Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan August 2026-

The West Still Doesn’t Understand the Taliban
How to Engage With the New Afghan Regime

The Taliban seized power on Aug. 15, 2021, as U.S. and NATO forces withdrew from the country after two decades of war.

Sun 15 Aug 2021
The fall of Kabul: a 20-year mission collapses in a single day
President Ashraf Ghani flees Afghanistan as Taliban sweep into city to seize control of country
The final collapse of the 20-year western mission to Afghanistan took only a single day as Taliban gunmen entered the capital, Kabul, on Sunday, President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, and America abandoned its embassy in panic.
Even the militants themselves were surprised by the speed of the takeover, co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar admitted in a video statement in the evening. Now the group faces the challenge of ruling, he added. They are expected to proclaim a new Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan soon.
Many in Kabul do not trust promises made by the former insurgents of an amnesty for their old enemies and those, like women’s rights activists, who sought a different future for Afghanistan. The airport was mobbed with thousands of people desperate to escape. In the evening they flooded on to the runway, halting all air traffic.
In deeply humiliating scenes for the Biden administration, less than a month before the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on America, smoke spiralled from the embassy compound as staff hastily destroyed documents, before a final group took down the stars and stripes flag and headed to the airport by military helicopter. —The Guardian)

Women’s prize for non‑fiction winner, The Finest Hotel in Kabul, gives voice to the people of Afghanistan
The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan is about an institution tasked with the job of housing strangers – Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel. Through this hotel, which sits high on a hill, and the people within it, seasoned BBC journalist and current foreign affairs editor, Lyse Doucet, attempts [to] tell an immersive history of the sweeping changes that have faced Afghanistan since it opened in 1969. —The Conversation

21 August
Hamid Karzai Helped Oust the Taliban. Now He Lives Under Their Rule
Afghanistan’s first elected president speaks on regime change wars, conflict with Pakistan and why he’s still talking to the Taliban.
By Mishal Husain
(Bloomberg) It’s been almost 25 years since the US-led invasion of Afghanistan propelled a little-known tribal leader, Hamid Karzai, to power. Two decades later, Karzai watched as the Taliban swept back into Kabul. He chose to remain, in the hope that they might in time prove more inclusive. That has not happened. Today, Karzai lives under virtual house arrest, rarely speaking to the media but maintaining a dialogue with some Taliban leaders. His eldest daughter, like all Afghan girls over 12, is no longer allowed to go to school, but Karzai insists his children will not go overseas to complete their studies. To do so, he says, would give up on a future in which education within Afghanistan is accessible to all.
When Hamid Karzai became Afghanistan’s leader in 2001, he hoped to build a peaceful, united country after years of Taliban rule. More than two decades later, the Taliban are back in power, Karzai is under de facto house arrest and his daughter can no longer attend school. Yet he continues to see dialogue with the Taliban as Afghanistan’s only path forward. “You don’t leave your home when things get difficult,” he tells Mishal Husain. “You stay on and get it corrected.”

15 August
Entrenched, Embattled and Defiant, the Taliban Celebrate 5 Years in Power
The Taliban have Afghanistan in a chokehold that spares no one. But threats are starting to crack their veneer of stability and control.
(NYT) … Girls and women face restrictions to a degree unseen anywhere else in the world. Religious minorities are witnessing the forced closure of their places of worship. Anyone who voices criticism is repressed. United Nations staff members face arrests; journalists and rights workers suffer forced disappearances.
The Taliban are collecting taxes and building roads, dams and canals. European countries have welcomed them in Brussels to facilitate the deportation of Afghan migrants and asylum seekers. They have expanded trade ties with Central Asian states and want the Trump administration to come back to Afghanistan.
… On a trip to the province [Badakhshan, bordering China, Pakistan and Tajikistan, is emerging as a hot spot.] this month, we talked to residents ready to support anti-Taliban groups because they said they were fed up with the Taliban’s iron grip, the lack of job opportunities and the government’s confiscation of natural resources.
… Once a sponsor of the Taliban, Pakistan has launched dozens of airstrikes on Afghanistan, killing 500 civilians since October, according to the United Nations, and has threatened to use even more force if the Taliban don’t rein in militants who are staging attacks on Pakistani territory. …
… Food, education and the economy
The picture on the domestic front is also grim. Extreme hunger has been spreading fast from one province to another after aid cuts last year plunged millions into deeper food insecurity. The Taliban’s ban on secondary and university education for women and girls is stifling development, experts say. …
… All the ingredients for things to get out of control in Afghanistan again are here, analysts say: A vast population of unemployed young Afghans are fertile ground for radicalization, especially as economic opportunities are nearly nonexistent. And with animosity growing between Pakistan and Afghanistan, it is unclear who might come to the Taliban’s aid: Afghanistan is, once again, a pariah state, with barely any allies.
The past five years have brought some predictability and an end to almost two decades of fighting, which many Afghans have welcomed, despite the immense hardship and repression. But the country remains shattered, and the fragile peace is already at risk. …

Concerns grow over increased global ties with Taliban in Afghanistan
Campaigners fear deeper diplomatic contacts are undermining demands for improvements in human rights
(The Guardian)  The Taliban in Afghanistan have launched a diplomatic effort to end their isolation as major regional and international powers show a readiness to engage more closely with the repressive regime despite its systematic human rights abuses.
The new contacts stem from a combination of regional security concerns, pressure in the west to reduce illegal immigration and a general recognition that the Taliban are unlikely to be forced from power in the foreseeable future.
Five years after the Taliban took power, an increasing number of countries are renewing ties or scaling up diplomatic contacts with the hardline Islamists, who seized power in Kabul in 2021 after 20 years of brutal insurgent warfare.
Campaigners fear that the individual contacts by different countries risk undermining “coherent, consistent” demands for an improvement in human rights in return for any diplomatic concession
The United Nations described a recent “cascade of [Taliban] edicts and laws” that have banned women from universities and most employment, denied teenage girls education and imposed strict dress codes. Minorities have been persecuted, while activists and journalists face repression. Afghanistan has become a “graveyard for human rights,” the UN said in March.
India, Qatar, China, Iran and several central Asian states all recently welcomed Taliban officials or opened new channels of communication. Russia, which recognised the Taliban government in Kabul just over a year ago, signed a military cooperation agreement last month. In June, the European Union held talks with Taliban officials in Brussels about returning failed asylum-seekers to Afghanistan. Individual European countries have also deepened their own contacts with Kabul.

Five years after Kabul fell, the reckoning over Afghanistan is far from over
Women, the focus of much western social policy during the war, have suffered enormously
(CBC) … Since the 2021 collapse, western countries have not been able to directly protect or enforce women’s rights inside Afghanistan. Instead, their response has relied on diplomatic condemnation and targeted travel and financial sanctions.
Many countries, however, did implement special humanitarian visa pathways and resettlement programs to evacuate and shelter high-risk Afghan female judges, activists, journalists and politicians.
But even those efforts have been found wanting.
Two organizations that spearheaded resettlement efforts across western countries released a report this week that assessed, in stark terms, how allied nations fared.
The analysis, entitled Allied Ledger, was written by Local Staff International and the U.S.-based AfghanEvac. It found that each country scrambled with both the evacuation and the eventual resettlement efforts.
According to Global Affairs Canada, over 60,000 vulnerable Afghans — interpreters and their families — were allowed into the country following the Taliban takeover in August 2021. The federal government initially pledged to bring in 40,000 people, a target it met and surpassed.
There are still more vulnerable people out there under the grip of the Taliban’s harsh rule, said former Canadian combat commander, retired major-general Denis Thompson.
“As the Allied Ledger shows, Canada resettled 63,000 Afghans, and we should be proud of that,” Thompson is quoted saying in a news release issued with the Allied Ledger report.
“But it left thousands of eligible people still vulnerable inside Afghanistan. To finish the job, we have to reopen the program that started this.” …

The Afghanistan Reckoning
Forever Wars and the Costs of Collective Forgetting
Foreign Affairs July/August)
When the United States completed its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan five years ago, many Americans feared that the country would once again become a safe haven for terrorists. But as Carter Malkasian wrote in an essay earlier this year, “nothing of the sort occurred.” In fact, the Taliban have largely contained terrorism, refrained from ruthless oppression, and ushered in the country’s longest stretch of peace since 1979. Malkasian, who advised U.S. officials on and off during the war, writes movingly on why so many American leaders and policy advisers, himself included, “so badly misjudged the risk of withdrawing”—and what the United States risks today by collectively forgetting the “anguish” of Afghanistan.

14 August
The world set Afghanistan up to fail. Now, it has forgotten its people
Five years ago, after decades of good-faith efforts and billions of dollars spent, the West abandoned Afghanistan to the Taliban. How did everything go so wrong?
Brigadier-General (Ret’d) Serge Labbé was deployed twice to Afghanistan with the Canadian Armed Forces in 2004 and from 2007 to 2008. After retiring in 2008, he advised the ministry of rural rehabilitation and development and the ministry of interior affairs in Kabul, as well as the office of the NATO senior civilian representative for Afghanistan.
(Globe & Mail) …We failed to take a comprehensive approach to the delivery of security, development and governance assistance, synchronized at all levels – internationally and within Afghanistan itself, at national, provincial and district levels.
We failed to work with Afghan officials in developing a campaign plan fully integrating our efforts in support of the host country. Rather than support Afghan-led programs, we often forced them to adopt unsustainable initiatives, conceived in Western capitals, wasting billions on programs that ultimately failed.
Most International Security Assistance Force troop-contributing countries also failed by refusing to accept they were facing a virulent insurgency, choosing to take refuge inside their bases instead of prosecuting a counter-insurgency campaign in support of Afghan security forces.
We failed, right at the start, to commit in a holistic manner to meaningful, genuine, coherent and sustainable capacity-building at all levels of government. And we failed at the end, by poorly articulating an exit strategy with few associated measures of effectiveness, when a clear strategy would have helped lead to a smooth events-based transition in due course. …
The death of the dreams of Afghan women and girls
In the negotiations leading up to the signing of the Doha Agreement, the Taliban publicly and privately pledged to safeguard women’s rights to education and work in accordance with Islamic law. … However, as the sun set in Kabul on Aug. 15, 2021, so too did it set on the hard-earned achievements and dreams of so many Afghan women and girls. [On May 7 2022, the Taliban announced] a decree on a dress code for Afghan women. The decree imposed some of the harshest restrictions on Afghanistan’s women since they seized power, ordering them to cover themselves fully in public, ideally with the traditional burqa. …
As we have done so reliably since the Second World War, we withdrew leaving things far worse than before intervening.
Kabul’s quick collapse may have been because of institutionalized corruption and weak leadership at all levels within the Afghan government and military. But it also lies with the international community: the devastating policy decisions by both the Trump and Biden administrations; the disjointed support of the wider international community, over two decades; a flawed U.S. model for security assistance; and for allowing Pakistan and the ISI to meddle in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation. And as was the case in Vietnam and Iraq, the U.S.’s efforts in structuring and training the Afghan National Security and Defence Forces failed over time, creating a foreign military that was addicted to Washington’s unsustainable support for its effectiveness, and resulting in its collapse when that support was withdrawn.
What’s more, the nexus between the Taliban and other terrorist groups is cause for concern moving ahead. Having largely forgotten Afghanistan, the West seems oblivious to what has become a hotbed of extremism and future violence through expanding networks of jihadist madrasas. There, hatred and violent ideologies are inculcated into the minds of millions of young boys – fuelling either the future of the Taliban, or worse, of extremist terror groups such as al-Qaeda and Islamic State. Equally alarming is the continued presence of some 20 foreign terrorist groups in Afghanistan, many of them maintaining historical, operational and ideological ties with the Taliban.

It’s time we talked to the Taliban
An economic argument from the world community – that leaving half of Afghanistan’s population out of society sets its economy up for certain failure – could be a way forward.
Sally Armstrong is a journalist, author and human rights activist. Mellissa Fung is a journalist, author and documentary filmmaker. Deborah Lyons was the UN special representative of the secretary-general in Afghanistan from 2020 to 2022 and Canada’s ambassador to Afghanistan from 2013 to 2016.
(Globe & Mail) … Today, there is an uneasy peace there – if only because those who disturbed the peace in the first place are now the de facto government. But there is no peace for Afghan women and girls. They cannot go to school beyond Grade 6 or work to support themselves. They are not allowed to speak in public; they have been publicly whipped for showing their faces; and alleged “crimes” such as speaking to a man they’re not related to are now punishable by death by stoning. Spousal abuse is legal if there is no visible wound, and child marriage has been effectively supported by the Taliban. And the humanitarian crisis that afflicts the country as a whole – the UN says that 21 million Afghans require urgent aid, and 14 million face acute hunger – has hit women especially hard.
… Five years into Taliban rule, no one has a clear answer on how to move the needle on Afghan women’s rights and girls’ education. What is clear is that abandonment isn’t an option. We know Canadians care about what’s happening to Afghan women – it’s something we’re asked about every time we speak at an event. But we can only help them if we restart principled, cautious, but deliberate engagement, because turning away is not the Canadian way.

12 August
Is it time to talk to the Taliban?
The West’s Afghanistan strategy has failed. In 2021, America withdrew from the country, ending two decades of fighting and nation-building with almost nothing to show for it. The Taliban swiftly reclaimed power and imposed a brutal regime; Western countries opted to isolate the country and do their best to forget the whole sorry misadventure. Five years on, this shun-and-shrug approach has achieved little. Is it time to try something new?
Zanny Minton Beddoes, Editor-in-chief
(The Economist) … Afghanistan[‘s]’ …recent history marks a humiliation for Western liberal interventionism, just as in generations past it was the graveyard of empires. The Taliban’s repression of women and girls, repression that if anything is intensifying, is a shocking moral stain.
This week, to mark the fifth anniversary of America’s embarrassing and chaotic withdrawal from Kabul, we are going to focus The Insider on what is going on inside Afghanistan. Has the strategy of isolating the country’s regime by way of sanctions, frozen assets and withholding diplomatic recognition worked? What is life like today for ordinary Afghans? And, when it comes to the world’s approach to dealing with the Taliban, is it time to try something new?
Tom Sasse, The Economist’s South Asia bureau chief, recently returned from a 1,000km road trip inside Afghanistan. He travelled from Kabul to Herat and Kandahar, meeting Taliban officials, business figures, village elders and school girls. He will join us from Delhi tomorrow to explain what he learnt from his travels. …
In the first part of tomorrow’s discussion we’ll explore what Afghanistan is like today. I’ll be relying heavily on Tom’s insights. In conversations since his trip, he has described to me a country gripped by a grim calm: heavily armed men patrol the streets, music is banned, poverty and unemployment are rife. We’ll also examine how countries are behaving towards the Taliban regime. Only Russia formally recognises the de facto government, but others are also in contact with it. The European Union, hypocritically, won’t offer recognition, but recently invited Taliban officials to Brussels to discuss migrant repatriation. …
In the second half of the show, we’ll ask what needs to change. Is it time to end the policy of isolation? How can we best encourage moderation? What’s in the interests of Western democracies? And, most important, what is most likely to help the Afghan people? …

11 August
2.4 million Afghan girls shut out of secondary school 5 years after Taliban takeover, UN says
(AP) — An estimated 2.4 million Afghan girls remain excluded from secondary education five years after the Taliban took over the country, a U.N. agency said Tuesday, renewing a call for an immediate restoration of their right to education.
UNESCO, the Paris-based U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, said the continued exclusion of women and girls from education amounted to a grave violation of their fundamental rights.
“Afghanistan remains the only country in the world where girls and women are formally banned from secondary and higher education,” Hoda Jaberian, UNESCO’s program coordinator for education in emergencies, said in a news conference by video. “Five years is not a temporary interruption in a child’s education. It is clearly almost an entire secondary school cycle.”
Jaberian said: “UNESCO continues to call for the immediate and unconditional restoration of girls and women’s right to secondary and higher education. It is not negotiable. It’s a basic human right and we reiterate that there is no substitute for this.”