By Sayed Madadi

For years, the world tried to soften the Taliban’s extremist ideology by exposing them to modernity. As an insurgency they learned diplomacy and negotiation tactics, but their medieval thinking remained just as rigid. Now that the Taliban rule over Afghanistan, the international community continues to appease them, assuming it can convince them to form an inclusive government and ease their regressive policies while alleviating the country’s worsening humanitarian disaster. That is a naïve assumption that overlooks the root causes of the current crisis. Not only will the international community not get what it wants, but it also risks creating a much greater crisis: a Taliban theocracy that institutionalizes its repressive rule at a steep human and economic cost.

The international community’s first priority has been to avert an unprecedented humanitarian and economic crisis, which has been severely exacerbated by the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan. Efforts thus far have focused on conventional approaches, such as lifting sanctions, releasing frozen assets, and pouring billions of dollars into ineffective and inefficient channels such as the U.N. These efforts ignore the fact that the main drivers of the crisis are political, not economic. The Taliban’s incompetence, discrimination, and intimidation have caused massive human and physical capital flight, disrupted the public sector and the economy, and undermined any sense of trust or stability.

No amount of aid will avert the catastrophe. Even if nearly $1 billion of the $9.1 billion in cash reserves in private banks is released, Afghans are likely to use the money to flee the country rather than inject it into the market by buying critical commodities. The argument that unfreezing assets will bring economic and currency stability assumes that the Taliban will govern the Central Bank as a professional monetary institution — a task they are neither willing nor capable of carrying out. Moreover, there is already ample evidence of misuse of humanitarian aid by the regime: They have discriminated against people in need based on their ethnic and religious identity and have used aid to pay their fighters’ salaries. Thus, as the amount of aid and engagement increases, so too will the group’s grip on power, while poverty will only deepen. President Joe Biden’s recent unjust and illegal executive order to split $7 billion of these assets between 9/11 victims and humanitarian aid will further destabilize the country’s economy while minimizing the international leverage over the Taliban. The question, then, remains: How much aid is the world prepared to provide, and for how long?

As a second priority, the world has tried to encourage the Taliban to form an inclusive government by including non-Pashtun ethnicities in their emirate. It is unlikely that the regime will agree to this as it would, in its view, taint its ethnic identity. One of the reasons that the Taliban’s Islamist ambitions have remained limited to Afghanistan is because of their deep merger with Pashtun identity and the goal of creating a mono-ethnic power structure. Even if they agreed to include other ethnic groups in their government, little would change. Inclusive and representative governance is only meaningful in a pluralistic and democratic system, where the voice and approval of the people drive state legitimacy and public policies. In authoritarian regimes, in which one or a handful of people make all the decisions with no accountability, their identity makes little difference. Old empires and monarchies in the region have long filled their royal courts with ethnic minorities, knowing that they did not have the power to pose any real threat. The Taliban already have several officials from other non-Pashtun communities, including their deputy prime minister, who is an Uzbek; their chief of army personnel, who is a Tajik; and two Hazara deputy ministers. Yet, these ethnic groups — particularly the Shi’a Hazaras — suffer structural persecution at the hands of the regime on a daily basis. Moreover, calls for inclusivity ignore women, the largest disenfranchised group in the country, who have put up the fiercest resistance against the regime. The Taliban will never incorporate women into government.

The third aim of the international community has been to convince the Taliban to soften their medieval governance methods. The result, however, has been the opposite: The group’s extremism has only hardened since their return to power last August. This is in line with the takeaways from years of talking peace with them and experiences in other parts of the world, which show that appeasing authoritarian rulers only emboldens them. During the negotiations in Doha, I observed how compromises made as confidence-building measures only solidified the Taliban’s intransigence and their refusal to abandon their maximalist positions. The most striking example of this was the release of 5,000 of their prisoners in the face of U.S. pressure; most of those released returned to the battlefield and the gesture did nothing to help at the negotiating table. The futility of international investment in the Taliban’s political office in Qatar is evidence that the rare tendency of some of their leaders to compromise has no effect on the group’s broader worldview — thus, such leaders are easily sidelined. A key example is the movement’s co-founder, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar: He was expected to become the highest Taliban decisionmaker, but instead has completely lost his relevance and authority to hardliners, such as the leader of the notorious Haqqani Network, Sirajuddin Haqqani, who runs the Ministry of Interior. The more the Taliban consolidate their power, the more unyielding they become to domestic demands and external pressures. They expect that in the end, the international community’s national security interests will trump its stewardship of humanitarian values; in the Taliban’s view, it will ultimately acquiesce and give them access to financial and political resources.

International efforts thus far have assumed that the Taliban are a conventional state apparatus that intends to abide by international law. However, groups like the Taliban derive their legitimacy partly from defying the international order. For such regimes — as we have seen in North Korea, Syria, Iran, and in the old Soviet republics — grim prospects of human suffering and hunger or the attractions of political acceptance are no deterrent to bad behavior. Unless the international community realizes that, its current approach — including the decision about the fate of frozen assets in the U.S. — will only bring further destitution to people in Afghanistan and chaos to the region, both through the worsening humanitarian and economic catastrophe and the empowerment and institutionalization of a predatory and fanatical regime. No one wants to live under such a regime, and the people of Afghanistan, who strive for freedom and dignity, are certainly no exception. Helping Afghanistan must begin by acknowledging that the Taliban are at the heart of the problem, not the solution.

Sayed Madadi was the Director of Foreign Relations at Afghanistan’s State Ministry for Peace and a Senior Member of the Joint Technical Secretariat of Afghan Peace Negotiations in Doha, Qatar. He tweets at @madadisaeid. The views expressed in this piece are his own.

By Sayed Madadi

As global attention shifts further away from Afghanistan to Ukraine and elsewhere, time is running out to change course before the country’s freefall under the Taliban becomes irreversible. There is no silver bullet for the problems facing Afghanistan and some of what is needed and possible could very well require uncomfortable, tough decisions and strategic patience to yield any results. But pivoting away from the counterproductivity of current efforts to appease the Taliban, as I have argued before, is necessary if the country’s future is to be saved.

Proponents of ongoing leniency justify it in the name of averting worse outcomes, such as the rise of Islamic State-Khorasan Province (ISKP), a deadly civil war, or a full-scale famine. They fail to acknowledge, however, that the Taliban are not a guard against those worries, but rather an enabler of them. According to the U.N., since the Taliban’s takeover, the economic catastrophe is only deepening toward a point of irreversibility despite more than $2 billion spent in aid, and ISKP recruitment has increased dramatically. Therefore, if Afghanistan is to avoid any or all of those outcomes, the limits of the Taliban’s ability and willingness to change must be put to the test. The international community needs a two-pronged, interlinked approach to normalize the economy and stabilize the political scene. While economic support could incentivize commercial activity, it is the political solutions that will ensure stability.

Supporting People: Minimal but Effective

The first step should be to rethink the current aid architecture, focusing on effectiveness, accountability, and conditionality. It is critical for aid money to build resilience by supporting economic activity at the local level instead of fueling further dependency through short-term, piecemeal interventions. Efforts should rely on domestic capabilities, especially human capital, to minimize costs, cater to local needs, increase employment, and sustain capacity for the future. Even after the departure of hundreds of thousands of educated Afghans, enough operational and technical expertise remains to execute such programs. Additionally, supporting small businesses and entrepreneurship, especially in the areas of food production, basic commodities, and agriculture, would help to rebuild local supply chains given the complexities that remain around international trade and transactions. The growth of grassroots civil society in recent years as foreign funding dried up shows that such times of crisis also provide opportunities for creativity. One solution is to let an international organization such as the ICRC manage the Afghanistan Red Crescent Society in order to play a more robust role in humanitarian response. The organization suffers from corruption and low capacity, but it also has the widest reach of any indigenous institution. Ensuring its independence by removing it from Taliban control and boosting its efficiency by decentralizing its operations would allow for the incorporation of local perspectives in the implementation of what is now a fully foreign-driven agenda.

The accountability of aid money is just as important as many have already raised concerns about the transparency of these programs. There has been, unsurprisingly, reluctance on the part of U.N. agencies whose overhead costs are disproportionately high compared to their programmatic spending to be fully open to outside scrutiny, including from the media. There is also a growing trend of NGOs mushrooming to undertake humanitarian activities similar to the early days of the post-2001 era. It is important not to repeat mistakes of the past. In 2015, I reviewed financial documents from the two largest national NGOs: the Afghanistan Development Association (ADA) affiliated with Jilani Popal, the former head of local governance, and Coordination for Humanitarian Assistance (CHA), then run by Salam Rahimi, who later became President Ashraf Ghani’s chief of staff. They both had submitted the same report to the Ministry of Economy for more than five consecutive years — each year executing around $12 million in development money. Recently, I also came across an organization engaging in humanitarian activity that, in addition to what it officially charges for its services in distributing aid, had a designated line in its fundraising appeal for donations as “tips,” without clarifying where the money would go. Humanitarian response can provide employment, but it must not turn into a lucrative business enterprise.

To that end, three layers of accountability measures are necessary. At the highest, the international organizations should have regular reporting cycles to publicize the financial and programmatic details of their activities. Entities such as Transparency International and Freedom House that track global accountability and access to information can partner with credible platforms such as Etilaat-e-Roz newspaper in setting up a designated accountability portal to track the expenditure of international aid in Afghanistan. Parallel to that, local and community-level accountability platforms should be set up to involve beneficiaries. This is important not just in identifying the right priorities, but also in supporting community-engagement practices that would strengthen the foundations for any meaningful democratic experiment in the future. To avoid commercialization and duplication, a uniform structure should be built into the design of aid programs based on past experience and existing institutional foundations. As a third-layer support system, easy-to-use, homegrown technological solutions could allow access to information, crowd-sourced reporting and documentation, and cost-effective feasibility studies and impact evaluations.

While the rapidly deteriorating economic situation and the power vacuum left by the disintegration of the republican state pushed the international community to assume the primary responsibility for mitigating the crisis in Afghanistan, the Taliban must begin to play their role if the outside world is to entertain any further meaningful engagement. It is obvious that humanitarian aid alone cannot solve all of Afghanistan’s problems. A calibrated degree of conditionality, thus, is necessary to prevent increasing aid from empowering the Taliban and to gauge their will to transform. Conditionality of aid and more robust diplomatic engagement with the Taliban, however, must be part of a comprehensive architecture with specific expectations of deliverables rather than vague, immeasurable commitments such as those made by the group in the Doha Agreement. Efforts thus far have failed to account for such delicacies. The U.S. Treasury comfort letters and general licenses allow transactions on issues related to “rule of law, citizenry participation, government accountability and transparency, human rights, access to information and civil society” without accounting for the shrinking space for such work under a cabinet full of sanctioned terrorists. Blank checks like these could foster aid embezzlement on the one hand and help cement the Taliban’s rule on the other.

Demands for gradual sanctions relief, asset defreezes, and similar actions should solicit in return clear changes in behavior from the regime. The Taliban must immediately end its campaign of arbitrary retribution and address the problem of legal ambiguity by acknowledging the validity of previous legal frameworks until they are reviewed — a key step to any economic and political normalcy. Moreover, the international community must define a series of fundamental non-negotiables to support and protect the people of Afghanistan against the Taliban. Key among them are the rights and civil liberties of women. It cannot be acceptable in 2022 for a regime, under whatever pretense, to remove half the population from public life. The international interest in paying the salaries of teachers and medical workers must be used as meaningful leverage to not only open schools to girls, but also influence the content of the curriculum and the broader issue of women’s employment. Of course, conditionality can only be effective if violations are met with credible consequences.

Additionally, access to the Central Bank’s foreign reserves must be conditioned on reforming its Board of Governors to include international representatives such as officials from the International Monetary Fund, allowing robust independent monitoring mechanisms as many have suggested, and fully implementing the Central Bank Law. The Taliban must allow this board to appoint an independent expert as governor of the bank and monitor recruitment and operational processes at senior levels. The issue of Afghanistan’s assets abroad, however, goes beyond the bank’s reserves. There are commercial properties abroad that produce revenue, hundreds of military aircraft in neighboring Uzbekistan and Tajikistan the fate of which has not been declared, hundreds of millions of afghanis in an European country that were printed in the last months of the republic, and a growing number of embassies vacated by diplomats as they run out of resources and supplies, including blank passports. A comprehensive but lean arrangement such as an U.N.-mandated taskforce involving other entities like the Asian Development Bank and Organization of Islamic Cooperation, can be established to manage all of Afghanistan’s foreign belongings until a truly representative government is in place in Kabul.

Political Roadmap: Decentralized Pluralism

Interventions to address the economic crisis can only be effective if political solutions are also implemented in parallel to ensure lasting stability. The Taliban have taken their grip on power and their brutality to new heights in an environment of legal ambiguity and political uncertainty. The best solution remains a political process to define a roadmap for the country’s future that would include all segments of Afghan society. A decentralized, pluralistic configuration would cater to the country’s political and socio-cultural diversity. The Taliban have utilized operational decentralization in their insurgency and know its merits well. They have to give in to political decentralization to ensure a basic level of stability and even their own survival. During the peace talks in Doha, they showed some degree of openness in informal engagements to democratic practices at the local level. Their rejection of national elections stems as much from their ideological rigidity, which considers sovereignty to be divine, as from their insecurity about winning public votes. Thus, pressuring them to allow other ethnic groups and political forces to define preferred forms of government in their regions would be a starting point, especially if they continue to dominate national politics.

Such a political process should be comprehensive and multilayered. One of the reasons the Doha talks failed was because of the simplicity of their design and the lack of a comprehensive, long-term roadmap. The reliance on a single-track direct negotiation would make the entire process vulnerable to the whims of individual actors, who could sabotage it when their narrowly defined interests are not served maximally. Additionally, it would limit the space for broad representation by enabling a select group of individuals on behalf of wide and diverse constituencies without necessarily speaking for their interests or being accountable to them. It also does not need to begin with the immediate conventional practices of holding grand meetings and conferences. That was what happened in Bonn in 2001 and in the Doha talks in 2020 and it proved disastrous. The last thing the international community should do is to bring back the corrupt old guards or to mobilize a new such class. The focus should be on structural changes rather than tokenistic incorporation of individuals into the Taliban’s emirate.

Such a political process should begin with a series of unilateral measures by the Taliban to establish trust and their willingness to work with others. They should realize that despite a near absolute hold on power, they are on the vulnerable end of any potential conflict. The unsuccessful talks in Doha can possibly provide a foundation to build on. For example, the U.N. should demand the Taliban sign the principles document that was developed in preparation for the Istanbul talks that ended up not taking place. This short document asked the Taliban to commit to civil liberties, democratic processes, equality of all citizens, and freedom of expression, among others, as the guiding principles of any meaningful negotiations. More broadly, the world should pressure the Taliban to provide the bare minimum of an environment conducive to political activity. Coherent and credible alternatives will eventually emerge on the ground in organic and indigenous ways. A basic level of protection for political dissent and diversity is required to ensure those alternatives are non-violent. The Taliban’s intransigence must be seen not as a constant to accept but an obstacle to overcome.

Precondition: Collective Action

Admittedly, achieving these objectives will not be easy. But any chance of success requires reestablishing the credibility and authority of the international community — which equally suffers from a trust deficit — so it can play a positive and effective role. The first step in doing so is better internal coordination and cohesiveness. Disunity and lack of consensus have been one of the key factors undermining global efforts to end the conflict in Afghanistan. There appears to be a lack of coordination even between the two American envoys: Rina Amiri, who is communicating a more critical approach on human rights, and Thomas West, who often appears more ready to compromise on the political front. It is imperative to mobilize more cohesively in pressuring the regime. Individual bilateral engagements only bolster the Taliban’s ability to bargain and play multiple stakeholders against each other. Additionally, working with regional countries remains critical to the effectiveness of external efforts. Using a more robust and coherent strategy of carrots and sticks can still yield some results.

The other component is a holistic, multi-dimensional negotiation strategy. The Taliban use a maximalist approach that starts negotiations from very low bars in order to use every ordinary matter as a point of leverage. For example, contrary to previous promises and assurances, they have taken the entire country and its people hostage, partly to use as bargaining chips against the international community to solidify their rule. The outside world, however, barely knows what it wants from the regime and what it would do if its demands are rejected. The European Union reopened its diplomatic mission in Kabul despite none of its five-point engagement benchmarks being fully met. Similarly, while almost all of Taliban leadership are on multiple sanction lists, they are roving around the globe, as we recently saw in Turkey, to expand diplomatic alliances; they are also expected in London for an upcoming donor conference. In order to negotiate effectively, the international community needs to have clarity about its interests and priorities. Limiting engagement with the Taliban to the U.N. mission in Kabul and the group’s Doha office by penalizing travel against sanctions would be an example of such strategic calibration. Sanctions will not have any consequences for the Taliban if transgressions (by the regime and members of the international community) are not addressed. Unless the international community uses its leverage effectively, it will soon have to give in even more helplessly than it already has — all to the detriment of Afghanistan’s future and undermining its own national security interests.

Sayed Madadi was the Director of Foreign Relations at Afghanistan’s State Ministry for Peace and a Senior Member of the Joint Technical Secretariat of Afghan Peace Negotiations in Doha, Qatar. He tweets at @madadisaeid. The views expressed in this piece are his own.

By Omar Sadr

By Omar Sadr

Published March 21, 2023 as part of a collection of essays produced from a colloquium hosted by the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies and the US Institute of Peace in Washington, DC in July 2022. Introduction The post-2001 war in Afghanistan was fought between the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, the Taliban, and NATO led by the US from 2001-2021.

Introduction

The post-2001 war in Afghanistan was fought between the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, the Taliban, and NATO led by the US from 2001-2021. While the US-Taliban war ended through a negotiated settlement, the Republic of Afghanistan-Taliban war did not. The Republic-Taliban peace negotiations (September 2020-April 2021) which was the second phase of the Doha peace process ended with the fall of the Republic and the Taliban military victory. Using the bargaining challenge approach, this paper tries to answer the question of why the Republic-Taliban war did not last through a negotiated settlement. It argues that the bargaining problems between the Taliban and the government were exacting. First, it will examine the failure of a settlement between the Taliban and the government of Afghanistan based on the bargaining challenges. Then, it will analyze some of the key policy implications of the findings.

Bargaining Challenges and Failed Peace Talks

A settlement allows parties to find a negotiated agreement to resolve disputes over the power, resources, and nature of the state. The peace process in Afghanistan was imagined around one of the following types of settlement by each party of the conflict: power-sharing, formation of an interim government, and/or inclusion of the Taliban into an electoral process. The chances of resolving the Taliban conflict were doomed to failure as the necessary conditions for any of the three proposed formats of the settlement were not available.

Not every peace talk ends in a negotiated settlement. More importantly, not every peace agreement creates sustainable peace. The peace process fails if the necessary and sufficient conditions for an agreement are not available. The conflict resolution literature indicates that compared to interstate war, historically, civil wars have rarely ended with a negotiated political settlement. One of the key reasons that armed conflicts are less likely to end through a negotiated settlement is bargaining obstacles. This essay analyzes at least four bargaining challenges as causes of the failure of Afghanistan peace talks: the cost of war, the indivisibility of stakes, ambitious leaders and lack of mediations, and finally credible issues and lack of guarantors.

Cost of War

The cost assumption would argue that the Taliban and the Republic would have agreed on a settlement if the cost of the war was so high for the parties. A predominant assumption suggests that the conflict reached a stalemate between 2011 to 2014 when the Taliban could not advance into the main cities and the government could not recapture the rural eras. This has been a misleading assessment. Based on the Correlates of War, there are four costs in a war: stalemate, length of the war, magnitude (deaths per every thousand people), and intensity (deaths per month). Except for the military stalemate, the cost of the Afghanistan war in terms of intensity, magnitude, and duration had increased by the fall of the Republic on August 15, 2021. The 2021 Global Peace Index report indicated Afghanistan as the world’s least peaceful country as it had “the highest total number of deaths due to internal conflict of any nation.” 1 Technically, a military stalemate would be materialized when a lack of advancement in the battleground is coupled with a perception that the military balance will not change soon. The Taliban’s calculation of the stalemate was shaped by two factors.

First, the Taliban differentiated a military stalemate with the Afghanistan National Army (ANA) from a stalemate with the international troops. They did not consider ANA determinant in the stalemate. Second, the Taliban’s perception of military stalemate was also shaped by the reduction of international troops and the timeline of troop pullout since 2011. The Taliban assumed that with the withdrawal of the international troops, the military balance will change in their favor. Both these factors were evident in the scale of violence on the battlefield. A study of the Long War Journal showed that since 2017, the Taliban had gradually expanded its area of control. Though the Trump administration increased the level of troops in order to force 2 the Taliban to an agreement with the US, the Taliban significantly increased the level of violence across the country by all measures as soon as they signed the agreement with the US in February 2020 to test the capacity of ANA. In April 2021, when the Biden administration announced the complete withdrawal by September 2021, the Taliban captured around 80 districts. By the time the US left Bagram Air Base, the Taliban had claimed control of 220 out of 398 districts. Hence, 3 as winning militarily was more favorable for the Taliban, the conflict did not reach a “mutual hurting stalemate” between the government of Afghanistan and the Taliban.

Indivisibility

A peaceful settlement would be unlikely when the stakes are difficult to divide. Conversely, the chance of a negotiated settlement increases as the stakes are divisible. The stake between the Taliban and the Republic was as high as difficult to divide. The Taliban did not claim a share of national revenues or local autonomy which would have been easily addressed. Rather, it aimed to take over the central government to remodel it based on a fundamentalist and tribal set of values and structures as an Emirate. On the other side, the government assumed that the survival of the Republic was at stake. Both sides saw an agreement as self-destructive. So, with the indivisible stake, the Afghanistan conflict was less likely to get into a successfully negotiated agreement.

Lack of concessions and the role of mediation

The third bargaining challenge to the peace negotiation was the lack of good communication and the existence of ambitious leaders in both the Taliban and the Republic which hindered compromise and concessions. This issue could have been addressed by a neutral and skilled mediator. First, both the Taliban and the Republic envisioned two different end states that reaching a middle ground not only required compromising leaders but also skillful mediators to support the parties in their search for compromise. From the beginning, the Taliban outlined its stance in vague and uncompromising terms such as establishing an Islamic state in Afghanistan.

A common thread between Ashraf Ghani’s two main peace proposals, the 2018 Road Map for Achieving Peace in November and the 2019 Seven Point Peace Plan was an effort to keep the status quo and the constitutional order. Presenting the third proposal, Securing End State: A Three-Phase Peace Roadmap in April 2021, four months before his unexcepted escape, he rejected an interim government and explicitly invoked elections as sources of legitimacy, presidential authorities based on the constitution, and the fact that he will not resign.

Moreover, the bargaining position of both sides and their deliberate negligence of the urgency of a peace agreement was also shaped by their understand about the role of the US troops. The government favored a status quo and did agree for concessions, as it thought the US military will prevent the collapse of the Republic and defend it against the offense of the Taliban. On the contrary, aware of the timetable of the withdrawal of the US troops, the Taliban tried to buy time and postpone the talks as much as possible. The Taliban’s negotiation tactic was to avoid negotiation. For instance, they denied participating in a regional summit in Istanbul planned for April 2021 at the very last minute. They were telling the government side that the dispute between them is not so intense, and it would be resolved very quickly once the international troops are out. The bargaining was also challenged by the fragmentation of the Republic team by factionalism both in Kabul and Doha. With a narrow and factional stance, Ghani consistently undermined the High Council for National Reconciliation (HCNR), an institution that was solely authorized to lead and manage the peace process, and deliberately violated the principles of consensus and inclusion on the government side. Kabul was divided on what sort of concession should be given to the Taliban and what should be denied. While Ghani denied a power-sharing transition government, many other politicians including the opposition and HCNR were open for this option. This made numerous opposition politicians in Kabul reach out to the Taliban as an independent party apart from the government.

To bring these divergent positions to a compromise, strong, credible, and skilled mediation was required. Qatar, which was facilitating the talks, was perceived by the government of Afghanistan as a biased party with a vested interest. And the American chief negotiator, Zalmay Khalilzad’s intentions were also questioned by Ghani and his close aides. Khalilzad tried to follow Álvaro de Soto and Richard Holbrook’s single-text mediation model applied respectively in El Salvador and Bosnia by presenting a peace agreement draft proposal to the parties in January 2021.

However, as the US agreed on a timeline to withdraw its troops in Afghanistan by May 2021, Khalilzad did not have enough leverage on the parties to persuade them to compromise and strike a deal. The only entity that partially accepted the draft was HCNR. Bringing together most of the political parties, HCNR presented a proposal that was closer to the State Department’s draft in terms of the format of the transition, but it departed from it on two points. First, it proposed the 2004 constitution as a legal framework unless it contradicts the agreement. Second, it suggested a decentralized administrative model for the transition period. Not only the Taliban did not give the proposals serious consideration, but they also did not offer any peace proposal. The Taliban’s denial to participate in negotiations after April 2021 deprived a chance of negotiation for both HCNR and Khalilzad’s proposed agreements

Guarantees and Guarantors

The lack of a credible and capable guarantor was the last bargaining challenge in the peace process. A credible guarantor provides assurances to the parties that their existence would not be endangered during the peace accord implementation and the guarantor will hold all parties accountable for their promises. A credible guarantor is one who has an interest in fulfilling its promises as it guarantees to the parties. Moreover, a capable guarantor has the capacity to use forces as a sanction to enforce the terms of the agreement, in case one party does not comply with it. Given the intensity of the conflict between the Taliban and the government, a strong guarantor capable of the use of force was needed. During the talks with the US, the Taliban asked European and Asian countries to play the role of guarantors.

However, during the talks with the Republic, it did not ask for a guarantor. Similarly, Ghani reiterated the National Security Forces as the guarantor of Afghanistan. He totally ignored the need for an external guarantor. Russia and China whose subtle objective was to ensure the full withdrawal of the US troops from Afghanistan volunteered to take responsibility as a guarantor in mid-2019. However, when it come to the Republic-Taliban talks, it was evident that their proposal was a weak verbal guarantee with no enforcement capacity. Ghani showed little interest in using the opportunity offered by Russia and China. On the other hand, Pakistan which had a substantial influence over the Taliban denied playing the role of a guarantor. 

In the absence of a credible and strong guarantor in the region and within the Muslim majority states, the only option left was the US troops on the ground. As in the 1958 Lebanon agreement, where the US maintained fourteen thousand troops as guarantors, the US should have proactively played the role of a guarantor in Afghanistan. This would have ensured that the belligerents do not walk away from the bargaining table. After signing the agreement, it would have also ensured the security of the parties, cessation of the hostilities, and survival of an agreement. This leverage was lost when the US-Taliban deal in February 2020 set a 14-month timeline for the withdrawal of the US troops. The US also continuously signaled to the parties that whether they make an agreement or not, it is pulling its troops out.

Agreeing on a fixed timeline to withdraw troops was also in contradiction with the initial principles of the negotiations played out by Khalilzad: “nothing is agreed upon until everything is agreed.” The US should have conditioned the withdrawal of troops to a successful peace agreement between the Republic and the Taliban. In the absence of a credible and capable guarantor, the challenge of credibility of commitment between the Taliban and Ghani remained untouched. Each side perceived the outcome of the talks as zero-sum which threatened their existence.

Policy Implications

Some important lessons could be drawn from the failure of the peace talks in Afghanistan. First, the failure of peace negotiation in a complicated and protracted conflict such as Afghanistan has numerous causes. The bargaining challenge approach can explain some of the causes of the failure. However, one should not neglect the role of ideational factors such as ideology and identity in Afghanistan. The three-decade war of the Taliban was equally driven by a parochial and contested Afghan nationalism and a fundamentalist political Islam. On the other side, the Republic was envisioned based on a constitutional order which guaranteed a set of fundamental rights for the citizens and established democratic order but also Afghan nationalism. The belligerent parties had incommensurable values and conceptions about rights, liberty, a system of governance, nationhood and the role of Islam.

Second, the bargaining challenge analysis shows that the high cost of the war in terms of duration of the war, intensity, and magnitude, and the offer of mediation did help in the initiation of the negotiation but none of them help the peaceful end of the conflict. The reasons were the absence of a strong security guarantee to address the security dilemma of the parties, poor mediation, lack of a mutually hurting stalemate, and the indivisibility of the stakes.

Third, the Taliban assume that a decisive victory is the end of the Afghanistan conflict. On the contrary, the peace studies literature indicates that the chances of peace failure are 200% higher following a military victory of an insurgent compared to a government victory in the first year of victory. No need to mention that peace failed right at the time the Taliban declared a victory as 5 the National Resistance Front challenged the Taliban. The conflict in Afghanistan would not be resolved until the background causes such as deep contention over the identity, values, ideology, and mechanisms for distribution of resources and power including the structure of the state are not resolved.

By Omar Sadr

Mass deprivation and transgression of women’s rights and the establishment of gender apartheid are often presented as a reflection of cultural and ideological norms and assumptions. This does not suggest that certain cultures are more prone to gender apartheid than others; rather, a state or actor opts to neglect the universality of the regime of rights and appropriates a cultural justification for its policies.

Viewing such a situation through the lens of cultural relativism counters the universality of human rights and presents culture, religion, and customs as bases for the entitlement of rights. In other words, cultural relativism restricts women’s rights as they apply to “their” ascriptive cultures or religions. This contribution considers the cases of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic Republic of Iran and argues that relativism denies human rights by demarcating a false line between the universal and the local.

The Taliban, Iran, and Cultural Relativism

While practices of mainstream Muslims across the world defy the limitation of fundamental rights, authoritarian and in certain cases sultanistic regimes in the Muslim world have enforced a conservative form of Sharia law in an idiosyncratic manner. Of all of them, the Islamic Emirate of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic Republic of Ayatollahs in Iran share a common policy of subjugating and segregating women, to the extent that it constitutes what scholars such as Abdelfatah Amor, Ann Mayer, and Karima Bennoune have termed “gender apartheid.”[1]

Moreover, Juan Cole has argued with respect to the first Taliban rule (1996-2001) and the Ayatollahs of Iran (1980s) that both regimes privatize women by redrawing the line between public and private and bringing medieval motifs to “the modern re-creation of power as representation” and exercising “power as spectacle.”[2] The same logic prevails in the second, current phase of the Taliban, whose project of political Islam emphasizes the privatization of women.

As the Taliban regime is an ethno-religious group that relies both on Afghan ethno-nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism, cultural relativists justify gender apartheid with reference to both Pashtun culture and Islam. Cultural relativism, in this case, is based both on local culture and transnational Islamic fundamentalism. Similarly, narrators and defenders of cultural relativism are both local and international.

For instance, Pakistan’s Permanent Representative in the United Nations, Munir Akram, said in a UN meeting in February 2023 that the Taliban’s restriction on women’s rights is rooted in Pashtun culture. He argued, “[T]he restrictions that have been put by the Afghan interim government flow not so much from a religious perspective as from a peculiar cultural perspective of the Pashtun culture, which requires women to be kept at home.”

A few months beforehand, in December 2022, Prime Minister of Pakistan Imran Khan made a similar argument in an OIC meeting: “[E]very society’s idea of human rights and women’s rights are different…If we are not sensitive to cultural norms of these people, even with stipends people in Afghanistan won’t send their girls to school.”

Such remarks by a neighboring country that has been accused of having a vested interest in supporting and preserving Taliban rule can be considered colonialism in that the use of cultural relativism by a foreign actor to justify the deprivation of a group’s rights is a mark of such a system. In other words, colonialism deprived the colonized of their right to self-determination based on relativist assumptions. As Maryam Namazie has argued, cultural relativism is a “racist phenomenon” as it legitimizes the deprivation of rights by segregating people in the same country based on religion. This can be observed in a few cases in Western democracies where Muslim asylum seekers and refugees are treated based on Sharia law. In some of these cases, this has led to ghettoization.

Though many secular nationalists in Afghanistan denounced the remarks from Pakistan, their narrative is also reductionist in that it portrays the Taliban exclusively as Pakistan’s proxy. Such an approach prevents a holistic perspective that considers the domestic sources of the Taliban’s conservative communalism. For instance, on 11 September 2022, the Taliban Minister of Education, Noorullah Munir, framed Taliban practices and beliefs as cultural during a visit to the southern province of Urozgan, arguing that residents do not want their daughters to attend school: “The culture is clear to everyone,” he said. Similarly, on 4 December 2022, Taliban Minister of Higher Education Nida Mohammad Nadim claimed that “education for women clash[es] with Islam and Afghan values.” One should not be surprised by the resemblance between the Taliban phrase “Afghan and Islamic values” and the Saudi Arabia Basic Law of Governance’s phrase “Arab-Islamic values,”[3] as both regimes implement a patriarchal system of segregation and the subjugation of women.

Despite these domestic cultural arguments, it is clear that the Taliban’s gender apartheid is not simply due to culture. Rather, it stems from specific political forms and decisions. First, the Taliban constitute a heightened authoritarian regime that manifests features of sultanism. According to Weber, a sultanistic regime is a government in which domination “operates primarily on the basis of discretion.” Totalitarianism is distinguished from a sultanistic regime through the level of autonomy of its state institutions. A totalitarian regime rules through its institutions, but in a sultanistic regime state institutions cannot veto the leader’s decisions; they must simply obey. While certain Taliban figures disagree with some of the gender policies of the regime, they cannot challenge the discretion of the decision of Habitullah Akhunzada.

Alfred Stepan and Juan Linz argue the transition from a sultanistic regime to democracy is less likely to happen peacefully compared to other types of authoritarian regimes as the soft liners would be suppressed by the Sultan.[4] If peaceful transfer to democracy is not an easy process, definitely addressing apartheid in a sultanist regime would also not be easy.

Second, Taliban apartheid is based on denial. For instance, in 1998 Said Shahidkhayl, the Taliban deputy minister of education, claimed that the Taliban have not only “recognized personhood and private autonomy of women” but also “improved women’s conditions.”[5] Zabiullah Mujahid, the Taliban’s current spokesperson, claims the same. The group also obscures reality by justifying their policies as short-term measures to be reversed. Suhail Shaheen, the Taliban representative in Qatar, for instance, stated that provisions with respect to women are temporary and will be removed as soon as appropriate conditions are developed. As Ann Mayer has written, the authoritarian Muslim state resorts to “equivocations, obfuscations, and hypocrisy”[6] with respect to women’s rights.

When in 2007 Saudi Arabia was challenged on its denial of the ban on women driving at the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) committee, the Saudi delegate claimed that “[t]here is no legal provision banning women from driving cars.”[7] Many restrictions on women in Afghanistan and Iran are also not stipulated in statutory laws. This lack of formal provisions can be understood in two ways. First, some restrictions originate from customary provisions such as Mullahs’ and Ayatollahs’ fatwas that are not regularly documented. Second, the Taliban does not have bureaucratic capacity and is still unaccustomed to running the state through formal regulations and bureaucracy. Hence, it at times rules by its leader’s verbal decrees. For the same reason, their policies are not implemented in a consistent manner. Therefore, one should be conscious of not falling into the trap of Taliban equivocations. Instead, their denials should be exposed.

The public execution of violence against women is also a political exercise of power as a spectacle through which the Taliban affirm their authority. Like their first era in the 1990s, the second phase of the Taliban is engaging in public whippings and amputations, as well as the public display of corpses.

Scholars’ analyses of cultural relativism reveal the tensions in coming to terms with communal values versus individual autonomy and human rights, and ultimately demonstrate the danger in using culture and religion to justify gender apartheid. 

Cultural Relativism and the Academy

Relativist scholars such as Alison Renteln advocate for ethical relativism, arguing that no truth assertion is acceptable if it is based on an abstract universal principle ignoring specific culture. Accordingly, she believes that a cross-cultural base for human rights increases the likelihood of its acceptability.[8] On the contrary, refuting the relativist argument, Reza Afshari believes that relativism overemphasizes the cultural significance of state administration of societies in the Muslim world, while Islamist rule such as that of Khomeini is driven by political interest. According to Afshari, “[T]he unrealized Islamic expectations in Iran indicate the problems of a discourse that assumes cultural primacy for a legal foundation for human rights in the modern state.”[9] Afshari argues that drawing a cultural foundation for human rights in a context where the state redefines culture and “subjects it to its modus operandi” is highly unlikely to ensure rights.

For Afshari, the Muslim cultural relativists who aim to amend the universal human rights scheme fall into two groups. The first includes those who want to Islamize modernity and human rights. They reject the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), labeling it as a Western value and instead offer a human rights scheme in accordance with Sharia. The second includes those interested in presenting an Islamic base for a modern human rights scheme. In other words, their project is the “modernization” of Islam.

The Islamic Emirate of the Taliban and the Islamic Republic of Iran belong to the first group as they reject the regime of human rights by calling it Western. As Mayer has noted, the Taliban label Afghanistan’s women activists as “servile imitators of the West” and “agents of Western cultural imperialism”[10] Conservative opponents of the Taliban who tend to draw from Islam for a rationale of women’s rights belong to the second group. However, the inability of the Muslim world to amend the gender apartheid policies of the Taliban and Iranian theocratic regimes’ persistent gender apartheid demonstrates that neither the Islamization of modernity nor the modernization of Islam has been able to address this problem.

This failure stems from a multiplicity of human rights schemes that are inherently paradoxical and at times contradictory. According to Mayer, “The relevant textual authorities are conflicting and scant.”[11] For instance, the reconciliation of women’s Islamic rights to enjoy legal rights, to own property, and to do business while avoiding contact with men has not been resolved. Mayer’s research highlights that each Muslim country has developed its own scheme of human rights at the national level that it claims as Islamic though there is no consistency among the various schemes. What unifies them, according to Mayer, is their provision with respect to the regulation of women. Comparing the 1979 Iranian constitution, the 1978 Al-Azhar Drafted Constitution, the 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI), and the 1992 Saudi Basic Law of Governance, Mayer finds that none firmly acknowledge gender equality and instead contain provisions that confine women to the domestic sphere. A stark commonality between these laws and Taliban rhetoric is the use of the vague phrases, “within the framework of Sharia” or “principles of Sharia.”

Rejecting Cultural Relativism and Advocating for Women’s Rights 

To end the gender apartheid regime, global human rights defenders and the international community must not only reject cultural relativism but should also use all available tools to end the Taliban’s exercise of power as spectacle. Working with the current campaigns for women’s rights in Afghanistan is critical.

In Afghanistan, the women’s movement has three forms: social movements, transnational networks, and professional organizations. The women’s social movement is a grassroots movement inside the country of students and women who previously worked as civil servants, teachers, librarians, and journalists; this group continuously organizes non-violent protests. Transnational networks are composed of former female politicians, parliamentarians, and civil society activists, as well as women human rights defenders, who are mainly in exile in the West. Finally, professional organizations are a small set of the remnants of republican Afghanistan enterprises, civic organizations, and educational institutions that are now partially underground. They support women by providing humanitarian support, access to the legal system, domestic violence shelters, and skill development.  

These campaigns transcend the Muslim relativism stance and attempt to follow the universal human rights scheme. This is necessary, as advocating for the recognition of gender apartheid is based on international law and universal norms of human rights. In the words of the feminist scholar and sociologist Valentine Moghadam, “The women’s rights movement is not ‘identity movements’ but rather democratic and democratizing movements.”[12]

At the same time, the Afghanistan women’s movement and other peaceful resistance show that human rights do not need a common moral foundation as the universalists call for. The mere fact that people claim their rights against Taliban oppression and subjugation proves the appeal of a human rights claim. In this regard, Michael Goodhart’s argument, which suggests that contestation over human rights should not be considered contestation over moral truth, rings true. The global appeal of human rights does not require a common moral foundation, and the fact that modern human rights norms are not incompatible with local values and cultures does not make them irrelevant to society. Rather, Goodhart argues that “human rights may appeal to people enduring subjection because of their transformative potential, both of which depend on compatibility with oppressive social arrangements and the conceptions of dignity that suffuse and legitimate them.”[13]

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