since retaking control of Afghanistan. However, that effort has not been quite successful.
Amnesty International campaigner Samira Hamidi says that the rights organization is especially concerned about “human rights violations and lack of accountability” now going on in Afghanistan. They are struggling to verify ground reports and rely on media for information, she says, but the arbitrary detentions of journalists and censorship of media are making things difficult on the ground.
“Even though we don’t have a physical presence in Afghanistan, my colleagues and I were able to travel frequently for our work and research,” says Hamidi, recalling how it was before the Taliban takeover. “We had a robust network of local contacts and counterparts in the erstwhile regime. But since the fall of the government, we have lost our ground support due to evacuations. Therefore, getting verified information has become very difficult.”
Those who do get information out of Afghanistan, however, confirm that most people there feel like they have been stripped of their civil liberties and professional freedoms. Many also continue to fear persecution due to their gender or ethnicity and retribution for their criticism of the Taliban.
“I’ve experienced the previous regime of Taliban and also the current emirate state,” says Yama, a 38-year-old who works for an international non-profit and who wants to be identified only by his first name. “Since the Taliban took over, my life has changed a lot. Salaries have gone down, a lot of government departments have stopped functioning, and many projects have come to a screeching halt.”
Unfortunately, indications are that Afghans are headed for much worse. According to the UN World Food Program, the country is on the cusp of “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” with millions of people on the verge of starvation. Indeed, the situation in Afghanistan that had been critical right after the Taliban came back to power has deteriorated further due to drought. Desperate Afghans have turned to selling everything as a result, from their household items to their own children.
A recent report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reveals that there is an urgent need for humanitarian aid in Afghanistan as almost “23 million people are facing acute hunger, including 8.7 million people at emergency levels.”
The biggest problem facing the Taliban regime is the loss of human capital. Hundreds of thousands of people have left the country.
The runaway leader
Some observers say that Afghanistan would not have been in this economic and humanitarian mess had its president, Ashraf Ghani, not fled the country so hastily. That act, they say, derailed eleventh-hour efforts to prevent the Taliban takeover and the subsequent sanctions on Afghanistan.
Others say that it was the United States that first “legitimized” the Taliban as a group worthy of recognition in matters involving Afghanistan. After all, it was the Trump administration that struck a peace deal with it in February 2020, paving the way toward ending the United States’ “forever war.”
Those talks, during which the Taliban pledged not to allow Afghan soil to be used for terrorist activities that could threaten the West, had shut out Ghani, a Ph.D. from Columbia University who was elected president of Afghanistan in 2014.
An expert on failed states, Ghani returned to Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion of the central Asian country in 2001. He served two years as finance minister under President Hamid Karzai. After his failed presidential bid in 2009, Ghani collaborated with influential Afghan politicians, among them Abdul Rashid Dostum, to clinch the country’s top post five years later.
But the Ghani government lacked the people’s trust as the results of the last two presidential elections of 2014 and 2019 were disputed. Even though he is Pashtun, Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group, Ghani was considered an outsider who lacked the political ability to keep the country’s multiple factions unified. Dismissed by the Taliban as a “puppet” of the West, he was also often described as impulsive and isolated by his rivals and close aides.
In 2021, after U.S. President Joe Biden set the Aug. 31deadline to complete the withdrawal of U.S. forces, Ghani refused to step down and allow the formation of the transitional government, even as the Taliban made sweeping military gains across the country.
But when the Taliban rolled into the capital one weekend, Ghani, along with his wife and close aides, escaped, abandoning the country he had led for nearly seven years and leaving it at the mercy of its new rulers.
He later took to Facebook, posting that he left the country to avoid Kabul’s military takeover and bloodshed — a message not taken very kindly by Afghans.
“They tied our hands behind our backs and sold off the country,” said Bismillah Mohammadi, Afghanistan’s acting defense minister, on Twitter after Ghani fled. “Damn to Ghani and his team.”
“There are two big reasons for Ghani’s failure in Afghanistan,” says political analyst Fahim Sadat, who used to head the Department of International Relations at Kardan University in Kabul. “One: that his government was hugely marginalized from the peace talks and that marginalization led Taliban to completely undermine his government. Ghani lost credibility not just with domestic stakeholders, but on the international level, too.”
“The second important issue — which I can call a strategic mistake by Ghani and his team — was their overthought that the Americans are not leaving,” Sadat continues. “But they were wrong because the Americans were leaving,”
In search of solutions
Sadat says that even though the war may be officially over, the humanitarian catastrophe in Afghanistan is making the country’s future bleak.
“Unemployment is on the rise, poverty has affected everyone, and then there is the problem of brain drain,” he says. “Hundreds of thousands of people who had the experience of modern governance have left the country. So the biggest problem facing the Taliban regime is the loss of human capital. Then they also have the problem of international recognition, the one problem that the Republic didn’t have to face.”
Some experts believe that the only way for the de facto regime to gain any form of recognition from the international community is through inclusivity, transparency, and restoration of women’s rights. Sadat agrees, saying, “They have to be more inclusive, open up some space for a woman in the public domain, and also show respect to human rights.”
The Taliban, though, have lately managed to hold talks with Western officials. In January 2022, its representatives had a meeting in Oslo with officials from the United States and the European Union — the Taliban’s first such meeting since regaining control of Afghanistan.
Acting Afghan Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi has acknowledged these talks as an important step toward diplomatic engagement between the Islamic Emirate and the Western world. In a statement, he also expressed the Taliban government’s desire to make Afghanistan into an “economic hub.”
Karimi echoed Muttaqi’s sentiment, saying that the Taliban government plans to “build Afghanistan in terms of trade, economy, and structural development.”
Following the Oslo talks, however, EU and U.S. diplomats have told Taliban officials that while humanitarian aid is the need of the hour, it would be tied to an improvement in the country’s human rights situation.
Yet for peace and civil activist Abid Humayun, Afghanistan’s problems cannot be fixed with humanitarian aid alone.
“Ineffective humanitarian aid can neither be the desired response to the current catastrophe, nor does it absolve the international community of its responsibility toward Afghan citizens,” he remarks.”So they shouldn’t be happy that ‘we are doing our part, we are mobilizing funds, we are sending it to Afghanistan, we are good, and we’re done.’ No, you are not done.”
The best way forward will be to build concrete foundations for future developments, argues Humayun. It is the only effective and efficient way to help Afghan citizens reach self-reliance, he says.
“It will be a huge relief for everyone in the region and in the world if Afghanistan becomes self-reliant,” Humayun says. “Then the world would no longer have to come together and pledge billions of dollars or extend a helping hand. They should probably just do it once, and do it right.” ●
Kanika Gupta is a journalist based in New Delhi, India, and works out of Kashmir and Afghanistan. She reports on human rights from conflict regions.
