By Sayed Madadi

When Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad embarked on his mission in September 2018 to end the American military engagement in Afghanistan, few people placed much hope in his efforts. Almost three years later, even fewer people could believe the staggering failure of the peace process he spearheaded as the Taliban entered Kabul uncontested. There was a fundamentally flawed process design at the core of that failure which not only upended the opportunities for reaching a political settlement but also contributed to the disastrous unraveling of the republican government. Three aspects of that process design were particularly consequential: A two-stage process that reduced the republic of Afghanistan to a subsidiary party; Ghani’s backchannel contacts with the Taliban; a lack of mediators and a lack of institutional framework for civil society engagement in the peace process.

Two-stage process

Delinking the withdrawal of foreign forces from a political settlement disrupted the balance of leverages and incentives required for any meaningful negotiations to progress. The Taliban insurgency had two key demands, which were the withdrawal of international forces and a Sharia-based governance structure replacing the Islamic republican system. Those demands were interrelated as the post-2004 constitutional order was a direct byproduct of the US-led international military intervention. The Taliban wanted not only the foreign troops to leave, but to erase any sign and legacy of their presence in the country. That was the logic behind their insistence on negotiating directly with the United States instead of a more direct adversary, the Kabul-based government. For them, the country Afghanistan had metamorphosed into after they were ousted from power in 2001 neither had the legitimacy to exist nor the merit to be sustained.

In that context, a process in which the US negotiated its withdrawal and left the Taliban and the Republic of Afghanistan to hammer out the details of a shared political future was fundamentally flawed and destined to fail. That arrangement redacted the entire peace process to the US-Taliban talks and made the other component of the process secondary to, dependent on, and an extension of those negotiations. The negative implications of such a design became more obvious during the so-called “intra-Afghanistan talks.” The Taliban often reminded the Republic’s negotiating team that they were at the table only to fulfill their commitment to the Americans rather than out of a genuine will to work towards a comprehensive peace agreement. Even on the Republic’s side, many thought that the fate of the negotiations had already been decided between the US and the Taliban.
The American commitment to a complete pullout before and regardless of a political settlement effectively left the Taliban with maximum leverage but minimum interest. The Taliban believed that it had resolved all points of difference in its talks with the US and had no need to see the direct negotiations through. The agenda of direct talks with the republic made that clear. In the republic’s calculus, it had more than 7000 Taliban members in custody—even after the release of 5000 prisoners in August 2020. The government was also the only authority to initiate the process of delisting the Taliban members from the UN sanctions lists. The Taliban, on the other hand, had not even included those issues in their agenda. It instead considered prisoner release and delisting as American commitments, and preconditions for their presence at the intra-Afghanistan table rather than an outcome of it. That left the republican team empty-handed, unable to offer anything the Taliban wanted in return for a ceasefire, a concession of extreme value to the republican constituency.

The two-stage process did not just give away the republic’s leverage against the Taliban. It also undermined the government in the country’s domestic political scene. Once the US committed to a full withdrawal, the authority and legitimacy of the government were challenged by political factions long before the Taliban arrived on the outskirts of the capital. Building the much-needed political consensus became incredibly difficult for Ashraf Ghani Administration as political actors bandwagoned on the American appeasement of the Taliban, trying to negotiate their mini-deals with the insurgency to protect their wealth and interest. The President’s divisive politics and stubbornly autocratic management further complicated that task and weakened the republic’s position at the table. This was clearly at play within the negotiating team where the political standing of the members’ patrons vis-à-vis the presidential palace in Kabul steered their relationship with the team’s leadership loyal to President Ghani.

Ghani’s backchannel contacts with the Taliban

The intra-Afghanistan negotiations could not produce a political settlement because of the limitations of a linear, single-track, and static negotiation table that suffered from a high trust deficit and a structural ineptness to address it. Personal relationships between negotiators of the two sides were utilized only towards personal objectives because the rigid process design could not harness them for the benefit of the official talks. At least on the republican side, most hid their communication with the Taliban. On several occasions, members had come under harsh criticism from their teammates for meeting with the Taliban ‘without authorization.’ As external events and stakeholders continuously derailed the formal talks, the entire process came to a halt for weeks simply because one of the parties did not show up at a scheduled meeting.

The process also lacked credible and defined safety nets and backchannels to break deadlocks and salvage the talks when the two negotiating parties could not make headways. Multiple actors either tried to offer backchannels or were approached by the parties to do so. However, without their explicit incorporation into the process design, such attempts remained ad hoc and ineffective. In September 2019, months after the State Ministry for Peace was formed, a senior British diplomat conveyed General Nick Carter, British Chief of the Defense Staff’s interest in operating a backchannel with the Pakistani Chief of Army, General Qamar Bajwa. Although Carter remained involved in Afghanistan affairs through his relationships with Ghani and Bajwa, his efforts, disconnected from the official negotiation process, left no positive impact.

Unlike the Taliban who seemed to listen to their advisors, the republican side dismissed most analysis and advice. Instead, it was steered by President Ghani’s political interests and his chief negotiator’s intellectual capacity, none of whom proved capable enough for the complex task at hand. 

Later, there were efforts by the American, German and Qatari special envoys to function as backchannels between the negotiating parties. However, they were often considered untrustworthy and partisan by both or at least one of the sides—Ghani government thought of the U.S. and Qatar as too sympathetic to the Taliban. Instead, his chief negotiator was in contact with a group of businessmen from Afghanistan in the Gulf that he thought had credibility with and influence over the Taliban. That also did not materialize in any positive impact. The only potentially effective backchannel, according to its participants, was established by Abdul Salam Rahimi, Ghani’s special envoy for peace and deputy chief negotiator. Mediated by a Doha-based think-tanker who claimed to have built some trust with the Taliban, Rahimi leveraged his family’s political ties to the Haqqanis in initiating a side conversation. As early as May 2021, Rahimi tabled the idea of a “peaceful transfer of power,” something that became center stage in discussions immediately preceding the fall of Kabul. Of course, the departure of Ghani and the Taliban’s uncontested takeover made it impossible to gauge whether those conversations were actually successful in forging an agreement even if sub-optimal.

Lack of institutional role for civil society

The overly simplified process could not incorporate constant demands for inclusivity and representation. The direct impact of that inability was the dissatisfaction of many constituencies who felt left out, and unheard, their interests and gains compromised by the talks. This also hindered the public legitimacy and buy-in of the process. This deficiency uniquely undermined the republican team as the process came under constant criticism from civil society, minorities, veteran groups, and other vulnerable constituencies.

In the absence of multiple and broad-based platforms of engagement and debate, there was little space for the public to pressure the negotiating parties, especially the Taliban, to negotiate more seriously and discuss pressing issues that could near the process to an eventual outcome. The stagnated table in Doha was incapable of fostering broader dialogues away from the interest-driven and confrontational negotiations. Although the government tried to mobilize its constituency, without formal linkages to the actual track-I talks, those efforts failed to bear fruits. For example, the High Council for National Reconciliation sent teams to several provinces to engage with communities, and the State Ministry for Peace established a Civil Society Coordination Board and a Women Advisory Board. Additionally, some NGOs and donor-sponsored initiatives such as the EU-funded Afghanistan Mechanism for Inclusive Peace (AMIP) also tried, all to no avail as they lacked institutional linkage to the actual negotiations, to create bridges between the formal negotiations and a much broader and diverse constituency.

Negotiation without mediation

The fourth important design deficiency that considerably contributed to the process’ failure in producing a political settlement was the absence of a third-party mediator. Rarely have peace negotiations succeeded without an impartial mutual interlocutor bridging the distrust between the parties. With suspicions in Kabul around the mostly secretive US-Taliban negotiations, President Ghani and his inner circle struggled to minimize Ambassador Khalilzad’s role in the then-upcoming intra-Afghanistan talks. However, as the talks neared, Qatar emerged as a more plausible and interested mediator or at least a facilitator. But Ghani considered Qatar only a stretched arm of the US, especially as the Gulf state saw the Afghanistan peace process as a diplomatic lifeline amid the blockade imposed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

While the Taliban’s rejection of mediation was understandable given their interest in stagnating and stalling the talks, the republican side’s opposition was confounding. With the clock on the American withdrawal ticking, it was obvious that prolonging the talks was hurting the Afghanistan government’s position. A mediator could have brought life-saving speed to the process. Many within the republican team seemed to have realized that since February 2021 and supported Qatar as a facilitator. However, despite constant nudging from the negotiators, Chief Negotiator Masoum Stanekzai refrained—as it only became clear in late June—from formally communicating the request to the Qatari government.

The other reason the lack of a third-party mediation contributed to the process’ failure was the dirt of technical capacity on both sides. Although the Taliban had much more strategic clarity about what they wanted from the talks and possessed better skills and in some ways even more experience in negotiations, their views of complex political and legal issues were very simplistic and rigid. The Taliban used their better negotiation techniques to push for those intransigent views, which made progress more difficult.

In the contact group meetings where the actual negotiation took place, it was obvious that the Taliban were coming with full preparation to counter the republic’s arguments. The republican side, on the other hand, lacked both the strategic clarity and negotiation techniques necessary to manage a process of such fragility and a conflict of such complexity. Strict hierarchy and political infighting disabled it from taking advantage of the available capacity in the negotiating team and the broader peace architecture. One example was their doubling down on religious reasoning against the Taliban’s insurgency and violence or in defense of democratic values, assuming that the Taliban would cease hostilities if they could provide one more irrefutable argument. They dismissed more nuanced arguments from politically less powerful voices who argued that it was falling into a trap where the Taliban forced their intellectual frameworks to drive the negotiations.

Unlike the Taliban who seemed to listen to their advisors, the republican side dismissed most analysis and advice. Instead, it was steered by President Ghani’s political interests and his chief negotiator’s intellectual capacity, none of whom proved capable enough for the complex task at hand. A credible third-party mediator could have helped the process progress by tabling creative ideas. It could also break gridlocks by applying iterative alternatives to conventional methods of negotiations. Equally important, a mediator could have kept the parties accountable against a timeline not necessarily driven by the US troops’ withdrawal.

The third important area where a mediator could have significantly contributed to the success of the process was in managing external stakeholders. The lack of international and regional consensus and the dismissal of allies’ views by the US incentivized many to try exerting influence directly to protect their interests. In addition to their ambassadors based in Kabul, many countries had their special envoys specifically tasked with engaging in the peace process. Such a crowded and chaotic scene took away the parties’ agency, especially of the republican side. The meetings in Moscow, Tehran, Beijing, Tashkent, and the Istanbul that eventually did not take place were examples of such an approach that derailed the process, took away the momentum and credibility from the Doha talks, and further undermined its prospects of success. A third-party mediator could have very well created centralized ownership of the process, channeled international engagements more constructively, and maintained focus in the negotiations.

Conclusion
It is hard to argue that had the process design addressed these three issues, it would have produced an outcome in the form of a comprehensive peace agreement. It is equally hard to discount the degree to which a flawed process design dimmed the prospects of a political settlement. Arguably, the poor design of the process also contributed to the disastrous and chaotic unravelling of the republican government in August 2021. The American decision to exclude the Afghanistan government from the withdrawal talks and commit to releasing the Taliban’s prisoners and removing sanctions took away from the republic the ‘fighting chance’ against the Taliban at the table and on the battlefield. Moreover, the absence of track-IIs and other support mechanisms further undermined representation and buy-in by minimizing public pressure on the negotiating parties. The absence of a credible backchannel also stagnated the talks in an environment of mistrust. Negotiations without a third-party mediator further prolonged the process and amplified the negative implications of the lack of technical capacity on both sides. Lacking a mediator, the process was constantly derailed by arbitrary and external deadlines and preferences. While the first shortcoming of the process design was uncorrectable from the beginning, the two other aspects could have easily been fixed at any point throughout the eleven months if there was political will. Although the process might have still failed even if the warnings about its simplicity and fragility were taken more seriously, it would have probably not collapsed the way it did and with the disastrous ramifications that it had.

Note: This essay was submitted as a discussion paper for a colloquium on “Why was a political settlement not achieved in Afghanistan?” convened on 15 – 16 July 2022, by the US Institute of Peace and the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies at the USIP headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Read at Negotiating Ideas

By Shoaib Rahim

Shoaib Rahim is a Toronto-based associate professor at the American University of Afghanistan who served as the acting and deputy mayor of Kabul from 2016 to 2019. He also lectured at University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.

My life’s journey brought me across an ocean to Canada last year, where I was issued permanent residency. Now, I am nearly halfway toward becoming a Canadian. But it is not lost on me that, despite cultural, linguistic and religious commonalities, I had no such path to naturalization after a decade of living in Afghanistan’s neighbour, Pakistan, during the Soviet invasion and war that began in 1979, nor in Iran, just to the west, where my family lived for four years during the first Taliban rule in the 1990s.

An estimated 3.6 million Afghans live in Pakistan, with a substantial number from eastern and southern Afghanistan. They mostly speak Pashto, are almost entirely Muslim and share a common history with Pakistanis, with many even sharing family ties from before Partition. Over the course of multiple large waves of migration that began in 1979, many Afghans in Pakistan have learned Urdu, formed families, and raised children who have never known life in Afghanistan. Many have established successful businesses, creating jobs and contributing to local economies.

But while many Pakistanis have been welcoming and generous to a people with whom they empathize, their government has systemically put paths to citizenship, and the basic legal protections that come with it, out of reach for Afghans. Islamabad, which once viewed Afghan migrants as a means to extract more funding from donor agencies and western capitals, now blames them for unemployment while pushing outdated narratives that they pose safety and national security risks. This fear-mongering has led to threats, intimidation and yet more undignified treatment.

Worse, in October, Pakistan’s government gave the estimated 1.7 million undocumented Afghans fewer than 30 days to return to Afghanistan or face deportation. That deadline passed last week, and now, even Afghans waiting for resettlement, those born in Pakistan and those with proper documentation are reportedly being caught up in the mass expulsion.

Afghans in Iran, meanwhile, almost entirely speak Farsi and many are Shia Muslims, sharing a love for Rumi’s poetry and a civilizational identity – yet the situation there is even worse. Even if Afghans are born in Iran, they are typically not given permanent residency; recently, nationality has been offered only to those who are willing to serve in the Islamic republic’s regional proxy wars. Instead, Afghans face xenophobia and outright racism in Iran, which seem to serve the populist narratives of the country’s political class. Until 2015, Afghan children didn’t even have the right to education. Now, Tehran is also promising to deport the 5 million Afghans it claims are living in Iran “illegally.”

So we must ask: despite the heritage shared by these communities and their host countries, why is there no legal path to naturalization available to Afghans? Is it too much to ask for the same treatment that Iran’s and Pakistan’s citizens ask of other countries elsewhere?

After the fall of the Taliban in 2001, many returned to Afghanistan, in the hopes of writing a new chapter for their country. Young people went to Afghanistan for the first time to discover and shape what it means to be from there, and worked to lay a better foundation for its growth and prosperity. Boys who learned cricket in Pakistan’s refugee camps formed a formidable national Afghan team that defeated Pakistan’s own mighty team in the World Cup last month. So clearly, there is potential in these communities. But the return of the Taliban prompted another massive exodus, and now Afghanistan is mired in a humanitarian crisis, made even worse by years-long drought and multiple earthquakes last month. This is the dire situation that Pakistan and Iran are sending Afghans to.

The moral position is for Iran and Pakistan to offer Afghans – people with whom they have so much in common – a meaningful route to the same protections owed to any of their citizens. Instead, these so-called neighbours are abdicating their responsibility toward the millions of people displaced over decades of conflicts they have, at least in part, inflamed. It is a great shame.

By Shoaib Rahim

Shoaib Rahim is a Toronto-based associate professor at the American University of Afghanistan who was the acting and deputy mayor of Kabul from 2016 to 2019. He has also served as senior adviser to Afghanistan’s minister of defence and senior adviser to the state ministry for peace, which oversaw peace negotiations between the government and the Taliban.

In 1979, when Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan to crush the local resistance against its brutal Communist government, the entire world was inspired to get involved in the country. Then, more than 20 years later, the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, brought Afghanistan back to global relevance as it became the epicentre of the War on Terror. And at the start of both campaigns, we, the people of Afghanistan, were darlings of the West, celebrated in global capitals as courageous and resilient people who fought for our land and freedom despite the odds – first against the communist bloc and then against global terror.

Yet both times, as soon as political interest shifted elsewhere, we were forgotten, and left to our own ruin. And the people of Afghanistan’s most basic yet most significant failure in the decades after 2001 was that we lost ownership of our own war – of its direction and its priorities.

Today, I am following the war in Ukraine from afar, with great sympathy and respect for its people. But I have also seen international pledging conferences for the Ukrainian military, highly publicized visits by world leaders to Ukrainian cities, and globe-trotting tours by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. I have seen some people throw blind support for the war effort without asking any difficult questions; I have seen the censoring of dissent and any critique rebuked as unpatriotic. And as I see all this, I am unfortunately reminded of what Afghanistan went through, and how things could have been very different. I wish to be very wrong here, but I can’t help but see Kabul in Kyiv. I hope that Ukrainians do not lose control of their war.

The people of Afghanistan didn’t lose theirs overnight. Over the past two decades, the Afghanistan National Defence and Security Forces (ANDSF) became increasingly dependent on Western funding to pay for training for our volunteer national army and national police, for the supply and maintenance of arms and ammunition, and for modern technology that would allow us to do surveillance and reconnaissance on the battlefield. At first, we engaged with NATO decision-makers and confronted or negotiated with them if we disagreed on an approach, but that eventually gave way to a culture of silence and appeasement, where decisions were rarely challenged. The money kept flowing into the coffers of the small number of military contractors in Afghanistan and their political patronage networks.

Our political class’s fatal mistake was a failure to recognize that the alignment of national and international interests is never meant to be permanent. As a result, the Afghan government was unable to maintain consensus domestically over the course of the last two decades. This was most evident in decisions around the ANDSF, which developed extreme financial dependence on the West’s funding that eventually compromised its ability to independently plan and execute. The world saw the consequences of this as soon as the U.S. signed the Doha deal to exit Afghanistan: A lack of independent preparation, combined with the U.S.’s withholding of intelligence, logistical and air support to the ANDSF, led to operational paralysis on the front lines and swift collapse in the face of the advancing Taliban. Maintaining a minimum level of combat and logistical independence and military capability over the years would have put our security forces in a much stronger position.

Then there’s the matter of international aid. Over the decades, governments from around the world have proudly committed billions of dollars to a wide variety of sectors in Afghanistan – and yet they have little to show for their investment at the end of the day. Despite the aid, our country never managed to recover from the economic devastation of the 1980s from fighting the Soviets and the civil wars of the 1990s; even before the Taliban’s return, Afghanistan remained on the bottom of most development indicators. Even as the international community continues to boast about the ocean of wealth it spent on Afghanistan, it is also quick to lay blame for the exorbitant spends on a lack of technical capacity in the country, or on local corruption.

On a national level, we failed to recognize early on that the global pledges in reconstruction aid were not intended to primarily serve the recipient country – they were meant to support the complex network of organizations in the foreign aid industrial complex. There is supposed to be a trickle-down of funds from the top of this food chain, but in Afghanistan, that flow was limited, and the funding’s effects were unclear. Even as the beneficiaries were left largely in the dark, the polished project appraisals and closeout reports kept being submitted and approved by the various treasuries that unquestioningly doled out these funds in the name of Afghanistan.

Nowhere was this nexus of problems and attitudes more apparent than in Kabul, the beating heart of the country. When I was serving as the acting mayor of Kabul, my team and I worked to reform the city’s governance, investing in its infrastructure and making the city more livable for its nearly 6 million residents. But it was a constant struggle between indifferent and disconnected donors, local power brokers, corrupt parliamentarians, and a population that had grown used to free money, and had difficulty accepting responsibility for its own expenses.

Most of these problems were beyond Afghans’ control. But what was in our control as a people was our ability to hold ourselves accountable.

As a people, we needed to develop and lift up genuinely patriotic leaders – Afghans who would prioritize national interest above their own political goals – but we failed to do so, and had to endure the deception, incompetence and cowardice of those who occupied those positions instead. Our civil society, meanwhile, struggled to rid itself of its short-term, project-oriented mindset. The media and universities did manage to create spaces where difficult questions were asked, but even those institutions could not break free from the dominant mindset of not rocking the boat out of fear that the well would dry up. It made reform attempts increasingly difficult within the government, as there was little incentive for those with their hands in the cookie jar to change their ways.

The public officials who embezzled and looted went largely unpunished, and Afghan society celebrated people who had accrued wealth, regardless of how those gains were gotten. This further shrank the space for dissent and perpetuated the exploitation and corruption of aid funds – in the public sector, to be sure, but also in the not-for-profit sector, which was ironically a very profitable enterprise that has produced some very wealthy individuals over the past two decades.

If we, in Afghanistan, had collectively held ourselves accountable – if we had asked the difficult questions about where and how the funds were being spent, if we had confronted the corrupt in a sustained and meaningful way, if we had supported whistle-blowers, reformers and journalists – we would have prevented the deadly erosion of trust from within. Instead, with the few benefitting at the expense of the many, this sense of distrust and pessimism infested our institutions and society at large and undermined the legitimacy of our fledgling democratic order. This was a moral failure, plain and simple – and one that many Afghans I have spoken to have since come to regret.

On a strategic level, the biggest failure on our part was the lack of consensus on a Plan B in a scenario where NATO would completely withdraw their forces. Our politicians, businessmen, and civil society chose to believe that the gravy train would simply never end, and so were caught off-guard and unable to come together at the most critical time. The writing was on the wall – NATO had even set a date for its withdrawal – and yet we chose to ignore it. Members of our national security forces paid the ultimate price: more than 70,000 lives were lost to the war fighting the Taliban, al-Qaeda and Islamic State. They were the first to be abandoned – not just by the world, but also by Afghanistan’s so-called leaders and, to an extent, Afghan society at large.

We did not realize, until it was too late, how quickly everything could change – how terms like “strategic ally,” “shoulder-to-shoulder” and “as long as it takes” all lose their meaning when priorities change in faraway capitals. A so-called peace process was forced upon us and essentially served us into the hands of the enemy.

If we had been bold and charted a different path early on, based on a clear understanding of the limits of international support and the ever-changing flow of geopolitical interests, the country might have been able to avoid today’s scenario: being ruled by a militant group responsible for the death and destruction of tens of thousands over the past two decades. I hope that Ukrainians take the lessons of Afghanistan to heart, so that they do not experience a similar fate.

Read the Globe and Mail

By Barry Salaam

The regime’s approach to media provides a rare chance to advance freedom of expression and push for greater civic space.

Since regaining power two years ago, the Taliban have largely discarded Afghanistan’s democratic institutions but have taken a somewhat accommodating, albeit contradictory, approach toward independent media. Instead of banning independent media altogether, they have implemented regulatory restrictions and punitive measures to limit free speech and control the media environment. This policy approach seems to be part of an evolving communication strategy that helped enable the group’s rise to power. Despite all the bad news coming out of Afghanistan, resilient, creative journalists and media outlets provide reason for some guarded optimism. The international community should do what it can to support the media sector, which is essential for advocating for citizen rights and providing an information lifeline to Afghans.

Free Media’s Emergence

The rise of independent media in Afghanistan was one of the most remarkable and celebrated achievements of the post-Taliban democratic era. Once an isolated country with no free press or internet access, Afghanistan quickly embraced the information age. Over the course of a few years, the country became an inspiring model of free media in the region, with unprecedented growth in news, entertainment channels, print publications and online platforms. Before the Taliban takeover, 543 local and national media outlets operated across Afghanistan.

The media also promoted pluralism in a highly fragmented society, drove democratic change and helped to empower women. New constitutional rights enabled marginalized ethnic and religious communities to establish for the first time their own outlets and pursue equal rights and opportunities. 

In a culturally diverse society often beset by political turbulence and a compromised rule of law, free media emerged as a powerful tool for challenging corrupt officials and advancing government accountability.

The Taliban’s Evolving Communication Strategy

With the media landscape undergoing significant transformation after 2001, the Taliban began adapting its information strategy, as early as 2005. A notable example of its adaptive approach was the incorporation of visual communication tools in propaganda campaigns, including pictures, drawings, videos and online platforms, which the movement had opposed or banned during its first reign from 1996 to 2001.

In addition, several other distinctive elements characterized the Taliban’s evolving communication strategy, enabling the group to outperform its opponents.

Consistency and Resonance

From the outset, the Taliban framed its war as a jihad to expel foreign “invaders” and establish a Shariah-based Islamic system, replacing the U.S.-backed government. This overarching strategic goal remained consistent throughout the insurgency and was central to the Taliban’s master narrative. In addition, their messaging employed cultural, religious and nationalistic codes and frames such as colonialism, occupation, infidels, religious obligation, martyrdom and sovereignty, among others. These terms were used to draw parallels with the historical victories of Afghans in previous holy wars, further enhancing narrative resonance.

Targeted Messaging

Devising targeted approaches, the group tailored messaging to specific audiences with the aim of achieving specific outcomes. For example, they spread intimidating shabnamah (or night letters) to deter locals from aiding the “infidels” and produced videos of heroic attacks to glorify jihad and ramp up recruitment.

Through media manipulation, the Taliban sought to incite outrage by highlighting culturally sensitive issues like home searches, night raids, civilian casualties and the propagation of Western values. They also exploited people’s grievances around the endemic corruption of the state, and their political alienation, to widen the state-society gap while positioning themselves as potential saviors.

Media Weaponization and Savviness

By 2008, the movement had already developed a complex communications strategy. They utilized traditional means like night letters, religious sermons, poetry and print publications and leveraged modern methods including multilingual websites, cell phones and DVDs.

With the rising popularity of digital media post-2009, the Taliban’s sophisticated approach expanded, using platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and encrypted apps like Telegram and WhatsApp for broader outreach, real-time updates and interaction with the local and foreign media.

With hundreds of aggressive social media accounts, the media-savvy insurgents countered NATO messaging, demonized opponents, threatened critics and projected power.

Through these methods, they pervaded cyberspace and maintained a palpable psychological presence.

Exploiting Weaknesses and Opportunities

Ineffective messaging by the United States and Afghan governments also gave insurgents an advantage. President Hamid Karzai’s calling the Taliban “brothers” and President Ashraf Ghani’s hesitance to call them “enemies” were particularly self-defeating. Washington’s focus on troop withdrawal from 2009 on undermined any appearance of long-term resolve and negated potential gains. These inconsistencies provided rich material for the Taliban to underscore its own resolve.

Premature conciliatory overtures since 2010, including the 2013 opening of a Taliban office in Doha, pushed insurgents into the political limelight. Starting in October 2018, official U.S.-Taliban talks further boosted Taliban legitimacy. Upon securing the landmark withdrawal deal, insurgents astutely entered Afghanistan’s mainstream media and expanded international outreach. The agreement validated the Taliban’s anti-occupation narrative and won them the information war.

Opting For a Controlled Media Environment

The Taliban have strictly controlled non-state media since August 2021. This approach likely stems from the communication strategy and media exploitation skills crucial in their ascent to power.

Early in the insurgency, the Taliban proclaimed that "wars today cannot be won without media," and to this day, they seem to value the media’s utility as a strategic tool, and a weapon, to promote their narrative and legitimacy.

However, the Taliban’s view of media is solely utilitarian, devoid of respect for democratic values. During the insurgency, they never wavered to threaten, attack or even massacre journalists. Post-takeover, they slashed media freedom using censorship and intimidation.

Yet, the Taliban's control over independent media is not absolute, a situation potentially shaped by two key considerations. First, pushing for total control might lead to the closure or exile of more independent channels, a scenario the Taliban likely wishes to avoid due to losing their leverage and control. Second, outlets driven into exile have often reemerged with more assertive voices countering the Taliban narrative.

Thus, the Taliban appear to have opted for a relatively accommodating approach, allowing media operations in exchange for enhanced control and self-promotion. Media within the country also understand that to avoid retribution it is necessary to navigate a fine line between objectivity and fair treatment.

This balance presents a conundrum for the Taliban and a potential opportunity for the media to incrementally push for greater freedom. What dynamics may eventually shape a new equilibrium in the media space?

Tightening The Media Noose

Since August 2021, advocacy organizations have reported over 300 incidents against media personnel including violence, imprisonment and surprise raids. Summons, arrests and punitive measures are carried out mainly by the intelligence authorities against local and foreign journalists deemed non-compliant with regulations.

The Taliban have issued multiple decrees, vaguely worded guidelines and verbal instructions drawing ethical and Islamic boundaries for journalists, banning music and entertainment and suppressing news related to citizen protests and resistance forces. These rules also require female journalists to cover their faces and work in segregated spaces.

In a July 2022 decree, Taliban Emir Haibatullah Akhundzada expressly cautioned against criticizing Taliban authorities. Later, in a public tweet, his notorious minister of higher education warned that undermining the emirate, either by speech, pen or action is “punishable by death.”

With no laws governing the free press, authorities across the country have free reign to censor and deal with the media as they see fit. Some provincial officials even demand review and approval of content prior to publication. The suspension of the Republic’s mass media law obstructs legal boundaries, leaving journalists uncertain where to draw the line to avoid reprisals or seek legal protection against persecution.

To control the flow of information, the Taliban heavily scrutinize media content, issue warnings, implement corrective measures and limit access to information deemed harmful to their reign or reputation. They have banned and expelled several popular national and international news services including Hasht-e-Sob daily, Etilat-e-Roz newspapers, Kabul News television, Radio Liberty, BBC and Deutsche Welle.

Media advocacy organizations on the ground report that 40% (200) of media outlets, including 55 TV channels, 109 radio stations, 21 news agencies and 15 newspapers, have been forced to close due to repressive policies and financial struggles. This has led to 60% (4,932) of journalists and media workers losing their jobs. Additionally, 67% (914) of female journalists are out of work, and outlets led by women have dwindled from 54 to 10. 

A rapidly contracting economy, aid reduction, cumbersome taxation and the widespread ban on income-generating entertainment shows have compounded the media's sustainability crisis. Some outlets have reported as much as an 80% drop in their revenues since 2021. Surviving outlets also face a growing capacity deficit due to a lack of experienced journalists and editors, most of whom have left the country.

Emerging Trends and Pushbacks

Still, journalists have resiliently persevered to keep media alive. The continued operation of major national television and radio stations like Tolo, Shamshad, 1TV, Ariana, Killied and Salam Watandar is remarkable. In addition to national outlets, over 30 local televisions and 100 community radio stations operate across Afghanistan. Cable networks that carry foreign news and entertainment channels, including Turkish and Indian, have been largely unaffected by restrictions.

Additionally, media remains one of the few select sectors where women are still permitted to work.

Systematic harassment has undeniably led to increased self-censorship and the media cannot dismiss legally binding restrictive edicts. Nonetheless, journalists have time and again ignored potential reprisals and pushed the boundaries by raising critical voices, covering citizen protests and questioning Taliban edicts such as bans on women's education and work.

Where access to information is denied, media intelligently resort to secondary sources of information, including social media and foreign-based news agencies.

Prominent advocacy organizations like the National Journalists Union, NAI and the Independent Journalists Association are reestablishing their presence. Notably, the Journalists Safety Committee (AJSC) has secured a seat at the Taliban's media violations commission and has led numerous safety and resiliency training nationwide. AJSC also assisted with the reopening of Voice of Women radio in Badakhshan province in April.

Another exciting trend expected to deter Taliban from further media repression or shutdown is the emergence of digital outlets and advocacy organizations in exile. Many news outlets or reporters forced by Taliban into exile have reemerged with stronger and more critical voices.

The exiled Hasht-e-Sob and Etilat-e-Roz publications are rapidly recovering online audiences. VOA and Radio Azadi may no longer be conveniently accessible on FM networks but they have extended their broadcasts online, as well as on medium and shortwave frequencies, ensuring that they remain relatively accessible.

In addition, a number of prominent journalists have launched new digital, foreign-based outlets including Amu TV, Chashm News, Kabul Now, Farsi Times, Sicht TV and ABN.

On the advocacy side, the Afghanistan Journalists Center, which runs a press freedom tracker, has shifted its base to Belgium, and more entities are emerging across different continents.

Media in exile play a significant role in countering the Taliban's disinformation campaign and taking the first shot at sensitive news stories, effectively paving the way for further follow-up coverage by local media. There also seems to be information sharing between foreign and local outlets, giving rise to a collaborative, hybrid media approach.

Online platforms continue to play an indispensable role in providing citizens with easier access to information. In addition, digital outlets have allowed audiences to record events and share valuable footage with media for wider public dissemination — a rising trend in citizen journalism.

There are no reliable statistics but de facto authorities have confirmed that at least one-quarter of the population has access to the internet via mobile phones. This corresponds with Meta's figures that put Facebook users in Afghanistan at roughly seven million.

Pressing Forward

The Taliban's strategic decision to allow media operations in exchange for enhanced control and self-promotion contrasts sharply with their 1990s rule. This shift provides journalists and the international community a rare chance to advance freedom of expression and push for greater civic space.

To achieve this goal, the international community should provide comprehensive technical and financial support to the media sector, with a particular focus on local media, and those pursuing a hybrid approach.

In addition:

• It is vital to prioritize the protection and empowerment of female journalists through improved training, resilience building, salary and professional coordination. Local outlets should be incentivized to hire female journalists and produce content related to women's rights.
• While pressuring the Taliban to respect free speech, human rights organizations should monitor incidents and advocate for the right of journalists who are mistreated, imprisoned or prosecuted.
• Local professional unions and associations must be sustained and strengthened in order to defend free speech and advocate for journalists' rights inside the country.
• Protecting journalists from intrusive surveillance requires technical support to shield sensitive information and confidential sources. Journalists should also be equipped with encryption tools and VPNs to bypass barriers that restrict access to information.
• A workable emergency mechanism must be put in place to ensure the identification, sheltering and safe evacuation and resettlement of journalists faced with life-threatening dangers.
• Thinking ahead on possible internet-related restrictions, it is advisable to engage with tech companies to explore possibilities for continued, seamless public access.

The Taliban are fundamentally opposed to democracy and its underlying values. Noting their relentless rollback of the democratic progress attained over the past two decades, there is little cause for hope in what lies ahead. Nonetheless, it is both pragmatic and wise to protect and enhance what remains of Afghans’ fundamental rights and liberties and push for improved conditions until a more favorable opportunity arises.

Read at The United States Institute of Peace

By Omaid Sharifi, Kabir Mokamel and Bilquis Ghani

This article is part of an ongoing series "Dispatches from Afghanistan" profiling Afghan artists and their experiences since the rise of the Taliban. Find all of the profiles so far here and a list of resources to help Afghan creatives here.

The past 40 years of war and instability in Afghanistan has cost the country any semblance of unity. Even so, different groups in the country have worked hard over the past two decades to heal the social and cultural ruptures left by conflict. Kabul in particular was experiencing a nascent cultural blooming despite the many challenges its people faced.

But the working conditions for artists—members of Afghanistan’s budding civil society, which included our own public art organisation ArtLords and many others—have not been easy. Each day was shadowed by fear and not knowing whether, when we left our homes each morning, we would come back alive. We experienced the loss of artists, journalists and activists who were brutally killed in explosions, including three members of our own ArtLords.

Despite all of this, we loved our work. We knew that we had to do our part to heal our wounded country—it was our responsibility. We sought to ease the pain and suffering of our people through setting up an art gallery, art therapy sessions, music concerts and public murals.

Armed with hope, paint and a dream

So much is lost through times of conflict: life, economy, infrastructure, educational institutions and the many other elements of a thriving society. As Afghans we were also working to reknit the fabric of our communities, the ties that bind us. But after decades of war, perspectives had formed that were strangling the life out of the potential we saw and evidence of violence was still all around us.

Armed with hope, paint and a dream, ArtLords sought to transform Kabul. We realised we could take blast walls—the concrete barriers constructed to protect buildings from improvised explosives—which had such a negative psychological impact on the city’s people, and convert them into a positive visual experience. By depicting subjects on the walls that concerned ordinary citizens, ArtLords created a space where social issues could be expressed and discussed in the street. It gave a visual voice to the voiceless.

For those of us who left our homeland, the exit from Afghanistan was a dramatic and surreal experience. During those last few days prior to leaving Kabul, the city that we loved had become so strange. Most of our friends left for an uncertain future and destination, and with each departure Kabul became less familiar; each person took a piece of the city with them. Afghanistan had always been home, but for the first time there was a sense of homelessness there.

Cruel fanatics

Outside of Afghanistan there was a collective gasp of horror among the diaspora, many of whom have family, friends and fond memories there, in reaction to the Taliban’s takeover. We have watched with disappointment, anger and deep sadness as the headlines roll out. Reports of cruelty by fanatics meted out to a vulnerable people far away are as horrific as they are disconnected and unrelatable. For those of us with roots in Afghanistan, with identities forged through its folklore, song, memory and language, the Taliban’s return is a betrayal of the Afghan people, a religion with which many identify deeply, the potential of their nation and the promises of a democratic government and its allies.

That the Taliban could make such sweeping gains in just days shows the precarity of the situation in Afghanistan all along. To treat the Taliban as if they were only a problem created by Afghans, because of Afghans, and for Afghans to clean up is not only selective amnesia, but will cost thousands of lives. These are lives that have, for 20 years, been striving to build a country; now they are striving to defend it, yet again.

Pessimism is a luxury. But for people living in Afghanistan, that is never an option. Maintaining the will to thrive amid yet another cycle of violence and instability requires one to dig very deeply. Where any semblance of humanity seems to have evaporated into piles of smoke and ash, art is the thread that echoes what could be. It is in the creative process that beginnings are born.

• Omaid Sharifi and Kabir Mokamel are co-founders of ArtLords (artlords.co), a Kabul-based organisation promoting public art for social transformation, started in 2014. Bilquis Ghani is the chair and co-founder of Sydney-based Hunar Symposia (hunarsymposia.com), exploring art through conflict

Read at The Art Newspaper