Episode Notes:

Almost a year and a half after the Taliban takeover of Kabul, we’re joined by Madiha Afzal for an update on conditions in Afghanistan. Madiha is a Fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution and author of Pakistan Under Siege: Extremism, Society, and the State.

[:38] Life under the Taliban

[2:42] Economic situation

[5:34] Political resistance

[8:06] Islamic State Khorasan Province

[11:56] Western response

Episode Transcript

Nicholas Danforth: My name is Nicholas Danforth, and I'm an editor at War on the Rocks. You are listening to the Warcast, a members-only podcast for what you need to know — now. Almost a year and a half after the Taliban takeover of Kabul, we're joined today by Madiha Afzal for an update on conditions in Afghanistan. Madiha is a fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution and author of Pakistan Under Siege: Extremism, Society, and the State. Welcome back to the Warcast. 

Madiha Afzal: Thanks for having me. 

Nicholas Danforth: Give us a sense of what conditions are like in Afghanistan right now. 

Madiha Afzal: Conditions in Afghanistan have been dire since August 2021. I would say that the worst fears of humanitarian catastrophe were staved off in the first winter after the Taliban takeover by large amounts of humanitarian aid that flowed into the country. That humanitarian aid has continued but is now under increasing threat because of decisions that the Taliban is taking, including the fact that in December, just last month, they banned women from working for NGOs. Those women, you know, working for those NGOs, were responsible for getting aid to large swaths of the population. So starting right now in 2023, January 2023, we actually have a situation where, you know, about two-thirds of the country — that's about 24 million people — need humanitarian assistance to survive. And it's unclear whether they will be able to get it. 

You know, the right situation has been troubling. You know, of course, for the last 17 months, girls have not been able to go to secondary school. That means grade seven onwards. For the last 17 months, they were allowed to attend university. So that means girls who were already sort of attending university or were about to take university exams, they had been allowed to attend university, but just last month, young women were barred from attending universities. You know, women's lives essentially are increasingly constrained and sort of don't really involve them participating at all in the public sphere. 

Nicholas Danformath: Tell us a little bit more, going back to the economic situation. I mean, beyond, you said it's largely dependent on humanitarian aid at this point, you know, beyond that, what is the state of economic activity in the, you know, legitimate or even, you know, illegitimate economy beyond that? 

Madiha Afzal: Right. Well, it's important to remember that prior to August 2021, Afghanistan, through the 20 years of U.S. presence there, was a country that was largely dependent on assistance, right? So about 75% dependent on foreign aid. That foreign aid dried up completely when the Taliban took over. Foreign assistance dried up completely in terms of development assistance. The Taliban was a sanctioned group, so when they took over, those sanctions went into place. And so [this] really constrained any kind of foreign activity in Afghanistan. And then reserves that the Afghan Central Bank had held abroad — about seven billion in the U.S. [and] two to three billion in Europe were frozen. That essentially meant that the liquidity in the economy completely dried up and humanitarian aid became necessary. It became lifesaving for people. 

Since then, things have changed somewhat And again, I'm talking about sort of the international community's involvement here, because the U.S. Treasury [is] sort of what allowed workarounds to sanctions so that humanitarian aid could flow through. It also, you know, international organizations, including the U.N., also enabled sort of the salaries of Afghan teachers [and] healthcare workers to be given out. So, you know, the World Bank stepped in. So largely through the international community's involvement, people were able to at least start a very low level of sustenance, right? This is a very low-level equilibrium that we're talking about. At the same time, the Taliban, because, you know, it's a very repressive regime, sort of a very centralized, repressive regime, it's been able to sort of streamline tax collection, et cetera. And so, you know, it has some revenues that it is generating. But that's sort of it in terms of economic activity. It's, I would say, functioning at a low-level equilibrium that relies heavily on international humanitarian assistance. And we know that that might not be sustainable. So it's a very precarious economic situation. 

Nicholas Danforth: And now going back to the repression and the human rights situation you mentioned, what is the state of politics, such as they are, in Afghanistan, and is there any form of political resistance happening still? 

Madiha Afzal: Well, the Taliban have essentially been, you know, very heavy-handed on political activity sort of very soon after they took over power. You know, there were protests, women had organized protests, and other groups, you know, they essentially cracked down on any kind of anti-regime protests, essentially saying that people would have to get permission from various ministries in order to stage protests. Of course, they're not granting these permissions. So there's still sporadic resistance that pops up in terms of, sort of, these protests in various cities. But they sort of swiftly crack down on them. In terms of any major political opposition, there really isn't any that has been able to get traction because they were able to, you know, sort of, impose this repressive rule over the country rapidly. 

I mean, by the time they took over in the middle of August 2021, they'd essentially taken over the entire country. There was no holdout, really. You know, there is sort of the old kind of national resistance front…sort of trying to fashion a resistance, but that hasn't really gained any traction. So what we see here is a repressive regime that has been able to exercise control, that has been able to quash protests through selective beating, through taking people into custody, you know, torturing them. And, you know, we've actually seen a return to the same kind of draconian rule as the first time that they were in power. For instance, you know, public beatings and whippings, and in fact, in recent months, the first public execution. 

Nicholas Danforth: And on the other side of the spectrum, there's also the conflict against the Islamic State Khorasan Province. What's the state of that>

Madiha Afzal: Right. The Islamic State Khorasan Province, ISK or ISIS-K, has been emboldened by the Taliban takeover. You know, we saw that in just the weeks after the Taliban took over in August of 2021, where they staged an attack at the airport that also killed some U.S. service members. Since then, they've sort of stepped up that violence, and especially engaging in violence against minority groups, Shia Hazara, groups and engaging in violence, at schools at a university entrance exam in the major cities and in other locations. That is sort of internally, you know, perhaps the biggest threat at this point that the Taliban faces. 

You know, one worry that the Taliban might have is sort of defections of disgruntled members of their group to ISIS-K because, after all, ISIS-K was actually formed by disgruntled members of the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban. And so that is a worry. And some have said that that might actually influence the Taliban's, you know, sort of hard-line kind of edicts and sort of move towards making sure that the hard-line edicts are the ones that come down and move away from any notion of, you know, the promises that they had given to the international community of some kind of moderation. But while the Taliban leadership in Kandahar, you know, which sort of, is the one that puts forth decisions, kind of functions, it seems as a black box, because we don't really know too much about the process through which edicts come out. 

They seem to take even those sometimes in the Taliban leadership in Kabul by surprise. So, for instance, I'll give you an example. Last March, the Taliban were supposed to reopen girls’ secondary schools. And the morning that those schools were supposed to reopen the decision came down from Kandahar that those schools couldn't reopen. Now, while it functions as sort of this kind of opaque black box, we know that it's hard-line. We know that it prevails over any decisions or any sort of views that the perhaps slightly more moderate leadership and members in Kabul have, but we don't really have an indication as to whether it's being influenced by the threat from ISIS-K or whether it's just hard-line on its own.

Nicholas Danforth: That also brings me to my final question. How have the Taliban's efforts to reestablish diplomatic ties with the international community gone? And by the same token, how has the international community responded to many of the hard-line measures that you've discussed? 

Madiha Afzal: Well, the Taliban's engagement with the international community hasn't gone well, and that's, essentially, entirely because of the Taliban's failure to live up to its promises leading up to August 2021, and at points even after, that it would moderate its behavior, that it would respect women's rights and human rights and allow girls to go to school. So the international community has tried to engage with them and has kept a dialogue open. There was a conference in Norway that took place. They meet with the leadership in Qatar at various points in time. There are U.N. officials and other diplomatic officials who meet with the leadership in Kabul, not in Kandahar, but in Kabul. 

And then a few countries actually have functioning embassies there, but no country has recognized the Taliban as the official regime of the country. This is in contrast to the first time around that they were in power when three countries recognized at that point, a very, very isolated Taliban, but three countries recognized it. Now, no country has recognized it, and the international community has made sure that it sort of has a consensus on that subject. Every time a decision is taken, because all of these decisions that I've sort of described: shutting off of girl schools and then not reopening them, not allowing women to go to parks and public spaces, them having to be covered up, them not being allowed to work in a lot of sort of public-sector offices and other private-sector situations as well. 

Men also having to, sort of, have beards. And then finally, these last two decisions, women sort of being shut off from universities and from working in NGOs. All of these, these are sort of gradual decisions, but when each of these edicts has come out, the international community has sort of forcefully pushed back against them, and that includes Muslim countries, the [Organisation of Islamic Cooperation], has also sort of put forth statements, but those really have not deemed to have any effect. So the entire notion of the Western world's engagement with the Taliban was that it would be able to use sort of development assistance or the lack of development assistance, sanctions, the freezing of reserves, all of that as sort of leverage tools to influence the Taliban's behavior, tools to moderate it. 

But those tools have not really worked. Now, sort of the international community is left at this point where the one thing that it was able to deliver sort of large amounts of humanitarian assistance that actually has helped sustain large swaths of the Afghan population. Now, even that, which most people will argue should be unconditional, but even that stands threatened because the very mechanism of delivery that you have, that women are working at NGOs, were able to sort of be the mechanism through which this aid was delivered to people. That very mechanism of delivery has been cut off by the Taliban. So, the international community has really reacted quite strongly to these last two decisions, by the Taliban, these two edicts that came out in December and is still trying to weigh its next moves. 

But in the meantime, in January, what we've seen, the Norwegian Refugee Council and others have suspended their humanitarian operations in Afghanistan. So we're in a bit of a state of limbo in terms of the international community's engagement and sort of the notion of humanitarian assistance. But when it comes to anything else — recognition, development assistance, the releasing of reserves — all of that has just gone by the wayside. Now, I think the very basic question is whether humanitarian aid can even continue over the next while because the mechanism through which it is given out has been cut off by the Taliban itself. 

Nicholas Danforth: Thank you so much for joining us on the Warcast.