{"id":11358,"date":"2021-07-01T12:32:31","date_gmt":"2021-07-01T10:32:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/?p=11358"},"modified":"2021-07-01T13:54:28","modified_gmt":"2021-07-01T11:54:28","slug":"the-people-were-leaving-behind-in-afghanistan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/2021\/07\/the-people-were-leaving-behind-in-afghanistan\/","title":{"rendered":"The People We\u2019re Leaving Behind in Afghanistan"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\"\"Steve Coll<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n

The New Yorker<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Young Afghans defied the Taliban and signed on to reconstruction efforts, only to learn that U.S. and NATO forces would be abruptly withdrawn.<\/span><\/h2>\n

On September 3, 2019, Abdul Samad Amiri, the acting head of the\u00a0Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission<\/a>\u2019s office in his home province of Ghor,\u00a0posted a reflective message<\/a>\u00a0on Facebook. He was just shy of thirty. He had grown up amid \u201cthe trauma of more than 40 years\u2019 civil war and feel wholeheartedly the affliction imposed on my people,\u201d he wrote. Yet he was optimistic. \u201cI can\u2019t ignore or forget the dreams for Afghanistan\u2019s future and her place as a part of this world.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Despite the difficulties, I owe my life to this land and will work for its betterment so long as I live.\u201d<\/p>\n

Later that day, while Amiri was travelling by car from\u00a0Kabul<\/a>\u00a0to Ghor,\u00a0Taliban<\/a>\u00a0militants kidnapped and then, two days later, murdered him\u2014one more death among hundreds of assassinations targeting rights advocates, journalists, civil servants, and other unarmed, younger Afghans who had seized the opportunities created by the American-led invasion of their country, in 2001. Nine months after Amiri\u2019s murder, Fatima Khalil, a commission employee who was twenty-four, and a driver, Ahmad Jawid Folad, forty-one,\u00a0were killed<\/a>\u00a0when unknown assailants placed a bomb on the road, targeting their vehicle; the explosive detonated as they drove through Kabul.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe loss of my colleagues really broke me in ways that I had never thought about before,\u201d Shaharzad Akbar, the chairwoman of the commission, told me recently. Akbar, who is thirty-four, was appointed to her position about two years ago. \u201cDealing with the anxiety of all this, for all of us in the leadership team\u2014we feel responsible, but there is very little we can do to keep people safe,\u201d she said. Colleagues sleep in the office for weeks on end, and it is an all but full-time job to sift through and evaluate the threats.<\/p>\n

As the\u00a0Biden Administration<\/a>\u00a0withdraws\u00a0the last American troops<\/a>\u00a0from Afghanistan, the Independent Human Rights Commission is one of the many civil institutions now left to confront a new era of insecurity and uncertainty. The commission was created by a provision of the Bonn Agreement of December, 2001, when, immediately following the Taliban\u2019s overthrow, the United States, European allies, Iran, and Pakistan met with anti-Taliban Afghan leaders, exiles, and regional strongmen to work out an accord for an interim government. The Bonn conference selected Hamid Karzai to lead the new government; the creation of the commission was also a provision of the accord. Since the Taliban have mounted a comeback, starting in 2006, the commission has been a regular target of threats and violence.<\/p>\n

Akbar is one of the Bonn generation of Afghans who did not join the war that spread as the Taliban seized control of rural areas and sent death squads into cities, but who sought to build a revived society, at once traditional and modernizing\u2014a society that\u00a0nato<\/em>\u00a0aspired to enable through security and investment. She forged a career that would have been unimaginable during the years of Taliban rule. Her father, a leftist journalist, had edited several publications before leaving with his family for Pakistan, in 1999, to escape the civil war and the rising influence of the Taliban. He introduced his daughter to \u201cprominent women and their lives, through books,\u201d she said. It was \u201cvery important to him that I was aware of feminism.\u201d<\/p>\n

The family returned to Afghanistan in February, 2002. Akbar, who had honed her study of English in Pakistan, enrolled at Kabul University, and then was accepted as a transfer student to Smith College, where she studied anthropology and graduated cum laude. Later, she earned a master\u2019s degree in international development at the University of Oxford.<\/p>\n

\n
She returned to Kabul during the first term of the Obama Administration<\/a>, a time when the U.S. was investing heavily in its state-building ambitions, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars annually into agriculture, drug eradication, education, and other sectors. But Akbar and her friends\u2014who were, she said, \u201cvery young and idealistic\u201d\u2014became disillusioned with the way that some of the groups involved were using the money. \u201cI could see that a lot of these organizations were very detached from local realities,\u201d she said. \u201cI felt that Afghans should have a greater say.\u201d<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

She was the kind of well-educated, next-generation Afghan that President\u00a0Ashraf Ghani<\/a>\u00a0sought to lure into government after he was elected, in 2014. Akbar served on his National Security Council, working on the peace process, an initially fitful and fractured effort to develop talks between Taliban leaders and Afghans associated with the Kabul government. From the start, negotiators aligned with Kabul were divided over how far to go to accommodate the Taliban\u2019s extremist views, particularly about the role of women. In 2019, Akbar participated in discussions with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, concerning victims\u2019 rights, human rights, women\u2019s rights, and freedom of expression. \u201cThey had some prepared statements, and they didn\u2019t want to go deeper,\u201d she recalled. The international community \u201cdid the same,\u201d offering gestural statements about protecting rights that elided hard questions about what accommodating the Taliban would require.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the Taliban are willing to engage, if they are willing to have deep discussions, if they are willing to negotiate\u2014that hasn\u2019t been determined yet,\u201d Akbar told me, adding that, if they are, \u201cthere are areas of common ground.\u201d The rights of children and war victims \u201care perhaps easier to talk about before we move to issues like freedom of expression and women\u2019s rights.\u201d Still, in Doha, \u201csome of the discussion was premature,\u201d she said. The Taliban \u201cthink they\u2019ve won and they will have the last say, anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n

Soon after that round of talks, Ghani selected Akbar to chair the commission. It runs offices in fourteen provinces and enjoys a measure of freedom to criticize government policy. Over the years, however, its campaigning for human rights has been undermined by the impunity enjoyed by Afghan strongmen commanding militias and bodyguards who have abused civilians but have never faced justice. \u201cThe fact that the culture of impunity was not tackled for political reasons really discredited the whole agenda\u2014the entire human-rights agenda,\u201d Akbar said. \u201cThere are so many Afghans who were victims of war crimes who will never see justice.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think there should be a reckoning among the international community, and among Afghans,\u201d she said, \u201cabout what went wrong, and what went right.\u201d She continued, \u201cWith the women\u2019s rights agenda, I often wonder\u2014yes, there\u2019s a greater sense of empowerment, and there are better laws, but to what extent were our agendas responsive to people\u2019s needs and priorities?\u201d<\/p>\n

In an age of renewed competition between dictatorships and democracies, self-reflective questioning about the integrity and the viability of the global human-rights regime\u2014and how to strengthen it\u2014could hardly be more urgent. Regarding Afghanistan, however, these are not questions in which the Biden Administration has shown much interest. Having made a risky and swift decision to withdraw all U.S. forces from the country this year, Joe Biden is understandably anxious to deflect responsibility for what may come next and to signal to Americans that it\u2019s up to the Afghans now. \u201cAfghans are going to have to decide their future, what they want,\u201d the President said on June 25th, when Ghani was on a visit to Washington. Biden said that Afghanistan\u2019s \u201csenseless violence has to stop\u201d\u2014a distanced formulation that risked giving the impression that the Taliban\u2019s attempt at armed revolution was not the main cause of that violence.<\/p>\n

U.S. veterans of the war and members of Congress are pressuring the White House to do more to protect the tens of thousands of interpreters, drivers, and other support workers who directly aided the U.S. military and government after 2001, and who are now vulnerable to Taliban vengeance. Last week, the Biden Administration said that it is preparing a plan to move thousands of interpreters and military-support personnel outside the country while they wait for U.S. visa applications to be processed. Yet that plan will not protect the countless other Afghans who lashed their lives to the ideals and the hopes of the U.S.-led invasion. That includes the young urbanites of Akbar\u2019s generation who defied the Taliban and signed on to a Sisyphean reconstruction effort in the midst of war, only to find, after years of violence and disappointment, that U.S. and\u00a0nato<\/em>\u00a0forces\u2014which are, because of their uncontested airpower, the only forces that can reliably keep the Taliban out of the cities\u2014would be abruptly withdrawn.<\/p>\n

President Biden has now pledged a large package of security assistance and humanitarian aid to the Kabul government. But recent Taliban advances, spreading fear, and deteriorating security forecasts have touched off what looks like a downward spiral, in which vital noncombat American support on the ground, such as\u00a0contractors who maintain Afghan aircraft<\/a>, will pull out alongside U.S. soldiers. Last week in Washington, Ghani said that his job now is to \u201cmanage the consequences\u201d of the U.S. withdrawal\u2014a technocrat\u2019s description of an existential struggle that seems, for now, to be running against him.<\/p>\n

Akbar told me that she is not \u201canti-withdrawal; I\u2019m all for it,\u201d but that the way the Biden Administration announced its decision\u2014linking it to the anniversary of September 11th, for example\u2014showed \u201cvery little consideration about the impact on a very fragile peace process\u201d and on the Afghan population. Her greatest fear is \u201call-out war,\u201d such as that which engulfed the country during the nineteen-nineties, a conflict laced with mass killings, rape, and other atrocities.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s little reflection on failures and America\u2019s role in these failures,\u201d Akbar said. \u201cThat\u2019s frustrating to watch. We are being left with a huge mess. We are being told to deal with it mostly on our own. Of course, it\u2019s our responsibility. It\u2019s our country. But it\u2019s not a mess we created on our own.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steve Coll The New Yorker Young Afghans defied the Taliban and signed on to reconstruction efforts, only to learn that U.S. and NATO forces would be abruptly withdrawn. On September 3, 2019, Abdul Samad Amiri, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11359,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,85,1132,48],"tags":[678],"class_list":["post-11358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-afghanistan","category-human-rights","category-war-and-imperialism","category-war-and-peace","tag-justice","country-afghanistan","country-usa","Documents-statements-multimedia"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11358"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11358\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11360,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11358\/revisions\/11360"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}