This episode explores the political mistakes which prevented human rights and the rule of law from taking root in Afghan society. What understandings of democracy prevailed following the U.S. invasion and what were the foundations on which the leaders of Afghanistan tried to build a modern republic? Listen to what made Taliban resurgence possible, as well as the prospects for a successful popular resistance to their rule of terror.
Guests featured in this episode:
Shaharzad Akbar, one of the most prominent among the Afghan democratic opposition voices in exile. She was born in Afghanistan, lived with her family as a refugee in Pakistan during the first Taliban regime for some years and she's the first Afghan woman to earn a postgraduate degree at Oxford University in 2011.
She was later Country Director for the Open Society Afghanistan, a nonprofit organization supporting civil society and media, focusing on human rights and peace building. Shaharzad also worked as Senior Advisor to the Afghan President on high development councils and was Chair of the country's Independent Human Rights Commission, a position that she held until early 2022.
In 2021, she was awarded the Franco-German Prize for Human Rights and the Rule of Law. Most recently, she was an Open Society Network Academic Fellow in Human Rights at Chatham House and is currently at Wolfson College, Oxford building a new international NGO to support human rights in Afghanistan.
Glossary:
What is the Taliban?
(00:47 or p.1 in the transcript)
Taliban, Pashto Ṭālebān (“Students”), also spelled Taleban is a political and religious faction and militia that came to power in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s. Following the Soviet Union’s 1989 withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban — whose name refers to the Islamic religious students who formed the group’s main recruits — arose as a popular reaction to the chaos that gripped the country. In 1994–95, under the leadership of Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taliban extended its control in Afghanistan from a single city to more than half the country, and in 1996 it captured Kabul and instituted a strict Islamic regime. By 1999, the
Taliban controlled most of Afghanistan but failed to win international recognition of its regime because of its harsh social policies — which included the almost complete removal of women from public life — and its role as a haven for Islamic extremists. Among these extremists was Osama bin Laden, the expatriate Saudi Arabian leader of Al-Qaeda, a network of Islamic militants that had engaged in numerous acts of terrorism. The Taliban’s refusal to extradite bin Laden to the U.S. following the September 11 attacks in 2001 prompted the U.S. to attack Taliban and Al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan, driving the former from power and sending the leaders of both groups into hiding. source
What is Loya Jirga?
(9:13 or p.3 in the transcript)
The term “Loya Jirga” is a combination of two words from one of Afghanistan's national languages, Pashto, "Loya" meaning grand or big, and "Jirga" meaning council, assembly, or meeting. The institution of Loya Jirga evolved from the institution of Jirga, which is usually a council of elders in Afghanistan's tribal groups - particularly the Pashtuns - to settle disputes and deal with other day-to-day problems of living. Loya Jirga is a political institution unique to Afghanistan. It was the highest consultative body with broad representation and has been used to decide upon the matters of national importance, such as declarations of war or adopting treaties of peace, selection of a new ruler or adopting a new constitution, approving reforms and all important foreign policy decisions since the mid-18th century. In short, the forum represents the general will of the Afghan people. source
Who are the Mujahideen?
(11:49 or p.3 in the transcript)
Mujahideen or Mujahidin is the plural form of the Arabic term mujahid, who is a person who wages jihad. According to doctrinal and historical applications of Islamic law, jihad indicates military action for the defense or expansion of Islam. While in the course of Islamic history the term mujahidin has been used by different groups to identify their struggles to defend Islam, the term gained global currency in the latter decades of the twentieth century after the leftist coup d'état in Afghanistan on 27 April 1978. The resistance groups first opposed the Afghan communist regime, declaring it atheist. They then turned their attention to the Soviet Union when it invaded Afghanistan on 27 December 1979. Fighting the Soviet Red Army, they collectively referred to themselves as mujahidin waging jihad against a communist power occupying an Islamic land. The Afghan mujahidin were divided into two main groups: (1) those based in and backed by Pakistan with substantial financial and military assistance from Saudi Arabia and the United States, who mainly represented the Sunni majority; and (2) those based in and supported by Iran, representing the Shiite minority. source
Democracy in Question? is brought to you by:
• Central European University: CEU
• The Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in Geneva: AHCD
• The Podcast Company: Novel
Follow us on social media!
• Central European University: @CEU
• Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in Geneva: @AHDCentre
Subscribe to the show. If you enjoyed what you listened to, you can support us by leaving a
review and sharing our podcast in your networks!
Shalini Randeria (SR): Welcome to "Democracy in Question", the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of Central European University, Vienna and Senior Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. This is the second episode of season six of "Democracy in Question". It's a great pleasure to welcome today one of the most prominent among the Afghan democratic opposition voices in exile, Shaharzad Akbar. She was born in Afghanistan, lived with her family as a refugee in Pakistan during the first Taliban regime for some years and she's the first Afghan woman to earn a postgraduate degree at Oxford University in 2011.
She was later Country Director for the Open Society Afghanistan, a nonprofit organization supporting civil society and media, focusing on human rights and peace building. Shaharzad also worked as Senior Advisor to the Afghan President on high development councils and was Chair of the country's Independent Human Rights Commission, a position that she held until early 2022.
In 2021, she was awarded the Franco-German Prize for Human Rights and the Rule of Law. And most recently, she was an Open Society Network Academic Fellow in Human Rights at Chatham House and is currently at Wolfson College, Oxford building a new international NGO to support human rights in Afghanistan.
No other image captures more powerfully the sense of despair on the eve of the Taliban takeover in the late summer of 2021 than the harrowing footage of crowds trying to board planes leaving the airport in Kabul. Amidst all the uncertainties, one thing was clear. After almost two decades, the democratic experiment of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan was coming to an abrupt and tragic end, dashing all hopes for a new generation that had grown up in an atmosphere of relative freedom since 2004. With Shaharzad, I want to discuss the immediate and the more distant causes of this fateful failure of democratization in Afghanistan.
What were the political mistakes made that prevented the institutional architecture of human rights and the rule of law taking root in Afghan society? What understandings of democracy prevailed in the wake of the U.S. invasion of the country? What were the foundations on which the newly elected democratic leaders of Afghanistan tried to build a modern republic? How could ethnic and religious identities closely tied often to the persecution of minorities like the Hazara have been reconciled with the ideals of tolerance and of pluralism? Do human rights mean different things to ordinary people, and what implications does this have for top-down projects of democratization? What made Taliban resurgence possible in Afghanistan, and what are the prospects of a successful popular resistance to their rule of terror?
These are some of the questions that I'll address with Shaharzad Akbar today. Shaharzad, welcome to the podcast and thank you so much for joining me for this conversation.
Shaharzad Akbar (SA): Thank you. I'm truly honored. I'm really looking forward.
SR: So, let me begin with a historical look at democratization in Afghanistan. To many of us, the brief history of democracy in your country spans less than the two-decade period starting with the American invasion of the country in the wake of 9/11 and ending with the fall of Kabul in late summer 2021 following the sudden withdrawal of American troops. But is there a longer history of establishing democracy in Afghanistan that can be told? There was, if you like, a top-down modernization in your country earlier, similar to that tried out by Atatürk in Turkey, including the banning of veils, of introducing education reforms, including also greater rights for women – attempted reforms that had already sparked resistance and even triggered a civil war. And then after the '78, 1978 revolution, the state socialist experiment marked the beginning of a political experiment, and I think your father was a very well-known figure at that time, which sought to fight religious traditions and customs from top down, if I may say so, through a forced secularization of the society from the top. And this raises for me the very general question which plagues countries all over South Asia and Middle East.
Can attempts to democratize ever be imposed successfully from the top down relying on a small, educated, urban elite and/or also support from external powers and forces? And was the latest experiment with democratization between 2004 and 2021 in Afghanistan destined to fail partly for this exact reason?
SA: Thank you for that really thoughtful question. Of course, there was a history of struggle for democracy in Afghanistan, depending on how we define democracy. If we define it more broadly than just participating in elections, even as early as the 1920s, there are efforts to create institutions, to give more spaces for public participation and these efforts, these top-down efforts continued. Afghanistan had a so-called democracy decade in which there was formation of political parties, elections. But these efforts were top down. Sometimes they were assisted with a demand from groups of intellectuals or activists or journalists. But usually, they weren't based on very widespread grassroots demands for changes in political structure. That has definitely been a factor in the history of Afghanistan. Afghans looking at the history of Afghanistan, particularly look at the Soviet intervention as a particular turning point because the Soviet intervention had attempted a new form of governance, but with violence rather than allowing for a gradual transition.
So, this path to a gradual transition that had opened up just before Soviet-backed government came to power was reversed and we had a period of Soviet-backed governments that was pretty forceful and wouldn't be really described as democratic. And a period of civil war followed by Taliban followed the post-2001. In the post-2001 Afghanistan, there was an attempt to create a government and a structure that would be more inclusive. This was in the
2004 constitution of Afghanistan. The process of consultation around the constitution itself was a very comprehensive process compared to similar processes before in our history. So, consultations were done not only with Afghans inside Afghanistan but with Afghans in Pakistan and Iran and because in that period leading to the 2004 constitution, we had relative security across the country. Many different parts of the country were accessible. You had a true process of consultation.
And of course, as in any constitution-building process, there were compromises made in the way that the structure of state was designed – highly centralized – and the way that we went for the voting system, the elections, and the way that parties were not really given a place in the country's constitution and the country's political structure. All of these were compromises. Some of them really pushed by the international community led by the U.S. Some of them protected the interests of local actors who were involved. Many former warlords were involved in the architecture of this post-war setup in Afghanistan.
So, it's a complicated history and particularly in the post-2001 Afghanistan but also before. There is external inspiration or external pressure trying to shape the way Afghans govern themselves. And one of the reasons that some of the concepts then take deeper roots was perhaps the degree to which they relied on external pressure.
SR: So, let me try to understand what democracy meant for ordinary people in Afghanistan or rather, what democracy meant for different people in your society. So, in the wake of the U.S. intervention, there was a so-called Loya Jirga which was held in 2002, which elected the president of the transitional administration and while it admitted women, for example, for the first time in Afghan history, as you very rightly pointed out, it also raised grave concerns about the inclusion of some of the warlords. So was such an attempt to balance traditional forms of assembly and imported institutional frameworks ill-matched as these two aims were doomed to failure? Or did some of these compromises mean that democracy had to be built with warlords at the table, which in a way was impossible due to the widespread impunity and lack of justice? So, could you say something about how these processes were perceived by ordinary citizens, many of whom had lost so much during the years of the civil war?
SA: In 2002, it was a period of great hope. Afghans thought that we have the world with us standing in solidarity with Afghan people. We have international attention. This is a moment to chart a new path. And then soon, as the events like the Loya Jirga, the interim governments followed. One of the things that became clear to many ordinary Afghans was the fact that many of the older players, the former players in the theater of conflict in Afghanistan minus the Taliban will remain relevant and will remain part of this new architecture. Maybe in some part there was some ambivalence about this and other parts, particularly families of those who had lost family members during the civil war in Afghanistan, there was outright anger and resentment. There was a push by the Afghan civil society, small as it was at the time for transitional justice, for some way of dealing with the past. The institution that I came to lead, Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission was partly built in response to this push for dealing with the past, was seen as a way to respond to these concerns without really doing much about them politically.
But there was a clear decision made by the Afghan political elite and the international community including the UN that the ideas of justice and political stability at that particular moment in time for Afghanistan could not go together. Of course, this had implications about how the new government was seen, how its legitimacy was seen, its legitimacy in speaking about democracy. One of the jokes that people made was how people, former Mujahideen who, who were wearing turbans and had beards and were fighting against the Soviet invasion or Soviet presence or Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan, talking about things like women should not be singing or women should not be part of the public life, that the same people turned from Mujahideen to technocrats, democrats overnight by shaving their beard and putting on a suit.
And so, this transformation didn't escape the Afghans. There were a lot of jokes, a lot of stories around this but it was also telling of the kind of the general mood about the fact that there was a level of disappointment, that this new is not new after all. And we see some of the people that we should be holding accountable coming back to power utilizing the means of "democratic order" to regain some legitimacy that they may have lost because they lost to Taliban, they were isolated, many of the leaders of the war had left the country at that point. They didn't have the backing among the people. This was, in a way, a golden opportunity to sort of marginalize them, continue to have them as part of the public space, treat them with some degree of respect but also introduce ideas of accountability, truth telling and not make them the foundation of a new Afghanistan. But that opportunity was missed.
And I think that had implications. But also, in terms of how democracy was understood. For
many people, democracy became synonymous in a way with women's rights, and this relates to a western definition of women's rights. This relates to how the war in Afghanistan was sold to American taxpayers, to taxpayers in the West.
SR: This is a very, very interesting point. I do want to take it up with you in a moment because I'd like to ask you to speak about your personal experience of trying to transcend on the one hand ethnic and religious boundaries, and on the other hand, to make a case for women's rights in a context in which they were not self-evident. You were the Founder and the first Chair of Harakat-e-Afghanistan 1,400, the Afghanistan 1,400 movement just a decade ago. And this was a grassroots movement which sought to overcome the main divisions within the political field between the secular traditional left and the Mujahideen Islamists whom you have just described so vividly changing clothes and appearances suddenly overnight. And your movement was promoting an agenda celebrating the diversity of the country, its inclusion and its future respect for human rights. How did the movement deal with the dilemma for example of involvement in elections? Because this is always a dilemma for all social movements. Should one participate now in the elections, or should one be outside of the electoral politics and exert a watchdog influence and pressure from the outside? Or how did you experience the gradual accommodation of the Taliban by this new government?
And what do you think in retrospect, looking back on your own years of leading this movement, what did it achieve, where did it fail and what lessons did you learn where you think, "I wish we had done something differently."
SA: Thank you. Afghanistan 1,400 and leading Afghanistan 1,400 was one of the most hopeful periods in my life. By 2006, Afghans had already started losing hope. Already the conflict was becoming more intense, corruption was rampant. And there was this idea that things are not improving, unfortunately, and government was losing legitimacy, resentment was growing. But when in 2013-2014 I was leading Afghanistan 1,400, we wanted to revive this message of hope. And central to that was to tell Afghans regardless of external factors, we can do something ourselves. We can chart a new path ourselves. Our motto was “Our country, our responsibility,” because we wanted to pass this message that we shouldn't get disheartened by the fact that international attention is moving away. This is our country. We have a responsibility. We can do something. Let's try to do something ourselves.
And as you said as well, trying to transcend ethnic and religious boundaries. We actually wanted to try mobilizing people around values: the right to choose, gender equality rather than ethnic identity or religious identity. Let's work together for a better Afghanistan because we are all Muslims or let’s work together for a better Afghanistan because we are all Pashtuns, Uzbeks or Hazaras. These were the ways in which politicians of the former generation organized themselves. What we wanted to do was to organize around, “Let's work together because we are all Afghans who want our daughters to be able to go to school because we want both women and men to take part in society, because we want to choose our own leaders.” So, trying to chart a new path.
I think that we created that sense of hope, but we couldn't sustain it, right? We really did create that moment of hope. A lot of eyes turned to us. Young people would volunteer to come. It was a fully volunteer movement. Everything we fundraised from among ourselves. Young people across Afghanistan reached out to us saying, "We want to act. How can we get involved?" Politicians felt uncertain and intimidated. Then they started trying to approach some of our members to bring them to their own side. It definitely created a movement, a momentum. But why we failed to sustain it? I also think it created a new way of talking, this possibility of looking at Afghan politics in a different way and thinking, "Oh, other ways of doing politics may be possible."
Of course, people had in theory written about these things for a while in the post-war Afghanistan, but this was a practical step trying to do it. And then we had other youth political movements announcing their existence as well. But why we couldn't sustain it? That's one of the lessons learned. I think we hadn't really spent enough time, especially before going public thinking through about questions of strategy and tactics in terms of where we see ourselves as a movement, as a political movement in relation to elections, knowing the weakness of our institutions, knowing the corruption of our political elites, but also knowing our own eventual desire to be in political power. How do we reconcile these different things knowing that we can't immediately come to power ourselves as an independent party, entity, movement.
So, this became one of the points of division. Some of us wanted to continue grassroots work and mobilization and stay away from electoral politics. At least presidential elections. Some of us felt like this is the moment. We have the skills. We have the attention. Why not go for it? Why not get our hands dirty, get involved, do things differently? This is our moment. Get power so we can change things.
That was one of the reasons for how we slowly fell apart because we couldn't create a broad consensus on this issue. Also, there were differences, which emerged on issues like how do we deal with religion? How do we as young people who come from very different religious backgrounds and different levels of, you know, kind of to what extent people were devoted or practicing, but also knowing how religion has been misused in our society and continues to get misused and our interactions with the public. How do we deal with this issue? Do we need to really focus on recruiting a lot of religious scholars to be part of our membership or not? These were some of the fault lines in a way.
SR: If I were to ask you to reflect on another aspect of your own personal experience, as I mentioned, you chaired the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and therefore were involved of course in promoting and protecting human rights in your country, the commission which has now illegitimately been dissolved by the Taliban recently. So how central was the idea of human rights for people in Afghanistan, for ordinary people? And were there tensions between the discourse of human rights and other political priorities which you've hinted at earlier? For example, what was the relationship between the war on terror and the discourse of human rights?
SA: Thank you. I think both the state-building efforts and the human rights discourse in Afghanistan, their credibility was damaged because of the war on terror. Initially, the sense was, "Okay, the world is here. They want to help us get rid of shelters for terrorism." But also, they are helping us build a government that promotes and respects and protects human rights. In action, what we saw from the international community increasingly was that whenever there was a clash, even a minor clash between war on terror objectives that were very immediate, that in brief could be, like, “killing the bad guys” and pursuit of democracy, pursuit of a legitimate government, delivery of services, the war on terror objectives always took priority. And these other priorities slowly, you know, fell off the list. Not only that, but also it came to be seen later in Afghanistan, especially as, for instance, incidents would happen where international forces were involved in violations of rights or civilians were harmed and there was no accountability and there were no proper operations. People started to see the whole talk about human rights by the international community as very empty and very contradictory, as a cover for their security intervention in Afghanistan, for their war in Afghanistan.
This led to a lot of resentment and a lot of grievances. One of the lessons learned or one of the ways in which the international intervention failed both democracy and human rights in Afghanistan was the fact that the talk just remained the talk. The action, the walk had not followed the talk and there were so many contradictions in the work, in the action because the primary objectives remained very narrow security objective and that was, you know, war on terror paradigm and war on terror priorities. It was unbelievable how much things like what was going on in Iraq, the issue at Guantanamo Bay, how much it resonated with ordinary Afghans across Afghanistan because they said, “Look. See? It's not about human rights. They're here for their own interests.” And of course, Taliban were playing this up and using this for recruitment, they were using this in their public discourse to a great extent.
SR: You alluded to just a little while ago, Shaharzad, to the idea of civil society as actors in this entire effort at anchoring women's rights, democratic rights, human rights. Does the idea, a Western idea of a civil society, does it resonate with ordinary people in Afghanistan? Is it translatable into Dari or Pashtu? What do people make of this idea of civil society and what did people understand that its role should be in a situation or context where a lot of primary loyalties were not to an abstract formation like civil society but to ethnic or religious identities? And do you think that a rather legalistic perspective, which privileged political rights at the expense of broader economic rights, questions of livelihood, questions of income, questions of restoring some kind of means of livelihood after all these years of disruption that got somehow marginalized because so much of western civil society privileged human rights, political rights rather than restoring livelihood? Do you think if one had had a different approach to democracy, which had tied it in much more closely with ideas of economic rights, that that might've been more successful?
SA: Some of the things that we did in the past 20 years in terms of human rights and democratization efforts, one of the things that we did was really getting the governments sign up on all these conventions. When I say we, I mean international human rights organizations, international community, Afghan civil society because it was an easy thing to do. You know, you are ticking the box, every year you had an achievement, you had signed into a new human rights convention. Followed by that, we then translated this into legal framework, an Afghan legal framework or tried to align our legal framework with this, reviewing and updating our penal codes, our antitorture laws, creating antitorture laws, freedom of expression, etc.
This lawmaking process was positive and negative. Positive because it did create some conversations about some of these issues among Afghans. For instance, what do we mean by freedom of expression in the context in Afghanistan? What is really free speech? What do we mean by torture even? What do we mean when we were talking about punishments, in terms of the penal code? Should we consider Hudud? If we don't, what does that mean? And from a religious perspective, what do other Islamic countries do? Women's rights, elimination of violence against women for instance. What does that look like in a legal framework in the institutions? But this process of lawmaking, also because of the security situation, A) they were not prompted by the needs of the communities, but they were prompted by the international obligations. B) they weren't very consultative processes. They happened in small rooms between small groups of elites. Even if religious community was involved, the elite within that religious community was involved in these conversations.
So again, they didn't go deep enough. Another thing that we did was offer a lot of trainings on these conventions to people. This was what the Commission for instance would do. What we didn't do was to go to the women of Afghanistan and kind of ask, "How do you understand rights? What rights are important to you? What do you want to have a right to and how can we help you in that process, right?" We looked at what the international architecture is and tried to copy that and then tried to kind of upgrade ourselves to come to that level. We also created institutions to make some of this happen. For instance, for elimination of violence against women, in addition to the law, there were specific units of the attorney general's office. But again, these units, they tried to tackle these issues but even people working for these units haven't gone through a process of fully understanding and embracing the changes that we had made in the laws. Because all these issues required a lot of discussion and they are of course, you know, debates, they are contested issues for people in many different communities in Afghanistan.
And I think also in a briefing, political rights, it was partly because of this measurability thing, right. You can measure how many women participated in the elections, how many women MPs do you have, how many women deputy ministers do you have. It was a positive thing. It was positive that now Afghan women, Afghan girls could watch TV and see a woman being in parliament and see that that can be a reality. But it was insufficient, and it didn't meet the needs of other groups of women who were in desperate need of economic empowerment. It was a lot about donor reporting, honestly and how that could happen. It doesn't mean that there weren't a lot of genuine efforts, but I think the way we prioritized definitely requires rethinking.
SR: So Shaharzad, let me draw your attention to something which some of the anthropologists working in local communities in Afghanistan have pointed out and that is that whereas this process of signing international conventions, training people in attaining activists in human rights law, etc. continued at the urban centers, at the local level, especially in a country like Afghanistan where it's often quite difficult to reach far away villages, it was the Taliban which began setting up courts, which was dealing with everyday property disputes, land issues, family conflicts and it was these Taliban courts which were not only closer in their thinking, in their operation, in the language which they used, the idiom of justice was closer to what resonated with people's everyday norms, expectations but also these Taliban judges provided a semblance of stability to local populations. Can you say something about the fact that there was in a sense a disjunct between urban and rural Afghanistan in this sense and that the fact that people saw the Taliban judges as providing justice on things which were of immediate importance and need, that gave them a legitimacy which helped them to come back into power?
SA: In terms of the urban and rural Afghanistan, I just want to bring a little bit of nuance to that discussion because I know that comes up a lot. So, my husband is from Central Afghanistan. He's from Bamyan. So, in Central Afghanistan, for instance, in very rural areas in Central Afghanistan communities were very supportive of girls' education. But this wasn't the case in all parts of rural Afghanistan. And while, for instance, Herat or Mazar-I-Sharif or Kabul, these were urban centers, but some of these kinds of ideas and values about freedom of expression, they were embraced more widely. I am from Jawzjan in North Afghanistan. I always ask people, "Do you think Jawzjan is urban or rural Afghanistan?" All my aunts, for instance, are teachers. Women in my community mostly have gone through a university education and in those ways, it doesn't fit with the narrative of rural Afghanistan. But also, of course, people are hesitant to send their daughter to join the police, for instance, or join the cycling team or, you know, participate in sports.
There might be a little bit more resistance to these things in Jawzjan than in Kabul. So, there's a lot of nuances and a lot of diversity which I think is important. But I think, yes, parts of Afghanistan that were controlled by the Taliban, which slowly increased over the years, Taliban there have their own justice system. Of course, that was part of their governance. And there has been different studies of how the justice system of Taliban, in fact how just it was. There is a consensus that it was faster, much faster than the official justice provided by the government. The government process was very bureaucratic, it took a long while. Part of it for good reasons because you wanted to make sure that there is due process, right? There is a fair trial.
But part of it is because of corruption and incompetence and the fact that laws were not well understood, and the judges didn't have enough levels of literacy and education to actually implement them although they had been through a formal process of training, but the quality of education wasn't great. So, corruption, capacity, political will in some cases to implement some of these laws, all of those made the government or the official justice sector very cumbersome and something that people hated and did not want to deal with. This wasn't unique to the republic. Even before, Afghans were always very hesitant to go to central government for things, you know. This was a history in Afghanistan. But it continued and even worsened in some cases because of the corruption with the republic unfortunately.
With Taliban justice system there is a consensus that there was a greater degree of fairness and that it was quick, and less bribery involved. But when it came to protection of marginalized groups like women, of course, and more broadly, minorities in some cases, then there was a lack of justice obviously. There was a lack of representation. There was also bias. So, Taliban would go on issues related to women's rights. On all other issues, they would rely on Sharia. But on issues related to women's rights, they would also consider customs, cultural traditions that put women at a disadvantage in many cases.
So, it is complicated, but I think the failure of delivery of justice on part of the republic was definitely a main contributing cost to return of Taliban to power, yes.
SR: Let me wrap up, Shaharzad, by asking you: you are setting up at the moment an NGO which of course can only be done from abroad but obviously it will need to mobilize popular support within Afghanistan. Where do you think this kind of support could come from? Is there a critical media? Are there institutions left still which are functioning which could in support of re-democratization after Taliban rule, play an important role and having looked in retrospect so critically and so reflectively at the mistakes made as you have here today, do you think there could be any way in which humanitarian aid from abroad can be used as leverage to exert pressure on Taliban? Because the dilemma is: should one engage with this regime, and does it give the regime legitimacy if one engages with it by providing humanitarian aid? However, not engaging with it really deepens the severe crises of food security, health security, life and livelihood in Afghanistan.
SA: Thank you. Those are really, really big questions. I have thought a lot about the mistakes that have been made but there were also gains in Afghanistan, right? In the past 20 years, the level of exposure to ideas from around the world. And also, migration part helped with this even before post-war government, the fact that Afghans from rural Afghanistan went to Pakistan, some went to Iran, some went to Europe. They got exposed to different kinds of lifestyles, ideas, ways of organizing the society, all of this. It led to our social and cultural transformation in Afghanistan, I would say, on a few of rights issues. Not on the whole, but in a few of rights issues. And what we want to do is to preserve and build on that social and cultural transformation.
One example of that is how there is resistance to Taliban compared to before. People talk about changed Taliban. Taliban haven't changed. They just reinstated flogging last week. They have closed secondary schools to girls. What has changed is the Afghan people. So, there are still media who are operating inside Afghanistan by Afghans. They're operating and there's censorship, but they are operating and they are not just the state media. There are TVs. This is an illustration of the change of Afghans in Afghanistan, not the Taliban.
There are women protesting every week for the rights of women and the rights of Afghans. This is an illustration of the fact that Afghanistan has changed. All the Taliban remain the same. Now I know several groups of actors across Afghanistan that are adapting different strategies, some of them more of a confrontational strategy like protests and going out or protests at home. Some of them more of a negotiation strategy, trying to negotiate with Taliban to have some women keep their jobs or run a school or run a literacy program or run a library. So there are seeds across the country. There are activities. What we hope to do with our work is to connect and to expand, to amplify, right, these efforts that are efforts for a better future for all Afghans.
That's important to remember, that although, for instance, most of the Afghanistan's human rights community is now in exile and probably working in sectors that are not human rights, but they still have a passion for Afghanistan, and they still have a passion for human rights. They want to continue to monitor, to document and want to create, be one of the platforms for people like that to keep the light on.
But in terms of how should the international community move forward in this situation, that seems really hopeless. I'm always for engagement. I think you should continue to try to talk, to continue to have a dialog. But I'm not okay with uncritical engagement. With the engagement that you go there and believe what Taliban say, which is why the work of organizations like us and other human rights organizations is important because we will give you and the Afghan public the facts about what's happening. So, every engagement with Taliban should also be an opportunity to hold them accountable.
Just today, the Foreign Minister of Pakistan, Hina Rabbani was in Kabul. There was a very mixed response to this, but for me it was a positive thing at the end of the day, that a senior female politician, Muslim female politician from our neighboring country is coming and Taliban have to see this and engage with this. And they should. And I do hope that Hina raised question of girls' schools with the Taliban. And every opportunity should be taken to raise these critical questions, I think. So, I don't think humanitarian aid should be leveraged. It's unconditional. Taliban also want development assistance. Taliban want recognition. Taliban want things from international community and Taliban want some form of continued engagement.
So, I think there is some leverage. Not a lot. I think we have to be realistic. And maybe it can be used for change. Maybe it can't. I think there is now a growing fatigue unfortunately, at least us as Afghans, I don't think we have the option to give up. We can't give up. We have to continue to raise attention and to ask for constructive and critical engagement and continue to push locally, regionally and internationally for change.
SR: Thank you so much, Shaharzad, for this really fantastic conversation talking not only about the past and the present, but also the future of your country, your own experience, reflecting on it very, very thoughtfully, critically but also despite a really difficult situation, not only keeping up hope but also building coalitions within Afghanistan and internationally to support you in your own work. So, I can only hope all the best for your success. Thank you.
SA: Thank you, professor. Thank you. This was a really wonderful experience. Thank you for giving me the platform.
SR: Let me conclude today by saying that Shaharzad has insightfully analyzed for us the immediate and more distant causes of the fateful failure of democratization in Afghanistan. She delineates the checkered history of many decades of attempts at democratization ending in attempts after 2001 to establish a more inclusive and representative government by means of elections after a well-designed process of consultations and constitution building. One flaw, however, in all of this were the external pressures on which these Afghan attempts relied far too much. Another mistake was a refusal to consider any forms of the transitional justice, which then led to a failure to address people’s sense of injustice, anger, and resentment among many ordinary citizens at the Mujahideen gaining legitimacy by turning overnight into technocrats and thus being the new powerholders without ever being held accountable for what they had done earlier. Turning a blind eye to the Mujahideen’s actions was due to the fact that the Afghan political elite and the international community including the United Nations argued that ideas of justice and political stability could not go together in the current situation in Afghanistan. The gradual accommodation to the Taliban therefore thus marginalized movements like the one that Shaharzad was leading, which promoted an agenda of inclusion, diversity, and the respect for human rights. In retrospect, we can also say that ironically, democracy became thus narrowed down and synonymous with women’s rights and especially a Western definition of women’s rights as this is how the war in Afghanistan and its high costs was sold to American taxpayers and to taxpayers in the Western world. Some of the movements that spelled hope for a new beginning in Afghanistan also failed for internal reasons as they have not thought through questions of strategy and tactics sufficiently especially with relation to grassroots work as against engagement with electoral politics which became a major dividing line among activists. But the cardinal error was that for the American and the foreign forces the war on terror’s objectives always took priority over delivering services to the people, priority over creating an effective and legitimate local and national democratic government. There was no accountability for the actions of soldiers in international forces who caused civilian deaths or harms either. Corruption in the government was compounded by this culture of impunity for international forces. Many of the laws which the Afghan government then passed or the international treaties it signed were far removed from local realities and had little meaning for ordinary citizens. So instead of working bottom up, from the communities and their needs, it was the international agendas and copying of Western models that most often dictated many of the legal changes which then of course failed to take root in Afghan society. So here the very strong dependence on international donors became a stumbling block in a way of democratic politics. Today there is a need for international community to keep up an international engagement and a critical dialogue with the Taliban to keep channels of pressure and communication open. Every engagement with Taliban should also however be used as an opportunity to hold it accountable for its violations of women’s rights.
This was episode two of season six of "Democracy in Question". Thank you very much for listening. Join us again for the next episode in two weeks' time when I will be talking with Ron Daniels, the President of Johns Hopkins University about his latest book, "What Universities Owe Democracy". Please go back and listen to any episode you might have missed and of course let your friends know about this podcast if you're enjoying it. You can stay in touch with the work of the Central European University at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at www. graduateinstitute.ch\democracy.