(L-r): Marvin Weinbaum, Amb Ronald Neumann, Lisa Curtis, Javid Ahmad, and Douglas London
Middle East Institute Panel on Ways Forward for Afghanistan
By Elaine Pasquini
Washington: On July 11, 2023, the Middle East Institute (MEI) hosted a discussion on rethinking US policy on Afghanistan.
Marvin G. Weinbaum, director of MEI’s Afghanistan and Pakistan studies, noted Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis continues to worsen, tens of thousands of Afghans who assisted American operations over the course of 20 years still need help leaving the country, and women and girls suffer from the Taliban’s tightening restrictions on their rights.
Javid Ahmad, former Afghan ambassador to the UAE and presently a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center and the MEI, described Afghanistan under the Taliban as “an ideological hermit kingdom in the making.” But, he cautioned, “it is important not to destabilize the ruling regime…or let it fail because there is no alternative.”
What Afghans want now is “a semblance of stability,” Ahmad stated. “The status quo of Taliban oppression is unacceptable to most Afghans, but the restoration of the former republic is also impossible.”
The US is “treading a fine line between engagement and isolation,” he argued. If the Taliban cooperate with the US on counterterrorism, Washington will not press the issue of women’s rights, because that is not a national security concern for the United States, he opined. Eventually, women’s rights and human rights will need to be dealt with internally by the Afghans themselves, which will require non-Taliban Afghans to have an “affirmative message, some kind of sufficient consensus, central organization and a semblance of a plan,” Ahmad said, stressing the need to support any anti-Taliban resistance group. “The more we wait, the stronger the Taliban will become.”
Lisa Curtis, director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for New American Security and former senior director for South and Central Asia at the US National Security Council, criticized the Biden administration’s interest in possibly engaging with the Taliban to fight terrorism while ignoring the group’s violation of human rights of women and girls. “I believe this is short-sighted and will not serve US national security interests over the long term,” Curtis argued. “The US should be focusing their attention, resources and diplomacy on seeking improvement of the treatment of women and girls…who are bravely standing up for themselves.” At least 86 women-led protests have been documented by the Center for New American Security in the last 20 months. The international community needs to stand with the women of Afghanistan in fighting for their rights, she added.
The Taliban’s latest mandate called for the closure of all beauty shops and teacher training centers along with disallowing women from working for the United Nations assistance mission in Afghanistan. These edicts follow the previous ones banning women from attending schools past the sixth grade – including universities, preventing women from leaving their homes without a male companion and from going to parks, gyms and holding most jobs, which will leave thousands of women in the country unemployed.
“I think the way women are treated in Afghanistan directly impacts the terrorism trends we are going to see in the region,” she said. “I think it’s a false choice that either we support human rights, or we support counterterrorism. They are directly linked, and we should be able to have a policy that addresses both issues as we move forward.”
Douglas London, a retired senior operations officer with 34 years of service in the Middle East, Africa and South and Central Asia, associate professor at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and author of The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence, argued that without a presence on the ground – as opposed to the US’s present over-the-horizon approach – “it’s difficult to know what is really going on inside the country.” He acknowledged this might only be ascertained by recognition of the Taliban, which “does not mean agreement with or support for what they are doing,” but he has seen fractures in leadership in the group.
“So, as a former intelligence professional, I would like to see the United States have an official presence on the ground, not just in Kabul, but particularly in Kandahar where most of the leadership decisions are being made,” he said.
While deploring the Taliban’s restrictions on women, London pointed out the importance, however, of human relations in the realm of intelligence “to talk to your friends, your enemies, and cultivating those in between. You’re not going to know what is actually going on unless there is engagement, unless you are on the ground, unless you are collecting intelligence, unless you are having diplomatic conversations.”
Ronald Neumann, president of the American Academy of Diplomacy and US ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007, said although the US has a policy, it suffers from lack of a strategy to achieve its goals of human rights for women, counterterrorism, stability in the region, and continuing evacuation of Afghans to whom we owe a “vast moral debt that we have not paid off.”
The US bears a certain amount of responsibility to the Afghan populace in terms of food because of our 20-year presence and policies, he said. Presently, a large population in Afghanistan is living with food insecurity and the poverty rate is approaching 97 percent.
In the absence of a coherent strategy, maintaining contact with the Taliban is important, he argued, “because if at some point there is change you want to be able to react to change.”
“There are no simple answers,” Neumann stated. “But the US will not or cannot ignore the role of women. After spending 20 years making gender policy part of our policy, training people, helping people become women doctors, women lawyers, women judges, women police officers, we have a moral responsibility. There is something rather brutally callus about pretending that it isn’t our responsibility.”
(Elaine Pasquini is a freelance journalist. Her reports appear in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and Nuze.Ink.)
