More than three years after the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, the international community is gradually pursuing a path towards greater dialogue with the Islamic Emirate government.
Diplomatic and humanitarian sources cited a UN-led meeting in Qatar in July as a significant step forward. “It was an important opportunity to put conditions and expectations on the table for everybody,” one Western diplomat told The New Humanitarian of the three-day gathering.
But hopes for greater engagement that might help to alleviate one of the world’s gravest humanitarian crises – 23.7 million people remain in need of assistance – are again running up against international criticism of the Taliban’s growing restrictions on women and girls.
Last week, the Ministry of Justice officially codified a sweeping set of laws that empower the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice to enforce rulings on everything from dress codes for men and women to the burning of musical instruments and banning any depictions of living beings.
If enforced, the laws would mean that women could be punished for not covering their faces and men for not properly growing out their beards. It would also keep women from singing and performing melodies in public.
The Islamic Emirate insists all 35 new articles are based on sharia and says any Muslim scholar challenging them will have to refute the Quranic scripture and hadiths they have cited for their justification.
But for many observers, the new laws are an example of the disconnect between the international community and the Islamic Emirate’s top decision-makers.
Obaidullah Baheer, an adjunct lecturer at the American University of Afghanistan, told The New Humanitarian that the international community has “done more to accommodate the Taliban than the Taliban have done to accommodate them”.
The Islamic Emirate, however, insists that the enforcement of their interpretation of sharia is the will of the Afghan people.
“99 percent of us Muslims want the implementation of an Islamic system,” Mohammad Khalid Hanafi, the acting minister for the propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice, told a recent press conference in the northern province of Jowzjan.
Taliban officials maintain that no outside force, particularly a non-Muslim one, has a right to criticise the enforcement of what they see as Islamic law. In a statement, the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice said: “Criticising this religious law is tantamount to criticising Islam and sharia rulings, and such baseless criticism should cease."
The fact that Afghan officials say they “will approach the implementation of these laws with a softness” appears to have done little to assuage international fears that they could pave the way for a return to the strict and violent tactics employed by the Taliban in the 1990s.
In the initial days after the laws were made public, the UN made it clear that they will only add to the challenges already facing the country. “It is hard to imagine any country moving forward, developing, improving its situation with such orders in place,” said Stéphane Dujarric, a spokesperson for the UN secretary-general.
The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan specifically referenced how the controversial laws could hinder further global engagement with the Islamic Emirate.
“The international community has been seeking, in good faith, to constructively engage with the de facto authorities,” said Roza Otunbayeva, the special representative of the secretary-general and head of UNAMA. “Further restricting the rights of the Afghan people and holding them in constant fear will make achieving this goal even harder.”
Progress made in Doha
Despite widespread international condemnation, the new laws didn’t immediately seem to have had any concrete effect on relations between the Islamic Emirate government and the UN or with any specific country.
In fact, within days of the laws being made public, Afghan officials spoke highly of a late August meeting between UNAMA’s political chief and the head of office of the Islamic Emirate’s deputy political prime minister. And Germany, typically one of the toughest critics of Taliban policies, carried out its first deportation of Afghans since the Islamic Emirate returned to power in 2021 weeks after the law’s announcement. Austria announced a similar move.
That doesn’t mean restrictions on education and work opportunities for girls and women aren’t still a problem. All the sources who spoke to The New Humanitarian said they remain the biggest issue standing in the way of Western countries recognising the Islamic Emirate.
According to the Western diplomat, who asked for anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the talks, envoys attending the Qatar meeting didn’t miss an opportunity to raise the issue, despite the Islamic Emirate’s request to avoid any discussions on the topic.
“The UN lost no time in putting women and girls on the table,” the diplomat said. That insistence created a situation where Zabihullah Mujahid, the chief spokesperson for the Islamic Emirate who headed the Afghan delegation, “had to sit there and listen while 20-plus envoys said you cannot be successful if you marginalise half your population”, they added.
The Western diplomat said they were heartened by the stances of “a couple” of regional envoys who reminded the Taliban that things they consider to be “internal” matters – like full access to education and employment for women – are in fact affecting the very countries with which they seek closer ties: “I was very impressed by some of the regional countries, who were pretty forthright.”
The Doha meeting was the first time the Taliban had sat down with such a large group of senior Western envoys – a chance for the UN, foreign diplomats, and Islamic Emirate representatives to lay out progress so far, but also concerns and expectations. Civil society and women’s groups were relegated to a separate meeting with UN officials after the talks.
The diplomat said they hoped the talks had laid the foundations for “work that is a lot more pragmatic and practical going forward”.
This could involve everything from securing new livelihoods for millions of farmers reliant on poppy cultivation, to convincing the Islamic Emirate to reopen secondary schools and universities for girls and women, to bolstering an economy that was already in decline during the final years of the former Western-backed government.
“The conversations have really advanced,” said Andrew Watkins, an analyst who wrote about the lead-up to the Doha meeting for the United States Institute of Peace. “They are now talking about sustainable development-oriented assistance among donor countries and international aid groups.”
Similarly positive mood music has been seen in recent statements from major international NGOs. In the lead-up to the third anniversary of the Taliban’s return to power earlier this month, 10 leading organisations released a joint statement calling for donor countries to increase diplomatic engagement.
“Humanitarian aid has provided a lifeline to Afghans since August 2021, averting the worst of the crisis,” Ellie Ward, a policy officer at the Norwegian Refugee Council, wrote in an email to The New Humanitarian. “[But in order] to create substantive change with limited resources, the humanitarian response would benefit from increased humanitarian diplomacy efforts.”
While Washington, the main backer of the former government during the 20-year US occupation, is still “struggling” with recognition of the Taliban-led government, other nations “are getting very close” to the Islamic Emirate, the Western diplomat said.
The month of August, when the Taliban marked the third anniversary of their return to power and the withdrawal of US forces, saw several diplomatic advances.
Uzbek Prime Minister Abdulla Aripov became the highest-ranking foreign leader to visit Kabul. During that trip, Tashkent signed $2.5 billion in trade agreements with Afghanistan. Days later, the United Arab Emirates became the second country, after China, to recognise the Taliban’s representative in Abu Dhabi as an official ambassador. A diplomatic source in Kabul said there will be a third country “very soon”, with all signs pointing to Uzbekistan.
That same week, the acting foreign minister travelled to the western province of Herat, where he met with his Turkmen counterpart. That trip was followed by high-level officials travelling to Cameroon, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan to take part in regional and international meetings.
Cut off, but not isolated
The Western diplomat said that regional countries have some very pragmatic reasons — security, influxes of refugees, and economic ties — to find ways to work with the Islamic Emirate. As the Taliban’s representative in Pakistan, which has had very shaky relations with Kabul, told an online event earlier this month: “Engagement with the Islamic Emirate is very crucial for the permanent stability of the region.”
Watkins said all of these meetings, visits, trade agreements, and press conferences show that today’s Islamic Emirate is not nearly as cut off from the world as some might like to think.
“When fully certified ambassadors are meeting with Taliban officials each week, it just goes to show that they are far from isolated,” Watkins said. “They are being blocked out of global political and economic institutions, to a grave effect, but they are not isolated.”
But those political and economic blockages are significant. There are still sanctions on high-ranking Islamic Emirate officials, including a $10 million bounty on the acting interior minister. Billions of US dollars in assets belonging to the Afghan Central Bank remain stuck in the US and UK. And the only representative Afghanistan has in the UN is from the former Western-backed Islamic Republic, and they have no interaction with the current government.
Watkins said the role of regional countries, and the notion of “cumulative engagement” with the Islamic Emirate should not be ignored, especially as Washington is likely to take more of a backseat on Afghanistan from now on compared to the previous two decades.
“It’s less that the US has changed its mind or is any more comfortable with the world gradually normalising the Taliban, but it’s very likely that over a five to 10-year timespan Washington is going to spend much less time, money, and attention on this country and on this file,” he said.
Several of the Afghanistan analysts and Western officials who spoke to The New Humanitarian over the past few months said this is likely why traditional US adversaries like Iran, Russia, and China have been cozying up to the Islamic Emirate over the last three years.
Though some countries, like Italy and the UK, whose chargé d’affaires has made several trips to Kabul, seem to be more engaged, Watkins saw little reason for other Western countries to move much closer to the Islamic Emirate.
Several observers also said the complicity of many Western nations in Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza has bolstered the Taliban's argument that the West is in no position to call out others right now.
“This development has significantly eroded the credibility of countries and organisations that claim to uphold human rights,” Mujahid, the chief Islamic Emirate spokesperson, said recently.
The Taliban, said Watkins, believe “the world is making excuses” out of issues around human rights while also supplying Israel with financial and military support that has allowed it to kill 40,000 Palestinians, including more than 10,000 children, since last October.
This, said Watkins, has created a situation where the Islamic Emirate is convinced “it’s all just an excuse to hurt them and keep them down, to keep Afghanistan in a state of dependency… Once a political actor becomes convinced criticism is just an excuse to keep them down, to keep them weak, you’re never going to make progress on the substance of the issue.”
Ultimately, however, the outcome of the Islamic Emirate’s quest for recognition rests on the actions of the Taliban themselves, the Western diplomat said.
“The legitimacy of the government rests on the Afghan people saying it’s legitimate. As of right now, we don’t recognise them, based on their actions,” they said. “I do not see that changing absent a huge breakthrough in how the Taliban treat women.”
Edited by Andrew Gully.
