IIn Afghanistan, the international community is faced with a number of extremely bad options. Almost two years after taking power, the Taliban have built a repressive system, sidelined critics and disenfranchised women. The most recent highlight of this development is the work ban for Afghan women, which now also applies to UN organizations. So the United Nations must violate its own charter and core principles by no longer employing Afghan women.
German aid money will also only go through men’s hands for the most part. For a minister who intends to pursue a feminist foreign policy, this is a nasty dilemma. The German position that the ban on women working was unacceptable was correspondingly clear in the past. But when the UN ends its projects, it will leave up to 28 million Afghans who it estimates depend on humanitarian assistance without aid. And that, as UN Secretary-General António Guterres said this week, is out of the question.
What helps Afghan women?
So what can you do? The answer cannot be to ride on the principles of international law, fundamental as they are. The country and Afghan women are best served when they and their children do not starve. There is no evidence to support the thesis that the majority of Afghan women would be in favor of using humanitarian aid as a means of exerting pressure on their rights.
The West must consider that the rule of the Taliban does not only bring disadvantages for large sections of Afghan women. The rigid moral laws, which give them hardly any rights, have applied beyond the urban centers before. With the assumption of power, some things have even changed for the better: the security situation has improved. As a result, many areas that were previously inaccessible to aid organizations because of the war can finally be provided with elementary health services and school education (also for girls). From the outside, one cannot imagine the devastation that decades of civil war brought to Afghanistan – not only from the terror of the Taliban, but also from the “collateral damage” of the fight against them.
Another “collateral damage” was that the old government and NATO relied on corrupt local rulers in their fight against the Taliban. The fact that many Afghans welcomed the Taliban with open arms – as they did in the 1990s – can only be understood in this context. The moral strictness of the Islamists has always been a response to the decline in morals during the civil war.
Afghan reality: women in a hillside district of Kabul
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Image: AFP
But what options remain? Supporting the armed opposition groups is out of the question. They are at odds with each other and have no chance against the superior power of the Taliban. The only thing the fighters could achieve would be instability and a new civil war. However, stability is not only in the interest of the Afghans, but also of the West. Otherwise there is a risk of the spread of the “Islamic State” and a new, even larger stream of refugees.
A high-stakes bet
But external pressure on the Taliban has so far not had the slightest effect, as have positive incentives, such as the prospect of recognition or economic normalization. There is much to suggest that arch-reactionary forces have meanwhile prevailed within the leadership. Their worldview includes an idealization of asceticism and poverty as cleansing from the “harmful influence” of the West.
These people have always hated the aid organizations because the programs always had an agenda of human rights and the advancement of women. It would be a gamble at high stakes that a suspension of this aid would make the Taliban give in. Viewed soberly, there are in any case few examples for the thesis that external pressure is forcing repressive regimes to give in. In the case of the Taliban, such hopes have absolutely no basis.
In the end, Afghanistan is once again teaching the rest of the world a lesson that it is an illusion to believe that a country’s fortunes can be changed for the better from the outside, given sufficient resources and goodwill. After decades of intervention, the West is left with the role of a humble bystander, providing unconditional emergency aid where people are starving and providing shelter to women when they seek to escape injustice. Everything else can only be solved by the Afghans themselves.
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