Life for Afghans got worse after the Taliban seized power. Now foreign aid is drying up

The walls of the commander’s home are festooned with rifles and flak jackets when we visit last October; souvenirs of a war that ended a little over a year earlier. Just above our heads, where we are seated cross-legged on a semicircle of floor cushions on a plush Afghan carpet and drinking tea, hangs a rocket-propelled grenade. The small room is packed with people, too: the commander has summoned the heads of 14 villages under his command, each of whom represents around 100 to 200 households in this remote, dusty corner of Maiwand, in southern Afghanistan’s Kandahar province, a few miles west over the desert from the border with Pakistan. The commander is holding court. “Our duty is to protect people,” he bellows, “but we can’t, because we don’t have any NGOs or foreign resources. We have nothing. “We need investment in water. We need foreign governments, foreign NGOs and foreign companies to help us. The government did not give us even one car. “We need clinics, we need trucks, we need ambulances. If someone is pregnant and needs to get to the clinic, how can we help?” But, we say cautiously – conscious of the rifles and grenade launcher – you are the government now. Do your leaders in Kabul not help? “The whole government has nothing,” says the commander with an exaggerated sigh. “The whole Taliban works [for] free.” And are you worried, we venture, that if you fail to deliver the vital resources your people need, they will no longer support the Taliban? The commander glows incandescent with rage, and turning to his men shouts, “Never! We are the rightful leaders. If you have any problem, then you tell me face to face!” The frightened men stare at the floor, shaking their heads and murmuring support. We’ve struck a nerve – and it’s no wonder. This is loyalist Taliban territory, and as far as these men are concerned, their victory over the Americans and the Afghan army was delivered to them by God. Some of them have been fighting for their entire adult lives, and they are tired. Peace was supposed to make life easier, but instead the country has been plunged into almost unimaginable poverty. Right now, we are locked in this toxic relationship where the outside world is trying to help the people without helping the Taliban. Which is a farce. It can’t be achieved. Graeme Smith, senior Afghanistan consultant at the International Crisis Group This province is entering its third consecutive year of drought, and 19 million Afghans – nearly half of the country’s population – do not have enough food. The Taliban are in charge, but the coffers are empty, and it has become painfully clear that they cannot afford to run the country without foreign support – help that will be thin on the ground until the international community recognises them as the legitimate government. To their consternation, these Talibs, many of whose own childhoods and schooling were brutally cut short by conflict or the necessity for survival, are grappling with the idea that because it is not acceptable for their daughters to go to school, outside governments may not send help. The arrivals hall at Kabul airport is in chaos. Non-uniformed men in Pashtun-style turbans and loose brown waistcoats shout instructions above the noise, thrusting landing forms haphazardly at anyone who looks foreign. Men crowd around the baggage carousel, jostling and shoving, while their female relatives hang back from the throng. In August 2021, as the Taliban took over the capital, thousands desperate to escape clambered over the fences around this terminal, some clinging to whatever part they could of the last planes leaving the runway. At least 183 were killed as they fled towards the planes by a suicide bomb detonated by an Isis-affiliated terrorist. Fourteen months later, the situation on the ground has calmed, and the airport is packed with Afghans returning to reunite with family, to get married, to start over – some of them having spent decades as refugees. An Afghan woman who now lives in Denmark, and whose sons are busy retrieving their bags, says she’s back to visit her family for the first time in 20 years. She must be excited, we say. She smiles faintly. “Yes,” she says. “But the trouble here, it’s …” and then she breaks down sobbing, apologising over and over in a mixture of English and Danish, unable to express her full grief in any language but tears. A kind baggage handler fetches her a chair. No one else bats an eyelid. Outside, “I Heart Afghanistan” is written in huge stone letters at the entrance to the car park. Two young women in hijabs pause for a moment to stare at it. They don’t look convinced, and they are not alone. In a Gallup poll published in December, 98 per cent of Afghans surveyed – including 100 per cent of respondents from the lowest income bracket – said they were suffering under Taliban rule, and two in five expected things to get worse in the next five years. The Taliban forbids music. These young musicians who fled have new problems Since returning to power that August, the Taliban have launched a far-reaching attack on many freedoms and rights formerly enshrined in Afghanistan’s 2004 constitution. Public floggings and executions are back. Child marriage is legal as soon as girls reach puberty. The free press has been obliterated. The Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice is busy enforcing a swathe of misogynistic laws and temporary rules that curtail women and girls’ ability to study and work in almost all professions, that threaten them and their male “guardians” with arrest for dress-code violations, and that prevent them from going to parks or gyms, from travelling overseas or anywhere within the country without a male chaperon, and from attempting to leave abusive relationships. Effectively, 49.5 per cent of the country’s population have been relegated to second-class citizens, prevented by law from fending for themselves and their families. “I don’t want the woman to be erased. Give us our basic rights. Islam has given [these rights] to us. That’s what we want,” says Mahbouba Seraj, a women’s rights activist nominated for the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize and the director of Kabul’s last remaining women’s shelter. “Women in other Muslim countries are living. They’re not being buried alive. The women of Afghanistan don’t want anything more than that.” We are speaking in her office at the shelter, which 75-year-old Seraj appears to have kept afloat, against ever-stacking odds, through sheer force of will. The shelter cares, educates and provides practical skills training for women and girls who have been abused or abandoned by their husbands or families – women typically viewed as criminals by the Taliban leadership, whose term for women who run away from home carries the same moral weight as “prostitute”. Right now, the centre feels like a sanctuary in more ways than one, as Seraj depicts many angry young Talibs as boys in desperate need of a mother, her gentle manner a refreshing contrast to the gun-waving and yelling that characterises our interactions with most Talib ministers and commanders. As we speak in English, her dog, Bullet, a mongrel she rescued from the street, frequently interrupts to demand belly rubs. But Seraj has no time for nonsense – “I say it like I see it. If I am not afraid of my God, why should I be afraid of them? They know that I’m not afraid” – and that includes her attitude to the educational restrictions. “They have to open schools, period. There are no ifs and buts about it,” she says, and this extends to the younger girls in her care, as well as children of women living at the shelter. “The little ones are going to school, and then we are teaching them here. We have to teach them. We know we can’t have girls that are not educated, no matter what the Taliban thinks. You think I’m going to have stupid people running around?” However deep her frustrations with the Taliban run, it is clear that Seraj sees normalisation and negotiation with the new regime as the only realistic way forward. “The ex-government, the people that are trying to form a group of whatever they call it, the resistance – I mean, it’s the same son-of-a-guns talking about the same things that they promised, that they could never give to the people of Afghanistan,” she sighs. “They looted everything. They took everything from us. “And now they are sitting and talking about the future of Afghanistan and what kind of a role they are going to have.” Seraj shakes her head. “I don’t think we can change the government,” she says. The important thing “is to change how they govern”. Milestone for non-profit that funds rural Chinese women’s education From a security perspective, there is no denying that Afghanistan is safer now than when the Taliban seized power in 2021. Two insurgent groups, the Isis-affiliated Islamic State-Khorasan Province and the National Resistance Front, are still creating headaches for the regime, but the wars that ravaged the country non-stop since the Soviet invasion of 1979 are, in effect, over. The South Asia Terrorism Portal recorded 490 terror attacks in the country in 2022, down from 1,602 in 2020. The country is heavily securitised: the black-and-white Taliban flag flies over endless military bases and checkpoints while tanks and armed trucks patrol city streets, interstate highways and even small towns and villages, loaded up with Kalashnikov-wielding police and soldiers. Meanwhile, the Taliban claims to have orchestrated a comprehensive civilian weapons amnesty, with one senior official telling us his colleagues went door-to-door in every village, demanding that families hand over their guns. The Taliban are clearly on a PR offensive to convince the world they have everything under control, and in the capital, we are able to make brief visits to markets (albeit with a vigilant eye for opportunistic kidnap attempts) and local restaurants (provided they have a “family section” – a curtained-off area for female diners), and we can travel hundreds of miles around the country by road, all of which would have been unimaginable a year earlier. At the Ministry of Interior in Kabul, every official and minister we speak to is quick to insist that the country is stable, secure and ready to accommodate and cooperate with the international community. At a military base in Maiwand, Mullah Tahir Muhammad Swarmee, assistant to the base commander, announces proudly, “We have a safe area and a safe country. We are happy and we are peaceful!” But the mask often slips. Sayed, a Taliban soldier in Maiwand, tells us the Taliban has two enemies, Iran and Pakistan, and that the Pakistani region of Balochistan belongs to Afghanistan – a cause of resentment that will explode into violence three months after our visit, in December, when fighting breaks out nearby between border forces on the Kandahar-Balochistan border, injuring 16 Pakistani civilians. In Kabul, a soldier who evidently did not get the “be-courteous-to-visitors” memo tries to drag one of us from the car before we have time to show him our letters of permission from the ministry. At another checkpoint, near Ghazni, a Taliban guard insists that their reputation as a danger to foreign journalists is unwarranted – we are perfectly safe. We point out, only half-joking, that a few years ago he’d have taken us hostage or cut off our heads. “Well, yes,” he concedes wryly, “but now you are welcome.” Of course, peace is only one condition of survival. No other country has yet recognised the Taliban government, making it virtually impossible for the country to establish diplomatic or trade relations. Aid has dramatically dried up; the World Bank-administered Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund, which until recently handled payments from dozens of countries and supplied around 30 per cent of the Afghan national government’s civilian budget, saw contributions drop from US$755 million in 2019 to US$59.4 million in 2022, with only the United States and Norway continuing to donate. US foreign assistance to Afghanistan to support the agriculture sector declined from US$280 million in 2011 to US$80 million in 2022 while funding for health fell from US$150 million to US$86 million and education from US$95 million to US$49 million over the same period. Other major donors, such as Britain, which previously helped fund schools for 4.3 million children and paid the salaries of the Afghan National Police, have withdrawn all but emergency support. Last May, Afghan news channel TOLOnews reported that the government had announced a national budget of just 231 billion afghanis (US$2.6 billion), of which only 27.9 billion was earmarked for development. This is the smallest budget in more than two decades, and less than half the previous year’s 473 billion afghanis. Out in the provinces, the impact of this credit crunch is all too evident. As we walk across a bone-dry field towards a one-storey farmhouse in Maiwand, Mahmood Walid comes running towards us with three of his youngest grandchildren in barefoot pursuit. Mahmood is 56, but he looks much older. “Have you come to bring medicine for the children?” he cries as we approach. We haven’t – we are not the expected aid workers – and he stops short, exhausted, straining to conceal the weight of his despair. The handful of NGOs that worked here fled when the Taliban seized control, and guilt hits us like a punch in the gut. Behind him, one of the grandchildren, a little boy, starts to cry. Maiwand, it turns out, is home to 10,000 families and not a single ambulance. The village school – another casualty of war – is a charred ruin that no one can afford to rebuild. The community is about to face its first winter since the new regime banned opium poppies, the only cash crop from which it has ever managed to eke out a living. Until just a few months ago, the field we are standing on was used to grow those poppies, and while Mahmood says it is possible to switch to another crop, he can’t do anything without money to buy new equipment to plant these alternatives, to irrigate the land, and to buy fuel for the machinery. ‘I was screaming for help’: the Cambodian brides trafficked into China To make matters worse, his 38-year-old son, Noor, shows us his damaged leg, which he says was injured in an air raid that was supposed to target Talibs but instead hit him while he was out herding sheep, which makes it harder to work the fields. Unless help arrives soon, Mahmood’s grandchildren, and millions of others, may well starve. “NGOs are, in a sense, the only game in town,” says Neil Turner, head of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC). “We’re the biggest employer […] but we are humanitarians, not experts in long-term infrastructure, power, rural development, health system strengthening, or all the things that are really needed.” A lack of alternatives or international assistance means organisations such as these have had to take on roles that they and their humanitarian funding mechanisms are “not suited for”, he says. The collapse of the banking system made it hard to get the money they need to do their work into the country, for example, so they have had to push hard for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to work with Afghan financial institutions to try and get this up and running again. “We’ve been calling for the sanctions regime to be liberalised,” says Turner. “We’ve been calling for the re-establishment of the Afghan central bank. We’ve been advocating for the return of the Afghan central bank assets directly because they belong to the Afghan people. And we have been calling for the reinstatement of development assistance.” The Taliban’s lack of international recognition as the official government remains a major stumbling block. “There is no textbook for a situation where a group of enlisted terrorists take over an entire country, so everybody is making up the rules as they go along,” says Graeme Smith, senior Afghanistan consultant at the International Crisis Group (ICG). While it is the Taliban’s own fault that they are so “politically radioactive”, he says, the only way to address a poverty and starvation crisis is by reducing poverty, including through economic growth – and it is impossible to do that without also benefiting the people running the country. “Right now, we are locked in this toxic relationship where the outside world is trying to help the people without helping the Taliban,” he says. “Which is a farce. It can’t be achieved.” As things stand, the US and its allies in the West remain virulently opposed to engaging with the Taliban. Chinese students pay for ‘guaranteed acceptance’ into elite US universities “Legitimacy is earned by actions, and the Taliban’s decisions have put them further than ever from international recognition,” a US State Department representative said in an email. “With each new restrictive policy they make prospects for normalisation more remote, both within Afghanistan and with the international community.” In the meantime, a handful of international NGOs and agencies have continued to try and cover the shortfall by shelling out for vital services. Last March, Voice of America reported that the International Committee of the Red Cross was paying the salaries of 10,000 health workers while Unicef had issued an emergency US$100 monthly stipend to 194,000 teachers, payable for two months. But Afghanistan is home to more than 40 million people, 41.2 per cent of whom are under the age of 14. After decades of relentless fighting and destruction, the country desperately needs money – a lot of money. Basic infrastructure has been obliterated: bridges and highways are crumbling or torn apart by bombs, swathes of land are unusable thanks to landmines and it is only after several days of driving through desert that we realise the enormous white blocks jutting from the hillsides at regular intervals are bases where electricity pylons once stood, before being blown up. Isolated, friendless, impoverished Afghanistan is hardly in a position to pay for the repairs itself. World Bank data from 2021 shows that, at US$368.75, its gross domestic product per capita was among lowest in the world. Without outside help, the Taliban simply does not have any way to raise or to borrow the money it needs to provide key services to its citizens. But rather than admitting weakness, the Taliban leadership seems to have chosen a different tactic: denying public services to half the country, ostensibly on moral grounds. Soon after declaring their military victory in 2021, the Taliban announced that girls in sixth grade and above would not be allowed to continue attending school. Initially this was framed as a security issue, which would remain in place until they could guarantee the safety of these schoolchildren, but this narrative has become increasingly muddled, at least partly due to a lack of consensus within the Taliban itself on why the ban is in place. When we visited, in October last year, several government workers at the Ministry of Interior, including one former teacher, were adamant that girls would be allowed to return to their studies “soon”, once a suitable curriculum had been locked down that reflects the Taliban’s religious views – although other colleagues in the room commented variously that educating girls was incompatible with Afghan culture, or that letting girls go to school would make men “horny”. But instead of lifting the ban, in December the Taliban extended it to include university students. This was not, however, a hard-and-fast decree. On the same day, spokesman Suhail Shaheen announced that the ban on women and girls accessing school and university was “not permanent”, but rather a temporary measure until a “conducive environment is created for their education”. While the ban understandably caused outrage internationally, and among Afghans for whom education is a given, those hardest hit are based in urban centres such as Kabul – wealthier areas where the main ethnicity is Dari, rather than the low-income rural Pashtuns that make up the Taliban’s loyal base. Once out of Kabul, as we head southwest through the provinces of Wardak, Ghazni, Zabul and Kandahar, we pass the occasional child in pristine school uniform, walking or cycling to or from class. But most young children we see – both girls and boys – are hard at work on farms or construction sites, herding goats, sheep or cows across the vast expanse of desert, carrying basins of water on their heads, pushing carts of produce through crowded markets, begging on the roadside or simply tagging along with adults as they plough the fields or fix cars and motorbikes. In Shahbarat, Zabul province, late one morning, a group of children all aged around five to eight years old are messing around in the dust by the road, teasing each other and playing peek-a-boo behind a broken stop sign. For these youngsters, at least, too young to be affected by the ban but clearly not in school, the Taliban’s educational policy seems irrelevant. Local soldier Sayed says he’d had just a few years of education himself before joining the Taliban as a 15-year-old to avenge his brother, who was killed by a drone while tending the family fields. He would like for his own son to receive an education so he can have better opportunities than he did (“I only know the gun,” he says), but there’s nowhere for the seven-year-old to attend school. For Maiwand locals like Sayed, access to education has never been an automatic right, but a luxury. And as with other farmers we speak to, he seems baffled that, for the international community, enshrining girls’ rights to schooling is a red line when it makes no difference anyway: the only school in the village is a pile of rubble. On December 24 last year, the Taliban issued a further edict, banning women from working for NGOs and threatening to revoke licences of those who fail to comply. The magazine Science reported that the Ministry of Economy wrote to the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief and Development, which represents 183 member NGOs, accusing some female staff of failing to adhere to the Taliban’s strict Islamic dress code and ordering all NGOs to stop female employees from working until further notice. The impact was swift and devastating, as Afghanistan is a strictly gender-segregated society. As explained by Science, male aid workers can’t interact with Afghan women for cultural reasons, and in November, The Washington Post reported that the Taliban were in the process of formalising rules – already widely in place – to legally restrict male medical professionals from treating female patients and vice versa. Afghanistan is a country that needs every capable hand to be working in it, every capable brain to be working in it. What difference does it make if that’s a man or a woman? Mahbouba Seraj, women’s rights activist It is impossible for organisations to provide many essential services to women without having female employees. In response to the edict, international organisations including Save the Children, the International Rescue Committee, CARE International, Afghanaid and the NRC suspended their services, while thousands of women found themselves in employment limbo. Vaccination programmes were put in jeopardy as Unicef and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative tried to establish clarity on whether female vaccinators were covered by the ban – and whether female children would be able to receive vaccinations at all. “To put it bluntly, we had been forced to pause operations because the Taliban decree said that we cannot employ women,” says the NRC’s Turner, who explains that there were two parts to this decision, a principled one and a practical one. “We simply cannot do our work in a culturally sensitive way if we don’t have women staff delivering services to women who are in need. When you put a ban on females operating, you immediately exclude the most vulnerable of the vulnerable, who are women-headed households in poverty.” But almost immediately, it was clear Afghanistan could not continue to function with a blanket ban on female aid workers. Taliban governors and ministers began issuing exemptions, some officially, others quietly. First, Afghanistan’s Ministry of Public Health said that female workers at clinics run by health NGOs were exempt. In January, a UN official told Reuters that caveats had also been made in the education sector and may be extended to agriculture. Rural women’s organisations that provide health interventions alongside other support services reclassified their “safe spaces” as “health clinics”, according to Science magazine. As Turner explains, NGOs began looking for loopholes that would allow them to apply exemptions to other female staff members within the same organisation, for example seeking exemptions for women working in administration and finance departments on a health project, not just the frontline health workers. The bureaucracy involved in seeking case-by-case exemptions is hardly ideal, and NGOs continue to be hamstrung by uncertainties – do the exemptions apply across provincial borders, for example? Do they need new paperwork for each new activity? – but as Turner says, “We’re not giving up on the Afghan people. However difficult it becomes for us to work. Whatever constraints are put in the way of us by the authorities here, we will continue to be here.” The fact that local and provincial officials are willing to find a workaround for these decrees from up high also offers grounds – however tentative – for hope. It shows that these rules are not set in stone, and that many figures within the Taliban already accept they don’t work. The international community cannot isolate the Taliban forever – at least, not without sentencing millions of people to malnutrition, disease and death – but as Seraj says, that recognition should come with conditions. As the ICG’s Smith puts it, “It’s less emotionally satisfying to grit your teeth and work with the Taliban, but that actually does more for women and girls.” Even the US does not appear to have ruled out the prospect of recognition entirely – owing, perhaps, to what Smith describes as “real differences in opinion” inside the administration. “We continue to stand with Afghans in calling on the Taliban to respect their rights. It is no secret that the Taliban want sanctions relief, diplomatic accreditation at the UN and all over the world, and investment in the Afghan economy,” said the US State Department representative. “We are working with our allies and partners to press the Taliban to follow through on their public commitments made to the Afghan people, as well as the international community, before we can proceed with moving toward any kind of significant normalisation.” For their part, the Taliban know they need external aid and assistance to govern and rebuild. They know they are inextricably dependent on NGOs to provide essential services to their people. And NGOs have seen that the door is open to negotiate protections for women as a condition of delivering those services. “Afghanistan is a country that needs every capable hand to be working in it, every capable brain to be working in it,” says Seraj. “What difference does it make if that’s a man or a woman?”

Life for Afghans got worse after the Taliban seized power. Now foreign aid is drying up

.css-1mniedq{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;}The Taliban are in dire need of foreign aid to fix their war-torn country, but their anti-female laws make them a pariah to the detriment of millions of Afghans

The Taliban are in dire need of foreign aid to fix their war-torn country, but their anti-female laws make them a pariah to the detriment of millions of Afghans