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“You Have No Right to Complain”

"Pakistan and the United States Have Betrayed the Afghan People"

What's it been like in Taliban controlled areas in Afghanistan. What will it be like for women and girls after the takeover. One factor will be how much control Taliban national leaders will have over their regional commanders. Some of the latter will undoubtedly be more conservative than the national honchos might like them to be.

Education, Social Restrictions, and Justice in Taliban-Held Afghanistan

Summary

June 30, 2020 News Release

On February 29, 2020, the United States and the Taliban signed an agreement outlining a phased withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan in exchange for Taliban commitments not to allow attacks on the US or its allies from Afghan territory. The troop withdrawal is expected to take place in parallel with negotiations between representatives from the Afghan government and other Afghan political groups and Taliban leaders aimed at achieving a political settlement after decades of armed conflict.

[...]

Education for Girls and Women

Since 2002, in cities under Afghan government control, millions of Afghan girls have gone to school and Afghan women have participated in public life, including holding political office, in greater numbers than ever before in Afghanistan’s history.

Yet these gains are partial and fragile even in government-controlled areas. While government efforts and donor-funded programs led to a dramatic rise in the numbers of girls in school, with millions enrolled in the initial years after 2002, the number of girls in school nationwide began to drop after 2014, due to factors including rising insecurity, discrimination, corruption, and diminished funding.

Research by Human Rights Watch and others demonstrates a rising demand for education in Afghanistan, including a growing acceptance in many parts of the country that girls should study. NGOs that support “community-based education”—schools located in homes in students’ communities—have often been more successful in enabling girls to go to school in areas where they would not have been able to attend government schools because of insecurity, family resistance, and community restrictions. But the government’s failure to integrate these schools into the state education system, combined with inconsistent funding for these schools, has deprived many girls of education.

Although the Taliban officially state that they no longer oppose girls’ education, very few Taliban officials actually permit girls to attend school past puberty. Others do not permit girls’ schools at all. The inconsistencies have left residents wary. As one teacher in Wardak province in central Afghanistan said, “Today, [a Taliban official] tells you that they allow girls up to sixth grade, but tomorrow, when someone else comes instead, he might not like girls’ education.” Taliban officials in several Kunduz districts have permitted girls’ primary schools to operate and in some cases allowed girls and young women to travel to government-held areas to attend high schools and university. By contrast, in some Taliban-controlled districts in Helmand province, there are no functioning primary schools for girls, let alone secondary schools—some of these rural districts had no functioning girls’ schools even when under government control. In Taliban-held districts, NGOs running community-based education programs have been able to provide education where no other schools are accessible.

In some districts, the Taliban have imposed “taxes” on teacher salaries and threatened teachers and residents whose relatives teach in schools in nearby government-controlled areas.

Taliban officials claim that the differences in access to education between districts and provinces are due to security issues and varying levels of acceptance of girls’ education within the communities themselves. There is resistance to girls’ education in many rural communities in Afghanistan. However, Taliban district and provincial officials also determine implementation of policies in the areas they control. Their inconsistent approach to girls’ schools reflects the differing views of provincial Taliban commanders, their standing in the Taliban military command hierarchy, and their relationship with local communities. In some districts, local demand for education has convinced or compelled Taliban authorities to take a more flexible approach.

Freedom of Expression and Social Restrictions

In government-controlled areas, Afghan media play an active role in public life and participate in public issues. Yet journalists critical of the authorities risk threats and violence from officials, security forces, and government-backed militias. They face government restrictions on access to information.

By contrast, Afghan media usually may only enter Taliban-held areas with explicit Taliban permission. Taliban officials in their political office in Doha, Qatar, have said that they only require that journalists respect Islamic values. But Taliban commanders have threatened and attacked journalists for critical reporting. Taliban officials prohibit watching television in some districts and residents who watch TV do so in secret. Similarly, some Taliban officials impose restrictions on smartphones or ban them outright, limiting residents’ access to information and their ability to communicate, study, or work using the internet.

Social controls embodied in “morality” officials—known as “vice and virtue” police when the Taliban were in power in the 1990s—continue to operate in districts under Taliban control. These officials patrol communities to monitor residents’ adherence to Taliban-prescribed social codes regarding dress and public deportment, beard length, men’s attendance at Friday prayers, and use of smartphones or other technological devices. The rigidity or flexibility with which the Taliban impose these rules varies by province and district, with Kunduz among the most flexible and Helmand among the least. Violating the rules can result in a warning for a first-time or relatively minor offense. While public punishment for infractions is infrequent compared to the 1990s, for offenses deemed more serious, Taliban officials have imprisoned residents and inflicted corporal punishments such as beatings.

Taliban officials have told Human Rights Watch that they have not imposed the social restrictions that exist in the areas they control and that these reflect local community norms. At the same time, they have encouraged residents and imams of the local mosques to report on community members who skip prayers or engage in prohibited behavior.

Strict social norms regarding dress—especially for women—and women’s movements are common among communities in much of rural Afghanistan, including in conservative government-held areas. However, in both government-held and Taliban-held areas where such restrictions exist, some residents, particularly younger Afghans, have resisted these constraints in seeking more freedom. Moreover, in more diverse or urbanized areas, Taliban officials have sanctioned and reinforced rigid social controls in communities that had previously not observed such practices.

Detention and Punishment for Government Contacts, Criticism of the Taliban

A major restriction the Taliban imposes is to prohibit any contact with the Afghan government, either civilians or the military, except in some cases to obtain identity cards (taskeras) that are needed for government services. Taliban commanders and officials have threatened residents whose relatives work in the government or security forces. They have even threatened people for being stopped at government checkpoints. A resident of Wardak who the Taliban accused of providing food to government soldiers was threatened with severe punishment if he did it again, and was told, “you do not have the right to complain.”

Criticizing Taliban military activities is strictly forbidden; fear of retaliation keeps residents from advocating for their own protection. Although deploying forces in populated villages without taking all feasible precautions to protect civilians from attack is a violation of the laws of war, the Taliban have sometimes punished residents who have complained about Taliban forces entering their homes and firing on government troops.

The Taliban have also punished family members or other relatives as a form of collective punishment in violation of international law. A Helmand man whose relatives worked for the police told Human Rights Watch the Taliban accused him of being “a police spy.”

Those accused of being government spies, abducted government officials, and others detained for any contact with the government may be imprisoned indefinitely or summarily executed. Local Taliban commanders have considerable autonomy to carry out punishments, particularly in frontline areas. While credited for offering swift justice, Taliban civil courts have overridden or co-opted local dispute mechanisms and offer few due process protections.

Women have sought out Taliban courts to settle inheritance and property disputes. However, for women and girls who are victims of domestic violence, registering complaints through the Taliban courts does not offer even the limited possibility for justice that exists in government courts, while mirroring the same deficiencies by requiring women to pursue mediation within the family. Taliban courts have imposed brutal punishments such as lashing on men and women for so-called moral crimes. These punishments deter women from fleeing abusive situations in the home.

Impunity for grave abuses has long been a problem in Afghanistan, where the current and previous governments have largely failed to hold officials accountable for rights violations or prosecuted pro-government warlords and militias for serious abuses. The Taliban claim that they hold members of their ranks, including commanders, accountable for abuses, but this has meant little in practice since Taliban officials have seldom considered many human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law as wrongful acts.

Since 2015, the Taliban have made public statements about their intention to ensure internal accountability. In some cases, they have put measures in place to respond to complaints about abuse at the local level. However, these measures are very limited in scope, and rarely affect senior officials or address serious abuses. In most cases, communities fear retaliation if they report abuse. Residents who have criticized Taliban actions have been accused of spying and beaten.

As the Taliban have consolidated control over areas that were previously contested, their restrictions have tightened, not eased. This raises serious concerns that as government influence wanes, the Taliban will be less willing to heed community demands about the protection of rights, as well as in any peace negotiations. The gap between official Taliban statements on rights and the restrictive positions adopted by Taliban officials on the ground indicates that the Taliban are far from an internal consensus on their own policies, and that reaching agreement on human rights provisions in a peace agreement will not necessarily result in their being implemented at the local level.

On other fundamental issues of governance, the Taliban have not developed consistent policies but rather a set of reflexive and reactive practices. While they have rolled back some harsh measures from the past, and communities have managed to push back against some restrictions, what has not changed is that in most areas there are few ways for communities to engage with Taliban officials to register complaints.

Afghans in Taliban-held districts have told Human Rights Watch that Taliban officials do not recognize any need to listen to them or allow them to air grievances or make recommendations. Instead Taliban officials generally see the communities as either with them or against them, and view criticism only as a challenge to their authority and evidence of affiliation with the enemy. Most importantly, in not permitting criticism, the Taliban have signaled that they do not see themselves as accountable to the people they govern.

In any settlement that emerges, it will be critical for the Taliban to demonstrate that they are willing to accommodate diverse communities, tolerate dissent, and meet the demands of the communities they govern, including of women and girls, for the protection of fundamental rights.

Related Content
June 30, 2020 News Release
Afghanistan: Taliban Rights Efforts Fall Far Short
https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/06/30/afghanistan-taliban-rights-efforts-fall-far-short

Key Recommendations To the Taliban Leadership:

* Uphold the right of girls and boys to education in all areas, including through secondary level and above, and issue clear orders to all commanders not to obstruct the functioning of schools.

* Work with donors and community-based education providers to expand community-based schools in all areas and promote these schools in communities where families resist sending children, especially girls, to school.

* Take all necessary measures to protect civilians under Taliban control from the harmful effects of attacks. Avoid deploying, to the extent feasible, within densely populated areas.

* Cease all acts of intimidation, harassment, and summary punishment of residents who have criticized Taliban policies.

https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/06/30/you-have-no-right-complain/education-social-restrictions-and-justice-taliban-held