Ways Forward for Afghanistan under Taliban Rule
By Elaine Pasquini

Adam Weinstein	Jonathan Schroden
Shkula Zadran	Tripp Copeland

Washington: Two years after the Taliban took over the government in Afghanistan after US-led troops withdrew, the Quincy Institute in Washington, DC hosted a panel of experts on August 29, 2023, to discuss the path forward for the country of 40 million who are facing poverty, hunger and an uncertain future.

Adam Weinstein, deputy director of QI’s Middle East program, noted that much has changed in the two years since US troops left Afghanistan and questioned his guests about the current situation and ways forward for the country.

Pointing out that while counterterrorism is “an enduring US national interest in Afghanistan,” Jonathan Schroden, director of the Countering Threats and Challenges Program at the Center for Naval Analyses, said the US is not relying on the Taliban as a partner for counterterrorism. “The US has its own over-the-horizon counterterrorism platform that it is using to monitor developments inside Afghanistan as best they can,” he said. The Islamic State Khorasan Province seems to have been significantly degraded over the course of this year by the Taliban and al-Qaeda as an organization is largely defunct at this time and has not reconstituted itself in Afghanistan, he claimed.

Stability in the entire South Asian region is also a major priority for the United States, Schroden said, as is pushing the Taliban to develop an inclusive government which would include the country’s minority religious and ethnic groups. Human rights and rights for women and girls are the other two issues Tom West, the US State Department’s special representative to Afghanistan and Rina Amiri, the US special envoy for Afghan women, girls, and human rights, are working diligently on these days, he said.

With respect to an inclusive government, Schroden said it has to be more than tokenism. “The Taliban did try early on to have a single Tajik, a single Hazari in their government and the international community was unimpressed,” he noted. “The Taliban quickly abandoned even any pretenses of having token minorities in their government.”

As to the ultimate solution for Afghanistan, Schroden said that contrary to the debates in Washington, there are “no quick fixes to the problems that exist in Afghanistan.”

Tripp Copeland, a former State Department foreign affairs officer who was part of the US negotiating team in Doha led by Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad to end US military involvement in Afghanistan, argued that Washington needs to understand the evolution of the Taliban in order to devise a strategy that increases the odds of achieving America’s interests and objectives.

Responding to a question on his experience in dealing with the Taliban during the Doha negotiations, Copeland said his main takeaway from the experience was “the importance of understanding your counterpart on a more human level, particularly one that the country had been at war with for decades.” Talking to the Taliban, trying to understand them is the only way to build good strategies and policies, he said. “It’s those more human interactions that I remember despite our different world views. It’s the shared meals and shared stories about families…and even sort of the quiet conversations on the sideline about different policies.”

Going forward, Copeland said, US officials need to meet more often with Taliban senior officials and to use engagement to cooperate on less politically sensitive issues such as curbing narcotics, programing disaster relief and human trafficking. “I think this will help achieve longer term policy objectives.”

Shkula Zadran, an Afghan youth representative to the United Nations in 2020, who now works with NGOs focusing on internally displaced persons and immigrants, stated: “August is always a reminder of the republic’s collapse and also the collapse of the entire generation and their aspirations and dreams.”

This two-year anniversary of the former Afghan government’s collapse is an indication of a “failed state-building mission in Afghanistan that can again be a lesson learned for the world in terms of pouring unlimited money into a country,” she added. An additional lesson she learned is that “democracies cannot be imposed by guns, and states can collapse very easily if the foundation of the state is not strong enough,” said Zadran who left Afghanistan in August 2021.

In 2020 during the negotiations for the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, Zadran was her country’s representative to the United Nations, advocating for meaningful peace and inclusion of women and youth in those negotiations. “I was amplifying Afghan voices and their concerns and demands regarding their peace negotiations,” she said.

Now, she pointed out, all Afghans in the diaspora and inside the country want elections. “They want a democratic regime,” she insisted. “They want political inclusivity and for every ethnic group to be a part of the government and they want women to be part of the government.”

Lastly, Zadran urged US diplomats and policymakers to stay connected with Afghans inside and outside Afghanistan. “Otherwise, I think this situation will continue and we will not see any positive changes,” she stated.

(Elaine Pasquini is a freelance journalist. Her reports appear in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and Nuze.Ink.)