Afghan women enjoy hard-won freedoms. Now a US deal with the Taliban threatens them
"With Taliban Talks Soon to Start, Afghan Government Splits Apart "No guarantees for Afghan women in draft U.S.-Taliban deal "Afghan peace deal hits first snag over prisoner releases "Trump's Latest Move on Afghanistan Is a Repeat of Obama's "For Syrian Kurds, a leader's killing deepens sense of U.S. betrayal"""" "
Foreign Correspondent
By Karishma Vyas in Afghanistan
Updated yesterday at 6:54pm
Photo: Not long ago Laila Haidari's life in Kabul would have been unimaginable. She fears it won't last under a resurgent Taliban. (Foreign Correspondent)
Related Story: Afghan Government to release 1,500 Taliban prisoners
Related Story: Trump 'to meet Taliban leaders' after US signs deal on pulling troops out of Afghanistan
"Stop talking crap! Stop talking crap! You're going to be kidnapped tomorrow."
As a foreign journalist in Afghanistan, I have an extensive list of dos and don'ts when working in the country. Threatening a Kabul cop in broad daylight is definitely high on my list of don'ts.
But my red lipstick-wearing, car horn-tooting companion didn't have the same list. I was beginning to suspect she didn't have a list at all.
The cop looked like I felt — confused and a little scared.
As she was threatening to kidnap him, Laila Haidari was driving on the wrong side of the road. Actually, she was driving on the wrong side of the road without a drivers license.
Photo: Laila Haidari takes no prisoners in the frenetic Kabul traffic. She doesn't have a licence but then again, she argues, no-one does. (Foreign Correspondent)
"If you live with wolves, you'll become a wolf," she said, before yelling , "Damn your father, you dog" to a jaywalking pedestrian.
Laila might seem harsh, but as one of the few women who dares to drive in Afghanistan, she attracts a lot of heat on the roads.
"They curse at you, tell you you're a whore," she said. "It's very upsetting because all you're doing is driving.
"This is the most normal thing a woman can do in the world, but here in Afghanistan it's strange."
Photo: Laila's work with drug-addicted men is dangerous. She has received death threats from some people who think it's inappropriate work for a woman. (Foreign Correspondent)
That day, we were driving around looking for junkies. Laila runs a rehab centre and every month she wanders through faeces-filled alleys under bridges, trying to convince whacked-out men to get clean.
We spent a few hours getting cursed at and having large rocks thrown at us. Laila slapped a guy. I added Kabul-junkie-hunting to my list of no-nos.
An uncertain future for women like Laila
I've been thinking a lot about Laila recently — ever since the US Government signed a peace deal with the Taliban on February 29.
More accurately, it's a withdrawal agreement designed to accelerate the departure of American troops after 19 years of relentless war.
COVID-19 and political infighting may stall the peace process, but the Taliban are on the march and the Americans can't wait to get out of there. The war in Afghanistan has cost them $US2 trillion and the lives of almost 2,400 US soldiers.
But where does that leave Afghans? The country's elected Government wasn't part of the negotiations and women, who make up the majority of the population, were completely sidelined.
Photo: Laila (second from left) and reporter Karishma Vyas (left) catch up with friends at a bowling alley. They would once have been publicly flogged for such an outing. (Foreign Correspondent)
Between her fits of road rage, Laila and I talked about the possibility of the Taliban returning to power.
"I'm shocked," she said. "The Americans introduced democracy, human rights, women's rights to us and encouraged us to defend them. Now they're telling us that the Taliban are legit?
"How has the Taliban changed? Was all this talk of human rights, women's right, democracy — was it just a game?"
It's a fair question. The last time the Taliban controlled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, women and girls were barred from education and work.
They couldn't leave their homes unless accompanied by a male relative and were publicly thrashed if even a wisp of hair escaped from under their burqa.
Photo: Foreign Correspondent reporter Karishma Vyas (second from right) uncovered evidence of continued Taliban mistreatment of women in her investigation. (Foreign Correspondent)
Taliban leaders are assuring the world that they have changed. During the negotiations in Qatar, their officials wandered through five-star resorts as bikini-clad guests sipped cocktails by the pool.
Women will be respected, they said. Girls would certainly be allowed to go to school, and women could work according to Islamic law. But in Afghanistan, I was investigating a very different reality.
Mobile phone videos from Taliban-controlled areas show a woman being publicly lashed for singing and dancing. Others were beaten or gunned down over accusations of adultery.
One young woman told me she was married off at age 12 to a violent man. After years, she managed to escape, but the Taliban in her area forced her to return.
She was in hiding again when I met her. This time the Taliban were holding her mother hostage. If she didn't return to face punishment they would kill her entire family.
Die or let your family die — that was Taliban justice in 2019. 'What did you do when the Taliban came?'
It made me wonder what they would do to someone like Laila — a chain-smoking, loud-laughing woman who works with drug addicts. But Laila said she already knew.
"If they caught us, they'd kill us. They'd say, 'Look at the way they look. Look at what they do in society'.
"As the people who have signed the death sentence of many women, I have no expectations of the Taliban."
Photo: After enduring rape and fighting for 10 years for a divorce, Laila does not want Afghanistan to return to Taliban rule. "I have the right to live the way I want," she says. (Foreign Correspondent)
It would not be the first time Laila had to fight for her life. When she was in sixth grade she was forced to marry a mullah in Iran who was almost twice her age.
She told me 12-year-old girls don't really understand rape. They just know it's wrong.
It took her almost 10 years but she finally got a divorce. Under Islamic law, her ex-husband got custody of their three children.
She doesn't say it, but I know that Laila is never going to surrender her freedom. She has worked too hard and lost too much to get it.
"I don't want my children to ask me 'What did you do when the Taliban came?' I can't tell them that I ran away," she said.
"As a human being, I have the right to live the way I want."
Watch Foreign Correspondent's 'The War on Afghan Women' tonight at 8pm on ABC TV and iview.
Afghans Need a Humanitarian Intervention Right Now
"With Taliban Talks Soon to Start, Afghan Government Splits Apart "No guarantees for Afghan women in draft U.S.-Taliban deal "Afghan peace deal hits first snag over prisoner releases "Trump's Latest Move on Afghanistan Is a Repeat of Obama's "For Syrian Kurds, a leader's killing deepens sense of U.S. betrayal"""""
The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan should continue. But a new military engagement should begin.
By Charli Carpenter, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Director of Human Security Lab.
American soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division deploy to fight Taliban fighters as part of Operation Mountain Thrust to a U.S. base near the village of Deh Afghan on June 22, 2006 in the Zabul province of Afghanistan. John Moore/Getty Images
August 12, 2021, 10:28 AM
In the run-up to the final U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the situation for civilians has predictably worsened. As of Wednesday, the Taliban had overrun nine provincial capitals .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/world/asia/afghanistan-taliban-farah-cities.html .. and is closing in on Kabul, with characteristically brutal methods .. https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/08/03/afghanistan-advancing-taliban-execute-detainees . Prisoners are being summarily executed; civilians, journalists, and aid workers are being rounded up and beheaded; and families are caught in the crossfire. Strangleholds on supply lines mean siege warfare will quickly lead to deaths and suffering from deprivation as well as bullets. Members of the Afghan military are deserting, and urban warfare has erupted between militias defending their cities and advancing Taliban troops. This is why Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary-General for Afghanistan Deborah Lyons told the United Nations Security Council .. https://reliefweb.int/report/afghanistan/briefing-united-nations-security-council-secretary-general-s-special-10 .. last Friday that Afghanistan is now in “a different kind of war, reminiscent of Syria recently or Sarajevo in the not-so-distant past.” - [ INSERT: Afghanistan's embassy says videos show Afghan civilians being tortured, murdered by Taliban By foreign affairs reporter Stephen Dziedzic Friday 16 Jul 2021 at 8:21pm , updated Fri 16 Jul 2021 at 8:46pm [...] The ABC confirmed that the content matches the descriptions provided by the embassy. However, the ABC cannot independently verify other details – including the identities of those killed or the locations where the videos were recorded. [...] ...the Taliban's representatives in Doha – who had been engaging in long stalled peace negotiations – have denied that they are intent on repressing women and say girls are still able to go to school. P - They have also repeatedly denied subjecting innocent civilians to violence or torture. P - Rodger Shanahan from the Lowy Institute said the Afghan embassy in Canberra was intent on undermining the Taliban's attempt to present itself as a more modern and responsible political entity. P - "The Afghan government is trying to make the point that Taliban 2.0 is the same as Taliban 1.0," he said. P - "They want to counter Taliban messaging. One of the things the Taliban want is legitimacy, and the Taliban are putting forward the line that they're not the same as before, that they've changed. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-16/taliban-militants-afghanistan-civilian-torture/100300730 ] -
This is a false choice. The United States can both continue its drawdown from a counterinsurgency and protect civilians from the slaughter by simply shifting its narrative about the purpose of military action and the legal architecture it engages to do so—and by acting quickly.
The analogy to Bosnia is telling. In that war, the stronger party to the conflict was also over-running cities and massacring civilians, and the international community stood by helplessly doing nothing—until it didn’t. Operation Deliberate Force, when NATO entered the conflict from the air to stop further Serbian advances on Bosnian Muslim- and Croat-held areas, ended the war by bringing both parties to the peace table in Dayton, Ohio. That agreement, brokered by the Clinton administration, brought relative peace and stability to a region that had seen the bloodiest civil war in Europe in decades, a peace that has lasted for 25 years despite continued ethnic tensions. This was not a counterinsurgency campaign nor a proxy war against rebels but a humanitarian intervention meant to protect civilians, forestall a regional conflagration, and enforce peace. Afghanistan needs similar help now.
In many cases, historically—Kosovo, Libya—the United States has led the charge to protect civilians or been instrumental in doing so. In places where it has not (for example, in Syria), it was because the logistical and political risks outweighed the possible good the United States could do. That’s not the case here: The United States has air power in the region already and a vested interest in protecting its legacy—a war fought to protect civilians, American and Afghan, from atrocities.
All that is missing is political will. To be fair, the United States had good reasons to end what seemed to be a losing counterinsurgency and withdraw its support from a withering Kabul government against the Taliban. And it is true the United States will be of limited long-term assistance in stitching this country back together, given its loss of favor in the region. It’s also reasonable for a new president to want to stand by his decisions to retain credibility.
But Biden need not choose between switching horses midstream and doing nothing as civilian lives are lost. Just as the war in Afghanistan is different now, the kind of outside intervention required is different than it seemed in 2001. This situation presents Biden not with a Kobayashi Maru[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobayashi_Maru ] scenario, but with an opportunity to salvage the U.S. legacy in Afghanistan. In short, Biden can stick with his policy of disengagement from the internal conflict and stem the bloodshed on his way out while laying the foundation for a Bosnia-style international operation to protect civilians and enforce a peaceful resolution to the conflict in Afghanistan.
To do so, the Biden administration needs to simultaneously reengage air power at the international community’s behest—on Afghan civilians’ behalf rather than Kabul’s—while shifting the narrative about what a U.S. presence in Afghanistan is all about. And crucially, the United Nations should marshal all its political will to assist, including authorizing such action under Chapter VII .. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/chapter-7 .. of the U.N. Charter or, if that vote should fail, a “Uniting for Peace” resolution under the U.N. General Assembly.
The kind of missions that stemmed bloodshed in Bosnia and Libya were different from the U.S. mission in Afghanistan that Biden is quite reasonably ending in two crucial ways. First, they were not U.S. missions at all but U.N. operations authorized under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter and occurring through multilateral coalitions. Second, the strategic and tactical purpose of Chapter VII humanitarian missions is not to support the government or to take either side in a conflict but rather to protect civilians caught in the crossfire and, where possible, broker a stable peace. Under the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, the U.N. General Assembly can also act on behalf of civilians when the U.N. Security Council cannot.
This is different from what the U.S. mission has been in Afghanistan thus far—a mission viewed as an imperialistic endeavor by the United States to defeat the Taliban and prop up the secular Kabul government. Rather than “providing air support to the Afghan military,” the calculus should now be how to tactically defend civilian areas from fighting by either Taliban or Afghan troops under a mandate from the international community. A politically neutral approach, where the international community is on neither political side but solely on the side of the civilian population, will not only constitute a middle ground between Biden’s agonizing set of choices but also be far more effective in bringing about a stable peace than the previous U.S. policy did. It recognizes both parties to a conflict as legitimate actors while delegitimizing human rights abuse and war crimes on both sides (and yes – the Afghan government also commits .. https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2021/country-chapters/afghanistan .. war crimes against civilians). Neutral humanitarian intervention creates space and incentives for both parties to come to the peace table. And it comes at the moral behest of the entire United Nations rather than simply the United States.
The final advantage of a humanitarian intervention is if handled well, it can be short and sweet. It is an emergency operation only, designed to bring a conflict to its conclusion while stemming civilian bloodshed. It does not require the United States to remain for decades or shoulder the burden: previous humanitarian interventions have quickly led to peace enforcement operations led by the U.N. Department of Peacekeeping Operations. U.N. envoys Kai Eide and Tadamichi Yamamoto have recently called for .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/02/opinion/afghanistan-taliban-america-withdrawal.html .. a stepped up U.N. role in Afghanistan, and they are right. The United Nations’ presence in Afghanistan over the years has been appallingly weak, under-resourced, and ineffectual. With the United States stepping back, it is time for the United Nations to step up.
Unlike counterinsurgencies or military occupations by Western powers, research shows U.N. peacekeeping operations have been remarkably successful at maintaining peace, and when given a robust mandate, they are effective at protecting civilians. Lise Howard, a professor at Georgetown University, has argued peacekeeping is more successful than counterinsurgency because of how peacekeepers get the warring parties to change their behavior—influencing both sides of a conflict. Because a broader range of nations shoulder the burden of contributing and rotating troops, peacekeeping missions can also have greater staying power. And they are generally seen as more legitimate by warring powers.
From the U.S. perspective, the best thing about a U.N. peace enforcement mission is it could dovetail with a U.S. withdrawal. The United States need not and likely should not participate in a peace enforcement mission in Afghanistan. A successful U.N. peace operation would need consent by both the Kabul government and the Taliban. The Taliban once indicated .. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/world/asia/21kabul.html .. it would consent to and cooperate with such a mission only should it be manned by peacekeepers from Muslim-majority countries, preferably from outside the region: Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Egypt. This harmony of interests, drawing on existing and time-tested U.N. architecture, could allow the United States to withdraw gracefully from its 20-year involvement, leaving the country in better hands rather than in ruin.
But before peacekeeping can work, there must be peace to keep. And there can be no peace so long as either party to a conflict believes it can terrorize civilians with impunity. Allowing terror against civilians to go unmet works against civilians and against peace by creating a wider legacy of bloodshed to overcome, un-leveling the playing field in favor of the most bloodthirsty party, and fueling conditions for the widest breach of trust.
In such situations, to bring the parties to the peace table, it is precisely a military solution that is needed—a robust military response from third parties. This does not mean Biden should radically undo his decision to end the counterinsurgency. There is a third way, and the United States should choose it while it can still work. The first step would be for the United States to field an emergency resolution to the U.N. Security Council asking for Chapter VII authorization to protect civilians in that country. Until other countries stepped up, Washington would also have to commit its forces to a final military campaign to defend Afghan cities until the Taliban capitulate to talks, while mustering other countries to assist. The UN should make clear this operation is no longer in support of Kabul but is politically neutral, focused on protecting civilians from conflict by both parties, and will end when both parties come to the peace table. Only then will the United States continue its withdrawal.
This stance will give the Taliban both a carrot and a stick to lay down arms and negotiate a settlement—whether a power-sharing arrangement or a Balkans-style federalized system. And ultimately, it is that peace that will ultimately protect Afghanistan’s civilians—while ensuring Biden’s first major foreign-policy legacy won’t be to turn away from Afghan civilians’ suffering as the international community did at Srebrenica.
Charli Carpenter @charlicarpenter my two cents on Afghanistan this week: "Biden can stick with his policy of disengagement *and* stem the bloodshed, while laying a foundation for a Bosnia-style international operation to protect civilians / enforce a peace. Afghans Need a Humanitarian Intervention Right Now The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan should continue. But a new military engagement should begin. foreignpolicy.com 3:23 AM · Aug 13, 2021·Twitter Web App tweet
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