Munich, Germany (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) –– More than three years have passed since US troops left Afghanistan in August 2021, putting an end to an occupation that lasted two decades. With the Taliban back in power, the rights of women and girls have suffered a severe setback. Under the Taliban’s rule, they are no longer allowed to attend public secondary schools and universities. Last September, the fundamentalist group issued a religious code banning women from raising their voices or reciting the Quran in public.

Political and media freedoms have also been severely restricted, and poverty and unemployment have increased amid a massive withdrawal of foreign aid. The war’s end has brought public security and access to rural areas has improved, but these benefits are often denied to the female half of society. Women are forbidden to travel long distances without a male chaperone.

Amin Saikal, an emeritus professor of Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies at the Australian National University (ANU), is the author of “How to Lose a War: The Story of America’s Intervention in Afghanistan”. The US, explains Saikal, had traditionally paid limited attention to Afghanistan. This changed with the Soviet invasion of the country in 1979, after which the Carter administration approached Afghanistan as having ‘strategic importance’. Under Carter’s successor, Reagan, the US lavished Pakistan and the Mujahideen fighting the Soviets with military and financial assistance.

The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 gave way to a period of profound internal strife that culminated with the Taliban’s takeover of the country in 1996. Saikal defines the Clinton administration’s approach to the Taliban as “full of ambiguity.”[1] On the one hand, it maintained informal contact with the group. On the other hand, it feared the Taliban’s alliance with Al-Qaeda, founded by former mujahidin Osama bin Laden. The 9/11 terrorist attacks, organized by bin Laden’s terrorist organization, would put an end to this era of ambiguity.

According to Saikal, the Bush administration’s decision to invade Afghanistan following 9/11 assumed that the Taliban and al-Qaeda could be defeated, and Afghanistan changed, with limited combat and economic investment. The ‘light footprint’ approach, however, soon morphed into a ‘heavy footprint’ one. Saikal lists several reasons for this. First, the US underestimated the complexity of intervening in Afghanistan. Second, the failure to capture or kill bin Laden at the beginning of the war led to an obsession with finding him. Third, the Bush administration greatly expanded its priorities in Afghanistan, where it now wanted to engage in ‘democracy promotion’ and a ‘war on terror.’

Reflecting on two decades of war in Afghanistan, former Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt noted that after the Taliban were overthrown, there would have been a theoretical possibility for a political settlement including the fundamentalist group. But the US would not have accepted this, nor the Northern Alliance armed groups the US had supported to depose the Taliban, remarks Bildt.

It is highly doubtful that the US ever had a real chance at achieving its declared objectives in Afghanistan. Saikal, however, believes this was possible. According to him, a key problem was that “Afghanistan’s conditions required from the outset a much larger appropriate military and reconstruction involvement than what unfolded.”[2] The invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to an opposite trend, as the US transferred resources to the new war theater.

Amin Saikal, How to Lose a War: The Story of America’s Intervention in Afghanistan< (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2024). Click Here to Buy.

Saikal considers that the constitutional structure adopted by Afghanistan in 2004 had profound flaws because it created a system of government that was too centralized. The strong presidency established in the constitution led to the domination of the executive over the legislative and judicial powers. It was also responsible for a winner-takes-all mentality that left many strongmen with little formal power but the capacity to spoil the country’s politics and security. Saikal spares no criticism for the two men who presided over Afghanistan during this period, Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani.

About Karzai, Saikal writes that he “invoked the constitution and stressed the importance of the rule of law only when they suited his political and power needs.”[3] The emeritus professor describes Karzai’s government as highly corrupt, dysfunctional, and lacking a clear ideological project. Initially lauded in Western capitals, Afghanistan’s Western partners were only too happy to see Karzai leave his position in 2014. His successor, Ashraf Ghani, was elected after a voting process that saw even more fraud than the previous presidential election in 2009.

Secretary of State John Kerry engaged in a mediation effort between Ghani, the official winner of the 2014 election, and his opponent Abdullah Abdullah, who also claimed to have won the vote. The impasse was resolved in favor of Ghani, who had better connections in Western countries after having spent more than a decade of his life in the US. Ghani, explains Saikal, sought to present himself as a traditional Muslim and Afghan but “ultimately could not be the man of the people.”[4]

The new president also generated resentment among other ethnic groups when he surrounded himself with fellow Pashtuns. Ghani presided over a continuous loss of territories to the Taliban. Although he had promised never to leave the country, he abandoned Kabul as the Taliban were completing its conquest of Afghanistan in August 2021.  

In his balance of twenty years of US presence in Afghanistan, Saikal notes that the country’s economy remained dependent on foreign aid, opium cultivation, and the black-market sector. Infrastructural projects and investments in the health and education sectors significantly improved the overall situation in the country. Still, the improvements bore no proportion with the money spent — $36 billion was allocated to governance and development, with smaller amounts for humanitarian aid, in a figure that does not include contributions by US allies.

US funds were misappropriated by both Americans and Afghans, while mismanagement, wastage, and corruption resulted in Afghanistan seeing “only artificial, not structural, economic development.”[5] The area where improvements were more significant, especially in comparison to the periods that preceded and followed the US intervention, was women’s rights. Even so, the gains were too often restricted to urban areas.

The 2020 Doha Agreement between the US and the Taliban was the prelude to the US exit from Afghanistan. The negotiations, handled on behalf of the Trump administration by Zalmay Khalilzad (who had played a major role in Bush’s Afghanistan policy), were “disastrous”, in Saikal’s words.[6] The emeritus professor argues that Khalilzad, under Trump’s imperative, was so concerned about reaching a quick agreement that he made too many concessions considering that the Taliban did not have control over many areas of Afghanistan at that time.

Under the terms of the Doha Agreement, the US promised to withdraw from Afghanistan in fourteen months whereas the Taliban committed themselves not to attack US and allied troops. The Taliban also agreed not to allow terrorist groups to operate from Afghanistan after the US withdrawal. That they were not ready to keep this promise became evident when a US drone strike killed al-Qaida’s leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in central Kabul one year after US troops had left Afghanistan.

“How to Lose a War” is the result of Saikal’s decades-long study of Afghanistan’s history and politics. He had access to some of the most prominent politicians and military men, both Afghan and foreign, who shaped Afghanistan during the last two decades. Saikal combines these insider sources with a clear analytical mind in a text that will prove a fruitful read not only for experts but also for those who have been following international politics less closely.

It would be a positive development if the book contributed to renewing the current conversation on Afghanistan, which has moved to the background since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s war on Gaza. One of the current discussions concerning Afghanistan is how foreign governments, NGOs, and multilateral institutions should engage with the Taliban-led country. Saikal pays little attention to the topic in his book, but this is a debate that is likely to stay with us for a long time since there is no realistic chance of the Taliban losing power in the short term.

In his book “The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan after the Americans Left”, Hassan Abbas argues that it is vital “to acknowledge the difference between engagement and endorsement”.[7] Abbas sees engagement as a way to better understand the interests and actions of the other side, in this case, the Taliban. Endorsement, on the contrary, would mean supporting the Taliban’s worldview. Whereas endorsement arises from affinity, engagement is born out of pragmatism. Abbas is convinced that engagement with the Taliban is possible and much-needed, even if the gains to be made are limited.

Graeme Smith, the Afghanistan Senior Analyst for the International Crisis Group, makes a similar argument. He notes that, when engaging the Taliban diplomatically, the rights of women and girls cannot be dropped from the conversation. At the same time, however, the international sanctions regime imposed on Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover has counter-productive results as they “do not have much effect on the Taliban, but they do drive up rates of malnutrition among children and disease among vulnerable families, especially female-headed households that often struggle in a patriarchal society.”

Smith reports that some European countries that publicly chastise the Taliban have sent discreet delegations to Afghanistan to confer about security issues. Calling the Taliban out for their transgressions while seeking to ease the suffering of the Afghan population and limiting the danger of international terrorism emerging from Afghanistan is a very complicated endeavor. It does not need to be hypocritical, though.

 Notes

[1] Amin Saikal, “How to Lose a War: The Story of America’s Intervention in Afghanistan” (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2024), p. 61.

[2] Ibid., p. 201.

[3] Ibid., p. 107.

[4] Ibid., p. 129.

[5] Ibid, p. 169.

[6] Ibid., p. 214.

[7] Hassan Abbas, “The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan after the Americans Left” (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2023), p. 210.

(The Conversation) – The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021 was a blow for education across the country – but especially for girls and women. Since then, the Taliban’s leaders have outlawed education for girls after sixth grade, expanded religious seminaries known as madrasas ninefold and reintroduced corporal punishment in schools.

Now, the Taliban are continuing their assault on education for both boys and girls by changing the curriculum in grades 1-12. They have already revised textbooks up to eighth grade, and they’re on track to finish the rest within months. After completion, the revised curriculum will go up for approval by the Taliban’s supreme leader and will likely be followed by swift implementation. The process is straightforward. The supreme leader of the Taliban controls education policy – including the curriculum. Once submitted to him, he has no reason to reject or delay the implementation.

As an educational policy scholar who pushed for educational progress in Afghanistan before the Taliban takeover, I believe these changes echo the tactics of the Soviet-backed regime in the 1980s to impose an ideology through textbooks. They also reflect the stifling climate of the 1990s, which promoted violence and suppressed critical thinking in education. By controlling education, the Taliban aims to instill their totalitarian and extremist religious-based ideology in young minds, ensuring their grip on power for generations to come.

The curriculum changes

Afghanistan’s education system is centralized, meaning all schools follow a single curriculum. The current textbooks are the result of two decades of reforms that followed the country’s recovery from the Soviet invasion and civil wars of the 1980s and 1990s.

Since 2001, when the Taliban’s last regime fell, the Ministry of Education, in collaboration with international developmental agencies, undertook a critical revision of the national curriculum. This initiative aimed to make curriculum and textbooks inclusive, nondiscriminatory and free from promotion of violence – a departure from previous textbooks that included illustrations of tanks, rocket launchers and automatic weapons.

In the last decade before the Taliban regained power, the Ministry of Education was still attempting to reform curriculum to focus on students’ personal and economic growth. Unfortunately, the ministry never completed the reforms.

Embed from Getty Images
Afghan school boys attend their first class following the start of the new academic year, at a private school in Khost on March 20, 2024. Schools in Afghanistan opened for the new academic year on March 20, the education ministry said, with girls banned from joining secondary-level classes for the third year in a row. (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)

Within a few months after their takeover in August 2021, senior Taliban leaders criticized the previous education system and curriculum, saying it was brainwashing Afghan youth and weakening religious values. They called for a reeducation campaign.

Since then, the Taliban have been revising the curriculum and aggressively rewriting textbooks for grades 1-12. This is based on 26 recommendations from their education commission. Some of the changes approved by the commission include:

1.) Removing subjects like formal art, civil education and culture. Instead, schools are increasing time spent on religious studies.

2.) Removing content about human rights, women’s rights, equal rights, freedoms, elections and democracy.

3.) Removing all images of living beings from textbooks, including pictures of humans, animals, sports and anatomy. The Taliban believe that only God creates living beings, and producing or distributing images of God’s creation is prohibited.

4.) Adding religious material to the curriculum that enforces Taliban narratives. This includes teachings that justify violence against those who resist or oppose the Taliban’s views.

5.) Shaping student behaviors to fit the Taliban’s vision of society, similar to what they defined in recent vice and virtue laws that ban women’s voices and bare faces in public, among other rules.

6.) Requiring schools to teach and assess students on “emirate studies,” which glorify Taliban leaders and their history by characterizing the Taliban takeover as a defeat of secular values, including equal rights, civil society and democracy.

The Taliban have also banned women from studying abroad. In addition, they have prohibited the sale, purchase and reprinting of more than 400 science and philosophy books and confiscated at least 50,000 books on democracy, social and civil rights, art, literature and poetry from publishing houses, bookstores and public libraries.

A 2023 Human Rights Watch report noted an increase in corporal punishment in schools. Even some teachers of nonreligious subjects, like math and science, now have to pass the religious tests to remain employed.

Beyond shaping thought processes, the Taliban aim to influence students’ actions. Through rigid rules and corporal punishments – including humiliation, beating, slapping and foot whipping – they seek to produce immediate behavioral changes that reflect their desired norms. Their ultimate goal is to cultivate individuals who embody the regime’s values and ideologies.

Consequences for Afghan students – and the world

During their first regime from 1995-2001, the Taliban used textbooks with biased content that promoted violent jihad. For example, the alphabet taught to first graders included teachings like “J” stands for jihad and “M” for mujahideen – referring to Islamic guerrilla fighters.

They increased religious education to 50% of the curriculum and banned art, music and photography. They deemed music against God’s will, according to their interpretation of Sharia.

As a result, academic freedom vanished. Student enrollment dropped. Families lost trust in schools, and many teachers left the profession, leading to the eventual collapse of the education system in the 1990s.

The Taliban are threatening to do the same today with their latest curriculum changes. Schools may turn into indoctrination centers instead of places for real learning. I fear that the altered curriculum could breed mistrust in public education. Furthermore, the Taliban removed the 2008 law that made school mandatory. As a result, many parents may pull their kids from schools again.

The ideologically driven curriculum also raises international concerns and has already led to cuts in foreign aid. Donors won’t support institutions that promote discriminatory ideologies. This is straining an already vulnerable education system, threatening its survival.

Ultimately, the Afghan people will bear the brunt of these policies, but the effects could spill beyond the country’s borders and impact the world.

Enayat Nasir, Doctoral Research Assistant in Educational Policy, University at Albany, State University of New York

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

(The Conversation) – Last month, the Taliban passed a new “vice and virtue” law, making it illegal for women to speak in public. Under the law, women can also be punished if they are heard singing or reading aloud from within their homes.

It was approved by the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, and will be enforced by the Ministry for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice.

Ahead of an international conference on the future of Afghanistan in Doha, Qatar, earlier this year, the United Nations’ mission head for Afghanistan, Roza Otunbayeva, said it would “take time” for the Taliban to accept women. The Taliban specifically mandated no women attend the conference, which the UN agreed to.

But as gender experts have been saying for years, Taliban leaders have not – and will not – change. Three years after they regained control of Afghanistan, the Taliban’s efforts to publicly erase women from Afghan society have reached a new low.

Gender apartheid

The Taliban’s burgeoning body of laws and practices restricting the rights of women and girls is a clear case of gender apartheid. Gender apartheid is defined as a regime of systematic gender-based oppression and domination.

Because there is no conventional legal framework in place in Afghanistan, the country is ruled by an increasingly tightly woven patchwork of decrees, policies and systematised practices, some written, others verbal.

Since returning to power in 2021, the Taliban has enacted more than 100 edicts, orders and directives restricting the rights of women and girls. These apply in a range of jurisdictions – nationally, provincially and in specific districts.

The most significant of these edicts prevent women and girls from attending school beyond grade six, working in many organisations, and travelling a certain distance to seek health care.

Restricting girls’ education

The ban on education for Afghan girls has had a dire effect on their wellbeing. Modelling from UN Women shows this has correlated with a 25% increase in child marriage and 45% increase in early childbirth. The loss of hope for young women has been profound.

Civil society groups in Afghanistan and around the world have clapped back at the Taliban’s ban on girl’s education with the hashtag “Let Afghan Girls Learn”.

Myriad small organisations are also running underground schools to continue girls’ education. Sometimes these schools operate under the guise of embroidery classes, or something else the Taliban finds acceptable.

But the ongoing lack of funding to women-led organisations has been a serious barrier to these kinds of programs, despite the fact they are primarily Afghan-led.

A range of internationally certified online programs have also been established, providing important educational and employment opportunities for smaller numbers of Afghan women and girls.

But these online options remain limited, and not just by funding. Data shows only 6% of Afghan women have internet access, and the Taliban is making it increasingly difficult for Afghans to access SIM cards for mobile phones.

Hurting women and children’s health

Women’s health has also suffered due to the brain drain of highly-skilled workers fleeing the country and the sharp reduction in international technical and financial assistance to Afghanistan’s public health system.

Human Rights Watch reports “women and girls have been disproportionately affected by the healthcare crisis” in the country, particularly because of the Taliban’s abuses of women’s rights.

For example, restrictions on women’s movement has meant that maternal and infant mortality rates have skyrocketed in recent years as women are prevented from reaching health facilities.

Data published in the British Medical Journal shows that eight in ten women in urban areas have reported symptoms of depression and/or anxiety living under the Taliban.

Fighting against the silence

Over the past year, the Taliban have also increasingly targeted women’s human rights defenders. Activists have been “disappeared”, arbitrarily detained, and egregiously abused in prison.

The Guardian recently published evidence of a woman being raped in prison.

In my own work, I’ve documented a pattern of Talibs using sexual torture against imprisoned women’s human rights defenders in a bid to shame them out of their activism and isolate them from familial and community support.

Yet, Afghan women continue to push back against the draconian authorities ruling the country.

In response to the latest “vice and virtue” law, for example, women all over the country have taken to social media posting videos of themselves singing and reciting poetry to show they cannot be silenced.

Some recite the Quran. Many wear traditional Afghan dress, while others wear the Taliban’s required burka. But they sing to prove they exist. To show they are Afghan, and that they are not impure, regardless of what the Talibs say.

Activists are also continuing to push for the international recognition of gender apartheid as a crime against humanity, and the International Criminal Court continues its investigations into alleged crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Taliban.

But Afghan women cannot be left alone in their struggle. The international community must follow through on its commitments to protect Afghan women’s rights defenders. It must also maintain long-term support, including through funding pathways, for women-led organisations helping women in Afghanistan.

Susan Hutchinson, PhD Candidate, International Relations, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

——

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‘Becoming a doctor is my dream’: Afghan women continue studies in Scotland | AFP

On Gaza, Harris said, “Well, let’s understand how we got here. On Oct. 7, Hamas, a terrorist organization, slaughtered 1,200 Israelis. Many of them young people who were simply attending a concert. Women were horribly raped. And so absolutely, I said then, I say now, Israel has a right to defend itself. We would. And how it does so matters. Because it is also true far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Children, mothers. What we know is that this war must end. It must when, end immediately, and the way it will end is we need a cease-fire deal and we need the hostages out. And so we will continue to work around the clock on that. Work around the clock also understanding that we must chart a course for a two-state solution. And in that solution, there must be security for the Israeli people and Israel and in equal measure for the Palestinians. But the one thing I will assure you always, I will always give Israel the ability to defend itself, in particular as it relates to Iran and any threat that Iran and its proxies pose to Israel. But we must have a two-state solution where we can rebuild Gaza, where the Palestinians have security, self-determination and the dignity they so rightly deserve.”

But that isn’t how we got there. The Israelis expelled 250,000 Palestinians to Gaza in 1948 from their homes in what became southern Israel, making Gaza a big refugee camp. The population has grown to 2.2 million. They detached from Gaza its agricultural lands and left it cut off from its markets. From 1967 the Israelis came after the Palestinians in Gaza again and occupied them. In 2007 they slapped an economic siege on the Gaza Strip, imposing 55% unemployment and causing children to be malnourished. So Hamas committed horrific terrorism on civilians on October 7 last year, for which there can be no justification. But if it had only attacked the Israeli military it might have had grounds in international law, which permits resistance groups to fight foreign military occupation. Harris left out the Nakbah or Palestinian displacement by Israel, and the long decades of military occupation and siege, so she made the story impossible to understand.

She is much better than Biden in at least expressing some empathy for the tens of thousands of innocent civilians Israel has killed in Gaza. But empathy, while better than nothing, won’t stop the killing, which is daily and directly enabled by US supply of weapons and ammunition (the Israelis ran out months ago).

The cease-fire deal she is touting does not exist. It was just a cheap trick pulled on Biden by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to giving him breathing space to continue the war, Netanyahu has constantly tacked on new conditions, most recently his occupation of the Philadelphi Corridor south of Rafah, which he knows Hamas (and even Egypt) will never agree to.

There is no two-state solution to be had, and politicians should start being honest about it. Gaza is rubble and there are hundreds of thousands of Israeli squatters in the Palestinian West Bank. Where would you put a state?

Trump’s response was to say that the war would not have happened on his watch because he starved Iran of money. That assertion is not true and it isn’t a policy. It is just a narcissistic boast that he can magically control the world. He can’t.

As usual, what he said is arrant nonsense. The CIA assesses that Hamas did not tell Iran it was planning Oct. 7. Iran had nothing to do with it.

Further, Biden has kept all the Trump sanctions on Iran, which is not a good thing. It puts the US on a war footing with Iran. Washington tries to interfere in Iran’s normal commerce such as selling its oil. There are no grounds in international law for this behavior. The US has even sanctioned the Iranian national bank, making all economic transactions with Iran a form of terrorism, including sending food or medicine. It is unprecedented to call the national bank of a country a terrorist organization.

Trump has no policies, just insults, such as that Harris hates Israel and even hates Arabs because her hatred of Israel will get Arabs killed. I couldn’t follow the argument because of that arrant nonsense thing.

CNN: “Watch the full Second Presidential Debate Hosted by ABC”

Afghanistan was the other country in the greater Middle East that came up.

Harris expressed her agreement with President Biden’s decision to pull out of Afghanistan, noting that four presidents had sought to withdraw, but he was the first to do so, saving the $300 million a day that the fruitless war was costing taxpayers. She said that “And as of today, there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world, the first time this century.”

Harris blamed the debacle of the withdrawal on the “weak deal” negotiated directly with the Taliban by Don Trump, which she implied rather detracted from his reputation as a deal-maker. She said he by-passed the Afghan government and as part of his deal he released 5,000 Taliban terrorists. She expressed outrage that he would invite the Taliban to Camp David.

Harris is correct about the cost of the Afghanistan War, which came to $2.313 trillion over 21 years. That is $110 billion a year. Divided by 365, it comes to $301 million per day. Although al-Qaeda plotted the 9/11 attacks from Afghanistan, it is not clear that they told the Taliban what they were planning, and it was kind of odd that Afghanistan, rather than the al-Qaeda network, should have been thought the danger to the U.S.

I’d say her account was accurate regarding the favorability of the deal Trump proposed to the Taliban. It is also true that Trump really wanted out of Afghanistan and kept telling his generals to get out, and they slow-rolled him. In some ways the story shows that on this issue Biden and Trump agreed. It isn’t for sure that Biden could have gotten a better deal than Trump on withdrawal. As for leaving the Afghan government out of the negotiations, that was weird. But given the way it collapsed and its top leaders were implicated in large-scale theft, it is not obvious that if Trump had included them in the talks, they could have obtained more favorable terms.

I don’t agree with her allegation that “there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world.” I think the 800 US troops at Tanf in southeast Syria are in a war zone and that they are actively still fighting al-Qaeda, but also Shiite militias. Although the 2,500 US troops in Iraq are now classified as trainers, they do appear to be providing back up to the Iraqi Army in mopping up operations against ISIL in northern Iraq.

But the statement is also a little misleading because so many U.S. military interventions are aerial. The U.S. has been bombing Yemen regularly because the Houthis have been targeting container ships and oil tankers in the Red Sea in support of the people of Gaza. You can’t just make this mini-war disappear because there are no boots on the ground. The US routinely bombs the al-Shabab extremist fundamentalist movement in Somalia.

In fact, in the past year the US has also bombed Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria in reprisal for their attacks on bases housing US troops in those two countries. The Shiite militias struck at the US in Iraq, Syria and Jordan in an effort to punish it for its heavy support to the Israeli total war on Gaza. When you are actively bombing Yemen, Somalia, Syria and Iraq you can’t be said to be entirely at peace.

“Prize Fight,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

Trump boasted that in the 18 months after his deal with the Taliban, no US troops were killed in Afghanistan. This is true, but it is because he promised to get out of Afghanistan shortly if the Taliban ceased the attacks.

Trump said that the leader of the Taliban is “Abdul.” He was probably referring to the Taliban political chief in 2020, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. Abdul is not a name on its own. It means “servant of” and is followed by a name of God. Abdul-Ghani means “servant of the All-Sufficient” (that is, God does not need anything because his essence is intrinsically rich). Baradar signed the deal for a complete US withdrawal from Afghanistan in February 2020.

Biden essentially followed the Trump treaty, though he delayed the promised US withdrawal from April 2021 to August. Although Trump is correct that the withdrawal was done chaotically, he was the one who guaranteed that it would be by his pledge to completely withdraw by a date certain. Trump’s claim that Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine because of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan is ridiculous.

( RFE/RL ) – The Taliban has attempted to police the public appearances and behavior of millions of Afghans, especially women, since seizing power in 2021.

But the enforcement of the extremist group’s rules governing morality, including its strict Islamic dress code and gender segregation in society, was sporadic and uneven across the country.

Now, the hard-line Islamist group has formally codified into law its long set of draconian restrictions, triggering fear among Afghans of stricter enforcement.

The Law On the Propagation Of Virtue And Prevention Of Vice, which was officially enacted and published on August 21, imposes severe restrictions on the appearances, behavior, and movement of women. The law also enforces constraints on men.

Adela, a middle-aged woman, is the sole breadwinner for her family of 10. She is concerned that the new morality law will erode the few rights that women still have.

The Taliban has allowed some women, primarily in the health and education sectors, to work outside their homes.

“I fear that Afghan women will no longer be able to go to their jobs,” Adela, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, told RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi.

Dilawar, a resident of the capital, Kabul, warned of a public backlash if the Taliban intensified the enforcement of its widely detested restrictions.

“The youth are suffering from extreme unemployment. Oppressing them…will provoke reactions,” the 26-year-old, whose name was also changed due to security concerns, told Radio Azadi.

Long List Of Restrictions

The new morality law consists of 35 articles, many of which target women.

Women are required to fully cover their faces and bodies when in public and are banned from wearing “transparent, tight, or short” clothing. The law also bans women from raising their voices or singing in public.

Women must also be accompanied by a male chaperone when they leave their homes and cannot use public transport without a male companion.

The law forbids unrelated adult men and women from looking at each other in public.

Men must also dress modestly, even when playing sports or exercising. They are prohibited from shaving or trimming their beards. Men are also compelled to attend prayers as well as fast during the holy Islamic month of Ramadan.

“[Men] should not get haircuts, which violate Islamic Shari’a law,” says one of the articles in the law. “Friendship and helping [non-Muslim] infidels and mimicking their appearance” is prohibited.

Afghans are forbidden from “using or promoting” crossses, neckties, and other symbols deemed to be Western.

Premarital sex and homosexuality are outlawed. Drinking alcohol, the use of illicit drugs, and gambling are considered serious crimes.

Playing or listening to music in public is banned. Meanwhile, the celebration of non-Muslim holidays, including Norouz, the Persian New Year, are also prohibited.

The Taliban’s dreaded morality police are responsible for enforcing the morality law. The force, believed to number several thousand, is overseen by the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.

Under the new law, the powers of the morality police have been expanded.

Members of the force will be deployed across the country to monitor compliance, according to the law. Members of the morality police are instructed to issue warnings to offenders. Repeat offenders can be detained, fined, and even have their property confiscated.

The morality police can detain offenders for up to three days and hand out punishments “deemed appropriate” without a trial.

The Taliban revealed last week that the force detained more than 13,000 Afghans during the past year for violating the extremist group’s morality rules.

‘Hellish Conditions’

The Taliban’s morality law has been widely condemned by Afghans, Western countries, and human rights organizations.

The Taliban has defended the law, which it claims is “firmly rooted in Islamic teachings.”

“This new law is deeply harmful,” said Heather Barr, associate women’s rights director at Human Rights Watch. “It represents a hardening and institutionalization of these rules by giving them the status of law.”

She said the law is a “serious escalation” and “swift slide to ever more hellish conditions for Afghan women and girls.”

Roza Otunbaeva, head of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, on August 25 called the law a “distressing vision for Afghanistan’s future” because of the broad powers the Taliban’s morality police will have “to threaten and detain anyone based on broad and sometimes vague lists of infractions.”

Obaidullah Baheer, a lecturer of politics at the American University of Afghanistan, said that parts of the morality law are “extremely vague.”

Yet, the morality police are given broad powers, including to “arbitrarily” punish people without due process, he said.

“[This is] making them the judge, jury, and executioner,” said Baheer.

Via RFE/RL

Copyright (c)2024 RFE/RL, Inc. Used with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

“Women banned from speaking in public by Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers” | BBC News

(The Conversation) – Until the collapse of Afghanistan’s US-backed government in August 2021, few knew clearly what the Taliban wanted once they had returned to power. Some western officials and observers hoped for a big change from the regime, which had governed the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate in the 1990s.

This time, they hoped, a more sophisticated and pragmatic vision might have replaced the Taliban’s previously extremist approach.

Some also argued that the rest of the world had a moral responsibility to approach Afghanistan’s new rulers with cautious optimism. Engagement should be the key. Anything else risked condemning the country and its population to isolation and economic hardship.

Others weren’t convinced.

During the negotiations that led to the February 2020 Doha agreement, the Taliban’s position on post-settlement Afghanistan’s politics remained ambiguous. The group continued this vague posture during the subsequent intra-Afghan dialogues with the former Afghan government.

Then, appearing in a press conference three days after Taliban forces took control of Kabul, its spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, appeared to give reassurances the new regime would respect women’s rights “within the norms of Islamic law”.

In the ensuing three years, the Taliban’s fundamentalist regime has continued to suffer from weak legitimacy, despite taking pains initially to cultivate a conciliatory image compared to its harsh rule in the 1990s.

However, what had appeared to some be Taliban 2.0 has increasingly looked like the old, harsh and fundamentalist Taliban as the regime has grown more confident in its hold on power.

Since 2021, Hibatullah Akhundzada, the leader of Afghanistan’s Islamic Emirate, has gradually issued more than 50 decrees that affect most areas of society.

Many hard-won achievements under the former republic, such as freedom of expression and the press, have been suppressed. The regime has forced into disappearance, imprisoned or murdered many former government members, despite announcing a general amnesty.

“Burqa,” Digital, Midjourney / Clip2Comic, 2024

In their treatment of women, including forbidding education after the age of 12, restrictions have become so harsh that the resulting subjugation has been labelled “gender apartheid” by many journalists, academics and activists.

Many female students have had to flee the country. Most recently a group of women medical students made the news after they were granted scholarships to go to UK to complete their studies.

The regime has also revived public executions and flogging reminiscent of their 1990s practices. An edict issued in March 2024 stated the regime will also resume public stoning.

The regime has now introduced a series of new “vice and virtue” laws, to be enforced by the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (PVPV).

Until now, government has been mainly by decrees from the Taliban leadership. But these, while giving an indication of the regime’s increasingly extremist and authoritarian nature, have not been accompanied with details of how they should be enforced. This uncertainty could, at times, allow local authorities a degree of leeway, including the ability in some cases to ignore decrees when it suits.

But the recent law chnage removes these ambiguities, empowers the Taliban’s morality police and is enforceable on everyone residing in Afghanistan.

Blueprint for oppression

The new laws are particularly harsh on women. They enforce the wearing of the hijab and stipulate this garment must be made of thick enough material to fully cover a woman’s face and body and avoid offering temptation to men.

Women’s voices are also deemed to be a source of temptation, so women are now not allowed to speak outside the family home. If a woman can be heard singing, even from within her own home, this is considered a violation of the law and can be punished. Women are even forbidden from looking directly at a man who is not their husband or blood relative.

Enforcement can be undertaken by anyone in society “who is capable”. Reports by two “trustworthy” individuals is enough to bring a prosecution. This is a worrying prospect, as it could lead to arbitrary accusations based on personal or political vendettas.

Officially enforcement will be carried out by the ministry’s appointees, the morality police or mohtaseb. “Fairness and kindness” are stipulated as guiding principles for how the new rules should be enforced, although these terms are not defined and the law is replete with subjective terminologies open to interpretation by those enforcing them.

New media laws introduced as part of the package prohibit “un-Islamic content” and empower the morality police to compel media officials to prevent the publication of content deemed contrary to Sharia and images of living beings. This last measure will effectively throw into doubt the future of TV broadcasting in Afghanistan.

The laws also forbid music in public and “un-Islamic” hairstyles. Men must grow beards at least as long as a fist. As a worrying sign for continued humanitarian engagement involving non-Muslim foreign workers, the law prohibits befriending, helping or imitating “nonbelievers”.

Violations will be met with on the spot fines issued by the mohtaseb or imprisonment for one-to-three days and prosecution in the regime’s courts for repeat offenders. The morality police also has the power to compel attendance at the mosque, with prosecution for those who do not obey, regardless of whether they pray at home.

As recently as June, Taliban representatives attended UN-sponsored talks in Doha at which spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid called for funds frozen by the west to be released and for the relaxation of sanctions on the regime. He dismissed western concerns over the regime’s treatment of women as “cultural differences”.

But these new laws have effectively removed any remaining differences between the current regime and its 1990s predecessor, a fundamentalist pariah that turned Afghanistan into an isolated outcast.

Kambaiz Rafi, Teaching Fellow in the School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

(The Conversation) – This week marks the third year since America’s retreat from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s return to power.

The United States had intervened in Afghanistan in response to the September 11 2001 terror attacks by al-Qaeda. The aim was to combat international terrorism and chart a new global order to make the world safer and more secure.

Yet, as I argue in my new book, How to Lose a War: The Story of America’s Intervention in Afghanistan, the world today is arguably more conflict-ridden and polarised than during the Cold War. It potentially stands on the edge of yet another world war.

America’s goals – and failures

Backed by its NATO and non-NATO allies, as well as extensive global sympathy, the key US objectives in Afghanistan were:

• eliminate al-Qaeda
• dismantle the Taliban’s ultra-extremist regime as the protector of al-Qaeda
• help change Afghanistan so it would never again become a nest of international terrorism.

Success in Afghanistan was intertwined with two other broader US foreign policy goals under the presidency of Republican George W. Bush – the global war on terrorism and promoting democracy. Both of these were means to bring change to the Middle East – and indeed the wider world – in accordance with the interests of the US as the sole post-Cold War superpower.

Ultimately, the US could not achieve any of these objectives.

At first, it prevailed militarily in toppling the Taliban government and dispersing al-Qaeda, with assistance from the anti-Taliban Afghan forces. But the respective leaders of both groups, Mullah Mohammad Omar and Osama bin Laden, and their main operatives escaped to Pakistan.

The Taliban swiftly regrouped. And with Pakistan’s support and its continuing alliance with al-Qaeda, it mounted an insurgency beyond the expectations of the US and its allies, including the fledgling Afghan government in Kabul.

The US had not originally intended to stay in Afghanistan for more than a few years. But its failure to decapitate al-Qaeda in the early days of its intervention resulted in a US hunt for bin Laden that took a decade. It also led to America’s deepening involvement in the difficult task of state-building in a highly socially divided and traditional Afghanistan.

Without ensuring Afghanistan was firmly placed on a stable, secure and democratic trajectory, the Bush administration invaded Iraq in 2003 on the false premises that the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein collaborated with bin Laden and possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Iraq was prioritised over Afghanistan. This resulted in a shift of important intelligence and military assets from the latter to the former.

In the absence of a well-thought-out plan of action about how to bring peace to Afghanistan and Iraq, the US found itself entangled in two unwinnable wars. This left it with little choice but to bow out of Iraq by the end of 2011 and Afghanistan by August 2021, without achieving its original objectives.

It also left behind two broken countries. Iraq is still struggling to recover. Afghanistan is in a mess under the Taliban.

The Afghanistan defeat could not be any less humiliating for the US than its devastating Vietnam War five decades earlier.

Sky News Australia Video: “Taliban hold ‘humiliating’ parade three years after returning to power in Afghanistan”

The Taliban’s extremism

The Taliban’s 2.0 minority tribal government has proven to be as dreadfully extremist and discriminatory as its previous reign of terror from 1996-2001.

It has professed a self-centred and self-serving version of Islam, which is not practised anywhere else in the Muslim world. Women are stripped of all basic rights (including to education and work). Any form of opposition is brutally suppressed. Other minorities, along with remnants of the previous US-backed regime, are punished daily. Many have been murdered.

The group has transformed Afghanistan into a protective enclave for al-Qaeda and several other similarly minded groups. These include the Pakistani Taliban (Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP) and the Islamic State–Khorasan Province (ISKP).

A new survey by the UN Mission in Afghanistan shows only 4% of respondents wanted the Taliban to be recognised internationally. The group’s lack of domestic legitimacy is paralleled by its pariah status in the global community.

Yet the group has been able to consolidate power in Afghanistan and stave off outside pressure, having taken advantage of regional and major power geopolitical rivalries and ambitions.

A more unstable world

The Taliban’s re-empowerment has significantly inspired and emboldened like-minded groups in many parts of the Muslim world, such as the TTP and ISKP. And the US defeat in Afghanistan has heartened America’s chief adversaries – Iran, Russia, China and North Korea.

Washington’s iron-clad commitment to ensure Israel’s security and its inability to end the devastating Gaza war have further stirred radical forces in the Muslim world and boosted America’s foes.

The related growing tensions between Israel and Iran, as well as with Tehran’s allies (most importantly Hezbollah in Lebanon), have seriously imperilled the cause of stability and security in a traditionally volatile region. A potential Israel-Iran war could drag the US in to defend Israel, with Russia and China supporting Iran.

This is not a scenario about which the Middle East and the world can be sanguine.

Amin Saikal, Emeritus professor of Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

() – The world has long been aware of the scourge of apartheid — the systemic segregation or discrimination of people based on their race. But what about the institutionalized practice of singling people out for ill-treatment due to their gender?

The push to recognize “gender apartheid” under international law is gaining steam, with oppression against women and girls in Afghanistan and Iran fueling calls for immediate action, but tremendous obstacles remain.

What Do They Want?

Advocates want to clearly define gender apartheid as a crime under international law. Currently, only “persecution” on the basis of gender is recognized as a crime against humanity. But rights groups and activists say the concept of persecution does not fully capture the scope of the abuses committed under a system of institutionalized gender apartheid.

The goal is for the United Nations to make up for this gap by legally shielding women and girls from systemic abuse and violence.

Afghan women’s rights defenders are credited with being the first to articulate the concept of gender apartheid in the 1990s, during the Taliban’s first regime.

Since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, the hard-line Islamist group has reimposed its oppressive policies against women and girls, including severe restrictions on their appearances, freedom of movement, and right to work and study.

Hoda Khamosh, an Afghan women’s rights activist, says the recognition of gender apartheid would greatly benefit women’s rights in the country.

“We would be able to hold accountable the authorities and perpetrators of gender-based violence and discrimination against women,” Khamosh told RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi.

Meanwhile, Iranian women’s rights activists have said the institutionalized discrimination against women in the Islamic republic amounts to gender apartheid.

UN experts have said the violent enforcement of the hijab law and punishments on women and girls who fail to wear the head scarf could be described as a form of gender apartheid.

The international community made a mistake in allowing the Taliban to exclude the voices of women and civil society in a recent meeting in Doha.

By Tarique Niazi | –

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – The United Nations recently hosted a third round of talks on Afghanistan in Doha, Qatar, to weigh the prospects for the country’s return to the international system. The talks were attended by special envoys on Afghanistan from 30 world nations, including the United States. That the world’s 30 leading nations have appointed “special envoys” on Afghanistan shows how concerning Afghanistan is to the globe. The UN sponsored the earlier two rounds in May 2023 and February 2024. Doha I and Doha II were, however, focused on the international obligations of Afghanistan’s de facto rulers, i.e., the Taliban regime.

The Taliban boycotted Doha I and Doha II, dismissing the “international obligations” as interference in Afghanistan’s internal affairs. Also, they refused to attend Doha III until the UN dropped human and women rights from its agenda, and barred Afghan women and civil society organization leaders from attending the talks. This capitulation is a step toward accepting the Taliban as the sole and legitimate representative of Afghanistan that they are not. The Taliban further snubbed the UN and participating countries by sending a delegation led by a low-level official, a government spokesperson, instead of their minister for foreign affairs.

To be fair, cutting and pruning the agenda around the Taliban’s demands was not an easy decision for the UN or special envoys to swallow. There is every indication that the decision irked UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who earlier attended Doha I and Doha II, enough to abstain from Doha III. Many others were dismayed by the decision. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women was “deeply concerned” about the exclusion that it said “will only further silence Afghan women and girls.”

Human Rights Watch found the decision “shocking.” The Afghan Representative at the United Nations, who does not represent the de facto Taliban regime in Kabul and is a holdover from the pre-Taliban Afghan government, was “disappointed” at the decision. He urged the world to hold the Taliban to their international obligation of forming an inclusive and representative government in Afghanistan, engage with all Afghan stakeholders, not just the Taliban, and not look away from human rights violations in Afghanistan.

The U.S. Special Envoy on Afghanistan, speaking at the UN Security Council, lamented that “the harm caused by the Taliban’s restrictions on women and girls cannot be overstated,” noting “that it has now been over 1,000 days since it banned girls from secondary schools.” Yet he seemed more concerned with “Afghanistan’s reintegration into an international system,” and having the UN appoint a “focal point to begin producing a road map” to this effect.

The world, nonetheless, stays united refusing to recognize the Taliban government in the face of their misanthropic and misogynistic policies, which ban girls from seeking an education beyond sixth grade and women from employment even in women-only establishments and organizations. Even diverse nations such as China, India, Iran, Russia, and the United States speak with one voice. More importantly, the UN has refused to accept the Taliban regime as a de jure government that has been constituted and propped up against the will of the Afghans, and with the muscular power of a militia force, i.e., the Taliban.

DW News Video: “Outrage over women’s exclusion from UN-led talks with Taliban | DW News”

The global call on the Taliban to end their misogyny has not gone unheeded, though. There is now a growing chorus of voices, both loud and quiet, within the Taliban regime that wants the ban on female education lifted. One such voice is that of the Taliban’s Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Stanikzai, who initially was tipped to be the country’s prime minister but got pushed aside because of his outspokenness. He has long been challenging his government’s ban on female education, arguing that Islam makes it obligatory for both men and women to get an education. He calls the ban on women and girls’ education “oppressive and unjust.”

Quieter voices also oppose the ban, prominent among them the ministers for defense and the interior, who see the ban as inconsistent with international norms. Defense Minister Yaqoob Mujahid’s dissent carries greater weight because of his heritage. He is a son of the founder of the Taliban Movement, Mullah Omar, and is widely respected by the rank and file of the movement. So is Sirajuddin Haqqani, the minister for the interior, whose father Jalaluddin Haqqani is credited with crafting military strategies that, years later, paved the way for the Taliban’s return to power.

Who is, then, opposed to women and girls’ right to education and work? It is the Taliban’s Supreme Leader, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, who is a recluse, hermit, blinkered, bigoted and inveterate misogynist with zero formal education, except for a few years of undistinguished religious instruction. Unlike many world scholars of Islam, Akhundzada has never traveled outside of  his birth country of Afghanistan and the remote village in neighboring Pakistan where he was in exile. This insularity has turned him into a literalist reader of religious texts. His medieval interpretations of Islam are rejected by every single Muslim religious scholar, including the world’s largest Islamic movement of Nahdatul Ulema in Indonesia, which boasts 100 million members.

Similarly, religious scholars in Cairo, Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia rebuffed Akhundzada’s orthodox reading of Islam. This universal repudiation has further turned him inward. He now refuses to meet with any visiting Islamic scholars. In parallel, he claims it is Pashtun culture, not necessarily religion, that doesn’t permit women to learn or work outside the home.

This citation of Pashtun culture did appeal to some. In 2021, Pakistan’s then Prime Minister Imran Khan, whose ancestors hail from Ghazni and Kandahar in Afghanistan, echoed Akhundzada’s position and urged the world to be understanding of Pashtun culture that discourages women’s education. His ambassador at the UN defended this stance saying that the Taliban’s ban on women’s education is part of Pashtun culture, which created a huge backlash. Afghanistan’s former President Hamid Karzai admonished Imran Kahn for peddling ignorance about Afghan culture. Afghan women, however, fared best under the Afghan communist regime (1979-1989), when 60% of university students in the country were women. The second best era for them was in 2001-2021, when 25% of university students were women.

If Pashtun culture were to blame for opposing women’s education, then Pashtun women in Pakistan would not be studying in co-ed schools, colleges, and universities. The Nobel laureate Malala Yousufzai, who risked her life for education, is a Pashtun. The 50 million Pashtuns in Pakistan outnumber the entire population of Afghanistan. Pakistani Pashtuns should be the true north of Pashtun culture, not Mullah Akhundzada.

Tragically, Afghanistan has fallen into the hands of those who are impervious to rational thought. Millions of Afghans have been fleeing their irrationality. Since 2021, 700,000 Afghans have sought refuge in neighboring Pakistan alone. How to stop Afghanistan from bleeding its best and brightest? All overseas Afghan assets, including the $7 billion that the United States has frozen since 2021, should be released only to Afghan women for their education. Any Afghan woman living inside or outside the country seeking higher education should be entitled to these funds. There are around 12,000 universities in India, Indonesia and the United States alone. If each of these universities offers one spot for them, 12,000 Afghan women can graduate every year. With an investment of just $7 billion, a million Afghan women can receive university education. This should be a realistic way to counter Taliban misogyny.

Unfortunately, the international community has provided the Taliban regime with $10 billion in “international aid and civilian support” since 2021, with zero accountability or transparency. The UN must engage with the Taliban to have them be accountable, transparent, meet their international obligations, and most importantly further women’s interests, i.e., their right to education, work, and public life. If the Taliban are responsive, they should be welcomed into the world community; if not, they should be shunned until they renounce their antiquated ideas. The Doha III meeting that shut out civil society and women’s voices was a nod to Taliban misogyny. This mistake needs to be undone, and soon.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus