The Afghan Impasse, Part 7: Talking to the Taliban

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[HAUNTING INSTRUMENTAL RUBĀB MUSIC]

JENN WILLIAMS, HOST:

Welcome back to The Negotiators, a production of Doha Debates and Foreign Policy. I’m your host, Jenn Williams. This is the seventh and final of our special series, “The Afghan Impasse,” exploring 20 years of failed attempts to negotiate a peace deal in Afghanistan.

[HAUNTING INSTRUMENTAL RUBĀB MUSIC]

JENN: If you haven’t started with episode one, we recommend that you go back and do that now. 

In this episode, we’re going to hear from researcher Ashley Jackson. Ashley is the co-director of the Centre for the Study of Armed Groups, and she’s written a book called Negotiating Survival, all about how aid workers, activists and ordinary citizens negotiated with the Taliban when it was an insurgency running pockets of the country. But now that the Taliban has taken control of the government, those negotiations look quite different, and some are questioning whether anyone should be negotiating with the Taliban at all. Here’s Ashley Jackson with “The Afghan Impasse,” episode seven: “Talking to the Taliban.”

UNIDENTIFIED AMERICAN WOMAN:

Everything seemed to change overnight when the Taliban came into Kabul. 

ASHLEY JACKSON:

Vicki Aken is an aid worker who lived in Afghanistan for nearly six years as the country director for the International Rescue Committee. She stayed on throughout the Taliban takeover and saw the chaos of evacuations give way to an eerie kind of calm. 

VICKI AKEN: It just got really quiet. No one was quite sure what to expect.

ASHLEY: Despite the uncertainty, Vicki felt an obligation to try to keep IRC’s operations running. 

VICKI: At that point, I had nearly 2,000 staff. Over 40 percent of them were women. And I wanted to make sure, if I could possibly do anything, that they would still have a livelihood when we reopened. And so the only way to do that was to stay and negotiate with the new authorities.

ASHLEY: NGOs like IRC had been negotiating with the Taliban for years, but it wasn’t people like Vicki who were talking to the Taliban. Instead, it would be local Afghan staff quietly negotiating with fighters and commanders in the villages where they were working. But after the Taliban took over, that changed. Senior aid workers like Vicki had to go directly to the new government.

NEWS CLIP OF AUSTRALIAN FEMALE REPORTER:

The United States calls him a global terrorist and offers a $5 million reward for his capture. Yet one week …

ASHLEY: Vicki’s first meeting was with Khalil Haqqani, the acting minister of refugees and repatriation. 

NEWS CLIP OF BRITISH FEMALE REPORTER:

Khalil Haqqani is a leader in the Haqqani network and remains on terror watch lists and under UN sanctions. But now, here in Kabul, after one week, he is acting as a diplomat.

VICKI: As an American and as a woman, I had doubts about what it would be like. And when we walked into the compound, it was filled with Talib men. There were no women anywhere. And we got into the minister’s office. It was a very cordial meeting. They had all of these, you know, refreshments. Apologizing because they didn’t have lunch—was because they were new there, and they were still trying to figure out what they were doing. 

ASHLEY: And from that first meeting, the Taliban ministers were hopeful about the future of their country.

VICKI: And this was with all of the ministers that I met with afterwards—there was always promises to solve any problems that we had. [CHUCKLES] It really felt like there was a lot of openness in the beginning. 

ASHLEY: In those early days, the Taliban made pledges to continue to allow women and girls to keep working and going to school. 

NEWS CLIP WITH UNIDENTIFIED MALE TALIB SPEAKING:

Women will be afforded all their rights, whether it is in work or other activities, because women are a key part of society.

ASHLEY: And Vicki says they make good on those promises, at least at first. 

VICKI: I hired 2,000 women after the Taliban took over, so it was still possible. 

ASHLEY: In fact, they were initially eager to reassure aid organizations that their female staff could keep working. 

VICKI: The first time I went to the Ministry of Interior, before I could even do it, they brought up, “Oh, we really need your help to look after women.” And the number of times that they brought up women first, before I even did, was very surprising to me. 

ASHLEY: But around the same time, Afghan women’s rights activist Mahbouba Seraj had a different first encounter with the Taliban. A group of former soldiers, now security officials, showed up at her office in Kabul. 

MAHBOUBA SERAJ:

The first time, the Taliban came at 10 p.m. at night to shut me down.

ASHLEY: Mahbouba runs domestic violence shelters for women. These were controversial, even under the republic. But the Taliban suspected that these shelters were actually brothels in disguise. Shortly after the Taliban took power, many women’s shelters preemptively closed or were forcibly shut by the Taliban. This meant sending the women and children they had been protecting back to abusive homes they had fled. But Mahbouba’s shelters stayed open.

MAHBOUBA: And they said, you know, “We want to see—we want to see the shelters.” I said, “You cannot see the shelters. The shelters are not for men. This is not a place for men. You cannot see the shelters.” They said, “No, we want to, because, you know, we believe this is a, a—a bordello,” or whatever. So I told them, I said, “You know, you have to—you have to shoot me. A bullet has to go from that gun through me in order for you to go and touch these girls. I will not allow it. Not allow it.”

ASHLEY: Mahbouba says the Taliban eventually realized that they needed her shelters. 

MAHBOUBA: It’s not that when the Taliban is here, none of the abuses are happening. They’re happening.

ASHLEY: Mahbouba is one of many Afghans who could have otherwise left. She and her husband were imprisoned by the Communist Party in 1978, and eventually moved to the United States. Mahbouba still holds a US passport, but she chose to stay. 

MAHBOUBA: I wanted to stay in Afghanistan because it was my country, and I have a responsibility towards the women and the girls of this country. And I promised them, and I’m working with them, and I want to be right next to them, protect them, be their voice. I am their hope. And I’m not going to leave the women of my country, this time, alone. Never.

ASHLEY: But while people like Mahbouba and Vicki were carving out space to work under the new Taliban government, the economy began to collapse, creating a whole host of other challenges to deal with. 

UNIDENTIFIED AFGHAN AMERICAN WOMAN: 

We couldn’t get money to our staff to pay their salaries. We couldn’t get money to the women who needed day-to-day survival money. 

ASHLEY: That’s Masuda Sultan, an Afghan American entrepreneur. She co-founded one of the largest women’s organizations in Afghanistan. At this point, in October of 2021, the problem wasn’t the Taliban. It was Afghanistan’s financial collapse. But it’s complicated, almost like a perfect storm of different factors that sent the economy into freefall. Sanctions kicked into effect when people like Khalil Haqqani were named ministers. That effectively shut down financial transfers to and from Afghanistan. And then? 

MASUDA SULTAN: Donors stopped funding a lot of programs and salaries, which Afghanistan was dependent on. Eighty percent of the budget—government’s budget was gone overnight. Most of the education and the health budgets were gone overnight. NGOs themselves were evacuating, so the people that were supposed to help were unable to help. 

ASHLEY: And then the US froze Afghan assets held in banks overseas. This included the central bank’s assets, which effectively allow Afghanistan to regulate its economy and the currency, the Afghani. But this wasn’t just freezing the government’s accounts so the Taliban couldn’t get to them. A lot of ordinary Afghans could no longer access their money either. 

MASUDA: Small businesses, even women’s businesses who had money in the bank accounts, they would often keep them in the US and in Europe to earn interest. I remember reading it on the news online and thinking, “How could this happen? Like, how could this happen?” This is Afghanistan’s money. It’s one of the poorest countries on Earth. 

ASHLEY: All of this propelled Afghanistan into an economic death spiral, which meant that no one could really get much cash in or out of the country. 

MASUDA: You had the fear of the run on the bank, and then you also had currency inflation.

ASHLEY: At this point, Masuda began paying more and more attention to these financial issues. 

MASUDA: As a women’s organization, we should be concerned not just about our own staff and our own women, but, like, the women of the country. How are they going to survive day to day? 

ASHLEY: Masuda says even people in Kabul, people who had been doing OK financially before now, found themselves in crisis.

MASUDA: One woman told me, you know, “I’m buying flour and oil for people, but, like, when I go to the market, the guy changes the price four times.” Women are telling us, “A, we don’t have money, we can’t get money. B, we don’t know what’s happening with our salaries. And C, the prices keep changing, like, oh my God, what are we going to do?”

And so we said, we have to, like, look at these issues as well. And we have to educate ourselves about these things as women’s rights activists, even though I don’t know how a central bank functions. I don’t understand these things. But if we don’t understand these things, we can’t help the women who we’re trying to help. 

ASHLEY: This led Masuda down an unexpected path. She founded an advocacy organization called Unfreeze Afghanistan, which is when I connected with her. Months later, there started to be exemptions and what they call carve-outs, allowing the transfer of money for humanitarian purposes. So aid started to resume, but it was much less than before. 

MASUDA: You know, just at survival level, people don’t want to fund Afghanistan, which is understandable. But also, we’re constantly teetering on the edge of—are we going to have a famine?

ASHLEY: While the economy was spiraling, other things started to shift as well. The Taliban began to issue new restrictions, and the space for negotiation that aid worker Vicki Aken was talking about? Well, that started to narrow. 

VICKI: It just got that much harder to make those arguments or to find people who actually cared about those arguments.

ASHLEY: One theory is, of course, that the financial collapse and the lack of international engagement drove the Taliban into a more reactionary position, and that particularly, the restrictions on women are, at least in part, an expression of their frustration and anger with the international community. 

VICKI: The message that I kept hearing when I would go into meetings was: We held up our end of the Doha Agreement. You know, why is the international community treating us this way? I would say, “I’m a humanitarian. I’m not equipped to have these discussions.” Right? I’m—humanitarians, by nature, shouldn’t be involved in the political discussions, and yet we were the only ones on the ground for them to have those discussions with. You could see the growing frustration, for sure. And I think the turning point really came in March.

ASHLEY: March of 2022. 

VICKI: That was the point when women started to be used as political pawns.

JENN: You’re listening to “The Afghan Impasse,” a special seven-episode season of The Negotiators from Doha Debates and Foreign Policy.

ASHLEY: The Taliban government had announced that schools would reopen for girls on March 23rd. US Special Representative for Afghanistan Tom West was so confident that it would happen that he helped put in place a deal to pay the salaries of teachers—not just female teachers, but all teachers. 

TOM WEST:

We had worked with a number of like-minded donors on an essential quid pro quo. And that was to say to the Taliban, “If you fulfill this commitment that you’ve made to your people and to the international community, then we’re going to find a way to support 220,000 teachers and their work.” And that is about 66 percent of Afghanistan’s civil service. 

ASHLEY: At the same time, entrepreneur Masuda Sultan was planning her first trip back to the country since the Taliban takeover.

MASUDA: To check on the women that we know and see how their operations are going. And then, wouldn’t it be great to go when schools reopen, so that we could also see girls in school and let them know that we care about them and see how they’re doing? 

ASHLEY: And then this happened. 

NEWS CLIP OF BRITISH MALE REPORTER #1:

The Taliban has ordered the closure of middle and high schools for girls in Afghanistan, just hours after they were reopened. 

NEWS CLIP OF BRITISH MALE REPORTER #2:

The girls had literally just sat down at their desks, and the head teacher got a WhatsApp message from the local Taliban in charge saying that actually, teenage girls can’t come back to class just yet.

NEWS CLIP OF AMERICAN FEMALE REPORTER: The Taliban’s sudden reversal means girls above the sixth grade can’t go to school until further notice. 

ASHLEY: The US considered breaking off talks with the Taliban government in protest of this decision. But just eight days after the announcement, on March 31st, Tom West met with Taliban representatives directly again at a meeting in China. 

TOM: I, I think the decision that we faced internally was whether that meeting goes ahead without a country present to express, in no uncertain terms, what an extraordinarily negative impact this decision was going to have for the potential for Afghanistan’s reintegration into the international community of, of nations. And, and that’s what I did. And it was no punches pulled. Yeah, it was extremely tense. But I also think that the representatives of the Taliban in the room were not surprised. And frankly, they weren’t even particularly defensive.

ASHLEY: Abdul Qahar Balkhi, the spokesperson of the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was one of those Taliban representatives in the room. 

ABDUL QAHAR BALKHI:

Yes, obviously, the United States was very—I don’t want to call it competitive, but they were not happy. They did raise that issue. And, and we did give our explanation of what happened. 

ASHLEY: Balkhi gave the Taliban’s explanation to the media, too. 

[NEWS CLIP OF INTERVIEW WITH ABDUL QAHAR BALKHI PLAYS]

UNIDENTIFIED MALE INTERVIEWER:

Why is it, right now, that teenage girls in Afghanistan are unable to access secondary education? 

ABDUL: There is a—a mix of reasons. It’s not just one or two. It’s cultural constraints. It’s financial constraints. It’s lack of teachers.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE INTERVIEWER: Do, do you know when, though, girls’ schools will open? 

ABDUL: That is a question that will be answered by the relevant ministries. I don’t have the timeline for it. 

ASHLEY: Entrepreneur Masuda Sultan had a decision to make. Would she go ahead with her planned trip to Afghanistan? The one that was supposed to be timed to coincide with the reopening of schools?

MASUDA: People are so upset, and I’m so upset, and we’re thinking, “Are we going to go to Afghanistan when they just did this?” Like, “Let’s not go, forget it.” Like, “We’re going to protest this.” I mean, we had this big debate, like, literally up until the last minute, thinking, “Should we cancel the flights or should we go?” So we got on the phone, and the crystallizing moment for us was when a woman explained, she said, “Look, I work with a lot of girls. They are very depressed. They’re demoralized. They’re devastated. And for you to say, ‘We’re not coming because they’re not allowed to go to school’—that’s going to make them even more depressed. They want to see you. They want interaction. They need it. Their minds need it. Their hearts need it.” And so we said, “OK, we’re going to go.”

ASHLEY: They were still really apprehensive. It was Masuda’s first trip back to Kabul after the Taliban takeover, and she was worried about whether she would be allowed to even enter the country. But as soon as she saw the girls, she knew she had made the right decision. 

MASUDA: The faces of these young teenage girls with so much energy and, you know, these bright-eyed, bushy-tailed girls who are like, “We really wanted to go to school and we, you know, we had our backpacks and our, you know, books and our sharpeners and everything ready, and we’re keeping them ready, and we’re giving them to other girls, too, because we want to prepare these girls for the day that they’re going to go back.” 

ASHLEY: And by going ahead with their trip, Masuda and her group also got the opportunity to meet with the Ministry of Education. 

MASUDA: When we went in, yeah, we were angry. And, you know, I thought, “These must be really awful people. These must be very cruel human beings.”

ASHLEY: But what Masuda heard really surprised her.

MASUDA: “We believe in girls’ education, and we were ready to start the schools. But we were given an order at the last minute.” And we were shocked, because they were saying, “Yeah, if the emir tells us today at 11 p.m. at night to open the girls’ schools, we’re ready to open the girls’ schools.” We’re badgering them, for hours and hours we were in that room badgering them. The truth was that every single Talib that we met said, “We want girls’ schools to reopen. We want girls’ schools to reopen. We have to work towards that.” And people will say—in the West and in the US will say, “Oh, that’s just—that’s just talk.” I don’t think that the people that we looked in the eye, who told us that they wanted the schools for their own daughters, are lying to us. I just—they’re not. 

ASHLEY: And this was the moment when the outside world began to understand the Taliban in a different way. The emir, Hibatullah Akhundzada, this very secretive figure who hardly meets anyone, emerged as a key decision maker, and he was making increasingly controversial decisions. 

MASUDA: You know, we’re in this moment of stuck with this, where one person, the emir, has ultimate decision-making power. And they are an organization of people that follow the emir. That is what they do.

[SOUND OF FILM CREW TALKING]

ASHLEY: An Al-Jazeera film crew came with activist Mahbouba Seraj when she met with Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid and begged him to talk sense to the emir.

[SOUND OF ZABIHULLAH MUJAHID AND MAHBOUBA SERAJ SPEAKING]

ASHLEY: Mahbouba is saying, “For God’s sake, please open the girls’ schools. It is not possible to have a generation that does not go to school. Unless you solve this, Mr. Mujahid, the whole world will stand against you, and therefore, the people of Afghanistan will suffer.”

MAHBOUBA: And he said that, “You know, I don’t make those decisions.” I said, “It’s true, but you are the only connection I have right now. You are the spokesperson for that man in Kandahar. Tell him, because this is not only my voice. This is the voice of, of millions of girls in this country. And women. And I have to beg him. I really did. I begged the man.

ASHLEY: The meeting ended with Mujahid telling Mahbouba, “May God find more mothers like you, who force us to give them their rights.”

Talking to the film crew later, Mahbouba sounded optimistic, believing that maybe if the message got back to the emir, things would get better. But instead, things just got harder. As the international community condemned these controversial decisions, the Taliban responded by doubling down. The restrictions and decrees began rapidly increasing and getting more severe. 

MAHBOUBA: They used the girls’ schools and education as a weapon for their discussion. To win. “You don’t do this, you don’t let us have our representatives in the United Nations, we are not going to let the girls go.” 

ASHLEY: And the Taliban was not alone in this tactic, Vicki Aken says. The US used it too.

VICKI: Saying, “Well, if you’re not going to let girls go to school, then we can’t engage with you on this.” On the economy or on, on other issues. So then the Taliban started issuing additional decrees. And then each time we’re on the verge of getting back on track, something else happens. 

ASHLEY: This reached a kind of peak in December of 2022.

VICKI: Christmas Eve. Won’t forget that.

NEWS CLIP OF MALE REPORTER:

Taliban has ordered all national and international NGOs to stop their female employees from working. The order from the economy ministry threatened to suspend the licenses of NGOs that failed to implement the directive.

ASHLEY: So at this point, aid workers like Vicki were frantically trying to get the Taliban to make exceptions and allow their female staff to keep working, which they did pretty successfully. But these were incredibly time-consuming and intense negotiations. 

VICKI: It’s not just negotiating in the capital or with the Ministry of Economy. It’s negotiating at the provincial level, at the district level, with every single ministry you might encounter along the way. And even then, you know, most of the commitments that you get are verbal, and then it’s up to your female staff to make that decision about whether or not they want to continue working.

ASHLEY: At the same time, they were also desperately trying to persuade international donors to keep the aid flowing. 

VICKI: Behind the scenes, just the amount of engagement we had to do to convince the international community not to abandon Afghanistan altogether.

ASHLEY: Part of the problem was, following the ban on post-primary education for women, Western diplomats like Tom West all but stopped talking to the Taliban government. 

TOM: I was hopeful that, as a consequence of the complete slowdown in engagement, that we would see a reversal, of course. And, and we haven’t. 

ASHLEY: Over the summer of 2023, dialogue between senior US officials and the Taliban-led government picked back up.

TOM: They will say it in unvarnished terms. They want to be on good and friendly terms with the United States. 

ASHLEY: US Special Representative Tom West and Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Abdul Balkhi both point to common ground that the two sides can talk about. 

ABDUL: I mean, what we hear from the United States is that they’re concerned about the security, the narcotics trade, trafficking arms and drugs and human trafficking problems, the economy, the banking sector. This is what we hear. Unfortunately, what you see is that despite the progress that we have in those areas, unfortunately there’s—doesn’t seem to be any reciprocation from the other side. 

ASHLEY: What does the Afghan government want from the international community? 

ABDUL: That, that is a question that we’ve repeatedly posed to the United States, the European countries and the UN—as “What do you want from Afghanistan?”

ASHLEY: One might argue the answer is simple: To let girls go to school. Yet, whereas the international community sees female education and the right to work as human rights, the Taliban see this as overreach. 

ABDUL: The priorities of the other side is what we deem meddling in the internal affairs of another sovereign country. And if, if that is what they seek from Afghanistan, obviously, then, there is no common ground.

ASHLEY: In essence, the situation is, once again, at a stalemate, with neither side willing to compromise. All three of the women we spoke to—aid worker Vicki Aken, entrepreneur Masuda Sultan and activist Mahbouba Seraj—they all agree that the only way to actually help the women in Afghanistan is through engagement. Here’s Vicki. 

VICKI: What do the women of Afghanistan get by their lack of engagement? Nowhere in the Doha Agreement is there a single reference to or safeguard for women’s rights. You know, part of that is because they’re left out of the conversation. Let’s not keep making that same mistake. Where there’s any possibility of standing in solidarity with and supporting women and girls in Afghanistan, we have to be here and we have to do that.

ASHLEY: And Masuda says there is space to work, even on girls’ education. 

MASUDA: Yes, there are schools. Some of them are secret, some of them not so secret. You have to make quiet progress. But the best progress is this quiet progress. It’s always easy to be a pessimist on Afghanistan because it’s so difficult of a place. And there’s always bad news. But for those of us that work on Afghanistan, we have to always be optimistic. Because if you’re not optimistic, and you don’t find the places where you can do something to help people, then you may as well pack up and go home and call it a day.

ASHLEY: Like Masuda, Mahbouba Seraj says she’s optimistic about the future of Afghanistan. She says she has to be.

MAHBOUBA: You know, I’m 75 years old, sweetie. And I don’t have a whole lot in front of me. But I will go on until my last breath. That I promise. To my girls, to myself and to my God. I’m not going to give in, honey. That’s not who I am. That’s not who I am. It’s my job. It’s my responsibility. I’m a woman. I am here and working for Afghanistan. And that’s all there is to it. Period.

JENN: The Negotiators is a podcast from Doha Debates and Foreign Policy. This episode was reported by Ashley Jackson. Karen Given is this season’s executive producer. Original music written by Afghan composer Arson Fahim, and performed by Arson Fahim and Afghan rubāb player Siddique Ahmad. Our production team includes Laura Rosbrow-Telem, Rob Sachs, Rosie Julin, Claudia Teti, Japhet Weeks, Jigar Mehta, Amjad Atallah and Dan Ephron. Thanks to Nelufar Hedayat, Govinda Clayton and James Wolley for helping create the show. 

Foreign Policy is a magazine of news and ideas from around the world. We encourage you to subscribe at foreignpolicy.com/subscribe. 

Doha Debates is a production of Qatar Foundation, where the most urgent issues of our time are discussed and debated. Learn more at dohadebates.com.