Key Reflections
* The current Taliban regime is more extreme than it was in the 1990s and has imposed harsher rules across the country. By controlling the major ethnic-Tajik territories, the Taliban has consolidated its rule there by pushing the migration of Pashtuns.
* Girls being denied access to education is the new norm in Afghanistan, enabled by the Taliban’s Ministry of Vice and Virtue, which oversees the bans on women’s rights.
* The closure of beauty parlours in the Summer 2023 demonstrated the Taliban’s continuous assault on women. 60,000 women became unemployed as the Taliban closed down one of the last social spaces for women.
* There is a debate over the recognition of the Taliban, with some in the West claiming that engagement is necessary for aid to the region. Afghan activists argue this will legitimise a regime that discriminates against women and ethnic minorities.
* There is a disagreement over al-Qaeda’s status in Afghanistan. The UN and others have stated that al-Qaeda and foreign fighters are being given freedom to operate by the Taliban, whereas the Biden administration believes that the terror threat has receded.
* Some current factions of the Taliban hold different international perspectives compared to their predecessors who were influenced by Mullah Omar’s Afghanistan-specific movement.
Transcript:
SG: Dr. Sajjan Gohel
DL: David Loyn
SG: Welcome to the NATO DEEP Dive podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Sajjan Gohel, and in this episode, I speak with David Loyn, author, journalist and analyst on global affairs. David is also a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at Kings’ College London and I discuss with him how Afghanistan has evolved two years after the Taliban’s return to power and the inherent challenges that remain including the concerning signs that terrorism is regrowing there.
David Loyn, Welcome back to NATO DEEP Dive.
DL: It’s very very good to be with you again, thanks for the invitation.
SG: It’s our pleasure. It’s now been over two years since the Taliban regime took control of Afghanistan once more. Have the Taliban surprised you in any way in the sense of how they have governed the country? Or is this very much the Taliban of the 1990s?
DL: There’s a key change between then and now, which is that then, they took over, you’ll remember, a country that had been bitterly divided and destroyed by an awful civil war. This time they took over a functioning country. I mean, albeit there were problems with the Republic, as we know, corruption ate at the core of it, but it was a functioning, somewhat democratic country and the institutions of the country were intact, and the Taliban have taken over those institutions.
One of the really interesting things about Afghanistan over the last 40/50 years now, of insurgency and disruption, violent changes of government, is the continuity of Afghan institutions, and the Taliban took over a functioning democracy. All the evidence is that, for example, the Ministry of Finance is working quite well, revenues are far lower than they were because the economy is so much smaller, but the Taliban have been quite efficient about the way that they’re dealing with those revenues. So, somebody I know well, who’s just come back from a trip to Afghanistan, said that he was really surprised that the roads are paved much better than they were. The Taliban have been successful at delivering—of course, they’re not blowing them up anymore, so there isn’t a disruption to transport that there was. But as there was in the late 1990s, they’ve taken down roadblocks, there’s a sense of the economy moving again, albeit at a much lower scale. So, I think the system is broadly working.
I wasn’t surprised by how doctrinaire they’d been. And there was, I think, this rather naive hope on the part of some Western governments, most notably the Biden administration, that there was somehow some Taliban 2.0 who would abide by the things that they promised to do in the Doha agreement, to have a more inclusive government, to potentially talk to some other players, to open girls schools, allow women to work etcetera, which were commitments that they made at Doha. And I must say, there was no sense that the Taliban that I saw had changed at all. I wasn’t surprised that there wasn’t any Taliban 2.0. They were, if anything, more extreme than they were in the late 1990s in the way that they’ve imposed very harsh judgments across the country. And the other big difference between then and now is that this time, the Taliban do control the whole country, including the major Tajik areas of the northeast, which were out of their hands in the late 1990s. So, they’ve been able to extend their writ. And there’s a lot of concern in those areas that the Taliban have been displacing Pashtuns from the south and putting them into those areas in the north in order to extend the sort of social control, which is the way that I think they’ll try and manage the country.
SG: So, they seem to be doing ground operations—changing the ground realities effectively.
DL: Yes, I mean, it’s oddly very similar to, in historical terms, what Abdur Rahman was doing towards the end of the 19th century, he did it much more sort of overtly, a very specific transplanting of Pashtuns from the South to the North. And I think this is the same sort of thing that the Taliban are doing. We heard months ago that they have moved significant numbers of people from the south into Hazara areas, Bamyan, and some of those central provinces, but now we’re hearing that they’re moving them to the north and the northeast as well.
SG: When decisions like this are made, who are the key Taliban individuals that are behind the decision making that actually implement these policies?
DL: All of these discussions have to be introduced with an enormous caveat that, honestly, we don’t know. We don’t really understand what’s going on inside the Taliban itself. There are glimpses that happen when certain situations emerge. But the broad analysis, with that caveat, the broad analysis is that—people who watch these things very closely have concluded—is that Hibatullah Akhundzada, the supreme leader of the Taliban, the Amir al-Mu’minin so called, the Commander of the Faithful, he took on the title that the founder of the Taliban Mullah Omar had taken. He is in pretty tight control of things from Kandahar and that means that these institutions of government, which are in Kabul operate under diktat from him. And so, some of the people who I think the West thought might be more in control, Mullah Baradar, Stanikzai, who was the deputy foreign minister in the last administration, he’s filling the same role in this administration, people in the West thought might take a more senior role, have been more sidelined.
There have been, we understand, some pretty significant arguments between those two factions. The Doha faction, the people who negotiated the deal, and Hibatullah and the older ideologues, who are based in Kandahar, and who still appear to really rule by diktat. And I think in recent months, you’ve seen Kandahar, if anything strengthening its grip. We saw, again you just get these glimpses of what’s happening, but Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman who was operating in Kabul and was pretty open to journalists, open to Western journalists, the few who’ve been given visas, he’s been told now to spend most of his time in Kandahar. So, there’s a sense that the Hibatullah administration is increasing its grip on what’s happening in the country.
There was a rather curious glimpse into arguments within the Taliban about four or five months ago, when a few leaders including Sirajuddin Haqqani, who’s the leader of the Haqqani Network, the interior minister in Kabul, made some videos which appear to criticise the government’s line on girls’ schools, and they were pretty swiftly condemned. Some months ago, and this hasn’t happened yet, so perhaps it was oversold at the time, some months ago, there was a sense that there was an increased possibility of armed fighting between Sirajuddin Haqqani, whose power base is very much Kabul and the east, and Hibatullah Akhundzada and the Kandaharis in the south. One of the glimpses we have of that was the report that suicide bombers who had been until then operating in sort of formation against ISIS groups in the east of the country, were moved to Kandahar to defend the central leadership. So, some sense of internal dissent, but although we had those reports a few months ago, nothing came of that.
SG: There are several aspects of what we’ve been talking about, the role of women’s rights or lack of, has come up. Now the Taliban’s Ministry of Vice and Virtue, effectively the ‘Ministry of Misogyny,’ has overseen the complete eradication of women from public life, also in terms of education as well. Is this now permanent? Is there any way that this can be changed? Is the Taliban as you said maybe potentially more extreme than what it was before, that this is a cornerstone of what their identity is about: misogyny?
DL: Well, it’s a very easy one, they use exactly the same language that they did in the 1990s, although with less justification, which is that there will be girls’ education under Islamic principles when the time is right, when things have settled down. Well, now they control the whole country, you’d have thought that things would have settled down enough. But it hasn’t happened. So, I think it is becoming clearer and clearer that this is the new norm. This is what the Taliban wants to do in Afghanistan, they want a very tightly constrained space for women. And one of the interesting things that has happened here is that the regulations didn’t all come at once. I mean, there were incremental regulations from the very beginning. And I think I mentioned this perception last time I spoke to you in the previous NATO podcast that when the Taliban came in, there was a sense in which this was an alien country to them. There were many young people in Kabul who were observant Muslims, but not in the Taliban’s sort of mindset, and they found it difficult to control the country in the way that they’d done in the 1990s. But that squeamishness or lack of social control, if you like, has gone.
One of the most symbolic elements of that is that the Ministry of Vice and Virtue is in, actually, what was the Ministry for Women’s Rights. The only significant institutional change the Taliban made was to replace one with the other. And the regulations on women were, as I say, incremental from the autumn really, of 2021. So, over the two years, by December, you had women not being allowed to travel without a Mahram, a male guardian. In the spring of last year, women’s access to public parks was severely curtailed. Travel on planes was curtailed without a Mahram. Clothing regulations were tightened up even more during the summer of last year, so that women had to cover up and what is broadly in the West called the burqa, the all-covering clothing when they left home. So, it became tighter and tighter and tighter, public parks closed, women’s access to gyms closed, and then in the summer of this year, the final straw really, the closure of women’s access to beauty parlours, which threw 60,000 women out of work and was a very specifically misogynist move by the administration. This was the Taliban closing down one of the last private spaces that women had to meet and to be able to talk to each other.
I think the change that has had the most impact on the way that the international community engages with the Taliban was again, incremental movements against women operating in the NGO space and the development sector. So, during the end of last year, women working for NGOs were banned and then in the spring of this year, the Taliban said this includes women working for UN organisations. So, I’m just going through a number of different restrictions. The UN has counted 173 separate restrictions made against women, but I think it’s going to become increasingly difficult for the United Nations to justify keeping its offices open in Afghanistan, if they can’t employ women in the way that they want to, because it’s under their charter, the mandate they have to employ people equally. And this has had a very significant impact on the way that international organisations have been able to operate.
So, it does feel as if this is permanent, and the international community has not found any way around it. Of course, it’s discussed when people talk to the Taliban, but I think there’s broadly a sense from the Western officials that I speak to, who speak to the Taliban, that if you force them to try and do things, they’re not going to do them. So, I think there’s an awareness that perhaps this is one that is not going to be argued about in every single meeting by Western officials.
The other thing I’d say about the women’s restrictions is that this is very restrictive to Afghan women in the same way as it would be to international women. So, to say what I mean by that, some people say, well, ‘these are just traditional Afghan values, the West is being obsessed about Afghan women,’ and certainly the Taliban’s view is that the West is obsessed about Afghan women. I remember ministers in the late 1990s saying to me, ‘Why are you so concerned with our women,’ as if there was some sort of Western obsession with Afghan women, but this time I think it’s different. Afghan women have experienced a different kind of life over the last 20 years and closing the door on that life, in 2021, and the incremental restrictions on it, have been much harder to bear because of that. A whole generation of women expected to be educated, expected to go to university and because they can’t I think it’s much more difficult for them.
SG: Absolutely. I’d add to that, that, in fact, Afghan women had pretty much similar rights to men before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. So, it’s not something that was only introduced necessarily in the last two decades, it has historical precedence, as well. You had this point, several times, about the role of the international community and you wrote a very interesting and important article in The Spectator and we’ll put the web link of that into the transcript. I’ll leave it to you if you want to come out with the title! but it’s become very clear that there’s a kind of typology of a Western politician, bureaucrat, that is advocating recognising the Taliban. So, if we were going to create that typology, what are the characteristics and motivations behind that, do you think?
DL: Yeah, this was Tobias Ellwood, who was then the chair of the UK’s Defence Select Committee, who went on a trip to Afghanistan, arranged by an international aid organisation and, of course, because that was arranged, he was given very good facilities everywhere he went, and the Taliban were willing to let him see lots of things. He went to Helmand and of course, as someone who’d been there as a British member of parliament, and had lots of friends who are soldiers, he’s an ex-soldier himself, he had some feeling for being in that area, and I think he—and look he went a bit over the top in the way that he said, ‘This is very normal.’ And I think a lot of people who go to Afghanistan, when they see the buses running and the security being very easy, have a sense there is a sort of normality.
And I think he rather let that go to his head and he did a video, which—well the headline that The Spectator put on my piece was ‘The Taliban’s Useful Idiot,’ using the old description of people who were friendly to Russia, during the days the Soviet Union, because they would go to Moscow and say, ‘Everything’s fine.’ And, in a sense, he was doing something vaguely similar to that. Because, obviously, there was no sense in his piece of the sorts of things we’ve been talking about: restrictions on women, the extremely harsh justice. I would say that at the time he was there, there were several British citizens who were being held by the Taliban. As I speak, we understand that they’ve actually been released. But the Taliban have had a track record since they came to power of holding a number of Western hostages; they also hold some Americans, not on any real charges and getting them released is rather complicated by the fact that the head of the Taliban intelligence service, the GDI, Wasiq was in Guantanamo Bay for I think 15 years, so he has no desire to be soft on any Westerners who come his way. And it’s a clear policy of the Taliban to hold a few Westerners, but none of that was in the description of what Mr. Ellwood said when he visited.
I think behind the slightly over enthusiastic sense of the way he described his visit is this much more serious sense that if not formal recognition, that Britain would be better placed to engage with the Taliban more positively, to accept their willingness to open a mission in Kabul if not an embassy, a number of countries—China, Pakistan, Russia most notably—have kept their embassies open, and, while not formally recognising the Taliban, they have significant links with them. And I think the argument by Ellwood and others is that this way, you can have some leverage over the Taliban, and he said that perhaps they could negotiate over women’s rights, which of course led to a huge argument, backlash from Afghan women activists who said, “Our rights are not negotiable. This is not something that can be negotiated about for the West. This is an absolute.” And so, I think there’s a pragmatic side to it. The first person in the UK to call for recognition of the Taliban was Lord David Richards, who was the former Chief of the Defence Staff who commanded NATO forces in Afghanistan back in 2006-07. And very soon after they took the country, he said, “Look, let’s be pragmatic. We’ve lost the war. This is the government that’s now in power. We need to deal with them. And it would be much better for Afghan people if we dealt with them and engaged them properly.”
The argument against recognition very strongly made by Afghan activists is that this legitimises the Taliban. They’re not an inclusive government in any way, not only inclusive of women, but they’re a Pashtun government, balanced as I say up to a point between the Pashtuns of the South and the Pashtuns of the East but not inclusive in any sense of Afghanistan’s myriad other tribes, let alone women. And that recognising them would somehow reward them for the violent takeover of a country. So, I think those are the two extremes. I think people like Ellwood are in the middle, saying, “Well, there is a sort of middle ground of more constructive engagement under which perhaps we could, as he says, negotiate around the edges of women’s rights and do more constructive development as well as humanitarian aid.”
And the questions at the heart of this are all about how we support the Afghan people. 20 million people are facing another winter. The drought has been terrible in Afghanistan. The ability to operate in aid terms is severely hampered by the problem of employing women. But there are a number of countries, Germany most notably, in Europe who are increasingly saying, we need to be more constructive in the way that we put in development money, so it’s not just humanitarian aid. And yes, of course, that will involve having some more discussions with the Taliban. But the opponents of that in the development community, and perhaps most notably, the most recent report by the American congressional Special Inspector General on Afghanistan Reconstruction, SIGAR, their report quoted a USIP investigation into the way that the Taliban are co-opting international development funding for their own purposes. So, the money is going towards Taliban coffers because they’re controlling most of the UN agencies, and where they’re not actually formally going through Taliban accounts itself, they’ve asked all NGOs who operate in Afghanistan to have an MOU with the Taliban, which effectively puts them under the Taliban wing. So, there is a really live argument in the development community about how you engage with the Taliban, with a lot of Western politicians increasingly saying that the answer is to at least engage with them more constructively, set up missions in Kabul, if not recognise them.
SG: I remember Lord Richards’ comments when the Taliban were on the cusp of taking over. He also, I think, if I recall correctly, said “The Taliban, if we give them time, could transform Afghanistan into a tourist haven akin to Vietnam.” That doesn’t seem likely.
DL: This was the Taliban 2.0, Sajjan. At that time, in the summer of 2021, that’s exactly how a lot of people were talking. And of course, it wasn’t true. I mean, I wrote a piece that weekend saying they’re not going to change.
SG: Well, I think that’s partly because people like yourself, David, and me, we’re a little more grounded in what happens with the Taliban as opposed to some that maybe hoping very wishfully that the Taliban can be reasoned with. But for an entity that was so dishonest out of power, it’s difficult to then assume how they can be faithful to any promises that they made, for example, as you said, the Doha accords. One of those things that comes up in our discussion is a key aspect of the Doha accords was this counter-terrorism component, where the Taliban promised that they would not harbour terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda, that they would be committed to preventing that country from being a cesspool for extremism. And we’re seeing a very interesting, different perspective on that terrorism-related situation currently unfold in Afghanistan. The UN Sanctions Monitoring Team has spoken about the fact that al-Qaeda, even though it may be weakened, is being protected in Afghanistan by the Taliban, that they’re being allowed to operate across various provinces, whereas the US National Security Council under the Biden administration has a different take on that, in that they believe that al-Qaeda is not regrowing and that the fact is that the Taliban are actually cooperating when it comes to counter-terrorism, including, for example, dealing with ISKP and other entities. There seems to be a disconnect here.
DL: Yeah, I’m sorry to say that I think the Biden administration, because of the shameful way that it abandoned the country in the summer of 2021 and scuttled and ran. Even though it was very clear, by the time by administration came in January of 2021, that the Taliban had not and would not adhere to the terms of the Doha deal, most notably that they would sever their links with al-Qaeda in return for the withdrawal of American troops, and America still withdrew its troops. And I think during this period, it is of political significance, political importance to the Biden administration that this deal is seen to have worked. So, I’m not sure that intelligence is being read with the scepticism that perhaps it should be read. I mean, we’ve heard in public from the president that he believes that these counter-terrorist measures are working. But it’s not just the UN report you cite. It’s references by other people who see al-Qaeda training camps not very far away from Kabul along the Jalalabad road. There are foreign fighters openly operating. And the detail of the UN report was quite specific about not just al-Qaeda, but the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the IMU, it described in terms how the East Turkestan movement, the anti-Chinese Uyghur group, are being used by the Taliban as fighters operating against ISIS in order to be given training camps and the capacity to operate in Afghanistan. The Taliban Ministry of Defence uses al-Qaeda training manuals, so tightly enmeshed are they into the Afghan system under the Taliban. So, I think all of that evidence feels pretty strong.
And the US system, I think, has a political directive, if you like, I’m sorry to say it, that these counter-terrorism measures are working. I would like to see more public evidence in the same way that the UN have reported their findings, which come from reports from a number of different countries that reach the UN for this counter-terrorism deal that’s supposedly working. Yes, it’s true that al-Qaeda have not yet managed to reconfigure themselves in a way that they’re going to operate internationally. And it’s also true, I think, that the Taliban probably still don’t have the same international perspective that some of these other jihadi groups do. They don’t have the same sense of a sort of global caliphate that Islamic State or al-Qaeda do. But in a sense, that’s changing. That’s one significant difference between the fighters who are currently operating in the field in the Taliban, the younger commanders and the older commanders. The older commanders are from the Mullah Omar generation when this was just a nationalist Islamic movement. It was a movement just for Afghanistan, and the younger fighters do see this as more part of a sort of global jihadi movement. They’ve been more connected with other international groups. So, I think that’s one division, if you like, in perspective within the Taliban. But certainly, there isn’t the same kind of sense within the Taliban that they want to stop attacks from Afghanistan as they did try to do in the late 1990s, unsuccessfully, as we know, because al-Qaeda succeeded.
SG: That’s very interesting. As a penultimate question, I wanted to ask about China. So, they’ve now appointed a permanent ambassador to Afghanistan under the Taliban regime. China’s already faced a lot of challenges in Afghanistan under the Taliban where their workers have been attacked, there have been all kinds of activities that have undermined their ability to expand the Belt and Road Initiative. Can China make any progress in Afghanistan? It seems to be persisting with it. Part of it seemed to have also been based on promises that their neighbour Pakistan had given in terms of guaranteeing that the Taliban would deliver. None of that seems to be happening, though.
DL: No. And China has one overriding interest in the region, which is to stop cross-border terrorism. Your listeners will remember that Afghanistan has a border with China—it’s very narrow, but it is a border. And those Uyghur militants that I mentioned are certainly training inside Afghanistan, and that is the overriding perspective in terms of the relationship that China has. It has huge industrial and commercial potential interests in Afghanistan. A lot of discussions about extracting lithium, other rare earth metals. We know about the world’s largest un-excavated copper mine, Mes Aynak in Logar Province near Kabul, which China built all the infrastructure for their workers, the sheds, the places where they would live some years ago now, but they’ve still not been able to do the final deal with the Taliban believing that there is enough security in that area to try to actually extract the copper. So, I think it all goes back to terrorism, and China is scratching its head, as every other country is, about the Taliban to try to understand what to do. Having said that, anecdotal reports again from people I know, there are a lot of Chinese citizens now operating in Kabul, they’ve been taking their families, there are Chinese women openly in the shops, speaking Pashto, being able to sort of operate domestically in the country, which is quite different in a way from the way that the United States and its allies operated over the last 20 years when they were all behind closed doors and not sort of living in the country. It’s much more similar to the way that the Russians did when they were there in the 1980s, but in a sense, that’s sort of just the cosmetic front. If China cannot do the deals that they need to do in order to have the security guarantees they want from Afghanistan, which as you say are very much connected with Pakistan’s complete inability to manage any of the promises that they thought they had from the Taliban.
SG: As a final question, David, so we’ve seen that in the month of October 2023, Hamas launched a deadly incursion into Israel. You mentioned that the Taliban isn’t necessarily wanting to promote itself internationally, but they seem very keen to talk about global issues with all their various ministries, issuing statements, and in the case of Israel-Palestine, the Taliban have come out very strongly against Israel and have supported Hamas’ operation. Does the Taliban getting involved in the Israeli Palestinian issue have wider implications? I ask this in part because you’ve reported in the past on the motivations of Hamas and Hezbollah, so you’ve got a lot of knowledge in that part of the world as well, so I’d just be curious to get your take on all of this.
DL: Yeah, I had a fascinating trip to the southern suburbs of Beirut when I worked for the BBC some years ago, interviewing Hezbollah and Hamas leaders, and got a real sense of an insight into their worldview, which is different than the Taliban’s, because it’s a different part of the world. But certainly, the Taliban see Hamas as brothers in a sense of a sort of anti-Western jihadi worldview, even if they don’t actually have the capacity to operate against them. There was some intriguing material that appeared on social media yesterday that appeared to show American weapons that had been taken off the battlefield by the Taliban in Afghanistan popping up in Gaza being used by Hamas. We know that lots of those American weapons have been sold, so it doesn’t necessarily mean a direct connection between the Taliban and Hamas, but it was quite an interesting insight into that sort of connection. It wouldn’t be surprising that the Taliban see themselves on that side of the fence, anti-Israel, Israel with its friends in the region, particularly India, who are no friends of the Taliban. But you’re right Sajjan that it does show more of a sense of a global perspective by the Taliban, which, once again, would point to perhaps the UN report on counter-terrorism being more accurate than the US National Security Council reports on suggesting that they’ve been more useful in counter-terrorism.
SG: Very interesting, indeed. And before I conclude, I’ll just remind everyone that listens to the podcast to buy David’s book, The Long War, because it’s a very important read when it comes to understanding the dynamics of Afghanistan and the challenges that occurred across two decades. But let me thank you again, David.
DL: I’m grateful for the plug and very happy always to talk to you and your informed audience.
SG: Well, we learn so much from you, and hope to have you back, unfortunately, no doubt it will be to convey some more troubling news on Afghanistan, but it’s important that we also have to hear it, especially with someone that has so much ground perspectives. David Loyn, thank you again for joining us on NATO DEEP Dive.
DL: Thank you very much. Goodbye for now.
SG: Thank you for listening to this episode of NATO DEEP Dive, brought to you by NATO’s Defence Education Enhancement Programme (DEEP). My producers are Marcus Andreopoulos and Victoria Jones. For additional content, including full transcripts of each episode, please visit: deepportal.hq.nato.int/deepdive.
Disclaimer: Please note that the views, information, or opinions expressed in the NATO DEEP Dive series are solely those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily represent those of NATO or DEEP.
This transcript has been edited for clarity.