5 Years Of The Taliban’s Return To Power In Afghanistan: What’s Next?
(ANALYSIS) On Aug. 15, 2021, the Taliban took over Afghanistan, bringing to an end two decades of significant progress in democracy, human rights and the well-being of people in the country, even though significant challenges remained. The past five years have been marked by human rights violations on a mass scale, with women and girls and religious minorities being removed from society piece by piece.
As the situation in the country continues to deteriorate, important questions must be asked about where to go from here. What is the future of Afghanistan?
The story of the Taliban’s return to power cannot be separated from the events of Sept. 11, 2001. The attacks on the United States, carried out by al Qaeda while its leadership was sheltered in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, led the U.S. and its allies to launch a military intervention that same year, with the stated aim of dismantling the terror group and preventing Afghanistan from being used as a base for terrorism.
The Taliban regime was removed from power, and over the following two decades, the international presence in Afghanistan helped create space for significant gains in education, health care, women’s participation in public life and democratic institutions — even as the war itself brought enormous civilian suffering and serious abuses.
Following the U.S. pullout in 2021, there are two groups of people in the country that require particular attention, as their rights and ability to coexist in the country are directly affected by the Taliban’s ideology.
Women and girls
The situation of women and girls in Afghanistan is without parallel in the world. The Taliban have introduced more than 100 decrees, edicts and laws removing women’s and girls’ human rights one by one. They do not have access to education, cannot work and cannot leave home or seek medical assistance without an escort, among other restrictions.
With the most recent wave of legal changes, the Taliban decriminalized child marriage and significantly changed legislation on domestic violence, increasing the threshold for criminal liability while lowering the punishment for perpetrators.
The situation of women and girls in Afghanistan has been classified as a crime against humanity of gender persecution. The International Criminal Court issued two arrest warrants for two Taliban leaders deemed most responsible for these crimes.
Furthermore, Afghan women themselves and international law experts call this treatment gender apartheid, defined as “a system of governance, based on laws and/or policies, which imposes systematic segregation of women and men and may also systematically exclude women from public spaces and spheres.”
They call on the international community to treat the Taliban de facto authorities as an apartheid regime, with all the consequences that such a designation should trigger.
Religious minorities
As the Taliban took over Afghanistan, many members of religious minority groups managed to flee, thanks to various organizations coordinating evacuations. However, not everyone managed to escape as the evacuations became chaotic and options for leaving the country closed one after another. Hazara Shia Muslims are among the religious groups left behind, in part because they constitute such a large group.
The Hazara, a minority group numbering in the millions, have been subjected to religious persecution for decades at the hands of the Taliban, the Islamic State Khorasan Province (IS-K) and others. This targeting continues to this day, while reporting on such attacks has become increasingly infrequent.
Such targeting includes attacks on places of religious significance, schools and hospitals in predominantly Hazara districts, and demolitions across Hazara neighborhoods, among other abuses. While such attacks clearly amount to crimes against humanity of religious persecution, they may also amount to the crime of genocide, as defined in the Genocide Convention.
Understandably, the human rights violations perpetrated by the Taliban are wide-ranging, and there are few people in Afghanistan who have not been affected by their deadly rule.
What now?
This brings us back to the question: Where do we go from here? If the treatment of women and girls or religious minorities can amount to international crimes, how can we move toward normalizing relations with the Taliban? If we believe in whatever is left of the international rules-based order, the only answer to this question can be: We cannot normalize the relationship.
Marking five years of Taliban rule, several U.N. special rapporteurs, including Richard Bennett, the special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, emphasized that “normalizing a regime that systematically persecutes more than half of its population does not promote change; it legitimizes oppression.”
U.N. special rapporteurs stressed that premature moves to invite Taliban representatives to foreign capitals or accept their diplomats could cause more harm than the perceived good. They further stressed that relations between other countries and the Taliban should not be normalized unless there is clear progress toward basic rights for women and girls.
However, with five years of evidence of the Taliban’s sheer disregard for international human rights standards, it is difficult to see the Taliban complying with such requests. The question is what would need to happen for the Taliban to want to meet the international community halfway?
One option is to increase targeted sanctions against the Taliban leadership. Such sanctions should be multilateral and coordinated. It is not enough for a few countries to proceed; the more such sanctions are imposed, the more the lives of Taliban leaders could be disrupted.
More arrest warrants, whether from the ICC or domestic courts, could further help limit the movements of Taliban leaders, even if the chances of them being brought before these courts are very low right now.
These steps can have some effect on the Taliban. However, the chances of progress are low, especially as the number of countries wishing to normalize relations with the Taliban is growing. Perseverance and coordination in these efforts are key, as Taliban rule will not stand the test of time. The international community cannot give up on the Afghan people.
Dr. Ewelina U. Ochab is a human rights advocate, author and co-founder of the Coalition for Genocide Response. She is on X @EwelinaUO.