See the full transcript below:

Introduction

Thank you very much, Eldaniz Gusseinov, for joining me on The Crossroads for a deep-dive conversation about the relations between the Taliban and Kazakhstan. Before we dive deep, I would like to introduce you to our audience:

Eldaniz Gusseinov is the co-founder and a geopolitical analyst at Nightingale International. He focuses on trade corridors, energy transitions, and the strategic behaviour of middle powers across Eurasia. Eldaniz has worked for several academic institutions and think tanks in Europe and Central Asia.

Question:

Eldaniz, let’s begin with Kazakhstan’s policy. In an article titled “Central Asia Is Becoming Europe’s Channel to Afghanistan,” which you co-published on The Diplomat on 22 June, you highlight that Kazakhstan was among the first states to normalise its relationship with Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, stopping just short of official recognition. For example, Astana removed the Taliban from its list of terrorist organisations in December 2023. Then in June 2025, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev appointed Yerkin Tukumov, former head of the presidential analytical center, as special representative for Afghanistan. As you put it in that article, “Astana’s approach to Kabul has begun to cohere into a deliberate strategy.” My question is: What exactly is this strategy? And what are the core interests that drive this strategy?

Eldaniz Gusseinov:

For Kazakhstan, thank you so much. And first and foremost assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh to everyone, especially to our brotherly colleagues from Afghanistan and from Central Asian states for following the channel and also to watch this podcast. So good morning everyone from Almaty.

And coming back to your question regarding Kazakhstan’s strategy and overall like Kazakhstan’s ambitions in Afghanistan, it’s basically more about Kazakhstan who passed its middle power status in Afghanistan. So, so far, we don’t see any major, maybe except Uzbekistan and Iran, major powers which are skillfully expanding the economic presence in Afghanistan. And for Kazakhstan it’s an opportunity also to expand beyond traditional markets and also to go to Afghanistan and to export non-raw goods, like flour, for example. Also there were discussions about car vehicles to be exported from Kazakhstan to Afghanistan. So basically it’s a new market, it’s almost like clean.

Let’s be honest there were like also contestations of like major powers like China to get upset there. But as I said, as I see, to a particular extent China also like failed in implementing some of the projects at least like in amurdaria oil deal it’s off but it’s also like a good like space middle powers which will not use like economic tools as a you know like measure of pressure against any other country especially Afghanistan. So I don’t think Afghan people like they are really like favoring this type of things like any major power will try to put some pressure on its authorities. So in this regard, Kazakhstan, I think, identifies itself as a neutral protocol with a neutral middle power which can really like support the people of Afghanistan. And we even follow it from the structure of Kazakh exports to Afghanistan so it’s basically like wheat flour which are and also seeding oil and overall like also oil because also exporting oil to Afghanistan so basically these are the main like goods and basic goods for the people of Afghanistan. So I think with this type of Kazakhstan expansion, expansion of exports, it also has a humanitarian mission to support the country.

So also Kazakhstan beyond then as I said like the president I think it was two years ago announced kazakhstan’s middle power stated and that’s why Afghanistan becomes a part of the Kazakhstan region overall like if you follow like trips of the president of Tokayev and overall like where Kazakhstan is seeking to invest it’s basically south forecast is Mongolia and Afghanistan these are the regions where Kazakhstan has some real chances to prove its real status of the middle power. And beyond that I should also mention that Kazakhstan, its strategy right now, it’s to expand economic relations also like maybe being a mediator in a conflict between Afghanistan and Pakistan. And I think Kazakhstan is like among the few states which can have some real like impact based approach in this in this conflict. And more than that I would say that Kazakhstan strategy is to just expand economic presence in Afghanistan also in the area of critical minerals by presenting itself as a middle power as an equal partner of Afghanistan and also as an actor without geopolitical ambitions in Afghanistan. Don’t consider Afghanistan as a part of its role of geopolitical branding as Russia has or China or even US which wanted to have its Bagram airbase back again.

Question:

Thank you. Kazakhstan has not officially recognised the Taliban as Afghanistan’s legitimate government. Recently, Yerkin Tukumov, Kazakhstan’s Special Representative for Afghanistan, said that removing the Taliban from the country’s list of terrorist organisations does not mean formal recognition. I hosted a few experts from Uzbekistan on my show. One of them said that Uzbekistan it would not recognize the Taliban unilaterally and that it would move toward the recognition within a multilateral framework such as the SCO or the Organization of the Turkic States. Does Kazakhstan follow the same collective line? If not, what’s its position on the recognition of the Taliban?

Eldaniz Gusseinov:

let’s be honest, let’s just be honest, I think almost each Central Asian state, maybe except Tajikistan, has already recognised Taliban as a ruling power in Afghanistan. So yes I think so far what do we understand under formal recognition, like let’s just take example of Russia. Russia just announced we recognise Taliban as a official authority of Afghanistan. This was actually the Russian state to recognise, like formally recognise Taliban. That’s all. And in the case of Kazakhstan, I think we only like this this announcement, like auto announcement and also I mean also recognising the taliban’s ambassador.

Okay two steps we are missing to recognise the taliban’s ambassador and also to make an announcement like orally. And as I said, Kazakhstan is waiting for decision from Security Council and of course, I think also in the case of Kazakhstan, we will be followed by decision of... Let’s also see what dynamics we will have between Afghanistan and SCO, CSTO and other institutions which were also mentioned by our ASTM Uzbek police.

So I think the same approach that Kazakhstan is making, but beyond that you see Afghan-Talibans everywhere, together with Central Asia. I think it’s one of the major signs of the Taliban being recognised. I mean, of course, deals which are being signed between Central Asia and Afghanistan is also a sign of recognition. I mean we are only thinking of these things which I have already mentioned like in an oral announcement. Taliban is a power. But look, as Kazakhstan also provided this invitation to prime minister of Afghanistan and he also invited Tokayev, the president of Kazakhstan, to come to Kabul and the same came to the Afghan establishment to come to Kazakhstan. I think it’s one of the also major signs of the acknowledgement between the states.

But as I said let’s also look into some specifics, so for example, none of Central Asian states is using the spain Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Nobody using it I think it’s also like a kind of sign okay guys we are doing business with you but symbolically like on the professional level they still like keep like existence like okay you can put your flag you can have your flag on the, on the building of the embassy of your state like in our countries you can sign bills but like when it comes to some symbolics like as I said mentions of it’s done anyway we would like really restrain I mean restrain from it be like a bit of like a way stay on the sidelines in this regard so still like we see like three major steps meeting that I said first make a roll follow announcement second uh accept accredences uh from uh ambassador of the Taliban and so I think also start using this frame which is not being used by none of Central Asian states.

Question:

So you think that the current de facto recognition already is enough for an a normalised relationship between the Taliban and the Central Asian countries, yes?

Eldaniz Gusseinov:

I think so completely and Central Asia has already done enough for Taliban to also spread their own narratives globally. So like if you follow events, international events, first international events, where we had representatives from the Taliban, it was mostly in Tashkent, Samarkand, Tashkent, also sometimes I think in Astana. I remember at Astana international forum I also saw some representatives of the Taliban.

So I think Central Asian states are doing also enough for Taliban to be trying to reintegrate into global political society or into global economic system. And right now Central Asia is actually the major economic gateway for the Taliban given the situation on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan and also the recent tensions between US and Iran and there were the disruptions on these border crossings because there were some civil bans or some mills exports from Iran which also included Afghanistan in one of the export markets.

Question:

Thank you. Kazakhstan’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of National Economy, visited Kabul from June 19 to 21 to participate in the fourth Afghan-Kazakh Economic/Business Forum. During the visit, Zhumangarin met the Taliban’s Prime Minister, Mohammad Hassan Akhund, and formally extended an invitation on behalf of the Kazakh President to visit Astana. In a reciprocal gesture, the Taliban Prime Minister invited the Kazakh leader to Kabul. Can you explain the core focus of this economic forum, and what this latest round of high-level diplomatic visit and invitations signals for the relations between the two countries?

Eldaniz Gusseinov:

I think we should also pretend that California is a middle mining power so we have so much experience i think mining industry it’s like it’s share in california strategy is like 10 percent if you only think about like real minerals except accepting oil and gas industry and yes, Karasa had a huge experience in this field and I think by threatening political dialogue with the Taliban it also helps Kazakhstan to get assessed the different deposits on the territory of Afghanistan and you will also see there was a deal signed on Aquarium which is a part of Peryllium on the territory of Afghanistan but more than that, Kazakhstan of course also cares about security issues and physical dialogue is one of the main dimensions which helps to exchange information and have also I think particular extent intelligence information sharing we like also to have some pre-emptive let’s say steps for any particular threats which might arise from the territory of Afghanistan but and also one additional point is that I see that we have a change of point cultures, particular exchange of ideas between Afghanistan and Central Asia. And political dialogue also helps understanding better each other.

And I think we have lack of knowledge of Afghanistan. And in Afghanistan, look, you have so many ethnic groups in the northern Afghanistan. You have Uzbeks, you have Turkmen, you have Tajiks. They just speak also a lot of languages of Central Asia. And I also met civil experts who were like very good I mean almost perfect in Russian.

So they also can read Russian speaking sources on the region so they’re quite aware of what’s happening in Central Asia. And I think certainly by threatening this stressing by threatening this political dialogue we can also maybe get better understanding of Taliban, especially of its foreign policy. So I think we don’t understand completely what’s going on how Taliban has like a short a mid-term and long-term vision of its country of its like plan how to integrate Afghanistan into global affairs. But I think this is that this helps also to understand and get better knowledge of the country.

Question:

You mentioned about the different ethnic groups in the north of Afghanistan. I, as I mentioned, I had experts from Uzbekistan on my show. Some of them expressed concerns about the taliban’s efforts to reconfigure the ethnic combinations in in the north, and they said that that is a concern for Uzbekistan. I think it would be different for Kazakhstan.

Eldaniz Gusseinov:

I think for Kazakhstan it’s not different also in terms of preservation of the rights not only minorities but like in general. And I think Kazakhstan’s approach is transformation by economic engagement is what Kazakhstan can really do because you should also understand that Kazakhstan has one of the main core principles of its foreign policy is not in the peace in domestic affairs and in this regard Kazakhstan can’t really know as I said press concerns or like trying to intervene in the domestic affairs of Afghanistan but they have still society and our society is really like worried about what’s going on in the country not only about minorities but also like broadly about human rights, women rights.

Just have a look, Kazakhstan is supporting several EU-UNDP projects to educate Afghan women on its soil together with Uzbekistan and Kurdistan. So I think the second phase of this project was expected to educate 155 Afghan women not much, let’s be honest, it’s a drop in the sea, but it’s something we can really do. And I think Kazakhstan is right now promoting negotiations with the EU to expand this type of project to invite more Afghan people to come to Central Asia to get to indicate here and maybe also to articulate maybe for some specific speeds and industries sign a deal with Afghanistan and some of the people will return and make transformation of the open countries.

So I think since 2014 there was even like an aim, a goal from Kazakhstan to have at least 1000 students from Afghanistan and to be honest it’s quite I mean it’s very obvious if you come to Central Asia. I remember as I was a student, like if you, if you come to any university here, you would always notice some Afghanistan students who are coming especially to Almaty to educate here. So I think that promoting educational ties is an important pillar of overall Central Asian foreign policy in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan is doing so much for this. Like there’s a Termez, in Termez, we have AIRITOM great economic zone and there are also several educational sites where people of Afghanistan can come and have some courses, trainings. There’s also a local training center mainly for Afghan people which was open in the support of international donors from similar countries also in fairness where people can get some technical knowledge. I think that’s a quite valuable effort. I think we should really go more in the direction as I said we can intervene in the domestic affairs of Afghanistan and as you know like there are so many efforts to do that and they almost fail.

I think that Central Asia’s approach should be different. They should really like make economic engagement and we don’t mainly you know, like for us, it’s not about cooperation with the Taliban. For us, it’s mostly cooperation with the people of Afghanistan who are actually, also particular extent, mentally and historically are part of Central Asia, especially northern Afghanistan. Culturally of course it’s a part of Central Asia. That’s why we should really like put some efforts as I say make new programs, negotiate with the Taliban, bring people to Central Asia, make all these transformations helping and succumbent that Afghanistan could really get into a humanitarian crisis

Question:

You already mentioned about Central Asia being like a channel for engagement with Afghanistan and you noted in the article that we referred to earlier. For example, you refer to the eighth meeting of EU and Central Asian special representatives for Afghanistan held in Almaty on June 15 as a consolidation of this pathway. Can you unpack how Central Asia, especially Kazakhstan, is evolving into this critical and diplomatic pipeline to Afghanistan?

Eldaniz Gusseinov:

I think it’s a major step, it was opened in Almaty. So I think it’s a break from my perspective for this Central Asia channel for Afghanistan policy but also for example the sum of humanitarian aid will be delivered to Afghanistan through the territory of Turkmenistan it was changed because of the tensions on Afghan-Pakistan border. As I said there were several projects which were supported by international donors and organisations and overall I think for EU makes from my perspective also sent to support several projects in agriculture for example in Kazakhstan because Kazakhstan is a grain let’s say hub, it’s a giant in terms of grain exports even like Uzbekistan is expanding its way to build the Afghanistan also increasing exports of flour. I mean you should also recognise that partly thanks to kazakhstan’s grain exports to Uzbekistan even like I saw that there were some intentions of Afghanistan to support local production of flour. And I think we will also partly rely on air of grain so in that sense for EU and broader sense it makes I mean EU would I think from my perspective I would favor EU to invest more in projects like agricultural water management also supporting Central Asia expanding its energy exports to Afghanistan since Central Asia is a stabilising factor right now in the country and i think partly also thanks to Central Asia state we could also support like prevent this coming from going to happen because i always mention these numbers but Central Asia is supplying like up to 90% of electricity imports of Afghanistan also Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan jointly export up to 90% of Afghan’s flour imports and of course behind it is basically Kazakh grain and we do have also some we would like to enhance our capacity even to produce more grain to export even more energy and energy system of Central Asia is also connected because sometimes we do have a lack of electricity ourselves and that’s why we input it from neighbouring states for example karlistan is also importing it from Australia from Uzbekistan. So like you know we are quite interconnected in this area and that’s why, it would also make sense to support like our energy integration of Central Asia and most including Afghanistan but I think right now this full capacity is being produced on Central Asian soil because of still some sort of instability. So as I said to have even better stabilisation efforts in the country, we should really like this capacity of Central Asia to do them.

Question:

And you note that Central Asia’s “exports to Afghanistan are growing, but on market conditions and geopolitical factors rather than a solid foundation.” Could you explain these market conditions and geopolitical factors that drive the growing trade? Moreover, you underscore the need for a phased energy and industrial transformation of Afghanistan apparently as part of building a solid foundation. Do you think Central Asian states believe that Afghanistan’s long-term stability must ultimately be rooted in domestic legitimacy to form that “solid foundation”?

Eldaniz Gusseinov:

Thank you so much for your question. So first I think that, sorry what was your first question?

Question: So there are two questions. What are the market conditions and geopolitical factors? And the second one is do you think that Afghanistan’s long-term stability must be rooted in domestic legitimacy?

Eldaniz Gusseinov:

So what I would like to emphasise is that our export is quite volatile. So we have two, three major goods which are forming our exports to our planet. So as I said, it’s basically grain, flour, oil, I mean, seeding oil and electricity. So if anything will happen like it was I think Kazakhstan is a good example of it for Kazakhstan in 2022 Kazakh-Afghanistan bilateral trade almost reached one billion right now. Kazakhstan has on the top of it because it was a it was a decrease and it was like quite sudden as being honest if you will build it the chart you will see that and it highlights kazakhstan’s volatile experts so the Kazakh experts to Afghanistan is quite volatile why because anything will happen like for example if there will be some new tariffs introduced by natives for grain activities, for grain transit if there will be some issues with planting the grain itself you know like for example you get high temperature high water temperature if you do not manage to harvest enough grain and make enough flour so if anything will happen any structure will have a direct and apparent effect on the experts of Central of Central Asian states to Afghanistan trust and second should also depend that the market of Afghanistan it’s a huge one but this market doesn’t have necessary money to purchase all the goods which Central Asian states can produce. So I talked to several logistic companies and which were also supplying goods to Afghanistan by using trucks and they told him that there was some Kazakhstan’s exports to Afghanistan is also narrowing down so before Taliban came to power Kazakhstan used to export eggs, milk and other agricultural products beyond wheat and flour to Afghanistan and we see the trend that yeah they expand our exports but in terms of but quality is narrowing down so Afghans aren’t able to purchase even like some other high quality foods so like I talked to some oil producers like seeding oil producers, they told me that it’s problematic right now to expand the seeding oil exports to Afghanistan because they are not able not everyone is able to buy Kazakh high quality seeding oil instead they prefer to purchase some seeding oil that’s mixed with palm oil they’re not a good quality.

And what about geopolitical factors so yeah I mean how otherwise can we explain that it’s like a double its export to Afghanistan because of the situation on Afghan Pakistan border and it also explains why Iran is increasing its economic present in Afghanistan and that being said it’s that one door closed another door opened. So we are using this opportunity to expand our economic present but as I said this trend is not a high quality one. So, anything that will happen with our production of flour or grain, this will also have implications for our exports in Afghanistan in terms of good reason, as I have already outlined in the case of example.

Question:

You also mentioned this in another article titled “Geo-Connectivity and the Death of Eurasia,” which you co-published with Vlad Paddack, you argue that the conflicts in Ukraine, Iran, and Afghanistan are undermining Central Asia’s viability as an energy and transport hub. Specifically, in the case of Afghanistan, you not that the border closures since late 2025 have severed overland transit, cutting off Central Asia’s shortest route to the Indian Ocean via Karachi and Gwadar. The Iran War eliminated the last remaining route via Bandar Abbas and Chabahar. Are these the geopolitical factors that you believe drive Central Asia’s current exports to Afghanistan? If there are changes to these factors, do you think it will affect the current level of exports?

Eldaniz Gusseinov:

So in short term we are winning from the situation on Afghan-Pakistan border. In long term we are looking for them because of course you can’t, you know, you can’t justify let’s say justify your expansion of goods to Afghanistan right no it’s not saying like you would have it if the border would be open not really the same so if the world would be open we would have even like more trade with Pakistan and more trade also by using these own links to get to Chabahar to trade with India and also to make business with gulf state and even Africa.

so I remember as I was in I think jubayra I forget the right name name of the city in guay. Okay, so as I was in UAE, I went to one of the markets and I noticed that they were selling Uzbek food and vegetables I was asking myself, how could Uzbekistan manage to export this to UAE?

So this was actually October, beginning of October last year yeah basically it could come either via Afghanistan-Pakistan or via Iran. So before Taliban came to power we didn’t even have any transit of goods through Afghan soil to Pakistan because there were some security issues namely after Taliban came to power they managed to have control over the border somehow they were successful in fighting against corruption on the border and also providing security for truck drivers. I even spoke to several expeditor companies and they told me that there were some even Central Asian truck drivers who could go across the whole territory of Afghanistan by reaching Pakistan. So before that, it had never happened.

So basically Central Asians were reaching some neighboring cities like Hairatan, bendeshahar also Torghundi they were bringing their goods from Central Asian trucks into Afghan trucks to enable it further exports in the Afghan depths more deep into Afghan territory and also to Pakistan so there was a lot of security issues right now I noticed even some companies which do go like more deep into the territory of Afghanistan to transfer the goods. So what I want to say that in short term we are winning from the situation on the border. In long term we are losing from it because we are losing one of the options or one of the pillars of our multi-vector foreign policy by expanding our economic cooperation not only with Afghanistan but also with Pakistan and a broader region like Gulf states India and even Africa because we had this ambition to assess our ambition was not to expand our economic cooperation with the Taliban but mainly to use Afghanistan as a branding zone to get to some broader market. This was our number one goal in our South Asian foreign policy not only of Kazakhstan but also of other Central Asian states like by expanding our card by having this this reliable roles which could also bring our goods and export and imports from these different regions.

Question:

Thank you that in October 2024, Kazakhstan reported that Afghanistan had requested machinery deliveries and asked Astana to consider opening dealerships for Kazakh vehicles. Around the same time, a correspondent account for Afghanistan’s Ghazanfar Bank was opened at Kazakhstan’s Zaman Bank, shifting a portion of bilateral settlements to direct payments that completely bypass third-country intermediaries. Did these initiatives actually materialize? Apart from these banking and trade agreements, what are some of the other major investments that Kazakhstan has made in Afghanistan since the Taliban took control?

Eldaniz Gusseinov:

It depends, even like the main I think one of the main obstacles for us to expand wheat is also lack of payment and financial systems so yeah there’s a deal between these two different banks but the problem is even like has a higher dimension so issue is that Taliban is excluded from SWIFT. Afghanistan is excluded through the section of the dream and for us because of like imbalances in our way with Afghanistan we can’t really like manage to have this. Okay, so look, because of the imbalances in our bilateral trade, so basically Central Asia is exporting more than importing from Afghanistan.

We can’t manage to have wheat in national currencies. So the issue is the following. For example, Afghans are purchasing wheat flour from Central Asia. so they can pay with the Afghans okay I can take the Afghans but what can I do with the Afghans i’m sorry what can I purchase from Afghanistan by having the Afghans so the demand side from Central Asia is lower than Afghan demand side for other goods so in this regard I can purchase basically dried fruits maybe some beverages. I don’t know what else I can buy from Afghanistan with this Afghans that is one of the main disruptions that’s why they have like hawala system they have also some people use cash to pay to make this deal possible. And this is one of the main obstacles for us also to promote the start of the nation. So basically, this great system is going to be clear.

So I think some Afghans, businessmen, they have relatives in different parts of the world, like in Turkey, in UAE, even in Moscow. And these people help them to initiate these payments, transactions between Central Asia and Afghanistan. So yeah, as I have already outlined, it’s a bit difficult right now to make this business.

Question:

Thank you so much and maybe my last question: Following the Taliban’s violent return to power in August 2021, Kazakhstan’s then-Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Akan Rakhmetullin, said during a briefing that Kazakhstan did not recognize the Taliban’s authority. Instead, he emphasized that Astana “supports the statement of the UN Security Council on the need to create an inclusive and representative government, respect the rights of national minorities and women, prevent the presence of groups that pose a threat to other states, and comply with international law.” Given Astana’s increased diplomatic engagement with the Taliban regime over the last few years, do you think Kazakhstan still meaningfully maintains this position on domestic inclusivity and human rights?

Eldaniz Gusseinov:

Yes, I mean as Kazakhstan is looking forward to and it changes amendments that’s in the UN and global approach to Afghanistan so Kazakhstan is a let’s say it is sustainable is a reliable member of the global society and of course Kazakhstan makes so many initiatives for international institutions like UN, OEC, ICO supports its principles and I think in this regard of course Kazakhstan understands its accessibility towards the people of Afghanistan but at the same time also expresses its adherence to global norms and also agreements.

So I think yes, I think we will not see any major changes before anything will change in UN security resolutions

Ali:

Thank you so much, Eldaniz Gusseinov, for this insightful discussion and I really appreciate your time.

Eldaniz Gusseinov:

Thank you so much, Ali, and assalamu alaikum

Introduction:

Thank you so much, Chris Costa, Professor Chris Costa, for joining me on The crossroads for a deep-dive conversation on your intelligence work in Afghanistan and the broader strategic environment since the withdrawal of US forces from the country in August 2021.

Before we dive deep, I would like to introduce you to our audience, Colonel Chris Costa (Ret.) is the Executive Director of the International Spy Museum. He previously served as Special Assistant to President Trump & Senior Director for Counterterrorism at the National Security Council during the first Trump administration. A 35-year veteran of the Department of Defense, Costa served 25 years in the United States Army working in counterintelligence, human intelligence and with special operations forces in Central America, Europe, and throughout the Middle East. Over his career, he ran a wide range of intelligence and special operations in Panama, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and the first and second Iraq wars. He earned two Bronze stars for his sensitive human intelligence work in Afghanistan. Chris holds an MA in Strategic Intelligence from American Military University; and another MA in National Security and Strategic Studies from the US Naval War College.

Question:

Professor Costa, I’d like to start off with your work in Afghanistan. Your bio on the International Spy Museum website notes that you offer “eye-opening observations” by drawing upon your “time working as a Human Intelligence practitioner overseas (Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq) with Special Operations Forces.” With that in mind, when were you first deployed to Afghanistan and how long did you work there? I know these are multiple questions, but also, looking back, what are some of the major observations from your time on the ground?

Chris Costa:

Yeah, Ali, thank you very much for having me. It is a privilege to be able to talk about my time in Afghanistan. And frankly my time in Afghanistan began in 2003. So to answer your question directly, that’s the first time I deployed to Afghanistan and got off an aircraft at Bagram air force base in spring of 2003 and I came back on multiple deployments, short deployments, very mission focused. I spent my first time in Afghanistan for four months and came back in 2004 and spent four to six months and I came back multiple times after that in 2009 and after 2013. And I ended up at the White House, as your bio suggested, where I worked on Afghanistan and and the South Asia strategy from a counterterrorism standpoint.

But my biggest observation, to just dive right in, is that Afghanistan has always been oversimplified, and there are very, very many assumptions that are made. We often looked at the country clearly through a counterterrorism lens, but Afghans experienced the war very differently through local power, tribal relationships, corruption, protection, fear, honor, all of the things you know far better than I will ever understand. And it’s very survival. So the Taliban, and I don’t want to give them too much credit, but, in fact I don’t want to give them a lot of credit at all, but they do understand the human terrain, they understand it better than we would ever understand it. And they understand the physical terrain.

So, in short, the Taliban’s real strength was not just its ideology or its battlefield skill, it was really patience. And let’s not forget that over the years, the Taliban variously was supported by Pakistan. That factored into this unique country that is Afghanistan. The idea though of local networks, support networks linked to al-Qaeda frankly as well as linked to the Haqqani Network, they all operated from 2003 forward after they reconstituted themselves after a very successful invasion and intervention by the United States and the aftermath of 2001.

So I’ll pause there to see if you have any any follow-up, but I do want to make the point that the early intervention of US special operations forces with CIA in working with tribal actors was a very very successful unconventional warfare operation that caused the Taliban to flee. The problems then evolved over time as the United States fought multiple wars over an extended period of time in Afghanistan.

Question:

Yeah, thank you. That’s really fascinating. And definitely you were dealing with the human intelligence work there and perhaps followed the Taliban’s bases closely, could you share your insights where?

Chris Costa:

Well, I mean it would depend on the time period we’re talking. Anywhere from Kandahar which is clearly was a centre of gravity for the Taliban, but my experience was operating and I worked against Taliban interests in the greater Kabul area and I also operated near Gardez and in border areas in Paktia and Paktika provinces. And remember in 2003 that is when the Taliban began to reconstitute and reemerge, so I spent some time trying to understand what those networks look like, where they were operating and in 2003 Americans were killed in Afghanistan near Gardez in particular and elsewhere in in Afghanistan.

So while the Taliban were reemerging, the United States and our partners, to include Afghan partners, were trying to understand the footprint, where those networks were, where their supporting nodes were and of course that’s something I would say that I never necessarily mastered. I say that with all humility because the dynamics were ever changing.

Question:

Thank you. Your bio also highlights your extensive experience interviewing “terrorists and defectors in U.S. custody” and co-authoring “some important contributions to terrorism literature.” And this gives you unique perspectives on “terrorist motivations, their activation for violence, and an explanation of the radicalization process.” Of course, you explore these exact themes in the “Terrorism/Counterterrorism” course you teach at Georgetown University. There you have specific questions for your course: “What motivates different types of terrorist groups? When does terrorism succeed and fail?” Applying that framework to your own experience, how do you view the Taliban’s motivations and their ultimate success during the US intervention? And do you agree that they ultimately succeeded against the US?

Chris Costa:

So I’ll answer the the last part. Most painfully but they did succeed, at a pure, from a pure insurgent and counterterrorism standpoint or terrorism standpoint depending on your perspective. The bottom line the violence was used selectively and symbolically and in many cases effectively but when I talked to students, not only was the Taliban a organisation that obviously was zealously religious, they also had streaks of nationalism, they exercised tribal traditions based on revenge, power, their identity.

And clearly for me to better understand those idiosyncrasies, those nuances, I talked to Americans that were born in Afghanistan that that were self-radicalised in the United States, and the question of self-radicalisation is is a matter of some subjectivity, but the bottom line is, yes, they were successful in the end because they achieved their political objective which is a regime under Taliban leadership. Now I would argue that the rest of the story is not decided because obviously the Taliban in Afghanistan has a long painful history of warfare and in many cases the future is going to depend, or in the case of the Taliban I should say, better said, the future is going to depend on Taliban choices.

Let me let me just tighten up this conversation a little bit and let me get back to radicalisation and then I'll talk about the Taliban choices. What I also tell my students: there is no one radicalisation path. I interviewed Najibullah Zazi, I talked to him about tribes and the impact his Pashtun tribal sensibilities were and his feelings toward tribes. Some of that was interesting.

But at the end of the day his radicalisation was very unique. It was based on dealing with other individuals and the feedback that he got and some of his own personal psychology. But what I have learned if anything by interviewing
a half dozen, I don't want to oversell, this was not a massive research project but I did want to understand from my experience the radicalisation of some of the Afghans and compare that to some of the individuals that radicalised and joined ISIS.

At the end of the day, the individuals I talked to that were raised in the United States felt a need to support the Taliban and answer Bin Laden's call for jihad and they thought that the best way to do that was to go and fight in Taliban and answer their call of duty. Now again their personal psychologies need to be studied and were studied. But when you talk to them at the end of the day, they felt a sense of duty and they made a significant error and they paid a price price for it. Zazi went to prison. Zarin is still in jail. This was Najibullah Zazi that was planning an attack in New York City at a subway.

So again, what I’ve learned from interviewing individuals that ultimately cooperated with US intelligence and with the Department of Justice, each radical path is very different, but, in their view, it was defensive and they recognised their mistake, at least Zazi did, but he paid a price for it. So back to the Taliban, I think the Taliban’s use of violence against their population, against other tribes, is one of the tools that they used not just against the coalition but also to terrorise villagers that wanted to support the coalition, while the United States and the coalition tried to rebuild Afghanistan during various years and of course that experiment failed ultimately.

There was never, there was, in some ways the United States lost their operational patience and we tried again, just to flash forward in 2017, with the 2017 South Asia strategy that general McMaster championed, I truly believed that the strategy instead of pulling forces out of Afghanistan, the idea of changing the kinds of US forces that would support with Afghanistan so they could continue the fight as US forces condition-based left Afghanistan over time, at a time of our choosing, no date or marker on the calendar. So I thought it was a sound strategy in 2017 and it was a broader strategy to put and to ensure, Ali, that Pakistan was again on notice that the United States was not leaving Afghanistan. That was the the idea in 2017 and it was a regional strategy it wasn’t just Afghanistan, there were many regional issues that started to bleed into great power competition. So that’s how I saw things in 2017 and when I left in 2018, that South Asia strategy was still in place.

Question:

I would like to come back to that point in a bit. Before that I wanted to have a follow-up to my previous question. I also took a terrorism and counter-terrorism course at Columbia University and my professor kind of refused to characterise the Taliban as a terrorist organisation and also even during their insurgency. I would like to have your views on that and also could you tell us how the Taliban differ from other militant and jihadist groups like the Islamic State or ISIS.

Chris Costa:

Yeah, I think it’s very complicated and it’s probably too short of a podcast to really dive deep. But at the end of the day, it was a specially designated terrorist group if I recall. But at the end of the day, it was not a global terrorist organisation in terms of its objectives.

Its ideologies clearly were all about estab, establishing, excuse me, an emirate in Afghanistan. It was about controlling the Afghan space and people. However, I would again, this can be debated and this can be unsettled, but at the end of the day the Taliban did use terrorism methodologies clearly, at times indiscriminate indiscriminate terror, assassinations of political leaders, but at the end of the day the objectives were not necessarily indiscriminate violence.

But I would separate that from the Haqqani Network that is, is a terrorist organisation and did use terrorism against the population and horrific terrorism and kidnapped Americans and Afghans and committed acts of rural terrorism.

So terrorism is a methodology, whether it’s designated or not, those are policy and political decisions, but the end at the end of the day the Taliban behaved like an insurgent group that used terrorism to include kidnapping and holding hostages like Caitlin Coleman and others.

Question:

Thank you so much and coming back to the point that you raised earlier. President Trump took office with an “instinct” to pull out of Afghanistan. Yet in August 2017, following “a comprehensive review of all strategic options” in the region by his national security team, he announced a new strategy for Afghanistan and South Asia, as you mentioned. The strategy laid out five major pillars, including shifting from a time-based approach to one guided by the conditions on the ground, to ensure the Taliban could not simply wait out the US forces. But by July 2018, President Trump instructed top diplomats to engage in direct talks with the Taliban. This led to a secret meeting in Doha between Alice Wells, then Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, and a six-member Taliban delegation, excluding Afghan government officials. This marked a significant concession to the Taliban who had long demanded direct and bilateral negotiations with the United States. How did the intelligence work and analysis inform this shift in strategy?

Chris Costa:

Ali, so I’m not dodging the question, but I left the administration in 2018. So my observations would have been from outside the US government and based on academics and talking to veterans. But here’s how I will couch it. The president trump did come in to the administration, his sensibility was no more forever wars, no more country-building, no more spending billions and billions of dollars on Afghanistan, the the Afghans had to be, had to be prepared to defend their nation.

And I was very very supportive of the strategy and the arguments behind giving the South Asia strategy and opportunity at the end of the day the president had choices and he had courses of action and as we already talked about a conditions-based regional approach with the five pillars you referenced was adopted. But by 2018 the United States patience was worn thin, the situation wasn’t changing dramatically for the better, so the president had an option to begin talks. The sensibility I think for talks are right. Strategists, former diplomats, people, academicians, Afghans themselves for years are going to argue was it right to cut out the Afghan government from those talks, especially back to your point earlier insurgency versus terrorism is about legitimacy.

And I should have said that at the outset. The coin of the realm is legitimacy. By cutting the Afghan government out of those talks because the Taliban didn’t want them there, there was little time to work out the power sharing agreements. I think that’s what Ghani wanted. All of these things seem to be playing out with the clock ticking. I cannot speak to the, the decisions again in 2018, but it seems to me in hindsight that the Afghan government should have had a seat at the table but that wasn’t a decision I made. I was out of the US government. I think, also in the hindsight, it is easier to look back at the mistakes made. The mistakes made were cutting the Afghans out of the discussions, not necessarily have negotiations. But in some ways having the Taliban to the negotiation table required that and there had to be some back and forth and give and take.

And the United States does deal with with insurgent organisations, it does engage with terrorist organisations. What we don’t do is pay terrorist groups to bring US hostages home but there are confidence building measures that need to get built into and humanitarian issues that can be built into those confidence building measures. I think many of those things were tried and tested but the United States was losing its operational patience.

Now back to the point of intelligence, what I can say is I always argued that Afghanistan is going to continue to be a US national security problem because of sanctuary historically given to al-Qaeda and now some 20 plus terrorist organisations are training, are free to move in Afghanistan and are giving succor by the Taliban and possibly support but I have no way of knowing that. I don’t have access to the intelligence and I’m not sure we have our focus on Afghanistan. But I will say and I’ve gone on too long, I apologise, but I will say,

Ali:

It’s absolutely fine.

Chris Costa:

Looking at my article that I wrote, hopefully you can share with your audience right before the United States began its bombing of Iran, I had co-authored a piece that suggested the Taliban better change their behaviour because by tethering themselves to an axis of convenience with Iran, they are very very vulnerable. I would argue the Taliban should be deeply deeply concerned with what has happened by the United States in terms of strikes in military forces being used against the Iranian regime, the Taliban need to be very careful. They also are paying a price for playing the kinds of power politics they’ve tried to play. Now Pakistan is deeply deeply disturbed in conducting military operations against Pakistan because of their support to terrorism isn’t that ironic.

Question:

You referred to the presence of 20 plus terrorist groups or militant groups in Afghanistan under the Taliban and you’ve previously responded to questions about the US shifting resources toward near-peer competition by suggesting a balanced approach. As you put it: “Our rebalancing can’t be binary; it can’t be an either/or proposition. We can’t, for instance, focus on North Korea or China and forget about CT [counterterrorism]. We’re going to have to figure out a way of doing both.” Given that perspective, do you think effective counterterrorism operations are still being maintained when it comes to the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan?

Chris Costa:

So I’ll answer your question, that’s an excellent question this way. First of all you made reference to a mantra that I’ve argued since I left the White House in 2018 that the United States is a great country we have great partners across the world we can do both great power competition and counterterrorism and I want to make a really important point I argued and I still maintain that the United States should have left a counterterrorism footprint on the ground in Afghanistan in the uh when the Biden administration made a decision wrongly i believe for a full and complete withdrawal out of Afghanistan with a date in a marker on the wall and giving up Bagram airbase had we left a footprint on the ground had we had a supply chain had we had the opportunity uh to be in place despite the hazards of that the United States also would have been in a position to counter China to send a strong message I’m talking about commercially with resources.

I, so i think you you you have to combine CT along with with working commercial interests in supply chains and maybe down the line normalisation of a relationship with the Taliban. And I think that’s what some Americans envision but we’re a long way away from that although it’s good news that the Taliban released they had no choice candidly they needed to release Americans that they’ve held in the last year that was a good choice by the Taliban. I, we know that they harbored in the past the Haqqani network clearly Sirajuddin Haqqani is a part of the Afghan government and Zawahiri was there even though the Taliban promised that they would not allow al-Qaeda to have sanctuary. So the idea of sanctuary, the idea of where the United States is currently only time will tell but we’re coming up on the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and the United States prob probably does not have a great sense of what is happening on the ground in Afghanistan but that’s not to say the US intelligence community along with foreign partners isn’t collecting, isn’t working with liaison partners, isn’t working closely with, with the Pakistanis for example or the Tajiks I have no sense for that but I, I do believe the united states understands the necessity to watch what is happening on the ground in Afghanistan to the extent it can.

Question:

Thank you on that note, following his appointment by President Trump as National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz emphasised the urgent need to recover an intelligence footing in Afghanistan. In a Washington Post interview published in January 2025, he stated that the administration would assess US intelligence-gathering capabilities in the region to ensure “we’re not surprised again—yet again—from that part of the world.” However, he clarified that this strategic assessment does not mean “we’ve got to go back and fight in Kandahar.” As someone who understands these capabilities on the ground, how do you think the US has maintained or reestablished this intelligence footprint?

Chris Costa:

It would really be speculation on my part, but again I'm not going to sidestep the question. It's an excellent question and I completely completely support the ambassador's [Mike Waltz, US ambassador to the UN and former national advisor] comments. And he and I have talked about this in the past.

The idea of of human intelligence operations and platforms that found al-Zawahiri in Kabul can still be employed. Standoff capabilities, liaison partners, I can only surmise that the United States has assessed those capabilities, has worked with with foreign partners to ensure the United States is understanding what happens.

This is a little redundant to what I said earlier, but I want to underscore that in the aftermath, I'll take us back to the cold war, the early cold war, the United States didn't have a human footprint necessarily on the ground in the Soviet Union, so we used U-2 aircraft famously, over time we had satellites and and we had sources that were able to travel legitimately into Afghanistan, merchants and in a full range of people to debrief and talk about. Similarly we could tap into refugee populations throughout the early part of the cold war. These are all opportunities.

And another point I will make is there are insurgent groups that are fighting rightly the Taliban, current Taliban regime as well as, of course, ISIS-K, which is unequivocally a terrorist organisation.

We want to see the Taliban prevail against a very dangerous ISIS-K, but at the same time, there are oganisations that are putting pressure on the Taliban. So clearly some intelligence must fall off the table because these individuals travel abroad and other intelligence services must or presumably debrief them.

Question:

Thank you, you earlier mentioned about the Taliban’s choice of releasing American nationals that they detained. On March 20, 2025, a U.S. delegation led by Adam Boehler, Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs, traveled to Afghanistan to meet with the Taliban’s Foreign Minister Amir Khan Mutaqi. That same day, the Taliban released American national George Glezmann on “humanitarian ground” and as a “goodwill gesture,” as the Taliban put it, aimed at signaling that the regime was ready for further engagement with the United States. The Taliban had held Glezmann since December 2022 when they detained him while he was visiting Afghanistan as a tourist. Apparently in return for his release, the Trump Administration dropped millions of dollars in bounties on the Taliban’s acting Interior Minister Serajuddin Haqqani, his brother Abdul Aziz Haqqani, and brother-in-law Yahya Haqqani. State Department officials confirmed to the media that “there is no current reward” for the three Haqqani Network officials, but they remain “Specially Designated Global Terrorists and the Haqqani Network remains designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.” As someone who managed counterterrorism and hostage recovery from inside the White House, how do you view this exchange? Does a concession like lifting a bounty in return for the release of hostages show that the Taliban’s hostage-taking strategy is actually paying off?

Chris Costa:

Well, they’re certainly not taking, I’m talking about the Taliban, they’re not making mistakes and taking Americans hostages now nor will they I feel safe to say that in the short term and long term, although it’s hard to predict obviously the future, it’s my educated guess. That said these are policy decisions and likely made at the White House I can only presume it and in consultation with the national security advisor and the Secretary of State Rubio clearly the Taliban are on notice. As somebody that’s work hostages, we use all means, all instruments of US power, we use diplomatic, diplomacy, we clearly use our intelligence services to inform those decisions. We have the opportunity to conduct military operations. We have the opportunity to conduct hostage rescue operations along with that and we have economic tools and sanctions so the idea of reducing charges the idea of trading prisoners as confidence building measures or humanitarian gestures those are policy and presidential decision decisions.

At a human level, it is unacceptable to take somebody’s freedom away from them and that was a part of the tool of malign regimes like Russia with as well as Myanmar as well as on occasion China, wrongful detentions unacceptable, kidnappings unacceptable, we could parse out what those those terms mean but the at the end of the day taking somebody hostage, taking somebody away from their family, put them in some oppressive condition, they don’t know whether they’re going to live or die, their families are seeking answers from the US government in these cases. So I’m an advocate for getting these people home in balancing out the long term risks. And I think the United States would have done the risk management and looked at the long term risks and found ultimately those courses of action acceptable, supportable.

And I am truly glad there are no Americans as far as I know being held by the Taliban today. I will also hats off to the current trump administration they’ve done extraordinary work on the wrongfully held detainees or or hostages space as well as hostages being held by terrorists, to include Hamas it is unacceptable as I said to take somebody hostage violates law and its a violation of who we are as people so I appreciate that Adam and I have talked to him and thanked him personally on other cases. I appreciate his commitment, the administration’s commitment, I want also make an important point for our listeners that each administration worked hard on trying to resolve hostage issues. We were successful in the first Trump administration setting conditions for bringing home Americans and I think we, with the continuity from the previous administration, the Obama administration to the first Trump administration to the Biden administration and some spy trades for other wrongfully held detainees in Russia etc. So I think the United States is committed to being bringing Americans home but we have a long way to go to prevent this kind of malign behaviour by regimes like the Taliban. So I think this was an excellent outcome.

Question:

And you know President Trump has been talking about the need to regain access to Bagram air base. And of course, you are, we just discussed the recovery of American nationals held by the Taliban. Do you know if the administration has engaged the Taliban, with the Taliban on those other fronts?

Chris Costa:

I have no sense if something’s happening back channel. That was eye-opening for me to hear that and that suggested the possibility for some kind of normalisation, some kind of agreements with the Taliban but I have no sense for that I would go back to the original sin was vacating Bagram and going to zero in Afghanistan, not a political comment, just my judgment was going to zero was the wrong message to send and the Taliban understood what that meant and continued to operate across Afghanistan and had a plan and the United States of course withdraw withdrew and I think that sent a poor signal to the world candidly and makes us vulnerable in other places maybe Ukraine maybe Taiwan. So that’s up to historians to assess. I do know that I’m looking forward to understand from the US there’s a commission that’s looking at Afghanistan and I very much want to understand what some of the big lessons learned were although I suspect I know what they are.

Question:

Thank you for that but you know that this was a negotiated settlement or deal between the United States and the Taliban in Doha. Would it have been acceptable for the Taliban if the US wanted to, wanted to maintain some presence or footprint at the Bagram airbase?

Chris Costa:

I can’t speak to what’s tolerable or not for the Taliban. I mean you know they’re a malign regime and and that’s how I assess them. They oppress their people, they oppress their women, they oppress kids in school. I think it’s, I understand there are, there are different points of view and there are cultural aspects of these things but at the end of the day it’s untenable. But I have no idea what their calculus is and I would never speak for the Taliban. But I will say that any negotiation is also, can be adjusted as a result of actions on the ground. We’re seeing that play out right now in Doha ironically. I don’t know what’s happening currently but on this date it’s possible that the United States might be using Doha as a platform to talk to the Iranians. So at the end of the day the negotiations and dynamics change in their actions that the actions on the ground matter.

Remember the United States was considering, also inviting the Taliban to camp David and what happened the Taliban did what the Taliban do and killed lots of innocent people in Kabul as I recall and and maybe American casualties, I do not recall the details regrettably. But I know it was enough to truly truly make any such travel by the Taliban untenable to the United States, again back to that point on legitimacy.

Question:

Thank you. I know you also follow the Taliban’s relations with the neighbouring countries. In an article “Iran and the Taliban: An Axis of Convenience the United States Cannot Ignore,” which you co-published with Wahab Azizi in March, you write “For nearly a quarter-century after the September 11 attacks, U.S. policy rested on a useful assumption: that Iran and the Taliban were irreconcilable enemies whose ideological and sectarian differences would prevent meaningful cooperation. That assumption was convenient for a time—but it is no longer valid.” Looking at the region since the US withdrawal, how exactly has the strategic environment changed and what are the primary shared interests driving the Taliban and Tehran together?

Chris Costa:

Well, I think now and I alluded to it earlier, Ali, the Taliban are extremely vulnerable as a result of what’s happening with Iran. They are on notice as we’ve talked about throughout this excellent conversation. They are on notice, they certainly are paying a price rightfully so from Pakistan pressing the Taliban so taken together the Taliban have to be extremely extremely mindful that the United States will use force if necessary to press the Taliban. Clearly that’s not a decision I have any sway on but I think by looking at what the United States has done against the Taliban, I’m sorry Iran.

Currently I think that the Taliban have to be very very cautious at the decisions they make diplomatically and militarily in, in the future and they are not a stable country by any stretch of the imagination. And I do want to say my heart does go out to the Afghan people, the children, the families, people that just want to live peacefully in a beautiful country of Afghanistan. I see the Taliban as as more of a problem in the future than a solution.

Question:

Thank you. Maybe my last question before we wrap it up. During the Biden Administration, Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed that the Taliban were receiving training from China to use American weapons left behind. From an intelligence point of view, what is your assessment of the Taliban-China relations and their implications for the U.S. interests in the region?

Chris Costa:

Yeah, I really can’t speak to Secretary Hegseth’s comments on intelligence in China. I do know that China, their foreign policy is exploitive in nature, that’s why we’re in a competition with China. Lieutenant general McMaster, the former national security advisor, talked about their strategy of coercion and exploitation. So I see China filling those vacuums in Afghanistan to exploit the resources, to to counter the United States by building a relationship with the Taliban. Remember China is also concerned with Uyghurs and and you know part of China touches Afghanistan as I recall, right?

So I think that it only will follow that China will continue to build a relationship on the ground with the Taliban government what I don’t have a sense for what’s happening with the leftover weapons. Clearly the Taliban is using it against, in some cases, against the population, but I have no sense for the Chinese being trained or Russians for that matter or mercenaries or anyone else.

I do know that the TTP, the Pakistan Taliban, are a threat to Pakistani stability. So that’s something that I’m sure Pakistan looks at, how are they being armed? are they being armed by the Taliban? So not a great answer to your question because I have no sense for, for the intelligence that the secretary offered.

Question:

And maybe the last bit, what do you think should a US policy towards the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan look like? We know that the administration has been doing a review of the US approach towards Afghanistan, but we have not seen any official policy yet. What do you think should a US policy should look like?

Chris Costa:

I think over time, Ali, I would like to see some normalisation but that time is very very much up to the Taliban’s behaviour. So again it’s going to be based on Taliban decisions what normalisation looks like. And I don’t see that happening anytime in the near term because of bad policy choices being made by the Taliban and their double game. I want to see evidence of what they’re doing against ISIS-K. I want to see evidence what they’re doing against other terrorist organisations that can provide regional instability or trigger regional instability. They cannot be trusted, so it’s gonna take time.

But I think diplomacy fits, but also the United States has a carrot as well as a stick. And I’d like to hope that all of that, those instruments of national power, get built into some policy output for the current administration. I think a lot is going to depend on what’s happening with Pakistan in Afghanistan currently. Clearly, Afghanistan is being attacked, I’m not talking about Afghanistan targets, Taliban targets are being attacked as we’ve talked about repeatedly because of their support to the TTP.

At the same time Pakistan is playing a role in negotiations, as I understand it, with with Iran and the United States. So I think that just like the South Asia strategy, Pakistan’s going to have a role in, in any kind of normalisation with the Taliban. Clearly the time isn’t right, that might be years from now, could be a decade from now but diplomacy can be, can be worked clearly.

Ali:

Thank you so much, Professor Chris costa, for this excellent and insightful discussion based on your intelligence work in Afghanistan. I really appreciate your time.

Chris Costa:

Thank you, Ali, thank you to your listeners and I appreciate the opportunity to talk based on my history, based on some of my experiences, but I am an outsider now. And my assessment is through the lens of policy, not politics, and, and through the lens of my experience as a counterterrorism professional and somebody that’s been involved in counterinsurgencies as well. And I really just appreciated the time today.

Ali:

Thank you so much.

Thank you very much, Ms Saodat Umarova, for joining me on The Crossroads for a deep-dive conversation on the geoeconomic dynamics of relations between Afghanistan and Central Asia, especially Uzbekistan. Before we begin our conversation, I’d like to briefly introduce you to our audience: Ms Umarova is an economic analyst at the Centre for Progressive Reforms based in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. She is also a PhD student and an Assistant Professor at the University of World Economy and Diplomacy, where she teaches courses related to international economic relations.

Question:

So let’s begin with the role of Central Asia in the Taliban-led Afghanistan. A joint report titled “Toward Peace, Friendship, and Prosperity for Afghanistan and Central Asia: Politics and Economics of Building a Common Space” was published by the Centre for Progressive Reforms in 2025. The report features authors from Afghanistan and four Central Asian countries, including Uzbekistan, and explores geopolitical and geoeconomic dynamics of the relations between the region and Afghanistan. Specifically, part two of the report discusses the geoeconomic dimension of relations between Afghanistan and Central Asia. The authors argue that since the Taliban takeover, Central Asian countries have contributed significantly to stabilising Afghanistan (p. 53). So, Ms Umarova, to start off, can you define geoeconomics and explain how it is so important for relations between Afghanistan and Central Asia?

Saodat Umaraova:

Thank you, Mr Adili, for kind introduction and thank you for inviting me to your interview. Yes, of course, I think first of all, geoeconomics refers to the use of economic instruments, trade, investment, energy cooperation, transport corridors, infrastructure and connectivity to achieve broader strategic objectives between countries.

And in the case of Central Asia and Afghanistan, geoeconomics is very important. It’s crucial because geography alone does not create integration and economic links create incentives for preparation, stability and long-term development and partnership. Afghanistan should not be viewed solely through security lens and we mentioned about this in our report several times and because it’s also a potential transit hub connecting Central Asia with South Asia and global markets and Central Asian countries can contribute not only through diplomacy but also through energy exports, improving transport corridors and infrastructure and bringing trade facilitation measures and improving the investment, achieving the investment coming to Afghanistan. Therefore, geoeconomics helps us understand how economic cooperation can contribute to both prosperity and stability in the region. One of the central messages of our report that economic connectivity and regional security should be seen as mutually reinforcing, rather than competing objectives.

Question:

Yeah, of course, the report paints a positive picture of the relations between Afghanistan an Central Asia. But it also highlights eight like geoeconomic barriers to promoting peace and stability in Afghanistan through economic partnership with Central Asian countries (p.55). What are these barriers? Can you explain them?

Saodat Umarova:

Yes, we are identifying eight main barriers and obstacles that continue to constrain Afghanistan’s economic integration with Central Asia. So we identify the infrastructural bottlenecks, energy constraints, banking system and financial limitations, trade imbalances. Yes, it’s huge trade imbalances in Afghanistan’s trade and weak productive capacity. Also some customs and border limitations and inefficiencies, political uncertainty in the region and investment risk that’s associated with security concerns.

And these barriers do not operate individually, yes, independently, but they are very connected. For example, weak infrastructure increases transportation costs and high, high cost for trade reduce investment and lower investment constraints industrial development in the region and limits export diversification. So, and one of the key findings that we mentioned in our research is that many of these challenges are not permanent structural obstacles, but they can be coordinated with the regional policies and improved connectivity and energy cooperation, customs modernisation and greater private sector engagement and trade between Central Asia and Afghanistan. And we believe that these barriers can be reduced by cooperating.

Question:

I would like to zoom in on the economic ties between the Taliban and Uzbekistan. In another joint article titled “Uzbekistan and Afghanistan: Economic Bridge Across the Amu Darya?” in October last year, you and Dr Gafarov, of course I had a conversation with him about the relations between the Taliban and Uzbekistan a couple of months ago, you and he mention that Uzbekistan continued to strengthen its economic ties with Afghanistan after the Taliban’s takeover of the country based on an economic and pragmatic approach. This was driven by Tashkent’s contemporary foreign policy, which you believe, prioritises economic development over political or military-security considerations. Do you think Uzbekistan is making a strategic miscalculation by downplaying the security dynamics under the Taliban? I raise this question because in the joint report that we discussed earlier, you identify security issues—such as terrorism, narcotics trafficking, and general instability—alongside ideological divergence (for example secular states in Central Asia versus a religious emirate in Afghanistan) as two major dividers (p.34). So do you think Uzbekistan is making a strategic miscalculation by downplaying the security dynamics under the Taliban?

Saodat Umarova:

Yeah, okay, let me, first of all, highlight that Afghanistan is not just simply another foreign country from Uzbekistan. It’s our direct geographical neighbour and therefore we cannot avoid the reality we are, we now have. Any long-term policy towards Afghanistan must begin with this fact. And neighbours not choose each other but they must find the way how to coexist and cooperate.

And since 2021 as you mentioned again Uzbekistan is pursuing what I would describe as a dual track approach on the one hand it remains attentive to the security risk including what you mentioned border stability, terrorism and regional extremism but on the other hand we recognise that economic isolation has historically contributed to instability in Afghanistan and the logic behind Tashkent’s policies that selective engagements through trade, electricity exports, transport links, and humanitarian cooperation, of course, can help create incentives for stability and predictability, which is very important to make decisions in policy. Economic development and security should not be viewed as competing objectives, but in the long run, they can help and support each other.

And therefore I would frame Uzbekistan’s approach as not economics instead of security, no, but it’s rather an effort to strengthen the regional security through economic engagement, connectivity and continuously monitoring the developments.

Question:

You note that Uzbekistan considers Afghanistan both as a major market for domestic exports and a strategic transit corridor for access to South Asia and the seaports of Gwadar and Karachi. This is actually a running theme in almost all reports published by scholars and experts from Uzbekistan [on the topic]. However, you also mention that following the border clashes between the Taliban and Pakistan in October last year, Tashkent began considering an alternative “western route.” The western route would extend the railway from Mazar-e Sharif to Herat and link further with Iran’s railway network. Did this shift actually happen? What are Uzbekistan’s core strategic interests in pursuing these two distinct routes? And does it have any preference for either of these routes.

Saodat Umarova:

Yes, I think today Uzbekistan is working on diversification routes. As you know, the south corridors are not stable anymore and we have access to the cheapest way of transit our goods through the Indian ports. And to achieve the Indian ports, of course, we need this South Asian Corridors. And I think we will continue investing in this railroad system and to make it sustainable, to achieve somehow the trade facilitation on all the routes. And the road you mentioned, I think this is very promising and we consider this as the future transport corridor that will work for both interests of Central Asian countries Uzbekistan and Afghanistan and we mentioned about the trade in our report and today I can share that trade between Afghanistan and Uzbekistan for the January through May 2026 already achieved $1 billion. So the promotion of the safe railroads will somehow reflect on these numbers.

Question:

You just mentioned about trade turnover between Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. I was just going to ask about that. As you highlight in your report, bilateral trade between the two countries reached almost 800 million [$765.7 million] in 2022. Meanwhile Uzbek representatives and the Taliban administration set targets to raise trade turnover to $1 billion and eventually to $3 billion within three years. What is the current status of this bilateral trade? Have they successfully met or are on the road to meet these ambitious turnovers?

Saodat Umarova:

Yes, as I said, for the first five months of this year, it’s already $1 billion. So I think $3 billion is not something unachievable for this year, for the next year. And the expansion of the trade turnover shows that engagement between two countries is only growing. Uzbekistan remains one of the Afghanistan’s key economic partners and we supply electricity, we supply food products, construction materials, agricultural goods and manufactured products also and that we expect long-term target of 3 billion yes it’s ambitious but achievable.

And as you mentioned the border issues between Pakistan and Afghanistan makes to choose another partner for Afghanistan for the trade and I think Uzbekistan is a very reliable partner in this case and recent growth of the bilateral trade shows that economic cooperation between countries is continuing and deepening despite some regional uncertainties. Yes but and I think it’s also important to see the developments with a broader regional context that Some of Afghanistan traditional routes, trade routes, increase relative importance of economic links with Central Asian countries and as a result trade and economic cooperation have become more significant. And I think the future goals of bilateral trade will depend not only on commercial demand, but also on continuing progress of the transport connectivity, as we said, on trade facilitation mechanisms and energy cooperation and border infrastructure development. Cross-border trade also plays a crucial role in improving the trade.

Question:

You highlight, of course as you continue to follow the growth in bilateral trade, you also highlight a severe trade imbalance as a primary challenge facing the two nations. For example, you note that Afghanistan’s exports account for less than 5% of the total bilateral trade turnover. To address this, you recommend a multi-pronged approach: establishing cross-border production and trade zones; developing labor-intensive industries within Afghanistan such as garment production, raw material processing, and construction material manufacturing to lower production costs for Uzbek companies while generating local jobs; and finally encouraging Uzbek firms to open branches and representative offices directly in Afghanistan to foster deeper trust and expand networks. But my question is: given the volatility on the ground, do these ambitious proposals take security for granted?

Saodat Umarova:

No, I think I would not say that this proposal takes security for granted. The key point here is that economic cooperation should be implemented gradually, of course, in some phases. For example, cross-border trade zones can be implemented and focus on the areas that are close to established border infrastructure currently, where customs administration, logistics and monitoring mechanisms already exist.

Similarly, industrial cooperation can also begin with small-scale projects before expanding further, and the purpose of these initiatives is not to ignore and the purpose of these initiatives is not to ignore risk, but to manage it responsibly while creating economic opportunities.

Experience from many regions around the world shows that economic interdependence can strengthen incentives and for stability and cooperation. Of course, investments should be accompanied by risk management and continuous monitoring. I see these proposals are carefully sequenced. Economic engagement and economic integration is most sustainable when it develops step by step and supported by practical mechanisms for managing risks. I see the best way to show it is to come to Aiyritom Termez Trade Center, which shows us that engagement, people to people, is very high and today you see many people are coming there from both sides, commercials from Uzbekistan and customers from Afghanistan, they can have dialogues and base they can analyse the markets and I think it’s best way to show that this approach works well.

Question:

So you are not concerned about the security situation in Afghanistan?

Saodat Umarova:

I wouldn’t say that I’m not concerned, but I can say that policymakers are taking into account while managing the cross-border trade. And I think we see the benefits for both sides, how the commercial points work. And we will see that step-by-step organisation of the close border points, how they will work.

Question:

Thank you. Also in that joint report, you underscore that following the Taliban’s violent return to power in August 2021, Afghan banks were disconnected from the SWIFT system, affecting the country’s international transactions, of course. To bypass this, alternative arrangements have emerged, including barter trade, cash settlements, and the use of intermediaries in third countries. How do these various workarounds operate in practice when it comes to the transactions between the Taliban-led Afghanistan and Uzbekistan?

Saodat Umarova:

I’m not sure what is the current situation for today but I think the challenge is not only SWIFT itself because I heard that some banks use SWIFT operations today but in reality that the disruption of correspondent banking relationships restrictions on international financial transactions and sanctions related concerns and overall difficulties with cross-border payments they can be analysed as constraints and as a result businesses engaged in trade with Afghanistan they had to rely some various alternative settlement arrangements and intermediary financial institutions to facilitate transactions.

Of course, this mechanism allowed trade to continue, but they increased transaction costs and administrative burdens that they say increased time required to complete the operations and payments in border. From an economic perspective that the key challenge is not absence of the trade opportunities but the higher cost and complexities associated with payments across borders. And I think improving, one of the recommendation of our reports, was improving financial connectivity and creating more efficient mechanisms to pay and that will contribute expanding regional trade and investment into Afghanistan. And I think the big percentage, big share of the payments are done by cash. I think that can be also seen as a constraint today.

Question:

Thank you. Maybe my last question. You describe, you already mentioned the Ayritom Free Economic Zone, if I pronounce it correctly, and you describe it as..

Saodat Umarova:

As a success story

Question:

Yeah, as a success story and it has been established on the Uzbek-Afghan border as a socio-humanitarian bridge that represents, that is what you said, a symbolic “window to Afghanistan” into the broader Central Asian market. When exactly was this zone established, and what is it designed to achieve?

Saodat Umarova:

Yes, it started operating since 2022 and it expanded its activities from being just trade center. It’s beyond traditional trade promotion and it’s designed as a commercial, logistical and humanitarian platform facilitating interaction between businesses, traders, service providers and people-to-people connections, first of all.

And what makes it very interesting is that it combines trade infrastructure with simplified access arrangements, business services, healthcare facilities, and warehousing, and creates new commercial opportunities. And I think it serves as an economic and a confidence-building mechanisms between countries. Peace, peacebuilding mechanisms as well. And in our report, we describe this initiative as a connector because it helps transform the border from barriers into spaces of interactions, trust building and economic opportunity. For Uzbekistan, the center reflects a broader vision of transforming the border from a line of separation into platform for regional cooperation, trade, and as I said, people to people connections.

I think it demonstrates how practical economic initiatives can contribute to building trust line of separation into platform for regional cooperation trade and engagement. As you mentioned before, the security risks still exist, but I think we can minimise the risk creating this type of cross-border places and platforms where we will see less security concerns, but more opportunities.

Question:

Have you visited this zone and if yes, are there also Afghan women doing business there or not?

Saodat Umarova:

Unfortunately, I haven’t visited yet, but every time my colleague went there, I come and sit and have deep conversation about what’s happening there. And they see many women coming to bazaars to the market places and they see that business always find a way how to establish the partnership and what kind of banks work there how you can make the exchanges of the currencies and it works like a real Eastern Bazaars. And many people speak Uzbek as you know in this area and there are no even language barriers sometimes and they say we are very similar and we and these commonalities between people creates. It’s a huge opportunity for the policy makers to rely on the people-to-people connections.

Question:

Thank you so much, Ms Saodat Umarova for this insightful conversation on the geoeconomic dynamics of the relations between Afghanistan and Central Asia in general and Uzbekistan in particular.

Saodat Umarova:

Thank you very much.

Yes, and I just wanted to make a closing remark so that I as an economist, see Afghanistan not just a neighboring country. I see it’s our our friends, our brothers, and Uzbekistan see the direct interest in seeing stable, connected and economically viable Afghanistan.

Question:

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Saodat Umarova:

Thank you very much.

Below is the full transcript of this conversation.

Introduction

Thank you very much, Haydee Dijkstal and Hadi Marifat, for joining me on the Crossroads for a deep-dive conversation about the international crimes of Islamic State-Khorasan Province (known as ISKP) in Afghanistan.

Before we dive deep into the topic, just a brief introduction for our audience: Haydee Dijkstal is a UK barrister at 33 Bedford Row Chambers in London practicing international criminal law and international human rights law. She is also a US attorney with over 15 years of experience in international law and a nonresident senior fellow with the Strategic Litigation Project at the Atlantic Council. Haydee’s practice in international criminal law has included cases before the International Criminal Court (ICC), International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and has involved the representation of victims, governments, and those accused. She is currently representing victims at the ICC in the situation in Afghanistan and the situation in Ukraine. Haydee holds a JD from the University of Wyoming College of Law, and an LLM in international and comparative law from the George Washington University Law School.

And Hadi Marifat is the founder and director of the Afghanistan Human Rights and Democracy Organisation (AHRDO). AHRDO is an independent, non-governmental, and non-for-profit organisation, which is committed to promoting human rights, democracy and justice in Afghanistan through investigating and documenting atrocity crimes, advocating for a victim-centred justice. Hadi has worked with various international human rights organisations, including human rights unit of UNAMA, Human Rights Watch and Centre for Civilians in Conflict. He holds a master’s degree in peace and conflict studies from the International Institute of Social Studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam, in the Netherlands.

Question:

And today our conversation is about the findings of a report that AHRDO published in December last year about the international crimes of ISKP in Afghanistan. To kick off the conversation, Hadi, could you provide an overview of ISKP and explain how it’s connected to the central Islamic State or parent organisation?

Hadi Marifat:

Thank you so much for having us and thank you also for reading our report and following up on that with us and Haydee. It’s a pleasure to be on your show and talking about this report. Well, ISKP was, or the Islamic State of Khorasan Province, was officially launched in January 2015 as a regional expansion of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria into what it called Khorasan, encompassing Afghanistan and Pakistan. The group emerged from 2014 meetings actually between the ISIS members and defectors from Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan, TTP, al-Qaeda and Afghan Taliban fighters active in the region and particularly Pakistan and Afghanistan. Essentially what we can call it a battle-hardened coalition that pledged allegiance in January 2015.

ISKP is rooted in the Islamic State’s ideological and theological foundations, including expansionist ambition toward a global caliphate and a binary worldview dividing true Muslims, Dar ul-Islam, and non-believers or apostates at Dar ul-Kufr. Within Afghanistan, ISKP has further developed an anti-Shia rhetoric through publications, propagandas, and fatwas. Initially, the Islamic State of Khorasan Province functioned as a subordinate vilayet or province of Islamic States, similar to those established in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Libya and Sinai. However, over time, the relationship has evolved with central control ebbing as ISKP expanded in territorial, financial and human resources.

By 2021, the UN Sanction Committee described ISKP as a regional network under ISIS, ISIS General Directorate of Provinces, or GDP, maintaining links through the al-Siddiq office. More broadly, Islamic State itself has decentralised following territorial losses, particularly in Iraq and Syria, and with new power centres such as the General Directorate of Provinces playing a strategic role.

In 2023, the caliphate, the caliph is believed to be Abu Hafs al-Hashimi al-Quraishi whose real identity might be Abdul Haqader Momin, a Somali national that, and his appointment, according to UN 2025 report, indicates a deliberate shift toward decentralisation and particularly decentralised operational structure. And ISKP historically had a significant reporting obligation, particularly between the period 2015 and 2019, if you look at how reporting has been done within the Islamic State, particularly on military and propaganda activities, reflecting both centralised oversight and fundraising and at the same time coordinating functions.

Question:

Thank you for this important background and I was reading the report and it notes that “[m]uch of the ISKP leadership remains clandestine, except for the identities of the Amir and a handful of other senior leaders” (p.5). Given this secrecy, what can you tell us about the current leader, who is Sanaullah Ghaffari, I believe? And how has the group’s internal leadership dynamic evolved?

Hadi Marifat:

Well, Ali, that’s correct. And simply because ISKP leadership has experienced a rapid turnover and due to targeted decapitation strategies of the ISKP adversaries. So for instance, if you look actually at the key leadership cessations, so the first leader Hafiz Haid Khan, Hafiz Haid Khan killed in 2016 by a US drone strike and then Hafiz Sayyid Khan was replaced by Abdul Hasib Lodari who then was killed in 2017 and then he was replaced by Abdul Rahman Ghalib also known as Abu Sayyid who was killed in another attack in 2018 and then he was replaced by Abdullah also known as Aslan Faraki. He was arrested by Afghan national forces in April 2020.

So if you look actually notably, the five of the first six leaders of the ISKP were Pakistani nationals linked to groups such as the TTP and Lashkari Tayyab. but you know the current leader was the seventh actually leader of the ISKP also known as Shahab al-Muhajir. He’s an Afghan national and he’s originally from Kunduz province and you know he took leadership of the ISKP in June 2020 after Forok was captured by the Afghan National and Defense Forces. Prior to becoming Amir, Ghafari was involved in planning large-scale attacks. The UN assessment suggests that he is a relatively well-educated person and has broadened recruitment to include more educated individuals, but also non-Salafists, possibly under a mandate to revitalise the Islamic State of Khorasan Province. Also if you know the Taliban intelligence report in November 2021 and a copy of that was seen by HRDO indicate that ISKP established a new leadership council to coordinate activities against the Taliban and also against other you know adversaries that they call it Ghafari is described as a urban warfare expert and looking at his expertise mainly and obviously under his leadership, ISKP carried out a major urban attack in several places, including an attack in Nangarhar on the central prison and freeing around 1,000 inmates, including Abdurrahman al-Logari. And of course, just for the background, Abdurrahman al-Logari was the one who then carried out the attack in August 2021 on Kabul airport during the evacuation of the international forces withdrawal from Afghanistan. So he was one of the main guys, you know, that he was freed from the prison and then carried out that major attack. There are conflicting reports about, you know, his background, particularly I’m talking about Sana’u La Ghaffar’s background and including alleged links, you know, to the Hakani network. He was listed under the UN sanctions in December 2021. So he is as an escape leader.

And then also in June 2023, there were reports that, you know, that he was killed. But subsequent reports suggest, you know, that he was not killed. And then he’s escaped actually into, you know, Pakistan and obviously survived. And then a 2024 UN report indicates that he’s still alive and he’s still the leader of the Islamic State Khorasan province.

Question:

The report highlights that attacks on Hazara-Shia communities have been a defining feature of ISKP’s operations in Afghanistan and that it targets “those it regards as the greatest obstacles towards its stated aim of a caliphate in “Khorasan” and beyond” (p.2) Could you explain why ISKP has targeted the Hazaras so aggressively and relentlessly? Also, conceptually, how does a historically marginalised ethno-religious group represent an obstacle to ISKP’s goals?

Hadi Marifat:

Well, thanks Ali for the question but I, before actually answering your, you know, your follow up question, I spoke actually about Sanaullah Ghaffari, but I think it is important, you know, for the audience to understand also and to know a few other key figures of the ISKP. I just name these figures because, you know, they are equally important as Sanaullah Ghaffari.

So the deputy senior leader is called Mawlawi Rajab, known as Mawlawi Rajab Salahuddin, and he’s also an important figure. And I think the second most important figure is the international financer of the ISKP and his name is Ismatullah Khalozai. Equally important is actually the spokesperson Sultan Aziz Azam because if you look actually at the propagandas and the media hub of the ISKP, so think about, you know, Sultan Aziz Azzam as one of the main and key figures of, you know, being behind all of these propagandas and publications and others that they’re doing in the region. And I think in terms of, you know, their religious leader, because it is equally important because it is a salafist ideology and entity, and I think, you know, the religious leader is equally important. His name is actually Sheikh Abu Fateh and also known as Abu Zahed Ziauddin Zakari. So these are other important figures of ISKP current leadership.

But when it comes to your question, I think again let me actually read a quote, you know, that we gather this quote from the Al-Azaim fashion magazine of the ISKP, and I think it captures, you know, the very essence of the question, you know, that you asked. I start by quoting

Many still question why the Mujahideen of the Islamic State specifically target Shia and Rawafis in their operations, turning their cities into gravures, Therefore, we want to clarify to the general Muslim population that the intensity of our operation has only one reason. Our enmity against all disbelievers and opposites. End of quote.

And then the second quote that I would like to also read in. The belief in taking a firm stance against Rawafis is not a new doctrine.

Question:

You are using the term Rawafis in the quote which means rejecter, I think. And that is the term that they use for the Shea’s, yes?

Absolutely. And then I will also explain, you know, it’s not just, you know, one of the terms, but obviously they use like four major terms against the Shea, and I will, you know, just briefly come to that as well. So, and then, yeah, thank you for the explanation.

And so I read again, the belief in taking a firm stance against our feet, is not a new doctrine that the majority of the Islamic State have only recently understood. Rather, all the scholars, imams of the religion, and people of intellect and insight have recognized this reality and confirmed it. Shias and Rawafid, they are the most extreme opposites in the world.

So, as you actually mentioned, these are obviously the clear term that they are using, but they are also using when it comes to share another word, takfir, excommunication, and then kofir or kofir, disbelief and disbeliever, and rafisdi, which is the rejectionist that you explained, and then mushrik, polytheist, and then murtad, which is apostate. So these are, if you look actually at their propagandas and publications. So you find these terms across all of their major propaganda and publication that are being used against the Shia. So again, coming back obviously again to explain that ISKP’s targeting of hazardous Shia communities, again, as I mentioned, is rooted in Salafi jihadist ideology. Salafism is a revivalist tradition seeking to return Islam to the practice of the earliest generation, associated with the 14th century scholar Ibni Taimima. As we all understand, this framework is highly exclusivist, allowing for taqfir, excommunication, meaning Muslim outsides that this interpretation can be labeled apostate and targeted.

Islamic State propaganda explicitly inside violence against Shia, reflecting earlier sectarian conflict in Iraq and Syria, and of course to put it into the context as well, you know, to go in Syria and because it was a sectarian, and the influence of particularly Abu Massab al-Zarqawi’s doctrine or approach of a total war against, you know, the Shia, and that has been basically announced in Iraq. And inside violence, if you look, you know, has been described as potentially amounting to crimes against humanity, including ethnic and religious cleansing. And of course, to that end, Haydee will speak later. When it comes in Afghanistan, so this has actually translated into systematic attacks on Hazara-Shia communities, which is a historically persecuted community in Afghanistan. I have to also mention that when it comes, you know, to The narrative of the Islamic State of Khorasan province, this does not remain only rhetorical. And they have been used to justify systematic violence against the Shia Haza communities. And again, you know, just if you look between 2016 and 2024, ISKP carried out more than 97 attacks targeting Hazarat and Shia community in Afghanistan. This attack has struck schools, hospitals, including maternity hospitals, mosques, public gatherings, transportation systems, weddings, and marketplaces. And

I have to also make a clarification that for the report and the discussion, HRO will focus only on 21 major incidents or cases that the Islamic State of Khorasan province took responsibility for that. Because for this report, It was not intended actually to provide an exhaustive list of incidents or analysis of international crimes attributed to ISKP. Rather, it was intended to encourage further investigation and analysis into the crimes identified and those not yet examined.

Question:

Thank you. really important. And before I turn to idea about the international crimes of ISKP, my last question about ISKP’s background and operation, the report points out that the ISKP has suffered reputational damage and attacks from the Taliban, leading to a significant reduction in its attacks inside Afghanistan. However, since the Taliban takeover of the country in August 2021, ISKP has claimed high-profile attacks in Uzbekistan, of course, Iran and Russia (p.3). How can you square the reduction in ISKP’s attacks inside Afghanistan with the expansion of its regional operation?

Hadi Marifat:

After the Taliban takeover in August 2021, so we did see a significant reduction in ISKP’s attacks in Afghanistan. And of course, if you look actually at the conflict location event database, and particularly their data, so their data suggests that the ISKP attacks inside Afghanistan dropped by over 90% between January 2022 and April 2024. However, despite this,

ISKPA continues to carry out attacks inside Afghanistan and particularly against civilians. and also against Taliban forces. And the last one, obviously, that we had also against the Shihazar community was in 2025, you know, so in the border of Daikundi and Gore province. So this is one of the incidents that this report has actually investigated and

established that the attack was carried out by ISKP and they took responsibility for that. But if you actually look, it was a tactical shift of the ISKP. The ISKP shifted from complex suicide or complex operations into smaller, large-scale attacks using particular IEDs in the form of mostly sticky bombs and often targeting civilians.

I have a list of the attacks. Alnova claims, and this is from Alnova. Alnova is actually one of the main publications of the ISKP. So between 2015 and 2020, so 21 claims of suicide bombing against share targets. And between 2021 to 2024, three claims of suicide bombing against share and hazardous targets.

And then between 2015 to 2020, so there are 14 IED attacks. And then if you actually look between 2021 and 2024, so you see 54 IED attacks, mostly sticky bombs. So you see a major shift in their tactics. So it is no longer, let’s say, a complex suicide attacks, you know, that they have been carrying out.

It is mostly, you know, IEDs and of course the data between, you know, 2021 and 2021. And of course, UNAMO also documented, you know, this IED attacks against the hazard, I think, to also look at their report, you know. But at the same time, you know, so ICE KPA, other than doing actually this tactical shift,

I have to also mention one thing, you know, that Unlike in the past, obviously, ISKP is not, you know, like carrying out major, major attacks in the urban centers. But, you know, the reports suggest, you know, that geographically, even inside Afghanistan, they have expanded. And particularly if you look, you know, particularly in the recruitment, you know,

which is also coming from a very ideological and sort of, you know, jihadist madrasas that have been established under the Taliban. So those madrasas are actually becoming one of the main sources of recruitment for the ISKP. So geographically speaking, ISKP has expanded its reach. But at the same time, they have also expanded its regional operations.

And as you mentioned, obviously, they have carried out several attacks. So they carried out actually an attack They also carried out an attack in Iran on 3rd January 2024. But they also carried out an attack on 20th March 2024 in Moscow in Russia. So, again, if you look actually at the U.S., you know, the U.S.

officials attributed the Iran attack to the SKP, but, you know, though the claims do not always confirm their operational involvement, so that’s just a note to make it. But this outward expansion may reflect operational constraints inside Afghanistan, pushing SKP to project influence regionally. And again, if you look actually at the estimates of ISKP strength,

so their strength actually fluctuates between or from 2,500 to 8,500 fighters in 2016 to roughly 2,000 to 6,000 in 2024. So again, in terms of strength, so you do not see a major, major scale down. Yeah.

Question:

I just want to turn to Haydee. Haydee, I think you oversaw the legal analysis of the report. The report says that it “provides a legal analysis of the available collected evidence showing that the nature of these attacks may rise to genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes” (p.1). For those of us who are not international law experts, could you define these three terms and explain the difference between them?

Haydee Dijkstal:

Of course. And first of all, let me just start by saying thank you for having us on your show and for highlighting this report. And also, I have to say that this report has to be attributed to all the hard work of AHRDO. Both the report as a whole and also the legal analysis was really led by a number of people within AHRDO, and I was very glad to support that as well.

Okay, so your question is about the legal analysis and the fact that the report came to some conclusions about certain crimes that it asserts have been committed by ISKP, and that’s war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of genocide. So let me give just a general overview of what those crimes mean before we dig into how this report applies that to the facts that are set up in the report.

So we looked at these crimes that are crimes under international criminal law, and we looked at them as they’re defined before the International Criminal Court. Now, the International Criminal Court uses the Rome Statute, which is its founding document, its legal framework, as the guide for those crimes. The Rome Statute sets out all of those crimes. It sets out the elements of the crimes. And therefore, that’s what was used in this report in order to apply those crimes within the report.

For war crimes, generally, what a war crime means is that it’s a crime that takes place within the context of an armed conflict. Now, this can be an international armed conflict or a non-international armed conflict. There’s a definition under international law for how you define an armed conflict in this situation in Afghanistan, multiple organisations, including the ICC, have defined it as a non-international armed conflict and therefore there’s certain crimes that fall under those types of armed conflicts.

So it’s an act that happens within the context of an armed conflict and it represents a breach of humanitarian law. Now humanitarian law is the law of war, the law of armed conflict, and it’s breaches of the Geneva Convention. So we can look at crimes such as willful killing, the crime of torture that happens within the context of a war, and things like the crime of extensive destruction or appropriation of property, and then looking at those concepts that come under international humanitarian law like proportionality and necessity. So when an attack happens against a property and it’s not justified as a military necessity, then that becomes a war crime. So those are the types of crimes that you’re looking at when you’re talking about a war crime.

The report also looks at crimes against humanity. Now, this is a little bit different because for crime against humanity, it does not necessarily need to take place during an armed conflict. It can, but it doesn’t require that. So we can also look at crimes that happen in peacetime as well. And the defining feature of a crime against humanity is that it is acts that happen on a widespread or a systematic scale and that are directed against a civilian population. We’re looking at acts like murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation or forcible transfer, torture, rape, persecution, enforced disappearances. And that’s all set out in the Rome Statute. Now, the key words here were widespread or systematic, which is a requirement. Widespread means that the acts happened in a massive, a frequent capacity, that there’s a multiplicity of victims and systematic is slightly different in the sense that it looks at the existence of patterns so that this was a non-accidental repetition of these crimes. They represent an organised nature that they happen in and it’s not just a random occurrence.

Finally, we looked at genocide. So genocide as defined in the Rome Statute, it’s a act that is committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. So we’re looking at three different kind of categories or elements that you have to prove here. You have to look at membership of a protected group for the victims, that there’s a list of acts that can be go towards genocide. I’ll come on to that in a moment. And then specific intent. And I’m also going to come on to that in just a moment because those are both quite important. So the acts that can qualify so that can be carried out in order to attack the protected group include things like killing members of the group, causing bodily harm to the members of the group, deliberately inflicting the group to conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction of the group, preventing births and forcibly transferring children. Again, all listed in the Rome Statute.

Now finally, intent. This is the thing that is really unique to the crime of genocide. It’s required that in order to prove that somebody has committed genocide, that the perpetrator who’s accused has committed genocide, you not only have to prove general intent to carry out those elements that we just reviewed, but also specific intent. And that’s specific intent to destroy a substantial part of the group. So this is a higher standard than crimes against humanity or war crimes. And that’s really quite important.

A quick side note on that that has come up, and it’s something that we addressed in the report as well, is some of the dialogue, the discourse and case law that’s developed with the crime of genocide around that specific intent, because as you can imagine, it’s something that’s been debated and considered really intently since it’s a higher standard. How high does that standard go? And that some of the dialogue more recently has been caused by some case law from the International Court of Justice for both the cases of Bosnia versus Serbia and Croatia versus Serbia. And in those cases, the court had said, in order to infer, and here I’m quoting, in order to infer the existence of specific intent from a pattern of conduct, it’s necessary and sufficient that this is the only inference that could reasonably be drawn from the acts in question. So the only inference, that’s really the wording that’s kind of hung up legal scholars and judges and lawyers. And the debate has really centred on what does that mean? And some commentators have said that that has to be the only thing in the perpetrator’s mind was to have to commit genocide, to destroy in whole or in part a specific group. But others and also courts like the ICTY have had commentary and legal discussions and also case law as well that take a much more practical approach, recognising that if you have too strict of a wording, to say that they have to be singularly focused on this, it would become almost impossible to prove genocide. And recognising specifically that often are committed in the context of war. And so genocidal intent can exist alongside military goals as well because oftentimes perpetrators or somebody who’s accused of genocide is going to point to those military goals or aims and say, no, that was my intent.

And if there’s multiple goals in their mind, then taking too strict of a reading of that language would preclude the crime of genocide. So taking a much more practical approach and saying you can hold two thoughts in your head at once. One of them can be a military goal. The other one can be genocidal intent. And that’s really what we’ve reflected in the report of saying follow the commentary of those legal scholars, the case law in courts like the ICTY that have talked about that because that is the practical approach for addressing these crimes. So I’ll pause there, but that was a bit of a long discussion. I know you have many more questions.

Question:

I think that is really great and important for the conversation that we will have about ISKP in Afghanistan. And obviously, in the report, you discussed the three categories related to ISKP in Afghanistan. And when it comes to the charge of Genocide, the report makes two major contentions. First, based on available information, evidence of the killing of members of the Hazara-Shia group by ISKP members in the period of 2016 to 2024 may indicate the commission of the crime of genocide under Article 6(a) of the Rome Statute. That is one contention that the report makes. Second, there is also evidence indicating that incitement to commit genocide against this group (Article 25(3)(e)) may also have been committed (p.38). Could you walk us through the legal reasoning behind these two contentions and explain their differences and implications?

Haydee Dijkstal:

Of course um okay so when it comes to the crime of genocide what the report as you correctly set out there were two bases for considering genocide but before I get into that I do want to reiterate what Hadi said before is that this report was not meant to be… It was not meant to set out every crime that is possible and not to leave it open for other interpretations, particularly when it goes for a prosecutor or an investigator to keep their mind open as they see further evidence that there might be other charges that can come with it as well. So these are the ones that we have proposed as being applicable based on the evidence that we’ve seen. But certainly there might be many more.

So to start, Article 6. So in the Rome Statute, genocide is set out under Article 6. And this is what I reviewed before about the elements being the membership of a group that’s targeted as the victims, the underlying acts. There’s that long list of ways that genocide can be set out. And in this case, we looked to killings as killings that happen to a degree that it can qualify as genocide because there is that specific intent to destroy the group, the protected group in whole or in part.

So when we looked at the protected groups, this is what we’ve been discussing during this entire conversation about the targeting of the Hazara Shia community. And so looking at that as civilians that belong to the Hazar community as an ethnic group, because remember that genocide looks at specific protected groups. They look at national groups based on their nationality, their ethnicity, their race and the religion. So what we’re looking at is the fact that the groups that were targeted based on the evidence that we see targeted by ISKP were the Hazar community for their ethnic identity and the Shia community for their religious identity. And then bringing in the context, the historical context of the fact that the Hazara community is an ethnic group that’s the third largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, but also with a long history of ethnic persecution and political marginalisation as well. So that really brings in the context of how this has developed.

This specific acts, as I mentioned, was killings. And here we’re drawing in, and please, I encourage everyone listening to this to have a look at the report because it really does set out in great detail all the facts that go into this legal analysis. It goes through facts between 2015 to 2014, looking at specific killings that happened. And it also includes the reports from other groups who have also collected data as well. So looking at things like the UN attributing 2,000 civilian deaths to ISKP and a significant portion of those being from the Hazara Shia community. We’re looking, as Hadi had mentioned before, about examples, evidence, information of attacks that are happening against this community by way of shootings, bombings, suicide attacks, ambushes, IEDs, and coordinated assaults on places like places of worship, schools, and public gatherings. Also a defining feature as well, and I think this goes both towards the facts of the acts that happened, but also the intent as well, is that these attacks seem to systemically be aimed at times and locations where the impact against the victims is going to cause the greatest amount of harm. So we’re seeing evidence of attacks that are happening during Friday prayers at a Shia mosque, during school examination periods, during public protests, or even on pilgrimage routes where those communities are known to travel and where there would be the greatest impact. And then the last bit for genocide, for this of this first part of genocide under Article 6A is genocidal intent. So how are we looking at genocidal intent? The report documents a number of different ways for this, but the biggest demonstration of intent comes directly from the words of ISKP, from their own statements. So this is through ISKP media propaganda, through their own media output that is kind of treated like a wing of the military operation. And it’s through, when you’re looking at those statements, you’re finding that they’re consistently using that derogatory language against Shias in order to create this dynamic of attacks. And these are the terms that Hadi had reviewed before of Shias being, you know, the terms of rejector, disbeliever, apostate, and polytheism. And then also statements that so these are creating a climate of which makes it possible for attacks against these communities, but then also having direct incitement to kill and to exterminate. So this includes evidence of justifications for killings and encouragement for killings. I’ll give a specific example of an attack on an educational centre that involved an edict from ISKP’s religious committee that included a direct call for killing of Shia, of people from the Shia community.

Okay, so let me move on to the second part of genocide. So this is under Article 25. To get a little bit technical with the legal bits of it. So as I said before, Article 6 is the main provision that sets out genocide in the Rome Statute. Article 25 is usually the provision that sets out criminal responsibility, but it has a unique feature in it under Article 253E. And this specifically applies only to genocide. What it says is that within the context of genocide, a person is responsible for committing a crime and that person directly and publicly incites others to commit genocide. So what’s important here is that the commission of genocide need not be achieved. So in other words, genocide didn’t actually have to take place. It didn’t need to be completed in order to prosecute and convict somebody of this crime. But the person can be prosecuted if they took steps to incite the crime to try to get somebody else to commit that crime of genocide. So again, you know, the report is looking at things like consistent statements from ISKP through public media and channels to tried to encourage and to persuade the general public to commit genocide against the Hazara Shia community in Afghanistan.

These are statements that are on ISKP’s media outlets and made through online posts, newspapers, magazine articles, fatwas, the radio. It’s really quite widespread as far as the different media outlets that are being used in order to publicly try to encourage others to commit this crime. And it ranges from statements that go so far as to directly incite or encourage people to kill Shias as part of their religious duty or in order to establish a global caliphate or it’s statements that create that climate. So it’s statements like that are creating a climate of us versus them or that portray the Shia community as the enemy or using that derogatory language that was reviewed before. There’s specific examples that are throughout the report, but things such as statements that glorify suicide attacks on Shias and provide that encouragement through glorification as well. So those are just some of the examples. I think that probably... unless you have followed questions sufficiently reviews the two basis that we’ve set out genocide.

Question:

Yeah I just wanted to zoom in on the element of intent a little bit and obviously as you discuss in the report intent and I also highlighted in a report for AAN which I mentioned earlier uh there was like uh a stop Hazara genocide campaign by the Hazara activists to draw the attention to the targeted killings or the systematic killings of the Hazaras. And there was a pushback against this campaign from certain quarters or circles within Afghanistan and saying that every other ….

Ad It extensively sets out examples and evidence information that’s been collected that demonstrate that these attacks are specifically targeted at communities, you know, either against members of the Hazara community or locations that are known. for being places that the Hazara community either live or work or gather so that there is that intent to specifically target them and then looking at the so looking at that targeting that demonstrates a specific intent to target that community but then also looking at the scope of it as well so the fact that there’s such a large documented pattern of attacks against this specific community. Now that’s not to say that there might be also a case to be made of a pattern of attacks that might rise to the level of genocide against other communities, but from what we’re seeing and what’s been reflected in this report, we believe that it certainly does reflect specific intent to target, to destroy in whole or in part the Hazara community and the Shia community. But Hadi, do you want to jump in on that at all?

Hadi Marifat:

Well, just one thing Ali to add. Well I think you know if you look at the ISKP attacks uh other than the Hazaras I think you know the other group that was attacked and other than Hazara-Shia was the Sufi order of Islam it was another group and again because of their religious identity so that you know their shrines have come under the attack of ISKP. Again if you go back, you know, to the sort of the roots of the ISKP and it is theological and ideological foundation, and you will find the answer why the Sufi order of Islam has been attacked. But again, I have to say, you know, that, of course, that requires a specific research, you know, to do, you know, and we really encourage, you know, an investigation into the attacks against the Sufi order of Islam. However, I think one way to make it, you know, that yes, there has been attack and for sure there are a lot of attacks on the Sufi order of Islam, but I think, you know, to the extent, you know, that the ISKP has targeted the Hazar Shia community is something, you know, to be looked at, you know, from a different lens and perspective as we explained, you know, and particularly in a concerted, concerted attacks in a very, you know, small neighbourhood. A lot of these attacks happened in the Dashti-e Barchi area or neighbourhood of Kabul city, which is in the distant part of the town. And if you actually look at the number of attacks that happened between 2016 and 2024, and you see almost every single aspect of the life of Hazaras in this particular neighbourhood came under attack.

Question:

Yeah, and maybe one example was that one of the education centres that were targeted in West Kabul and Dashti Barchi and my brother unfortunately lost a sister-in-law there that education centre had two different branches one was based in Dasht-e Barchi which is predominantly Hazara neighbourhood and the other one was in a mixed area of Kabul so the one that was in Dasht-e Barchi was targeted not the other one.

Hadi Marifat:

Ali if you allow me actually because you mentioned this particular incident and again if you allow me to read an excerpt from the Khorasan Villaya news October 2020 when the attack happened on that particular educational center. So again, quote, you must have heard the news of an attack on a group of Shia and rawafis, rawafis, you know, in the Polykhushk area of Dasht Bershi. So they specifically named, you know, this area. So we explained to you that it was a preparatory course for Shia boys and girls for the entrance examination. As a result of the suicide attack of one of our heroes of the Islamic Caliphate, dozens of our people were eliminated.

All our praises is to God for it. Ibn Abbas citing the Prophet, whoever changes his religion, kill him. End of quote.

Haydee Dijkstal:

I think this is really important, and this is something that the report highlights, is that not only does it show targeting of this community, but it also shows the follow up afterwards of not only accepting responsibility, but celebrating. So by virtue of that, it’s not only committing the crime, showing responsibility for it, but trying to encourage further crimes as well against that specific community.

Question:

Yeah, thank you. As you mentioned, I would encourage the audience to read the report because there are a lot of references to the facts and evidence in the report. Now I want to turn to the second category of the crimes, crimes against humanity. the report argues that available information indicates that in the period again, from 2016 to 2024, ISKP members committed crimes against humanity of murder against the Hazara/Shia civilian population (p.60). Can you explain the legal framework for this category and the evidence that supports this conclusion? Maybe, you already explained like of course the legal framework, maybe the evidence that supports this conclusion.

Haydee Dijkstal:

Yes, the, so as I said before crimes against humanity are those crimes that are happening on on a large scale. So it’s not just individual crimes themselves, but when you show a pattern, so that widespread or systematic nature of the crimes that show a pattern of attacks. And there’s different types of crimes against humanity. And we’ve focused on two different crimes against humanity.

One is the crime against humanity of murder. So alleging that the crime of murder was committed on such a widespread or systematic scale that it makes it a crime against humanity. And so here, what we’re looking at is the number of attacks that happened from 2016 to 2014, sorry, 2024, that show that widespread nature of the attacks.

As I said before, attacks that are, the number of attacks that happened during that period and the portion of those attacks that were against the Hazara and the Shia community, but also looking at the systematic nature of it as well and the scope of that. So I had mentioned before that the report reflects evidence of the consistent methods that these killings were carried out, whether it’s shootings or bombings, ambushes, suicide attacks, IEDs, car bombs. Essentially what it is is relentless attacks that are resorting in the murder of members of this community. So that’s really what’s looked at to show that widespread or systematic nature of the attacks for the crime against humanity of murder.

But let me move on to the crime against humanity of persecution because that’s quite an interesting crime in the sense that for this crime, it combines elements of both international criminal law with elements of human rights law as well, because what the crime against humanity is looking at is really two main things.

So it’s going to be that the perpetrator targeted a specific group. So that kind of is similar to what we discussed with genocide. But the specific group is much wider for persecution. So for persecution, we’re looking at targeting of a group that’s based on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious and also gender as well.

And then also the second part of genocide would be, so there’s a specific group that’s targeted. And because of those attacks, that group has been deprived of their rights, their fundamental human rights under international law. So it involves also identifying elements under human rights law of rights violations that have happened.

So again, we looked at the membership of the Hazara Shia community. So they fit squarely within the definition of persecution of a protected group here for their ethnic and religious identity. But then looking at the way that the various crimes that have happened, the way that these attacks not only translate into murder, but how they translate into violations of those victims’ human rights. So what was applicable here is the right to life, the right to security of a person, that these attacks represent a violation of the right against torture, against cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment, the right to freedom of expression, the right to freedom of assembly and association, the right to education as well, and the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. So by virtue of being attacked for their identity, those rights are being violated, you know, the rights to freedom of assembly, association, freedom of thought and religion, but also there’s those ones that flow from that as well.

So attacks on an educational center, you know, there are attacks against that specific community, but then the fact that students who are taking exams are being attacked, that impacts the right to education. So there’s so many rights that really are being impacted by these crimes. And so what’s set out in the report is that it really reflects this widespread systematic attack on the Hazara Shia community that translates into persecution because of the severe violation of the community’s rights as well.

Question:

Thank you. And in the third category is about war crimes. The report contends that available information indicates that in the period of 2016 to 2024, members of ISKP have committed the war crimes of murder and intentionally directed attacks against protected objects (p.83). Can you please unpack it?

Haydee Dijkstal:

Yes. Okay, so as I said before, a war crime is a crime that happens within the context of war and represents a breach of the Geneva Conventions of international humanitarian law. So the two war crimes that we identified were the war crime of murder and the war crime of targeting protected objects.

Coming back to the war crime of murder, this is, again, the same evidence that we’ve referenced throughout, the same incidents, the same attacks. But what the report is reflecting is that this is so serious that it can be reflected under multiple crimes that these killings of members of the Hazara-Shia community can amount to war crimes.

They’re done on such a scale, so widespread, so systematically that they become a crime against humanity and as well that they rise to the level of genocide as well because those murders are the foundation of the claim for genocide. So I think it really reflects the weight of the evidence within this report of the gravity of the killings by ISKP against the Hazara Shia community. But to just come on to kind of the more technical analysis that was involved with the war crime of murder, when it comes to the war crime of murder, again, we’re reflecting what the rules of war are under humanitarian law.

One of the big focuses of humanitarian law is the protection of civilians. So you’ll run afoul of the laws of war, of humanitarian law, when attacks are directed against a civilian population who should be protected during a conflict. And that is one thing that was analysed throughout the report. The specific incidents, the facts that are shown in the report really reflect the fact that those who are targeted, those who are the victims, cannot be attributed to being involved in the conflict as combatants, but are just members of a civilian community who are being targeted unlawfully.

So the case is made out on that basis and reflecting the same evidence that we’ve reviewed before. But moving on to the war crime of directing attacks against protected objects. Now, under humanitarian law and also as reflected in the Rome Statute, so the war crimes in the Rome Statute, there are crimes that are against property. more generally, so against civilian property. Again, there’s this concept of protecting civilians and also their property unless there’s a military necessity for attacking that property. The crime that we’ve highlighted in the report goes beyond that. There’s another crime in the Rome Statute that not only talks about civilian property, but property that is important because of its intrinsic value to that community. So this is attacks against buildings that are dedicated to religion, education, art, science, charitable purposes. We’re talking about historical monuments, museums, hospitals. And the provision also includes places where the sick and wounded are treated. So hospitals essentially that have this extra protection.

And so what we’ve looked at is attacks against these kinds of locations, properties, objects that carry this extra value to the communities who are impacted. The examples that are reflected in the report center around attacks on schools and religious places of worship. So just by way of example, looking at attacks against Shia mosques in areas that are known to be locations of the Hazara Shia community and looking at educational centers as well. I think the example before was one of the key ones that was highlighted in the report. And then also analysing as part of the legal analysis that the number of examples that are given for none of those, is there any way of suggesting that the mosques or the educational centers, the various locations that hold that significant cultural value, they can’t be suggested to have some kind of dual purpose where they’re important to the civilian community, but also a military target as well. No, they are...completely categorised as a civilian location and a civilian location that carries that extra protection because of the value that they signify to the community, yet they were attacked as well. So that’s the war crime of attacking protected places that’s reflected in the report.

Question:

Yeah. And I remember at that time, one of the journalists, I think Kathy Gannon, had reported that even running an errand in Dasht-e Barchi in the Hazara dominated neighbourhood run the risk of getting killed. So it affected like all aspects of life in that neighbourhood.

Haydee Dijkstal:

And just say one other thing about protected, these locations that hold this extra protection, because I think it’s key to understand why they have this extra protection. You know, as I said before, they carry that extra value to the community as representing places of significance. But, you know, by reflecting the culture, the religion, the identity of these communities, an attack against this location is attack against the identity of the Hazara Shia community. And it essentially goes towards this intent to attack certain communities for who they are and an attempt to destroy the identity of those groups.

And that’s why they hold extra protection and why that crime should be considered so grave. And why also, you know, a lot of these crimes build on each other and the evidence as you read through it is, you know, they apply to different crimes and also to intent as well. demonstrating the attacks by ISKP against culturally significant locations can also go towards intent as well, that genocidal intent or even intent for any of the other crimes as well as an attack that is attempting to target the identity of that community. So I thought I would add that because I do think it is important to realize how significant that crime is.

Question:

That is indeed important. Thank you so much for that. And my last question before we wrap it up, it is about the way forward. The report also offers a set of specific recommendations to states, UN Special Rapporteur, UNAMA, ICC, IIM-A (p.88). Can you explain these recommendations and tell us what they can achieve?

Haydee Dijkstal:

I’m happy to jump in on this. And Hadi, if you have anything to add, please let us know. Okay, so there was four different bodies. First of all, let me back up. The recommendations in the report are directed towards both states and also these individual bodies. So I think it’s important to start with saying that the recommendations involve these bodies that I’ll come on to in a moment and what they can do in order to address the crimes that are reflected in this report. But the report also calls on states to support the investigations and efforts towards justice by way of these bodies as well. So that’s quite important. The four different bodies that were noted were the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Afghanistan, IIM-A, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, the UNAMA, the ICC and UN Special Rapporteurs. I’ll start with the last two because they’re more investigative bodies.

What both of them are going to do is support the continued gathering of evidence, particularly the investigative mechanism for Afghanistan. This is an independent UN body that has the mandate to collect and preserve and analyse evidence and to hold it for the opportunity for it to be used in some kind of judicial proceeding. Now, the UN has a number of these bodies for different locations around the world that are requiring justice. And the one for Afghanistan is very important. What those bodies do is they recognise that there might not at the moment be justice that’s available in the country or even internationally, but there’s an importance in gathering that evidence now while it’s still fresh, while it’s still available and holding it somewhere secure so that it can be used in the future when legal proceedings, legal remedies become available. So that’s quite an important body.

As far as where to achieve justice, what the report has recommended is the ICC and then UN Special Rapporteurs. The ICC, of course, we’ve spoken a lot today about the Rome Statute and how these crimes apply directly to the crimes within the Rome Statute. The ICC has jurisdiction to examine crimes in Afghanistan. And it has an open investigation. It has also issued arrest warrants. So there is an example that the ICC Office of the Prosecutor has quite an interest in making sure that crimes in Afghanistan are addressed. But of course, the resources of the court are limited. So there is an importance in highlighting these crimes, demonstrating that there is significant evidence, and encouraging that the ICC prosecution look into these crimes and include them as part of their investigation with a view towards prosecution as a method of achieving individual criminal responsibility. So there we’re looking at international criminal law, and when I bring it over to UN Special Rapporteurs, we’re moving over to the realm of international human rights law.

So not forgetting that while it’s important to achieve justice through accountability and through prosecutions and individual criminal responsibility. It’s also important part of finding justice for the victims is also recognising the harm that they suffered. And that’s what international human rights law really does focus on.

It focuses on that harm to the victims and the rights violations that they have suffered. One of the mechanisms for doing that is by approaching U.N. Special Rapporteurs who are essentially U.N. experts who are appointed to examine either thematic or regional subject matters. So there is a U.N. Special Rapporteur on Afghanistan, but also applicable UN Special Rapporteurs, UN experts who look at things like the Special Rapporteur on torture, the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, or on the right to on freedom of religion. So things that are completely applicable to what’s happening here to make sure that those individuals are fully examining the crimes and how that translates into rights violations. That’s one example.

Of course, the UN is a really large place. So of course, there might be, as we said before, this is not exhaustive. There might be other mechanisms at the UN that… By doing actually this research, we have also identified several thematic areas that fall within or beyond the scope of the crimes analysed. And one of them is the impact of ISKP attacks on children. Because a significant number of the ISKP attack and ISKP attacks casualties were children. Because they have, you know, like targeted you know, educational centers, gatherings where children were harmed. So that’s something that needs to be investigated, needs to be looked at and particularly how it impacted actually the children. And I think that’s something that unfortunately has been neglected so far. So this is one thing. And the second thing, maybe more for the audience and your audience that I would like to request that, you know, if they are engaging with this debate and discussion, but also engaging with the report and review the report to understand this persecution and of the Hazara and shared communities by ISKP alongside the ongoing persecution of this community by the Taliban.

Recent assessments suggest that the persecution of this community both in scope but also in nature has increased significantly in recent months. So I would like to urge everyone engaging with the report to look at this but also put it in the context of an ongoing persecution by the Taliban.

Ali:

Thank you so much, Hadi Marifat and Haydee Dijkstal, for joining me on The Crossroads and for this deep-dive, insightful and very important discussions on the findings of HRDO’s report on the international crimes of ISKP against the Hazaras and Shia population in Afghanistan. I hope I can have you on the show in the future to discuss HRDO’ss other reports as well.

Hadi Marifat:

Thanks Ali for having us.

Haydee Dijkstal:

Thank you so much

Introduction

Thank you very much, Dr Zohra Saed, for joining me on The Crossroads for a deep-dive conversation on indigeneity, migration and belonging. Just for our audience, Dr. Saed, you are a Macaulay Distinguished Lecturer at Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York. You are the co-editor of “One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature” published by University of Arkansas Press in 2010 and you are also the editor of “Langston Hughes in Turkestan 1932-1933: Notebooks, Photos, and Poems” published by Lost & Found, The Poetics Documents Initiative of City University of New York, in 2015. You are also a poet and have published numerous poems and literary essays. Finally, Dr. Saed, you hold a PhD in English literature from the City University of New York’s Graduate Center.

Questions:

But today, we are going to discuss “An Other Afghanistan: Indigeneity, Migration, and Belonging in Andkhoy (1973),” which is the tile of a chapter you contributed to the volume “Decolonizing Afghanistan: Countering Imperial Knowledge and Power” edited by Wazhma Osman and Robert Crews. In this chapter, you share the story of your father, who traveled from Nangarhar to Andkhoy in 1973 to serve the community there as a dentist. Reflecting on your father’s journey, you write, “Baba [which means father] traveled in search of belonging through service to the people of Afghanistan in remote towns and villages” (Saed, 318). What does this remembrance mean for you today? Also, I think you were born in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and immigrated to Brooklyn with your family as a child in the 1980s, right?

Dr Saed:

So thank you for having me. Thank you for this great attention to my essay and to my Baba story. Thank you, my Baba Jan story. Yes, I migrated here with my family when I was a child. We left and we’re also in Saudi Arabia in Riyadh and then came here. So for me I think it’s my father’s memories that it’s my father’s memories that made me connected to Afghanistan. It’s his stories, this story in particular is more of the moment when my father learned that you could speak a word where is it that you could speak Uzbek in the streets of Afghanistan. There’s places in Afghanistan where everyone spoke Uzbek. That was his big surprise in life. He was in his twenties and he went to Afghanistan and he went to other towns of the media.

So for me, it was interesting, this memory, because I am learning about where I belong as an Afghan-American, Uzbek Afghan-American, where I belong. And then my dad was also going through that when he was younger, but in the country he was born in. So it was very interesting for me to record that, especially since it came after the recordings and the interest in recording the Afghan-Turkic experience came after I started helping some families in the North because I speak Uzbek, so the route was zero to communicate with some families in the north in 2021. And I became very curious that the Afghanistan that we knew brought was very different than the stories that we heard, and my dad’s stories as well, in different areas in Afghanistan, in entirely different countries almost, Afghanistan within an Afghanistan.

And I think in most, the memory is humorous. My dad is a great storyteller. He tells a funny story of how he’s trying to adjust. But at the same time, it’s a very important way of analysing ethnic hierarchies in Afghanistan. The importance of the access to power and privilege that language gives you. So if Uzbek-speakers didn’t have the same access, as someone who spoke, you know, called Kabuli Farsi, which is very different than the Farsi spoken in the north. All right. So sorry. Uh, so for me, the memories were mostly, um, it taught me a few things that if you read the interview, um, and the story, and you can enjoy it from being humorous and a great story, my dad’s great storyteller, but at the same time, you can see those moments, uh, knowing Pashto and speaking it fluently. Uh, again, same in the US. If you speak unaccented English, you’ll have more access to things and a more sense of being welcome than if you have accents. Same thing with my dad when he was just in his own country, right? So in the North, that it gave him access to water. Andkhoy has brackish water, so they have a problem with water. There’s a lot of drugs. To this day, there’s problems with water, and Central Asia is having a whole problem. So these politics are coming into play in Al-Foy, but in 1973, back when Al-Foy, the prepet leavers were very wealthy there, with mostly Chukman and Uzbek, and new families were being moved up, using the same policies as sort of, which is like moving poor Pashtun families and moving them up to the north, taking away a lot of nomadic pasture lands and giving better quality land to Pashto speakers. So that’s what he was seeing, but he’s seeing it also from his perspective of turning it into a story and making it humorous as well. So that’s that experience..

Question:

Very interesting. And I was reading the chapter, when your father arrives in Andkhoy and visits a local madrassa, he asks the mullah if there is a malik or local leader he can speak with. The mullah responds, “Yes, of course, but he’s Afghan.” He goes on to say, “He’s Afghan. He’s not going to be helpful to us. They don’t care for the Uzbeks here. They don’t listen to us…” (Saed, 321). Looking back at this encounter, what does that reveal to you?

Dr Saed:

Well, I think that was very important. That is, again, that legacy of Abdul Rahman Khan, which is influenced also by British policies, British concerns about the northern borders. I think we think a lot, especially in Western historical accounts of Afghanistan, the only border or frontier land we think of is the area in the Durand Line, right? That area we think of the most. But we don’t think of the frontier land of the north. So the same Abdur-Makham policy of like making Shredda People in Power or Pashtu Speakers and the paperwork we have Maumond who later turned all the paperwork that people in the north had to fill out is Pashtu instead of Farsi which really takes away access to being able to read title deeds what you’re signing away all these kinds of things so language plays a very important and sort of very heavy and in Northern politics or the way the North was treated in Muslim. So taking away the lingo from Farsi and turning the paperwork, the bureaucratic work to have administrators who are coming in from, you know, areas that were... Sorry, I’ve got two thoughts going on at once. Because there is a system of taking down desertion, having different ethnic groups served as soldiers in areas that were the sort of opposite of their ethnic group or different from their ethnic group.

That was a different kind of policy, which I think was about integration. It was about people kind of meeting each other and also it didn’t allow for favoritism, but it also allowed soldiers to see different parts of Afghanistan. So that is a different policy.

This one is where you have power given to a particular group and language speaker, and that language speaker then would not be able to communicate with their community. I mean, this happened even in because you had all of the governors in the northern areas. I mean, you know, the Taliban came from the north. So when they came, it’s all the governors and the generals, whatever, they all had already fled and they were not connected with their people. Those are Christian speakers and the population is mostly Turkic and Tajik and Farsi speakers. So you just had a disconnect with their communities. In Afoy 1970s, you see it very clearly. because my dad, when he talks to the mullah, it was the madrasa of Bogawali. Bogawali is like a very popular peer at the time, so it’s very important. Also, the northern function is through a lot of peers and a lot of, what do you call it, there’s a different system that is also asking for malik instead of like a governor or a mayor or things like that, right? And so, So that moment where he’s talking to the moment he’s speaking of Uzbek, the assumption is that he’s not mad, you know, far so long, and definitely not know Pashtun language.

But my dad pushes through, and because he’s wearing his suit, because he speaks of a native Pashtun, because he was raised in Jalalabad, he has access to water, whereas the regular people have to wait for this Um, shipment of water that is, it’s dirty, it’s dirty water. Time comes from Maimanat all the way down through the, through the irrigation system to come to the hallways. It’s already, um, you know, you’re going through a lot of animal, um, sort of excrement and other kinds of garbage that’s there. So, um, this is reported by anthropologists. This is reported by, um, you know, American anthropologists sort of come to the North.

A lot of anthropologists came to the North. That’s why the funny thing about my dad being in the North was that one hand they didn’t have burning water in the same way or access to water, but on the other hand of the toilet paper, box tissues, things that were very, you know, sort of Western because there were a lot of Americans visiting there. So in 64 or 63 when Zahir Shah opens up the sort of You know, closed borders of Afghanistan and says everyone can come and study and research. The North becomes an example of this exotic part of Afghanistan.

So you have a lot of research around that time in the North. Musical research like Mark Sloan did a lot of ethnomusicology work in Tosh Barwan, or what’s later renamed as Bum, in Juz John. And, you know, so you have a lot more of this movement. So Anne Hoy kind of represents that strange place where it has access and encounters with the Americans that, because it is an exotic place, but the people themselves are suffering because they can’t communicate with the local administration to have things like clean water. And my dad, or even medical access because there’s some hospitals, people have to drive, you know, two hours, travel two hours to get to the, to call go for treatment. And these are not poor people. at that time it was very wealthy they had access to jeeps and cars so there’s a lot of money but that money didn’t buy civil infrastructure or representation so in fact Injiloglub you know is like a resort town it was the place where a lot of politicians lived as well it’s Florida without the beach so my dad is coming from an entirely different place developed with a strong medical system. I think that later on, Nandahar becomes a place for medical and dental universities as well.

But at this point, he knows that he can access people through language. And so when he says, this is an alfban, he sings a Christian speaker. What alfban means in alfban is to the outside. Of course, it’s come to me, all of us, and we’ve adopted a lot of the

You know, depending on people, of course, are always pushing against the word Afghan, too. But in abroad, mostly it’s Afghan-American because we’re coming from Afghanistan. And in Afghanistan, it’s Western speakers.

Those are the Afghans. So when the Mullah says he’s Afghan, he’s not going to listen, he’s saying there is a disconnect. The community, the Turkic community, the first-speaking community is not connecting with this administrator. So that was an important scene.

Question:

And it seems that the same disconnect is still going on under the current Taliban regime.

Dr Saed:

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. That continues. One of the things that stays normal throughout, um, and actually we had a really great discussion with the grad center with Mustafa Bayumi. And one of the things that came out in the conversation was your mom, um, this book has been a great way to have a conversation, an open conversation about Afghanistan, which I really appreciate. So I feel like I’ve learned more after writing this. There are certain things I wanted to bring out based on the work I had done with Afghanistan, Turkey, people who wanted to leave Afghanistan in 2021 who were facing danger.

A lot of it was like the same neglect of the North, even by U.S. forces because they were kind of resting, they rested they felt assured that the North was safe. So then both bombing and food and development went to the Southeast, right? So, and then Kabul development for Kabul, food and bombings for Southeast, which is ridiculous actually, but the North was neglected in the same way. And it’s the same politics. And I remember when I was in Turkey traveling, I met a lot of the Uzbeks. One of the biggest complaints is that land is being taken away again under Homi. This is 2019.

And that it’s the same thing that had happened with Apurama. Land gets taken away. That’s the major problem because it’s mostly pastoral communities. They need a lot of land to move the cattle, but that land is also prime areas of real estate, so that gets taken away. And then it’s through these fraudulent and you don’t even need to be fraudulent. The law, actually, it’s still in, I think it’s still in the constitution. I can’t quote this because I don’t know enough, but I know other scholars who are doing this work where to sell your land to someone who’s a Peshti speaker, you have to sell it for like a or something. So there’s like these laws where you have to give up your land if someone else wants it. So that is a settlement, you know, a settler, a colonizer type of relationship when you have that and you don’t treat people from the North as citizens, but as, you know, sort of raw material in a sense. It’s where the carpets come from that create the identity and the financial backbone at the time of the 70s. You have like , you have from the North, you know, like part of the North. So it’s integrated, but not in a way where people feel represented.

And I think that’s what my dad was beginning to understand when he was an employee that You can be part of it, you can have privileges based on language, education, how you dress, but communities are neglected. Communities are not necessarily heard and do not suspect that representation just because they’re token things that represent them in the national sort of identity or conversation. And a lot of times that those things are taken without giving credit, like two-man carpets are very important. but we call them just Afghan carpets, right? These are... Yeah. This is Turkmen. Of course, other groups, of course, make carpets as well. But originally, really, they were really thinking of the prints and the designs and the styles of Turkmen carpets. So, yeah, so that was one of the interesting things about this memory. It was funny, entertaining, and it shows how my dad had to be really creative to make his dental practice work there. Mm-hmm. and how to get clean water because he’s also treating people who needs clean water for dental treatments. Otherwise you get infections and things. So yeah, so that was it. And one of the most important things also that my dad wanted to really emphasize is that it’s the women, the elder women were the ones who, it wasn’t the administrators, it wasn’t the government that set up the dental office and had people come. It actually was the women who were doing that, the elder women. You know, they bless the place. It’s very comedic. But at the same time, he sees the power of the women coming together to draw people in.

The only thing the administrator can do is, like, threaten people. So, you know, barbers, even in Europe, barbers are the ones who pulled out teeth. And that’s why you have the barber shop sign of, like, blue, red, and white stripes. The red meant that they pulled teeth as well, took blood. But Oh, so barbers pull teeth in rural areas. So, um, the only thing he did, the administrator did this impose a kind of fine if they practice this, but, uh, it’s just something my dad didn’t want anyway, but he did train people while he was there. That was, you know, helpful.

Question:

Yeah. I want to turn to the question of Turkestan. You describe Andkhoy as “the heart of carpet weaving in Afghanistan and a town of mostly Turkmen and Uzbeks in what was referred to as Turkestan, nestled near the border of Turkmenistan” (Saed, 317). That is the quote from your chapter. Today, we have no official administrative or geographic unit under the name of Turkestan. What happened to the area known as Turkestan and what does the loss of that name mean for the identity of the people living there today?

Dr Saed:

So, um, I think it is on certain maps, you’ll see Fonto Criston as still there for the 19th century, which really under Abdur-Rahman Fonich I think is the despot kind of leader that, uh, does all these, um, with funding from the British colonies actually, uh, gets in with a lot of massacres and, um, harsh laws and displacing people to kind of create this solid nation state but before that it was relatively like, you know, relatively independent areas. Hedoth was its own place, its own identity. Central of Flintstone as our adult area is its own. And then the North was its own, and Cacahone was its own kind of personality and place, and they had their own administrators. So it wasn’t, and it was a lot more autonomous, especially I think in the journey, it was definitely much more autonomous. Again, I would really recommend Jonathan Lee’s book which is very thorough and it goes through all of the letters and all of the interactions.

So it really builds a really strong history of Northern Afghanistan. I don’t think I’ve seen anything as comprehensive and as fair-minded, I would say. So meaning his own language in itself doesn’t have that colonial baggage of a Western writing history. So I would definitely recommend that. What happens with the Turkestan is, you know, it was a place that spoke its own language, but it was integrated within Afongstan, of course, through trade and relative sharing of identities and travel. You have people referring to Turkestan even in the 1930s in Kabul, where there was a book by, I forgot the, I don’t know if it’s Dutch or from Scandinavian parts, we did a lot of research on Turkic speakers and Afghansan and he interviewed some from Turkestan from the north so I mean you can’t really separate it with a border like this as Turkestan is uploaded because really Turkic history was a big part of Afghansan it’s just been wiped out and erased very much I mean the Timur’d Emperor itself the whole Uzbekistan talks about but he’s also using Herat so you’re having this influence all over you have names in Jalalabad probably through the Mughal era maybe earlier but you have a lot of Uzbek Turkic names that predates Uzbekistan Turkic names even in Nandahar so there is a strong trace of it but it’s just that it’s been erased from the national face of Afghanistan. Whether it’s in European history, and unfortunately, and also the way they made their national identity, the focus is, you know, Pashtun area, Pashtun stone, because it’s a frontier border that was overemphasized during the 19th century, during the Great Gains, and then it became the main kind of identity for Afghanistan. So it was an erasure of other identities. When you read the Yates work, and you read the, and of course you’re familiar with this, You know, you’re much more knowledgeable in this, but the independent people of, like, Hazar Ajat, the independent, you know, people of, you know, the northern area, I mean, there was a lot of flexibility and openness and history, but it’s erased from the national sort of identity, cohesive identity. So it’s hard to say it’s just about Turkestan because that Turkic history runs throughout and even in our language and our words, you know, from Khaichi to, you know, Atlama, you have a lot of, um, uh, Uzbek, uh, Turkey, but you can’t say it’s just about Turkic history or remnants or traces, but it’s not really, um, yeah. So, but Turkestan upon Turkestan was a specific area and it was, um, run mostly within this Malik system. our peer system, right? So that’s why the Khazalaya Khalfa was very important in this piece as well, in his influence, because more than the Kabul government or central government, it was figures like the Khazalaya Khalfa who plays a larger role in peacekeeping and governance and safety and in negotiations with central government.

So that’s where, you know...

Question:

Dr Naqibullah Faiq, a former governor of Faryab, recently noted that the northern region of Afghanistan was historically recognized as the southern Turkestan. He also said that a new state under the name of Southern Turkestan could be formed if structural change ever transformed the international order. He was commenting on the Informal Summit of the Organization of Turkic States convened in Turkistan, Kazakhstan, which is considered as the he spiritual capital of the Turkic World. How do you see this statement?

Dr Saed:

So I do have to admit that I don’t know a lot about Uzbek politics recently or currently because, one, it’s actually not my area of study. Ali Adili Ali Adili Ali Adili Ali Adili Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali

Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali But the word for me, the word I never heard. It doesn’t come up in the research.

It doesn’t come up in the ancestral research I’ve done. It doesn’t mean that I know enough or I’m the expert at it. But I mean, those kinds of separatist politics, it really predates the essay. I mean, I’m sorry, it postdates all this essay.

It’s a result of 40 years of war and fracturing and American presence and then also diaspora politics that I just don’t know enough about. I can’t really comment on it. I also don’t know the figures. I mean, I’m a literature person, I’m a poetry person, so I don’t know the way I do diaspora politics.

But I was curious because in my essay, the Kuzalaya Khalfa, his son is the one who mobilizes and fights the Soviet Union. has soldiers to fight the Soviet Union and they’re very much involved in that. So I thought that was really interesting that the influence helped. And then they move on to Turkey. So,

but what’s happening now with southern, I mean, it’s a little beyond my scope or I don’t even know enough about it to add that. But it is from this compacted, you know, resentment. It has a lot to do with 200 years of having an identity stripped.

When I talk about my grandfathers, I have a presence from history being stripped. So when someone is stripped from a people where they feel that they have no voice within their own country or no presence and no footprints and everything gets erased and you can’t even say I’m Uzbek or I’m Turkmen or this because you have to

say you’re Afghan and everyone is Afghan. At least that’s the language and the best as well. or that names, street names get changed, city names get changed. You know, when the Taliban came in, they were also destroying 15th century Turkic heritage sites. They destroyed the Ali Şirin Aroya site, which after Uzbekistan schools,

then they go back and rebuild. So they’ll respect, with Afghanistan, I’ve noticed they respect more Turkic people outside of Afghanistan, but within the borders that history, that history, a conversation has not had. So when you have that kind of compacted 200 years of being a race.

Of course, you’ll have movements that are, you know, we want our own land, we want to insist. So I think that movement is more of an insistence of ancestral rights to that land and place. And the land is very important. So, but I should say I am, like, we’re considered more Aje, or Farhan Aje for Uzbek.

So my ancestors all came in the 1920s and 30s, so it’s, 100 years of being in immigration, we have three layers of refugee status. So my history is different than, I would say, those connected to the land. Because what I’ve learned in my research was that far on a chair, people are connected to language.

So it’s the same respect to maintain language. But we lost land a long time ago. But with indigenous Turkic people in Afghanistan, land becomes important. Land is the identity. Uh, so for a struggle like that, I can understand why, you know, calling it southern tripstone, demanding, uh, drawing borders, things like that would be important because it’s a compacted, um, you know, 200-year sort of, um, uh, eruption almost, right? So I think that’s within what I, what I study and also my own heritage.

Question:

In discussing Turkestan history, you refer to “Yate’s policy” named after the British administrator Colonel C. E. Yate during the Great Game (Saed, 317-318). Could you explain what Yate’s policy was and how it shaped the region?

Dr Saed:

the histories of three central, western, and northern prophets. And then this is, again, all from the Jonathan Lee book, which is very well documented with letters from British officials and the aides themselves. So the whole thing is readily available for everyone to read. But what that does is a policy where, again, the border, the frontier land,

should be all over Afghanistan, Western and Northern, should be as similar to the people who are loyal, considered loyal to Afghanistan, who are the people living on the, you know, the front line, the whole Kashinistan area, should also be on all the other two borders because that would protect British interests, which is India, right?

So Afghanistan is serving that protective gatekeeper or being the lock in the gate against the Russians. um that transformed the one that creates the genocide and it funds it because there are letters between um the British and um and uh by getting money for he sends him

asking for money because he wants to finish things there’s massacres in Turkestan areas there’s destruction of cultures and uh in western so you have uh you know um just that the AIDS policy is an emphasis not to have autonomous regions and it’s really under the normal form that it just becomes something that’s referred to from

like ancestral memory but it’s no longer mapped out on the map right so then it comes caught up into different provinces you know um Joe’s Joan this that whatever all the other like the other provinces um and again because I’m not in Afghanistan expert. I don’t know. I don’t even know the provinces.

So I would really go back to the historians. But it was a very interesting way to learn and hit off as well. Like the leaders are cut up. These three, like there’s writings about Hazarajah being so independent and financially wealthy that it posed a big threat to Abiramal Fong.

So he breaks that down because of the threat of being in an independent place. So Gates probably really funds, and it propels Abdur-Mahim’s authoritarian and genocidal campaigns.

Question:

You highlight the “Turkestan Atrocity” of the late 1880s. Could you elaborate on what happened during this event and its repercussions for the local communities?

Dr Saed:

Yeah, it’s the same, um, you know, a smaller land space, uh, but, uh, against the Turkestani or Turkic people in North Afghanistan. It was a massacre. It was, um, really horrific kind of stories documented, uh, about that time period. So I wanted to really make that clear before I go into this lighthearted, humorous, but also politically charged, um, memory that my dad had. I really wanted to map out what was happening in the background because, um, there is a history of massacres. There is a history of, you know, genocidal attacks. So you’re not coming into a place, land desertions, land grabs are the big thing in the northern areas.

So it’s not a neutral place to enter into and have access to things through language that my dad had. So there was a very long, bloody history that he was entering. And these are the survivors that he was meeting. And so that’s why they were so protective about who could help them, who couldn’t, how to, you know, their complaints weren’t being heard. They told me that, but they’re not being heard by the administrators. So, yeah, so the Turkestan atrocity, the genocide, these are all around the same time. It targets particular ethnic groups so that they get erased. So there are moments in Afghanistan, you know, again, very much like American history, where there’s freedom and there’s space and there’s moments of different ethnicities holding higher positions of power and being very visible. And then that gets reversed very quickly as well. So, which is also the story of my grandfather when he came, he was treated well, he was respected. And then at some point, the politics erases him from the textbooks.

Question:

Yeah, I just wanted to turn to your identity, your roots. It seems you have your roots in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Your grandfather, Mir Mohammad Kaamil, fled Tashkent and ended up in Mumbai, India. And from there, as you described, he traveled to Afghanistan with his brother, Mir Mohammad Hussayn Hashem. While your grandfather initially returned to India and left his brother behind, he ultimately relocated to Afghanistan after losing his business in India just a year before the partition of the subcontinent (Saed, 325-326). Could you unpack this migration story and what it means for your family’s identity?

Dr. Saed:

Yeah, I think that, thank you for naming them, that means a lot. So I think it’s a path that a lot of Turkic migrants who have come to Afghanistan have taken. It’s the route from anywhere, whether you’re in Kazakhstan or, you know, these places aren’t named, those are Turkestan then at the time.

But when you’re leaving different cities, the only way to get out was 1920s or 1930s was during Ila, the border of Russian China, Ila, China. And Ila is a very important place because it’s where even to this day you’ll still see Russian, it’s Ugar areas, so there’s Turkic language, and Chinese, but Russian is also there as well because of this sort of border area it’s at. and I’m beginning to learn a lot more about it. So the Turkic Muhajirs, they went from, you know, whether it’s Tushkan of my family to Ila and then from there would go over the Himalayas actually and go into India from there and settled in India. The Turkestani people became very, you know, important because they were anti-Russian and they were already, the breaking creates a different kind of layer during the 1920s and 30s. So they’re still anti-Russian or British. So they had a lot more opportunities.

My grandfather created a filmmaking factory around the time when filmmaking became very important and became very wealthy. And we have a history of that through important moments. He’s written it in his home. He has 1933. He bought his house and he has the address there, the birth of my father, you know, all these things.

So that’s later because he travels at the same time. So that migration is coming and you’ll hear it in other, um, Turkey, like, I don’t know if they’re still coming home or whatever. Um, these are a community that still consider themselves a Turkestani diaspora. So that’s my diaspora that I’m part of. and they came then from Afghanistan.

1920s, the first under Amal Makhlam, you have a lot of the policy is to accept the Turkic pledges coming in, the same kind of growl. Others were coming right across the border into Afghanistan and they weren’t given, you know, passports right away, like the commas right away. And so they had identity cards as soon as they walked into Afghanistan land. So that part is very important. But my grandfather himself came a different way. My maternal family came just crossing the border and actually ran an employee. And then they moved to Kobo. But my paternal side went all the way from, you know, they had already established themselves in India, but they had heard that Afghanistan had watandid. From free families. I think I’m freezing a lot, but they came to Afghanistan it was because, you know, I mean, I guess very much in the same way, Bulba is very nostalgic for the pollen, the melons and the fruits of Turkestan. So my grandfather is nostalgic for something that smelled like homeland and came to Babylon.

He wanted to come to Babylon in the north. And then he’s, so usually British, passports are stopped at the border because of the wars with the British. But because it said he was from Turkestan, he was allowed in. And then it made him curious and also a profession.

Occupation is also listed and he is educated under the British system in Hong Kong. For dentistry, there’s only one school in Asia that had dental school, which was in Hong Kong in his medical dental school. And mostly people, Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania is the first Dental School in the U.S. or in the world is U.S.

So Europe gets it later and then they put one in Asia. So my grandfather graduated from that program. So anyway, because it said his occupation was, I think, so proud of being a doctor that he used dentists as the occupation businessmen. He was brought in and they had a meeting.

He had a special access and he trained and he treated people. It was a very welcoming experience initially and then it changes politically. My dad said his face was there until the 1950s and I think in the 60s it changes because the narrative of Afghanistan is changing in the 60s.

He is a Muhajir so he was an Afghan at the time when he was the first atheist. So he becomes a leader.

Question:

Yeah, that’s what you wrote in the chapter. You said that your grandfather’s name and photo were featured in school textbooks as the first dentist in Afghanistan. However, in the 1960s, his name was replaced with the name of an apprentice your grandfather had trained (Saed 326-327). Do you know who the apprentice was that replaced your grandfather in those textbooks and what does that erasure mean to you?

Dr Saed:

I think his name is Elyas, the dentist who was a student. The first one was a student who became a dentist. And then, you know, there are others who were... I’m surprised there’s a lot of dentist memoirs coming up. I’m sorry, I think. So there’s a lot of these stories coming up, but it was Ilyas was the, I think the dentist, I will double check if my dad was like, I think what it meant for me was that, you know, again, for me learning that I’m, I don’t know how controversial this will sound with the people from Afghanistan as an audience. But when I was growing up, I spoke Uzbek. They’re from Brooklyn.

We have a Chukistan community. We have people speaking Uzbek. They come from Afghanistan. They also come from Turkey. They also come from Saudi Arabia and the U.S. and Brooklyn. So I grew up in that community. And then all of a sudden at 13, you know, it was like going to the Avalon Mosque and then facing all their racism because my face was so... As I said, Ezra, meaning Asian. So, uh, so it was really shocking for me to go from a place where you felt like you belonged and everyone was half something else. You know, like everyone is mixed with going up and all of a sudden I went to a mosque that was in Queens, which was like very, I had to hide under the dining room table. So for me, um, hearing, being exposed to, um, although I know my dad loved the place and he drew the, you know, how the Mumbai, everywhere we went, he would, like, have a, he was an artist, so he would paint it and dry it and then have it up on the wall and it was, like, there were pictures where I shot and there was, like, you know, all this love, um, all this love for country and longing for it.

And when I went to the mosque, I don’t think they like me. I don’t think they like me at all, like, I didn’t know how to fit my, you know, So for me, hearing my dad’s stories is like, oh, so it’s not just me not fitting in. And like, it’s a different thing where people don’t know their own country people, but even in Afghanistan, people didn’t know their own country people and didn’t, you know, mix in that there’s some clear hierarchies and that there’s relations. So, you know, I remember being criticized for not speaking Farsi when I was like, but I speak, I respect currently.

And I remember standing up for myself for the first time. at 16, no, but I am speaking a language from my home, so I speak a big thing, but it was just not, so I never really felt accepted. And then when I read this history, I was like, oh, we’re always feeling this.

It’s not just a diaspora that doesn’t understand itself. It’s a longer history. So that made it, that made me more curious and interested. And I have to say, I wouldn’t have really thought about it. I mean, I didn’t feel You know, in Jawabod, there wasn’t racism. Like, my dad did not grow up feeling any kind of racism.

And, um, there was a sense of, like, everyone coming together and being very welcoming. A couple of different, but Jawabod was very different. It was very welcoming. Um, it was very, you know, my dad served also. He went to Anfield, but he also went to Dari Nude. He went to Sherrod. He went to this place.

It was one that’s really far. They need guns. Um, So he’s traveled a lot in the Fungsum, and he’s served a lot as a dentist there. And one of his jokes is that everywhere he went, it could be the most remote place that you’d find an American with a notebook, you know, sort of recording.

That was his big, you know, funny time. And it makes sense. 60s, 70s is when you had the most anthropologists, historians, whatever, archaeologists, and Europeans or Americans.

Question:

You note that “Turkic people had been present in these areas [Jalalabad] since the Mughal era, but these families primarily spoke Pashto, like the Sikh communities in Shinwar” (Saed, 328). Do these Pashto-speaking Turkic communities still exist in Jalalabad today? If not, when and why did they leave the area, and what happened to their distinct identity?

Dr Saed:

Well, there’s many layers of people. There’s, of course, the Mughal era. There’s a lot of Turkish speakers. We also had some, I think it was 16th or 17th century. It’s very popular. It’s known in Nangarhar areas that they were once Turkic people, but their language, but even Turkic identity is also linguistic, I feel like.

Once the language changes, you can become another ethnicity based on language. These are, I guess, ethnological things. If I knew anything about anthology, I’d have a better term. So there’s that layer. There’s also names of places. My dad did one. I did a video with my dad where he talks about Bish Valaq in Jalalabad, which is Bish Valaq, which means five students. and it was at Five Springs but the people living there weren’t Christians and they said they didn’t know what the word meant and so he was his big thing was he had when he was younger did a whole news thing based on the etymology of this town’s name so you have those Jalal ad-Aqbar built the city so it’s Jalal abroad they changed that story later to someone else but it’s Jalal ad-Aqbar city and then you have other You had during the 70s, you had the movement of administrators, so you had Tuqman administrator in Lugard, no, Larmont, and then you had the Uzbek commissioner in Jalalabad. So you had a lot of movements like that, smaller movements, right? Smaller movements of people.

But that community, I forgot what the tribe is called.

They still have the tribe, but the tribe name means like foreigners or something, right? I don’t know enough, but I do remember these stories. So we have multiple centuries of mixing, but no one ever talks about it. And still, Turkic experiences and Northern experiences are still considered as like perpetual foreigners. Even with the Taliban now,

the main thing is that Uzbeks and Turkic people and, you know, minorities, Asian minorities, Hazara are perpetual foreigners, like you’re always a foreigner even in your own country. So that is the problem. There was a recent controversy with the red hat, the turkey cats, the red hats. I remember that young man crying on Instagram saying,

I’m a foreigner in my own homeland, which is really that feeling, which is from the 70s memory experience of my dad and this town that he had come to. in this young man now. So you always have that perpetual foreign feel. So that’s the ultimate problem. Which is why it can be intact. They’re not Muslim enough.

We’re not Muslim enough. We’re not Afgan enough. We’re not, you know, sort of assimilable. And there’s, even in the most well-meaning people, they’ll say, oh, you look extreme. Is that not? I don’t know. Is that not me?

I’m more Asian than they do.

So, you know, these wordings are important to look at and to think through.

Question:

And my last question. You paint a deeply nostalgic picture of women’s roles in Dara-e-Nur and Andkhoy drawn from your father’s encounters along the way. For example, you write that “Baba remembers an Afghanistan where women’s roles and contributions were the community’s spine” (Saed, 328-329). Could you explain how it looked like in practice? How does it contrast with women’s role in Afghanistan today?

Dr Saed:

Yeah. Thank you for that. Yeah. Well, I love my dad’s stories because in it, um, you know, he meets these very tall women and they’re out on the church camp. They were just cutting like wood or fire. And they saw my dad and his radio.

And also my dad and his, his best friend were stuck on the mountain there. They didn’t work. So the women saved them, the women rescued them, put them, take out the basket. Um, the basket of wood and they put my dad in one and the other woman carried my dad’s girlfriend and they just ran down the mountain.

So there’s a lot of mobility, freedom. This is very far up in the mountains. So he said it was so high up that I had to put onions in my nose because there was so little oxygen. So these are places that the northern nomadic areas are properly versus the whole economy is based on women’s craft and art.

And also they had a very strong role, especially elderly women. So what happens is really the disruptions of war. I mean, it’s really a war, 40, 50 years war, seeing only one gender in power, exploiting, harming, you know women as a way to exert political power whether that’s you know giving them power which was like had a lot of strings attached even during the republic era and where women’s bodies in certain places became political symbols in a way and then taking women away from areas and hiding them away is also another you know kind of using women’s bodies as political currency so um it’s been 40-50 years of that and unfortunately it’s women and children who bear the brunt of these radical changes in government and stability so um yeah it’s suffered a lot I don’t know what it’d be like if it was left alone and everyone had a chance to grow but um it’s not what my dad remembers even the clothing my dad says it was made for you know like the women who met in the north while wearing the sides are cut so they could ride horses. So then they could ride horses. They’re mobile. There wasn’t restrictions.

He also explained that’s probably why in the North, in the last 20 years, there were so many sportswomen who are cyclists because cycling is really the modern way of thinking of horseback riding, which was culturally, you know, part of our traditions. Everyone is on horse from age three, right? So this culture has been, you know,

It’s just destroyed by your culture. The Taliban is not indigenous. It’s not of Afghanistan. It is just taking control of it and it is your culture. It is not, you know, at all aware of itself or have an untainted history. So it’s just as exploitative and colonial as anything else.

You know, you lost a lot of the... Of course, you know, there are women who are still you know you have a lot of I mean you know I don’t want to also just say that there’s so many strong women running school programs underground fighting the

Taliban protesting against the Taliban that was the most scariest thing and they were out in the streets you have like you know fathers with daughters who are out protesting you know there’s a lot to be out there but you know I think that that shows that it’s not natural, that it’s not natural.

Since they emphasize giving back a clean enough fun song, they are not. You’re getting protests from your own young women, from your own, you know, who are protesting to get their daughters to school. They’re not authentic either. So that’s my thinking. I hope that

Question:

On that note, recognising Afghan women's extraordinary struggles against the Taliban for their rights, thank you very much, Dr Zohra Saed, for sharing a fascinating story of your family's migration, identity, belonging, and the broader context in Afghanistan and Central Asia.

Dr Saed:

Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for the thoughtful questions.

Below is the full transcript of this conversation.

Introduction

Thank you very much, Dr Farkhondeh Akbari, for joining me on The Crossroads for a deep-dive conversation about women, peace and security agenda and intersectionality. Just for our audience, Dr Akbari, you are a research fellow at the Center of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence Against Women at Monash University.

You are the author of the book “Non-State Actors in Diplomacy: Peace Settlements with the Taliban and the Khmer Rouge,” which was published by Routledge last year; co-author of the book “Women, Peace and Security in Afghanistan: Resistance and Resilience” published by De Gruyter last year; and finally co-editor of the volume “Mapping Futures for Afghanistan.” Dr Akbari, you hold a PhD in Diplomatic Studies from the Australian National University.

Question:

Today we are going to discuss “women, peace and security in Afghanistan: resistance and resilience,” which is the title of the book you co-authored with Professor Jacqui True. In this book, you and True explore an empirical research question: “how far and in what ways has the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, and the key actors and institutions promoting it, protected the rights and security of women and girls in Afghanistan?” (p.12). So let’s begin with an explanation of women, peace and security agenda. What’s it? How is Afghanistan a case for the WPS agenda?

Dr Akbari:

Thank you very much, Mr Adili, for your kind invitation. I really, really enjoy your deep dive with scholars on their work and really good that we have the initiative you have created in order to have a session and then talk about our research that we, anyone have been doing for some time, but have this hour with, precious hour with you to really talk about the essence of it. I think for today’s global audience, it’s really, really important that we communicate, especially for Afghanistan, which is a forgotten cause.

Really good question, and thank you for picking our book, The Women, Peace and Security Agenda, which is the center part of the book, “Women, Peace and Security in Afghanistan: Resistance and Resilience.” I’ll just give you a little bit of background, the Women and Peace and Security Agenda is an international normative and policy framework that was established by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 in the year 2000 and the intervention in Afghanistan happened in 2001. So it’s very aligned with, the WPS agenda is very aligned with the intervention in Afghanistan. And the agenda itself also emerged from ongoing networks of women and advocacy of women from across the world about the importance of recognising that in armed conflict women are affected differently than men and sustainable peace that, we saw a lot of peacemaking happening in the 90s especially after the Cold War, I think it sort of triggered this agenda that it could not be achieved without meaningful participation of a woman in these processes.

So the WPS Agenda or the Women and Peace and Security Agenda is commonly organised around four pillars. So it’s participation, protection, prevention and relief and recovery. And it aims to sort of increase women’s representation in peace and political processes, protect women and girls from violence, prevent conflict, and also gender-based harms such as sexual violence against women, and also ensure that recovery and reconstruction post-war efforts address the needs of women and also address their priorities. And that is very different from communities to communities after each conflict.

So WPS, in a way, in 2000, that was the resolution that was passed. It wanted to challenge the traditional assumption that security is solely about state and military threats and then the development stuff that was like security is human security or the gender equality. It went beyond it. And it sort of digged [dug]into that in a war and in a conflict. And then when there is peace happening or there’s efforts for peacemaking in any way and shape, it is very vague. It’s very large. It can accommodate all kinds of peace. That woman’s participation is a key into it.

And in a way, as I mentioned earlier, because of the WPS agenda coming into place, I mean, for me, as a person from Afghanistan, it’s also a very symbolic moment that the women of the world, the network of the women rights of the world fought so many decades and years to create an advocate for WPS to be recognised. And it happened at a time that the intervention was happening. So I think in a way, everything was in our favour. And that’s why that when the intervention occurred in Afghanistan, not, I mean, it took a decade for WPS to have an agenda in Afghanistan or pass a national action plan, but there was a concrete gender perspective in the donors, in the states that contributes militarily in their mind that they have to do it.

And that’s why we saw a lot of donor countries, development programs in Afghanistan, and probably the constitution that we had in 2004 or the um the the development project that as we know from Afghanistan there’s always a gender box that they had to pick so all of these in a way inflicted by that by that agenda but I also want to raise that um um I think because of this agenda and its consensus among member states at the UN and then the resolution that was passed and then the support that it received this military intervention in Afghanistan had a lot of support for women rights issues and that ended up having a constitution that was very gender progressive given in our region for example or the history of Afghanistan but I think the case of Afghanistan also revealed the limits and the weakness of that agenda because it’s a silver lining but empirically and practically the case also reveals a lot of weaknesses.

Question:

In the book, you highlight that since the Taliban take over in Afghanistan in August 2021, the Women, Peace and Security Transnational Network has widened and deepened significantly (p.18). In what ways? and what is the subsequent impact of this broader network or deepening network on women’s situation in Afghanistan?

Dr Akbari:

Really good question. I think it goes to the heart of it that we had WPS and then 20 years later Taliban takeover that unraveled all the in all the formal gains that we had like equality in the Constitution between men and women and then the gender quota in the parliament or and so on and so on and overnight we saw it’s unraveling. But I think studying the transnational network of women from Afghanistan fighting for women’s rights in Afghanistan is really, really interesting to study the impact of WPS on the Afghanistan country and the people. We saw that WPS from the last five years, I mean, August, we’re going to be in August very soon, marking five years of the Taliban rule, WPS has been sustained through transnational network of women rights activists, the peace-builders, policymakers, scholars, diplomats, civil society actors, and they work across different avenues locally inside Afghanistan, and we also see them in the international level.

And why we say that this network has widened and deepened, because before we had a state, a constitution that recognised the rights of women and girls, but after the unraveling in 2021, we saw that how the normative commitment was discarded and also the formal and constitutional and formal institution was discarded, but the network exists still.

And from my own experience going to different places and talking to different women outside the country, but also inside the country, it continues because the two 20 years period inside Afghanistan provided an opportunity for these women to enhance their rights and have at least an avenue to fight for their rights.

And now if their journey has been difficult, they have been lawyer, they have been human rights defenders, they have been ministers, they have been law advocates, judges, whatever. Now they are sort of uprooted from the country and then they’re in different things. And they still think. And today, if you want to boil down on the discourse or the narrative or the political commitment towards Afghanistan, it’s about gender, it’s about women rights. And it’s not a formal network, it’s an informal network. The initiative run by me in my bedroom here about women in Afghanistan. It’s you over there talking about women.

It’s a lawyer that is teaching girls inside of Afghanistan. So this informal network of women from Afghanistan are spread across the world. Why? Because we are not the generation of 90s. And the leaders, the women that have worked in the 90s, they told us that that has changed and today we have not one advocate to advocate but we have many advocates and also accessibility right because the evacuation provided in a way I mean whatever there was so many things wrong about evacuation but that also meant that some women be it elite or whatever they got out and they are advocating right now in different capital cities about women’s rights. And they are foregrounding the gender issue in these places. And this network is really, really important. As I said, the WPS does come from a network of women human rights defenders from different parts of the world. And today we are also seeing the only cohesive thing that we see about Afghanistan post-Taliban takeover is this informal network of Afghan women. We have so many disagreements, but we have a solid agreement, which is protection of women’s rights.

Question:

Yeah, and this woman cannot sit silent in the face of the gravity of the situation of women in Afghanistan, which many human rights organisations characterise as gender apartheid in Afghanistan?

Dr Akbari:

Absolutely. Absolutely. I just want to make an highlight. There is a limit to what Amnesty International can do, for example. There is a limit to what Human Rights Watch can do. These organisations were still involved in Afghanistan in the first Taliban rule. But in the second Taliban rule that happened, I think despite all the difficulties, divisions, whatever, I think there is a very concrete informal network of Afghan women in their own way, carrying the resistance. And they’re the ones that are running the gender apartheid camp, end of gender apartheid campaign. And they’re the ones that are advocating the countries to to hold the Taliban accountable, for example, and they’re the ones that are the loudest voices still ignored in many conferences about development, about humanitarian issues that women do not have access. I mean, maybe later we’ll talk more about this whole division issue, but I think it has created that network, that transnational network, but also the transnational network of Afghan women from inside the country outside now whether you call them elite or whatever and then them collaborating with international organisation is very new and that was not there before and that’s something that we see a lot more a better substance for example about understanding the situation of women rights inside Afghanistan.

Question:

We already somehow mentioned the gravity of the situation for women in Afghanistan. One example which you correctly note in your book is that Afghanistan is the only country in which the UN cannot officially imply women. So given this fundamental barrier, how can UNAMA, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, or the broader UN apparatus, effectively contribute to the implementation of WPS agenda in a Taliban-led Afghanistan?

Dr Akbari:

Yes. With UN, it has been a very difficult relationship in the last five years. And there’s also a critique about UN’s operation inside Afghanistan in that 20 years. They were there, they were good, they were one of the biggest missions of its time and so on.

But considering that we are at a very special time, it’s not ordinary, Afghanistan is under the Taliban rule. It’s a gender apartheid. Just like you consider that there was racial apartheid in South Africa or maybe there was, I don’t want to be insensitive, but when there was like different types of war going on and targeting different people.

So here we have the target is women really for the Taliban to take power. And then we have agencies like UNAMA who has physical presence in the country and a mandate to support human rights, humanitarian assistance and political engagement and inclusivity and humour, all those things that the actors that were involved in Afghanistan, the ISAF, I don’t know, I think there were like 52 countries that left and packed their back and left and this is like the remaining essence of those countries, those promises and unfortunately UNAMA did not redo itself to reflect critically and also reflect itself and change itself in a way that you’re now operating under a gender apartheid and under a regime that is exclusionary, that is very discriminatory. It’s not just gender and women, but also ethnic groups, especially ethnic minorities. And we have seen forced displacement of the Hazaras, for example, or targeted killing of particular members of the security forces.

In my view, the challenges and then the way the challenge has been described that, okay, UN is there and there is gender, there is Taliban and we are trying to operate in order to have access to the country. But the evidence since 2021 suggests that UNAMA’s engagement, its strategy, its policy has had very, very limited influence on the Taliban. The fight sustained dialogue and they have been engaging, they have been giving them money, they have been reflected to the regime by recruiting locally only people, mostly people from the regime, from the people of the regime, but still nothing has been reversed, right? And there have been no reversal of restriction on women and girls, including bans. There’s like 180 now, but the audience listening already know.

And also a quick criticism to the UN is that we know it’s facing competing priorities, like it’s humanitarian access operation, it’s safeguarding its staff and preserving this channel of communication as the only international body in the country. But the concerns are, these concerns are understandable, but they can create incentives in which they have not done so far for caution and for accommodation of what we want, what the people of Afghanistan want and creating some sort of narrative from the country against what the Taliban are. And what they have said that the risk is that they are going to lose their access in the country. But access has become a mean of being there and access is not a mean of protecting the people, human rights in Afghanistan.

I want to, on the record, give an example. There was a targeted killing of family, my family members in Daikundi province in November 2022, where nine members of my extended family were targeted and killed in Daikundi province. And when through my own network.

Question:

I am deeply sorry for your loss here.

Dr Akbari:

Thank you. And through my network, because we try to get UNAMA to go and record the incident. Whose fault was it? What is happening? And the UNAMA went in Daikundi in Khedir district with Pashtun speaker, UNAMA staff, and Taliban members as their guard. And my cousin who was who is a girl he’s like 20 years old really sharp beautiful girl and she was asked to give evidence of what has happened in Pashto because the staff could not speak in Farsi or Hazaragi or Dari and it was not able to record her statement because she was not a and that was her only opportunity to say how how her father was killed in this. And we still don’t know how he was killed on the official record because there are many, many narratives. He was beheaded. He was killed by a gun and so on.

And then this all happened while the Taliban member that was escorting UNAMA member was at the door waiting for them. And they don’t have and they’re living there. So the, it is really, really important for us, I mean, especially now, five years on, that we really need to critically evaluate that.

What is the presence of UN agencies inside Afghanistan? What are they offering? And in a bigger picture, I mean, we have had so many evidence-based reports about diversion of aid inside Afghanistan. And this aid does go through this UN agencies and when they are diverged [diverted] and they go to militarisation of the Taliban rule and does access become and here’s the thing that they are there for access and access for what? And this is the critique that it is beyond the WPS it’s also about about how we how we are going to go forward.

And the recent example is that the recent decrees that was passed by the Taliban about child marriage and also about the complexity of making women divorcing more difficult that the Taliban spokesman said that our enemies, what our enemies said, because UNAMA had a statement saying that they are concerned about this decree and Taliban spokesperson statement said that we are not worried or concerned about what our enemies said. They have always said this does not change anything. So because of engagement, because of access in the country, compromise after compromises after compromises and also reflecting the regime and changing your own internal staff, stuffing in the in the UNAMA like this.

Another thing that we need to study that who really works for UNAMA right now inside of UNAMA and what they do in diversion of aid that we see. What is happening and where the money that this international actors that are giving as guilt money that whatever to have that money spend it, which is maybe a way that the Taliban have been sustained for the last five years.

Question:

Yeah. Okay. In the book, you criticise the argument that urban and elite women do not represent all Afghan women is a narrative used to dismiss advocates of women’s rights. And of course that argument was [there] before August 2021 and it has been there since August 2021. Specifically, you take issue with the argument that for rural women, an end to the conflict was more important than rights. Could you unpack this narrative, this argument, and your own criticism of it?

ِDr Akbari:

Yeah, really, really good question. I think this question really ties everything, the intervention that was justified over protection of women’s rights, unveiling Afghan women, Tony Blair, George Bush, and then 2001 narrative after 9-11 and everything. And then for us, it’s like mapping all of this, right? This is what they said.

And then I was in Kabul and that’s also when I met you and your beautiful family in 2018 during my fieldwork, which is about peace settlements with the Taliban. And everywhere we go, every consultation, interviews, focus group and stuff happening in the country. And we see two narratives. One is what the woman in the country wants,

what people, not just women, what the families wants. Like they’re concerned about the education of their daughter. They’re concerned about what’s happening if the Taliban who committed mass massacres, committed genocide in the 1990s, committed gender apartheid, and now in a way, like we saw each one of us have lost friends,

family member during the 20 years of Taliban’s insurgency. That is true. Each one of us has it. And now in a way in 2000, I think it was October 2018 when the official US Taliban talk happened and I got in Kabul like a month before it. So I really captured that narrative

that was happening that peace is important. And then and then the way that Taliban was framed before the axis of evil demonization of the Taliban and so on. And then all of a sudden I saw the shift and I really, really saw and traveled with how policy changed overnight about making peace with Taliban.

But I mean, research wise, we go back, I see that change post 2010 or 11. But then in the narrative building part, because the US really wanted to make peace with Taliban and their sort of endless war. And then that narrative in the circles in Kabul,

we were seeing that whatever meeting was happening Khalilzad was visiting or the government was pushed to sort of show this and whenever there’s a talk about Taliban woman issue is number one agenda because the Taliban ideology is based on women and the Taliban are empowered because because of their uniqueness is because of their general policies.

So by default, whenever we talk about making peace with Taliban, the women are concerned. No issue. And that’s the uniting part in Afghanistan, that the women of every province and black parts say that when the Taliban is there, all women are in trouble. And then I saw that evolution of narrative, that women

rights what what we see what the ground level that people in the I mean this was 2018 so probably like 17 years after the intervention and then at least a good decade of development peace building and so on and then that we have we have equality we have w we have women peace and security protection representation we

have quota in the parliament we Ali Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili

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Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Adili Ad The Taliban never left post 2001. They were always there, but we knew that they hadn’t changed. But this narrative was like shoving in our throat that Taliban has changed, Taliban 2.0, the protect women, right, and so on and so on.

And I think that was where the concern raised more that the elite in the Afghan government, the international civil society is also backing off the embassies and so on. And also the political process and the political statement and so on is also saying that it’s not an issue, peace is the most important thing. And that becomes

very problematic. And I saw a lot of pushbacks. I saw a lot of concerns. And I think I wanted to document that in that book. And I also saw a lot of think tanks, international organization talking it, but I wanted to see how they talk about it.

I’ll tell you one example, international crisis groups, Afan Sunlit was traveling, who was the one or reporter that was saying that elite and village woman in Afghanistan are very different for them. Peace is number one and for them. Right. And then he went to a home in Kandahar and he was meeting with different women.

And then it’s not in the documentary because like the translation did not made it to the documentary. And then the woman wearing burqa was said, oh, Would you go to Kabul? And she said that this burqa is hurting my head. And if I could go to Kabul and make decision, I would do it.

And this very report referencing this very documentary said that the rural woman does not want rights, but they want rights. and also other women that we talked to that they’re like, yes, of course, nobody wants bombardment. That should not be prioritized. And then this is very wrong in the whole human rights political issue.

It’s very wrong to prioritize security and rights as competing issues. right and for this woman like of course maybe she does not want bombardment in her house but she also said that if I have to go in Kabul and make decision I love to

do it if I have to go to school and if I am able to send my daughter to school I would love to and my own travel across different rural provinces I mean I’m a girl from rural province education. They’re not asking for more. They’re asking for education, employment, and also like some sort of recognition and dignity.

And this is given to us by Islam. This is given to us by our culture. and every woman in any part of Afghanistan want that. So I think this rural-arban divide was in the context of Afghanistan that you don’t have the most basic is a very flawed and facade argument.

In the book, again, you criticize international researchers and think tanks for praising the Taliban’s swift justice system before their takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021. I think there is also a new book titled The Taliban Courts in Afghanistan Waging War by Law by Adam Bajku.

There he argues that the Taliban set up hundreds of courts in the countryside and by insisting on due process impartiality from the judges and the enforcements of Wardex, this system of justice has established itself as one of the few sources of predictability in the daily lives of Afghans. That was a quote from the blurb about the book.

So why do you critique such arguments? What do you think they miss in their analysis of the Taliban’s justice?

Yeah, really good question. It was one of the hyped theme that international researchers or so-called researchers targeted. But our critique is not that the Taliban’s shadow court or whatever was not entirely ineffective, given that there was a lot of corruption going on within the system. There’s a lot of insecurity.

but also it’s overlooking the question that the question of justice who gets the justice who decides upon it and especially especially in the rural area about like those disputes that were happening in those rural area that the Taliban were part of destabilizing the state system

And our critique is about the absence of gender lens in those justice system. And especially for many women, the experience of domestic violence, forced marriage, sexual violence and other forms of gender-based harms. The Taliban courts offered almost none protection or redress for these issues.

and one’s ability to appear before court or represent for them to be able to represent themselves or challenge the male family members was constrained by, of course, by social norm, by security challenges in this course. And in the in the Taliban justice system, especially in many parts that the male member of the family has to represent them.

Right.

Yeah. Could themselves be perpetrator. So this whole and also like later on, that’s the gender issue, but there’s also the ethnic issues. who who is there like the justice system the Taliban provide it’s it’s by force it’s by submission and that’s why it’s swift that’s why it’s quick can you go into

the Hazara region and ask that did your issue become resolved more under the Taliban rule and was it just just because we know that the Taliban have a very hi radical issue about ethnicity in Afghanistan and we are at the bottom of the

record like my family is filing a justice system in the last five years and we are not getting anywhere and then the woman issue which is 50% of the population

Right.

And then the land issues, which is so, the land issue is the most important one. Like it’s, I think it makes up the highest court cases and it could be forced eviction of different ethnicities from their lands. The Panjshiris, the Hazaras, the Shamalis and so on.

Like why, why our colleagues internationally go in a country that is so politically charged and said this justice system work and this doesn’t. Yes, the justice system of the Republic was corrupt. It was not working. It was slow. It was thin.

But that does not mean that the Taliban swift process was just and it quit because it was not. It really was not. And there’s a lot of knowledge coming outside of Afghanistan the last 20 years that is very top-down, very elite and also very colonial and colonize all of those experiences.

Yeah, go ahead, please.

No, that’s something.

Okay. I want to turn to another theme in your book. One chapter of your book deals with the concept of intersectionality, which I think is relatively new in the case of Afghanistan. You imply this framework of intersectionality to consider the distinct challenges faced by ethnic minority women. which you just alluded to.

What exactly is intersectionality and how does it apply to women’s security in Afghanistan or why is it important to apply this framework to the Afghanistan context?

Thank you for the very good question, Saudadili. I think we need to talk more about intersectionality when we talk about Afghanistan, the conflict and its resolution. So intersectionality is a framework that helps us understand how different forms of identity and inequality interact to shape people’s experience of power, privilege and discrimination.

It was developed by Professor Kimberly Crenshaw, a Black African-American woman lawyer. And the concept argues, which was developed in the process and movement of the Black movement inside America gaining their rights, but then the woman of Black women. and it argues that individuals do not experience discrimination through a single category like man, woman or Hazara,

Pashtun or whatever, but it’s an intersecting part. And in Kimberly Crenshaw’s, the original theory look at gender and race only, that how gender and race interacts. And it was because it was developed by black women from African descendants. and but after that it was applied to like geography disability and so on and so on

and then there’s also critic of that it should not be used in that way that it has to be only used in gender and ethnicity which I very agree and in the context of Afghanistan intersectionality is important because women of Afghanistan are not homogeneous girls which was treated as a way

for whatever time that existed, especially the last 20 years. And women’s experience of insecurity, of exclusion, of discrimination are significantly different from one another. And then for us in Afghanistan, because in this book we try to research and I try to understand the policies, the projects that was in operating in Afghanistan.

And I tried to say whether intersectionality was part of anything. I did not find a single project that applied intersectionality to try to understand the experience of different women. As I said, I mean, gender and race is the fundamental, but it could be applied across other things like urban, rural, like different things.

So applying intersectionality to Afghanistan is really, really important to address the problem that exists in Afghanistan, because the Afghan woman has always been treated as a homogeneous group. They are one, whatever. But we know coming from the country, but also the experience shows this is not a marathon of whose pain is more or whose

who receive more discrimination, but it’s about identifying and acknowledging and then shaping the response according to this. And that’s the important part, which unfortunately, in Afghanistan, it is very, and also the network that we talked about is a very challenging and very sensitive issue because the thing that we are prioritizing our pain above the other. But no,

intersectionality is very different, just the way that the WPS agenda did not work. It’s not one template across 34 provinces. Every province needs to have its own needs and its own thing. And in the same way, we need to recognize that. For example, in gender apartheid, the Taliban rule, the rules that are edicts that are written applies

to all women of Afghanistan. But the way that it’s implemented is very different across provinces, across cultures, across district. And this is where we need to recognize these differences of discrimination. That is because of who you are and that’s because of your ethnicity, your gender identity, and maybe other factors can affect. But for me,

I really want to stick to that gender ethnicity and that’s the original understanding of intersectionality. Because once we saw this, the rest we could always work on it. And I think that was missed on a lot of the projects in Afghanistan before and it’s missing now in our own advocacy.

In the book, you mentioned that following the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan in 2001, Hazorah women became more prominent in public life. And of course, throughout the book, I can understand your positionality is someone coming from the Hazorah community. Why do you think that was the case? I mean, the Hazara women became more prominent in public life. Why?

Yeah, the increased visibility of Hazara women in public life after 2001 was primarily, I think, a result of the legal system that was in place in post-2001 Afghanistan. the constitution that recognized them as equal citizens inside Afghanistan probably for the first time. And also there was a legal protection and also commitment for the political

participation in the country. So this created that opportunity for Hazara women, not only in the state level, but also in their community that In the parliament, for example, we had a quota system that a particular part of women and that has to be in the parliament and for Hazara community that has been largely historically excluded, persecuted.

And this change was very significant. And we saw that we we saw how from far provinces and from the commitment that the families put that they have to enroll their girls to schools and their support for the women in the parliament and sort of opening themselves up for this opportunity was to reverse the history of

persecution and marginalization and and change that discourse. I think for the families that I visited in through my travels in several years was that you want to change our fate. We know what we have been through and this is the time and especially legally because socially there was still a barrier.

Politically there was a barrier because we know judiciary Nihab and Tabassum happened. There was a structural discrimination embedded within the Afghan system, Afghan government system, but at least legally it was recognized. So that sort of created an opportunity for this woman and girls across Afghanistan

and gave an opportunity for girls in the Hazara family to fight for their right. I can go to school, I can go to university, I can be a police woman or an army of her own, an MP. So because the formal recognition really empowered them, and then that’s why we saw this huge...

I think, Ustadi, it was your reporting that we saw the biggest turnaround of Hazara women voters in the provinces.

Yeah, yeah, that was the case.

And I think, yeah, I think that came from that history and it came from that part. And I think we should recognize it and celebrate that those women.

Again, in the context of intersectionality, you and Professor True argued that the potential inequality and bias must be addressed to realize the goals of WPS and indeed peace and security for all, quote-unquote. How could they be addressed?

The potential inequality and bias can only be addressed if we move beyond treating women as a single, homogeneous group and recognize the diversity of women’s experience in Afghanistan. We have a few recommendations in the book, but also it’s realized by our experience that first, advocacy on issues such as gender apartheid, as mentioned that, okay,

the women are sort of leading the processes of initiatives about Afghanistan should adopt a framework that understands and includes diverse voices of women from Afghanistan. And it could be ethnicity, it could be your gender orientation, and it could be your geographical or whatever. and ignoring these intersection risks that we are just going back to where we were

and also excludes responses that could help us. And secondly, international platform that work on women rights in Afonso. I mean, this is the hottest topic. I mean, We say it’s a guilt money international organization of trying to support women rights initiative in Afghanistan, but it should not be a tick box.

They should be very generally including and being inclusive in their work about representation, about their narrative, about their policy. And it’s not just enough to talk about Afghan women, quote unquote, but diverse group of Afghan women must represent and bring them who could speak about what they want, who they want. Because tell me,

when was the last time that an international organization or initiative was able to speak to diverse women of Afghanistan and try to understand? It’s a shame. Millions and billions of dollars was spent. We still don’t know what are the priorities and we still fight about and Arab women. And third, community-based advocacy is very important, very powerful,

but our communities is also, we come from a very patriarchal societies. They need to have a gender-sensitive approach to things. I come from the Hazara community. I watch different initiatives that the community have been doing, especially the Stop Hazara Genocide and so on. There’s mother being murdered for giving a child and there’s girls being killed and

targeted but we frame it as Hazara genocide but we don’t talk about Hazara woman genocide or Hazara girl genocide because gender is such an import. This is being used as a tool by the Taliban and we’re not understanding that language of the enemy. And more broadly, I think the agenda,

the WPS agenda is a really good framework for us to engage with it more critically and also for it to use it because it’s internationally recognized, right? It has a base, it has funding, whatever. But how can we use Women, Peace and Security to bring local voices from the ground, right?

to try to understand intersectionality from it because it’s so broad, it allows us that capacity. And then what I learned from my research that to strengthen this international network or international network for women and international norms, such as the WPS, which was curated by women,

They’re only valid and verified when it’s locally embedded and when it works locally. It’s a good agenda and then how it’s not something out there. I’m not an advocate. I’m not a representative. It’s a good one because it talks about diversity. It talks about representation. It’s also about protection, about prevention, about

us being involved in every aspect of recovery or whatever. But it only works if it works for us locally. And how do we channel that interest, you know, that is there, recognized, understood, 112 countries have a national action plan in those WPS. and they’re committed, especially like I’m in Australia, like they have the agenda and so on.

It’s a framework. How do we do it in a way that we enhance it in a more meaningful way?

I would like to somehow wrap up this conversation and my last question would be and I know you as a scholar and practitioner in your book chapters, in your journal articles, in your books, you always try to propose some way forward for the situation of women in Afghanistan. So my question would be,

what is the way forward for women’s struggles against what many human rights organizations call a gender apartheid, which we mentioned previously.

Nothing has worked so far. Neither UNAMO’s appeasement of the Taliban, nor UN Women. You talked about agencies. Their funding has doubled, tripled. No restrictions have been reversed so far. We have had thousands of engagement diplomatic engagement with the taliban nothing had worked because we know they were like okay we engaged with this country for 20 years we

were there whatever now we try to engage and and push back and try to see but look we have to break this down in two ways one is for afghanistan itself one is for the region The Taliban have been in power for the last almost five years, and it is having a regional and international implication, security implication.

There is a rise of extremism, not just men, but women as well. And regionally, it has not created any kind of stability, but we are having many, many war going on, like the Taliban of of Pakistan fights. And we have also seen the way in which international organizations inside Afghanistan, because of their access,

have been appeasing to the Taliban and they have not been able to reverse anything. So the way forward should be have concrete, very concrete conditions to the Taliban. Any money that goes to Afghanistan has to be conditioned. We know about diversion of aid. It’s not 10, 20, 50.

I think it’s like 70, 80, 90% of diversion of aid. Those aid money needs to be conditioned to go to the people of Afghanistan, especially to women, number one, to women of vulnerable groups and also to people of pop in rural population. And this cannot continue the way it is.

And access of humanitarian organization or the UN or UN Women is not just access has not resulted anything in five years. It’s not going to result in the next five years. So I think this is a wake up call that um international community needs to understand the Taliban as an act as an actor

which is another topic I hope we can talk more as an actor that why can they compromise what they cannot compromise and um secondly I think political will for Afonso is really really important we have had we talked about initiatives uh the network of women created different

initiative taking Taliban to ICJ for the general persecution and codifying general apartheid in ICC. But this is not enough. International law can take so long. The legal initiative will take so long. But here, what do you see a world that Taliban is in power in the way in which it is for the next 10, 20, 30,

40 years, because last time we only had them for five years, less than five years, and now we are going to have them for almost five years. I think we need to really be reflective of who we are internationally as a state, as human rights organizations, civil society advocates and so on, and be very practical,

but we need to be cohesive. because political will and resource is the first thing that we need to talk about. Because you know what? Many countries still don’t sponsor Afghan students to come to that country because the country is not recognized. Who is going to be the next generation of Afghan women leaders or educators?

And there are so many issues. It’s not just the political, but also looking back practically What has everybody really done in the last five years? And it’s a lot. And if you don’t hold anyone accountable in the last five years, it could go on for maybe another 50 years and where Afghanistan will be because it will have a lot of security implications for region and the rest of the world.

Thank you so much, Dr Akbari, for this really, really enlightening and insightful deep-dive conversation about women, peace and security in Afghanistan. I am really grateful that you took the time out of your busy schedule to do this conversation.

Dr Akbari:

My pleasure, Dr Adili. Thank you very much.

Introduction:

Thank you very much, Ms. Aziza Mokhammedova, for joining me on The Crossroads for a deep-dive conversation about the regional connectivity and the relations between Afghanistan and Uzbekistan and the broader regional dynamics. This is my second conversation on this topic so far. The first one was with Dr. Gafarov about a month ago. So just for our audience, Ms. Mokhammedova, you are a senior research fellow at the Center for Afghanistan and South Asia Studies at the Institute for Advanced International Studies. You hold a master’s degree in political science from the University of World Economy and Diplomacy and currently pursue a PhD program at IAIS.

Question:

Let’s begin with the Termez Dialogue. On 19 to 21 May last year, Uzbekistan hosted the inaugural Termez Dialogue titled “Building a Common Space for Peace, Friendship and Prosperity” to promote connectivity between Central and South Asia. Reports show that Afghanistan featured prominently due to its geographical position as a land bridge between the two regions. Can you explain what the Termez Dialogue is and the primary objectives behind it? And do you have any updates about the next round of it? Sorry, these are like a few questions, but I think they are inter, they are related.

Mokhammedova:

Yeah, thank you. First of all, thank you for having me today, Mr. Adili. And I hope that our discussion is going to be quite fruitful and productive. And as for the Termez Dialogue, this dialogue itself is a relatively new regional initiative. It was initially designed to institutionalise the connectivity between Central Asia and the South Asia with Afghanistan and the Afghanistan positioned at the center of that process. So in many ways it reflects Uzbekistan’s broader foreign policy, its foreign policy approach is that the idea of the regional stability is best achieved not through isolation but through economic interdependence of Afghanistan, dialogue and the infrastructure connectivity between the regions. So the first Termez Dialogue held in May 25 actually brought together nearly 200 participants from over 20 countries, if I’m not mistaken, and it included governmental officials, regional experts, international organisations, some financial institutions and also business representatives as well.

So its primary objectives, I’d say, it was to create a permanent multilateral platform that was focused on practical implementation of the UN’s National General Assembly’s resolution on strengthening connectivity between Central and South Asia. And as we mentioned, Afghanistan naturally occupied a central place in this discussion because geographically it’s the only realistic land bridge that connects the two regions. So without Afghanistan, it’s very difficult to imagine sustainable overland trade or energy corridors, railway connectivity or broader Eurasian integration between Central and South Asia.

However, I think that it’s important to stress that the Termez Dialogue is not only about Afghanistan, it’s also about reshaping the geopolitical imagination of the region itself. So historically Central and South Asia were deeply interconnected through trade roads and cultural exchanges and shared economic spaces. So that’s why the agenda of this dialogue therefore goes beyond just security issues. So it includes transport corridors, it includes trade facilitation, it includes energy cooperation, the private sector engagement and climate challenges, humanitarian interactions as well.

So as for the next round, yes, there are already indications that the dialogue is evolving into a regular platform rather than the one-time event, because as I mentioned, it was initiated as a permanent platform. So, some Uzbek officials have stated that the next session is expected to take place this year. So, I believe that the Termez Dialogue could take place sometime maybe in June this year or at the end of May as the previous one was held. For the most accurate information and updated information I would recommend following the official publications and announcements of the Institute for Strategic and Interregional Studies under the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan. This organisation served as one of the key organizers of the first dialogue last year and is likely to remain central to future rounds of the initiatives as well.

Question:

Do you know what the focus will be this time?

Mokhammedova:

I believe that the focus will remain on Afghanistan and maybe on the regional connectivity on the projects, on the private sector interconnectivity of the region. And I don’t think that these themes will go beyond the usual discussing topics.

Question:

Thank you. I would like to turn to the question of Trans-Afghan Railway. You mentioned that regional connectivity is one of the major themes of the Termez Dialogue. In July 2023, the Taliban, Uzbekistan and Pakistan finalised a route for the Trans-Afghan Railway, also known as Trans-Afghan Corridor. I think it begins, it starts from Termez and ends in Kharlachi in Pakistan. And in February 2026, this year, Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev approved the intergovernmental agreement to conduct a joint feasibility study of the railway. How did this project start and where it stands today?

Mokhammedova:

So the Trans-Afghan Railway project actually has deeper roots than many people assume. Although the discussions intensified after the Taliban returned to power in 2021, the idea itself was first actively promoted by Uzbekistan back in 2018 as a part of Tashkent’s broader regional connectivity strategy. So Uzbekistan understood that it’s a double landlocked country as a double landlocked country, access to Pakistani seaports through Afghanistan and other countries could dramatically reduce transportation costs and diversify trade routes towards the South Asia to global markets. So initially the project focused on connecting Termez with Mazar-i-Sharif Kabul and Peshawar. Over time, trilateral consultations between Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan evolved into a more concrete initiative.

As you have mentioned, the measure breakthrough came in 2023. The three sides finalised the railway route through Termez till Karachi, Kharlachi. That was important because it moved the discussions from political declarations toward technical planning. The next measure step occurred in February 26. As you mentioned, the President Mirziyoyev approved the intergovernmental agreement on conducting the joint feasibility. This essentially institutionalised the trilateral cooperation and created a legal and technical framework According to the current estimates, the railway could eventually transport up to 20 million tons of cargo annually and significantly reduce the transit times between Central and South Asia.

And coming back to your question, at the same time, the project still remains at the feasibility and planning stage, financing technical and other standards, security guarantees and long-term political stability remains unfortunately unresolved. The other issue is that the cost estimates themselves vary substantially because from roughly 4 billion US dollars to over 8 billion US dollars it depends on the methodology and root calculations. So this is the stage where the project still remains

Question:

And do you think that the ongoing conflict between the Taliban and Pakistan will impact the feasibility and security of this project?

Mokhammedova:

Regarding the Taliban Pakistan tensions, this is probably the single biggest challenge facing the project today because the core problem is that the railways viability depends not only on infrastructure construction, but also on predictable political relations between Kabul and Islamabad. Since 2024, we know that the relations between the Taliban and Pakistan have deteriorated.

So I suppose that due to border clashes, disputes over the Durand line, and Pakistan’s accusations that Afghan territory is being used by TTP, it causes one of the big challenges for this project.

Question:

Yeah, thank you. I was reading a report by Afghanistan Analysts Network, which highlighted several challenges to the project. This includes, for example, the ongoing friction or the management and operation of the existing Hairtan to Mazar-i-Sharif line; lack of technical capacity in trained staff needed to operate the railways in Afghanistan; third, uncertain security; and the fourth one, Afghanistan’s geography, including the Salang Pass, which makes it very difficult to construct the railway; and finally the ongoing tension between Pakistan and Afghanistan, which we just discussed. Do you agree with this assessment and how can these challenges be overcome?

Mokhammedova:

Yes, overall, I would agree with that assessment. In fact, many discussions around the Trans-Afghan railway tend to focus on primarily geopolitics. While the real complexity lies in the combination of political, technical, security and geographical challenges. So the project is not impossible but it is far more complicated than simply laying tracks across Afghanistan.

So I think that some of the factors that could overcome, that could help to overcome these obstacles, maybe it’s maybe we need some gradualism like instead of attempting to compete the entire corridor at once maybe stakeholders may prioritise economically viable segments first and expand some incrementally. So the other factor may be regional ownership is also essential because the project cannot rely solely on Afghanistan Uzbekistan, Pakistan, international financial institutions and potential Gulf and Asian investors all need to remain involved politically and financially to this process. The other factor is that Afghanistan’s technical limitations can partly be addressed through joint training centers, some railway academies and long-term technical assistance programs, Uzbekistan already has comparative experience in railway modernisation and could play an important mentoring role in this issue. And finally, the broader geopolitical environment matters enormously because if tensions between Afghanistan and Pakistan continue escalating, the project will slow down regardless of all the technical progress. But if economic pragmatism eventually begins overreeing political confrontation, the railway could also actually become a stabilising mechanism connecting Central and South Asia more closely than even before. So in my view, the report you mentioned identifies real and serious concerns, but none of them are individually unsurmountable. The bigger question is whether all stakeholders can sustain long-term political commitment despite all unstable regional environment in this area.

Question:

Just a quick follow-up on this. Do you think in this context, given the relations between the Taliban and Pakistan, the Taliban regime itself is a challenge because we don’t have an inclusive government in Afghanistan and the political stability is uncertain in the country.

Mokhammedova:

So from my perspective, another cycle of internal destabilisation or political collapse inside Afghanistan would likely produce more consequences and far more dangerous for the region than the current imperfect status quo. So this includes risks related to terrorism, refugee flows, humanitarian crisis, the migration flows. So I think that and we need to consider the fact that after the Taliban took the power in 2021, the overall security situation inside the country is becoming more safe. So the number of attacks, murders inside the cities are reducing. So I think that the Taliban’s regime is the reality we have today and that we face today in Afghanistan and we need to take more pragmatic and objective measures.

Question:

I would like to turn to Uzbekistan’s investments in northern Afghanistan and the challenges that these investments are facing. In one article in the “AFGHANISTN: Contemporary Developments and Alternative Perspectives” last year, which you edited and reviewed, highlighted three major challenges to Pakistan’s investment in northern Afghanistan. This included the Taliban’s conscious and subtle push toward changing the ethnic landscape of the northern regions of Afghanistan, which you said could shift the balance in these provinces. And the second one was China’s growing influence through investments in oil extractions from the Amu Darya Delta and the development of the Wakhan corridor project [and finally] the implementation of international energy projects such as TAPI and CASA-1000. Can you unpack how these developments pose challenges to Uzbekistan’s investments in northern Afghanistan? Also, what are those investments in the first place?

Mokhammedova:

Okay, I think those concerns are quite valid, especially because Uzbekistan’s approach towards Afghanistan has become increasingly economic and connectivity oriented over the last several years. So as Uzbekistan deepens its engagement in northern Afghanistan or developments inside Afghanistan, whether it’s demographic, geopolitical or infrastructural, they inevitably begin affecting Uzbek strategic interests.

Regarding the first challenge, namely demographic and ethnic shifts in northern Afghanistan, this issue is extremely sensitive and strategically important for Uzbekistan because historically northern Afghanistan has had strong ethnic, linguistic, cultural and economic ties So with the Central Asian countries, it includes large Uzbek and Tajik populations in the region. So from Tajik’s perspective, from Tashkhen’s perspective, stability in northern Afghanistan has always been partly linked to their preservation of this historical balance. So there are growing concerns among some regional analysts that the Taliban may be gradually encouraging demographic redistribution or governance restructuring that could weaken the traditional influence of non-Pashtun communities in the North.

If the ethnic balance changes, there are worries that this could affect local power dynamics. So it could affect also border stability, informal trade networks and even the long term reliability of local partners in northern provinces and the bordering provinces in these countries. So this does not necessarily mean that Uzbekistan views the situation through the ethnic lens alone but rather Tashkent is primarily concerned about the predictability and stability along in Afghanistan’s northern provinces.

So going to the next question regarding the China’s expanding role, it also presents a different type of challenge, not necessarily a hostile one, but a competitive geopolitical or economic challenge. So maybe China’s enormous financial capacity means those big projects might eventually face competition from larger and faster financed Chinese infrastructure initiatives. Nevertheless, Uzbekistan actually prefers a diversified investment environment in Afghanistan, because no single country can stabilise Afghanistan economically on its own.

And regarding the TAPI and CASA, these projects create another complexity because they partially shift Afghanistan’s economic orientation southward rather than northward. So, for example, if southern-oriented infrastructure projects become dominant while the trans-Afghan railways tolls, Uzbekistan’s own connectivity vision could become less central in long term in the country’s agenda. So there is also some strategic issues because Afghanistan today is increasingly becoming a space where multiple connectivity models overlap. I mean, Chinese corridors, Pakistani transit ambitions, Central Asia, Asian railway projects, the Gulf investments, the Energy initiatives like TAPI and CASA. So this creates both opportunities and competition in the region as well.

Overall, I would say that Uzbekistan’s strategy towards Northern Afghanistan is based on very pragmatic calculation because Tashkent wants Northern Afghanistan to remain economically interconnected with Central Asia, politically stable, and they’re relatively insulated from geopolitical fragmentation. So the challenge in this case is that Afghanistan is no longer shaped by one external actor or one regional vision. Today multiple powers are competing, sometimes indirectly, to shape Afghanistan’s future economic geography. So Uzbekistan, therefore, has to constantly adapt its policies to avoid being strategically sidelined while still maintaining constructive relations with all major stakeholders, including the Taliban, China, Pakistan, and other international and financial actors.

Question:

If I may have a quick follow-up question on the fast challenge, which is the Taliban’s conscious and subtle push towards changing the ethnic landscape of the northern regions. You mentioned how significant it is for Tashkent. My question would be, do you know if Tashkent has raised the issue or concerns with the Taliban officials or government in Kabul?

Mokhammedova:

I don’t think so, because the Tashkent’s policy is, first of all, is non-interference into Taliban’s policy. So it’s a very sensitive question. So I don’t think that this is some question to be raised on a political level. Yeah.

Question:

Thank you. Again, as I was reading the report that I mentioned by Afghanistan Analysts Network, it indicated that the Islamic movement of Uzbekistan, IMU, has disappeared because its members have either merged into Islamic State Khorasan Province known as ISKP or joined the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan known as TTP. In April 2022, ISKP launched a rocket attack from Afghanistan into Uzbekistan. My question would be: What is Uzbekistan’s assessment of IMU and other militant groups that could pose security threats to Uzbekistan?

Mokhammedova:

Uzbekistan’s assessment today is much more nuanced that simply viewing the IMU as a stand-alone organisation in the way it was perceived at the late [19]90s. Most regional experts and security officials would agree that the IMU in its original organisational form has significantly weakened and fragmented over the past decade. Part of its membership was observed into other militant structures. Some factions were destroyed military, particularly after internal splits between Taliban-aligned and ISKP-aligned elements.

So, yes, the IMU as a centralised and coherent movement is far less influential today than it once was. However, from Uzbekistan’s perspective, the disappearance of the IMU as a formal structure does not necessarily mean the disappearance of the threat itself. What concerns me more today is the transformation and the diffusion of extremist networks rather than the survival of a specific organisation under a specific name. So the regional security environment has become more decentralised, more transnational and more digitally interconnected.

So in this context, ISKP is currently viewed as the most serious external terrorist threat emanating from Afghanistan. We closely monitored ISKP because unlike the Taliban, ISKP openly promotes a transnational regional agenda and explicitly targets Central Asian governments theoretically, rhetorically and ideologically because we actually conducted monitoring research. We monitored the ISKP-led online segments in five languages, five regional languages including Uzbek, Kazak, Kyrgyz, Tajik and the Russian language as well in different social media. And we monitor their narratives, the themes they raise in their posts, the auditory they are trying to target.

So yes, I can say that including the fact that the Uzbek and the Tajik language content was dominant in our research and I think that today it is one of the one of the biggest threats towards the regional countries, especially Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, because the majority of the radical content produced by the ISKP is produced in Uzbek and Tajik language.

So the April 22 rocket attack into Uzbekistan territory, I think that it was symbolically significant, even though military, it caused limited damage. That time, it demonstrated that Afghanistan-based groups still possess both the intent and capability to project instability beyond Afghanistan’s borders. It also showed that ISKP-6 media and psychological impact as much as military effect. But at the same time, Uzbekistan’s position toward the Taliban differs from the approaches of some other actors. Tashkent generally believes that maintaining pragmatic dialogue with the Taliban authorities is necessary precisely to contain threats like ISKP because Uzbek officials have repeatedly emphasised that isolating Afghanistan could create security vacuums that extremist organisation would exploit, for sure.

Another important point is that Uzbekistan security strategy today is much broader than purely military containment. So we increasingly focus on preventive measures including border modernisation, the intelligence cooperation, the cyber monitoring of online radicalization, the original diplomacy, and the socioeconomic stabilisation as I mentioned before.

Question:

Just a quick follow up on this. We know that, as you mentioned of course, the Taliban have perceived ISKPA as a rival and have been trying to fight ISKPA in Afghanistan, but we also know that, especially according to reports by the UN Security Council sanctions and monitoring team, that the Taliban have created a sort of enabling environment for different militant groups, including the TTP. And that’s why we see the tensions between the Taliban and Pakistan. So you mentioned that the name itself is not important. What is important is the threats posed by different militant groups. Do you think that since the Taliban’s return to power, that threats to Uzbekistan have increased?

Mokhammedova:

You mean increased threat?

Question:

Yeah.

Mokhammedova:

I think that answering this question, we can see the processes from 2021 to 2026, because it already five years passed. And today we see more not a physically presence of ISKP in our borders, but we see the more digital upgrade of the ISKP and other groups assessment in the region.

So I believe that in this case, the best thing we could do, the regional countries, is to coordinate in counter-terrorism, counter-extremism and counter-radicalism issues and to work in coordination with the respective ministries and the agencies inside the countries and to develop these ties in order to use and produce some countermeasures.

Question:

In January 2025, you attended the third Afghanistan-Pakistan civil society conference in Islamabad. You had interactions with representatives from Afghanistan in which you called for creating a framework for amplifying the voices of women. and expanding cross-border dialogues. You also proposed that you would host the next regional meetings in Tashkent to include Central Asian countries. I’m sure you are following the kind of what human rights organisations call gender apartheid implemented by the Taliban in Afghanistan. So as a woman it might be important for you. Did this cross-border dialogue happen or is it going to happen? And also could you explain how a civil society framework could be developed for achieving some rights and freedoms within these national entities, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan, but also foster regional security?

Mokhammedova:

Yes, I did participate in the AFPAK civil society dialect process. It was track two. And I really believe that these kind of platforms are extremely important because they preserve channels of communications at a time when official political relations in the region are often tense or fragmented. And yes, following those discussions, we were indeed able to organise the next round of the dialogue here in Tashkent on the platform of the Institute for Advanced International Studies. The meeting brought together the leading experts from the leading scholars, experts, the representatives of the civil society from not only Afghanistan, Pakistan, but from Egypt and some Central Asian countries as well. So in many ways, this was an important step towards the broadening the dialogue beyond the purely bilateral Pakistan-Afghanistan framework and making it more regionally inclusive.

Regarding the women’s participation specifically, my position has always been that excluding half of society from dialect processes weakens not only social development but also the long-term regional resilience because women often play critical roles in education in community mediation humanitarian work and countering radicalisation at the local level.

So therefore amplifying women’s voices should not be viewed only as a human right issue but it also directly connected to questions of social stability and security as well. That’s why we included a lot of representatives of the female part of the civil society of Afghanistan and Pakistan as well. So I believe that the significance of such initiatives lies in the fact that security in the region in our region especially cannot be achieved only through military or state-centric mechanisms. Because sustainable regional stability also depends on human connections, on academic cooperation, on the humanitarian engagements, on the ability of societies to continue communicating even during periods of political uncertainty, which we face today.

So another important aspect is that the regional dialogue helps to reduce mutual stereotypes and mistrust between the countries. So much of the instability in the broader Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asian space is reinforced by fragmentation and lack of sustained of sustained communication between societies themselves. So when we speak about the regional security, we should not think only in terms of borders and military threats, because security is also about whether societies remain connected, whether young people see opportunities instead of extremism. whether the regional actors can build a shared understanding of common challenges. So that’s why in this sense I see these civil society dialogues not as symbolic events but as a long-term confidence-building mechanisms that can help create a more resilient regional environment over time regarding region.

Question:

Yeah, I have been following some of this regional forums, for example, the Moscow Consultation Rormat on Afghanistan. In the years, like after the Taliban’s return to power, they did emphasize in the respect for human rights and women’s rights, but in its last joint statement, it really dropped that call for human rights and women’s rights. And we already discussed the Termez Dialogue. Do you think that a call or like dialogue about women’s rights and human rights could be part of the Termez Dialogue?

Mokhammedova:

I think that it definitely could be a part of it because it’s one big huge challenge that Afghanistan face today and the Afghan society face today and I think that the regional countries will not ignore this one. So maybe we could observe one of these questions be raised in this platform.

Question:

Thank you. And perhaps my last question. Your colleagues at the Center for Afghanistan and South Asia Studies argued that the recent conflict between the Taliban and Pakistan, as well as the conflict in the Middle East, which have forced Afghanistan to rely on Central Asian countries as transit and humanitarian hubs and therefore provided an opportunity to strengthen and expand the presence of Central Asian goods within Afghanistan’s import structure. And that it could contribute to the development of more stable and trust-based economic ties between Afghanistan and Central Asia. Do you think that regional connectivity can be achieved if the Taliban continue to remain in conflict with Pakistan? And also you know since October 2025, some circles in Pakistan have spoken of the need for a regime change in Afghanistan. How has Uzbekistan responded to this kind of talks about a regime change in Afghanistan?

Mokhammedova:

Ok. I think that the argument made by my colleagues is largely correct because over the past two years we have indeed seen Afghanistan becoming increasingly dependent on Central Asian transit routes, so especially as tensions with Pakistan intensified and instability in the broader Middle East disrupted some trade and some traditional trade dynamics, this dependence actually increased.

So this situation has objectively created new economic opportunities for Central Asian countries, including Uzbekistan as well, because Uzbekistan in particular has strengthened its role as one of Afghanistan’s key trade and transit partners through Termez through railway logistics, electricity exports and the international trade cargo center near the Afghan border which is located in Termez.

This cargo center also plays a huge role because Afghan entrepreneurs can or just Afghan people can come and stay in this in the territory of this cargo center for 15 days without the visa. They can do their business. They can have some accommodation there for fixed prices. They can have some medical help or service there.

So at the same time, I think that it’s important to understand that Uzbekistan does not approach this only through the economic lens because Tashkent believes that economic engagement and connectivity can contribute to stabilisation inside Afghanistan. The underlying logic is that an economically isolated Afghanistan becomes far more vulnerable to humanitarian collapse, to criminal economies, to irregular migration as we have mentioned several times. So in my opinion connectivity can still partially develop despite political tension tensions but its scale and sustainability will remain limited and it will remain limited if Afghanistan Pakistan stay in prolonged confrontation. So geography matters in this issue.

Pakistan remains Afghanistan’s main access point to trade and one of the central pillars of all measures southward connectivity projects. So it also includes trans-Afghan railways as well. So if border closures or military incidents or political mistrust between these two countries continue, this creates unpredictability for investors, for transport companies, for regional infrastructure planning. So I think that long-term connectivity projects require stable transit regimes and at least a minimum level of the political coordination in these issues.

And coming back to your question regarding discussions inside some Pakistani circles as you mentioned about possible regime change in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan’s position in this case remains very cautious and consistent because Tashkent has generally avoided supporting destabilising approaches towards Afghanistan because Uzbekistan’s policy over the last several years has been based on this principle that Afghanistan stability is a regional security necessity. So Uzbekistan’s officials have repeatedly emphasised that the importance of non-interference the pragmatic engagement and the maintaining dialect with the de facto authorities in Kabul regardless of border international disagreements.

So from my perspective, as I’ve mentioned before, there is no need in another cycle of internal destabilisation or political collapse inside Afghanistan because it would likely produce even more dangerous consequences than we have today. So it will produce another risk such as terrorism, refugee flows, humanitarian crises. Because today Taliban politically has a big influence inside Afghanistan and there is no alternative power even through the opposition with such strength, and which can change the Taliban in their position. So overall, I’d say that rather than supporting isolation or the regime change narratives, we need to focus on gradual engagement, on economic cooperation, on humanitarian assistance and integrating Afghanistan into regional processes wherever possible. Because we don’t talk about the Taliban regime, we talk about the Afghan people that are suffering because of all these processes. So I think that this is the conclusion of my view on this issue.

Question:

Thank you, but you mentioned that about Afghan people, as you mentioned that half of the population cannot be excluded from public life and the Taliban have done just that. And also in terms of the Taliban’s popularity, of course, it has always been a question before their return to power and after their return to power. For example, there was an annual survey conducted by Asia Foundation. And some of these surveys showed that the Taliban really had only, the people of Afghanistan on, less than 15% of the people of Afghanistan had sympathy with the Taliban. And of course, since their return to power, they have been ruling the country through kind of coercion and force and oppression. But if, just like the first time in the Taliban were ousted from power, there was like a celebration by majority of the people of Afghanistan. It does not mean that I also support a regime change, but my question would be about the status quo, whether the status quo you think [will] be sustainable in the long run.

Mokhammedova:

Yes, it’s indeed a very controversial question and the controversial issue because we are talking about the violence against women in Afghanistan that they face today and we are talking about the regime change. But I think that this is very sensitive question and the only thing we can we could do today is to raise these issues in different international platforms what Uzbekistan actually have been doing during this period and use these questions like women’s right or human’s right as a leverage, some kind of leverage in the negotiations between the de facto regime. So I think that in this issue we have to be very sensitive and very objective and we need to take pragmatic views and we need to see the situation as a whole with all the factors, with all the consequences, with all the threats in both ways.

Question:

On that note, thank you so much, Ms Aziza Mokhamadova, for joining me on the crossroads and for this fascinating and enlightening conversation on regional connectivity.

Mokhammedova:

Thank you so much for inviting me. I hope that our discussion was quite productive and fruitful and it will definitely benefit to.

Question:

I’m sure it was. Thank you.

Mokhammedova:

Yes. Thank you.

In this deep-dive conversation, Dr Niamatullah Ibrahimi, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne’s School of Social and Political Sciences, author of The Hazaras and the Afghan State and co-editor of the book Mapping Futures for Afghanistan, discusses three modes of knowledge production about Afghanistan and their implications for national identity, state building, and the trajectory of foreign interventions and withdrawals.

Dr Ibrahimi situates regime changes in Afghanistan within a long-term historical perspective, arguing that it is important that national and international stakeholders maintain a long-term vision for Afghanistan in which the Taliban will not be the only actor shaping the future of the country and its people. The following is the transcript of this conversation:

Introduction

Thank you very much, Dr. Niamatullah Ibrahimi, for joining me on The Crossroads for this deep-dive conversation about knowledge production on Afghanistan. Dr. Ibrahimi is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne’s School of Social and Political Sciences. His research focuses on the dynamics of peace and violence in conflict and post-conflict states across the Middle East and South Asia. As prolific scholar and author, his work includes the highly-cited book, The Hazaras and the Afghan State: Rebellion, Exclusion and the Struggle for Recognition. He holds a PhD from the Australian National University.

Question:

I’d like to focus on knowledge production on Afghanistan, a central theme of your latest co-edited volume titled Mapping Futures for Afghanistan published by Routledge last year. But before we dive deep into the question of knowledge production, I would love to begin this conversation by asking about this collaboration itself: What sparked the idea for this book?

Dr Ibrahimi:

Well, thank you, Mr Adili, for having me in this conversation series. I’m very pleased that you have joined the space on online discussion of Afghanistan and its region. So really a pleasure to be one of the guests on your show.

Just to come back to the question of what sparked the edited volume, which came out last year, Mapping Futures for Afghanistan, I think it’s really going back to the period after the fall of Kabul in the hands of the Taliban in August of 2021, when we saw a number of important challenges about understanding Afghanistan, portraying what was happening in Afghanistan and the kind of different perspectives and points of views that were being promoted by diverse groups about why Afghanistan was collapsing once again and why the Taliban was returning to power and why Western forces were withdrawing from Afghanistan after 20 years of sustained efforts in nation building, state building, counter-terrorism and so on and so forth.

So in a way, the idea of the book, the edited volume, was born out of those kinds of conversations we had among ourselves in a group of us here in Australia when we started reflecting on what those really important but also in a way traumatic events meant for Afghanistan, ourselves and its people and also reflecting on various kind of narratives, discourses that were promoted to explain the fall of Kabul into the hands of the Taliban and the failure of the Republic, the withdrawal of foreign forces. So as you may remember, many of the other listeners may also remember, during those years, before 2021 and after 2021, there were also some very common Orientalist tropes that were being used quite early on, even before August of 2021, to explain the rise of the Taliban, to explain the failure of democratisation, modernisation, you know, the failure of the republic to take hold in Afghanistan.

You know, some of the listeners might remember that Afghanistan was quite frequently used, described as a graveyard of empire to which we can come back later. The idea was that this was this is a country which was doomed to fail, you know, like other empire that had intervened in Afghanistan, the United States was you know predestined to fail in Afghanistan because it was a tribal conservative country the people of which had always resisted any kind of modernising changes and influences. So therefore you know that kind of society always fights back, you know, no matter we know what empire, what foreign actors, try to change the country, you know, they’re going to fail and it also obviously has important implications for understanding the role of local actors and agencies. So in a way, taken to the extreme, the Taliban became the representative of that kind of culture, right? In a way, you know, the return of the Taliban was seen as a kind of natural response of the Afghan society, forgetting the fact that the society in Afghanistan is extremely diverse and the Taliban itself as a group is also extremely unpopular among other diverse groups in Afghanistan.

So in that kind of context, we decided to come together and put together this volume which is co-edited by myself, Dr Abbas Farasoo, Farkhundeh Akbari and Dr Arif Saba and we have reached out to a number of scholars from Afghanistan who tried to deliberately focus on contributions from Afghanistan, scholars from Afghanistan in Australia, scholars from Afghanistan in Australia, in Europe, and we were quite lucky that we received some really important contributions by scholars from the country who have and often both, you know, advanced degree, PhD or other kind of postgraduate qualification, but also extensive experience, professional experience on the issues they write about in this book.

So we are very lucky that in the last year we concluded, you know, bringing this volume together, which is, I believe, the first volume of its kind, which is entirely edited and contributed by scholars from Afghanistan. We have a foreword by Professor William Maley, who is a mentor and supervisor to many of us. But otherwise, all of the chapters are written by and edited by scholars from Afghanistan.

Question:

That’s fascinating. Turning to the topic and concept of knowledge production, which is the topic for today’s discussion. Can you define what knowledge production is and why it is an issue in the study of Afghanistan?

Dr Ibrahimi:

Well, knowledge production is a way of looking at the political and social and historical context in which certain kinds of claims to knowledge are produced, promoted, and those kind of conditions, those kind of claims to knowledge often shapes understanding of an issue area and in this case Afghanistan. And it is also a way of looking at claims of knowledge or knowledge production about a country such as Afghanistan as a kind of political act in a way, you know.

We often look at knowledge, you know, claims of knowledge, you know, knowledge production processes as kind of neutral objective processes, right? Where, you know, taken to, you know, in an academic sense of the word, you know, a claim of knowledge is made through rigorous research, you know, often clear methodological processes. And after, you know, following those kind of methodological rigorous research, you know a claim is made about you know certain kind of historical or contemporary phenomena in Afghanistan.

But in this kind of environment what we again drawing on our experiences and observations from the events of before in August of 2021, we look at knowledge production or claims of knowledge about Afghanistan more critically you know. We essentially look at, you know, the relationship between knowledge, knowledge production and claims of knowledge about Afghanistan, its people, to power in a way the prevailing powers either in Afghanistan or internationally, you know, often shapes a kind of um social and political economy under which um the knowledge is produced in Afghanistan. If you take for example uh the period from August uh from 20 2001 into 2021 uh we saw massive literature were produced about Afghanistan by um you know different think tanks, you know, scholars uh and other kind of actors who claim to have such a kind of access to knowledge and facts about Afghanistan. And much of those kind of knowledge production was also underpinned by a political economy which was generated by the US-led military intervention in Afghanistan.

And much of that knowledge economy that was created was in fact intended to serve, you know, that they use that intervention in Afghanistan and provide information provide, you know, figures and how the US and NATO and other actors could navigate the complex dynamics of Afghanistan and its people and its society and its international relations. And then we also then ask, you know, who is setting the agenda right that brings us to the next question who is in fact asking what is knowledge and what are the kind of topics, issues, events that are worthy of academic inquiry, right? That can, in a way, include certain events from academic discussion of Afghanistan, include others, and those kind of dynamics of inclusion and exclusion can also have important implications for the way we understand Afghanistan, it is people, it is history, it is society, and it is relations with the outside world.

And often those kinds of academic knowledge production discourses also have important policy implications, right? As we saw again, going back to the August of 2021, when actors were invoking certain kind of narratives, certain ideas, certain kind of knowledge or claims of knowledge to justify either the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, right? or the return of the Taliban to power or calling for sustained engagement by the international community for the longer period of time.

Question:

I was reading the introduction, and of course, where you discuss knowledge production. There you identify three modes of knowledge or understanding about Afghanistan, which are colonial, official or state-led and critical-academic. What are they and what were the historical and political contexts in which these modes of knowledge were produced?

Dr Ibrahimi:

Well, in the introduction we tried to lay out the kind of broader context and some general kind of categories and tendencies of knowledge production about Afghanistan, it is people. We, you know, try to identify three main modes of knowledge production or claims to knowledge about Afghanistan. One not about Afghanistan, but also about other countries that experience either direct or indirect form of colonisation, you know, going back the 19th century. You know, Afghanistan is not an exception to that. We know that that during the 19th century, Afghanistan and its people, what became of Afghanistan, as I said, were the subject of quite intense writing by British colonial administrators, agents, travelers who were fascinated by Afghanistan as what they were perceiving to be this kind of remote, mountainous, exotic part of the world, which was different from, obviously from the West, but also even in relation to other parts of the region, South Asia or Central Asia. And in that era has seen the production of some really influential texts that we now associate with colonial modes of understanding Afghanistan. Perhaps the most influential one is Elphinstone’s book, An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul, and its Dependencies, which came out in the early, the first half of the 19th century and has really provided this kind of encyclopedic introduction to Afghanistan’s history, politics, society, geography, topography, and flower and fauna, right?

And that was based on those kind of reports they were receiving. In fact, the book was written while he was in Peshawar. He did not step in Afghanistan itself. And that kind of era produced a kind of knowledge which is again coming back to that, you know, earlier idea that knowledge is not neutral, right? It was serving a kind of particular political purpose which was, you know, then you know colonialism to justify western colonial intervention, domination of Afghanistan and this is a time when we see the first modern cliches about Afghanistan as being tribal, conservative, ungovernable, in some of the early iterations of the graveyard of empire we often see circulating today. And then those kinds of knowledge production came to be quite influential. Now there is a lot of, you know, kind of serious academic literature by some scholars from Afghanistan, but also Western scholars who are trying to, you know, challenge some of the core premises and ideas and claims that were made by, you know, those British colonial writers, including Elphinstone and others.

And then the second mode, we really talk about the modes, kind of broader tendency is the state-led mode of knowledge production in Afghanistan. We know modernist states have quite a vested interest in developing certain modes of understanding, historical narratives and ideas about the past and the present and the future of a country that they are governing, the ruling elites. Afghanistan began to witness the emergence of modern education in a modern educated class in the early half of the 20th century, first during the period of Amir Habibullah Khan and then Amir Amanullah Khan from 1919 to 1929. And this is the time we see, you know, different kind of ideas coming to Afghanistan. You know, one powerful idea that emerging during this period is, you know, this kind of nationalism, right? You know, while Afghanistan was constructed as a nation state in terms of physical boundaries, you know, the land, its people, all of those things, But there was no kind of nationalist ideology in the modern sense in the 19th century. So what we see during this period is, you know, in a nationalist historiography, you know, being sponsored by the state.

The state is, you know, forming the Kabul Literary Society and other kind of associations, you know, the universities, the schools, which slowly expanded during the first half of the 20th century became important mediums through which the state tried to portray certain kinds of claims about narratives, ideas about the history of Afghanistan and its people and its future as well. As we discussed in the introduction, there were some elements of appropriation and borrowing. The state elites selectively appropriated some of the claims made by colonial literature of the 19th century about Afghanistan. We discussed, for example, this whole idea of Afghanistan being an Aryan country, the Aryan race theory, and that Afghanistan was, in fact, not only an Aryan country, but also the cradle of Aryan civilization. which was also then backed up by other ideas that were produced in the early half of the 20th century. So this is the kind of broader context we see.

In that kind of context, we also see different kinds of, more academic kind of knowledge being produced about Afghanistan. We saw a significant number of Western anthropologists, you know, many of them who spent really a long time in Afghanistan in the 1950s, 60s and 70s before the sort of violent conflict. And there, I think it is in this context, which is shaped by the colonial literature, by the state kind of literature, where I think academic inquiry is also taking place. While we see certain kinds of certain groups of academics, you know, taking what we see kind of more mainstream conservative approaches to academic inquiry, and that is taking those kind of state-led knowledge production, colonial modes of knowledge production for granted, not really questioning their premises, you know, not asking the questions that are often neglected in those kind of modes of thinking. But we also see in recent years more critical kind of approaches which is trying to unravel those kind of historical epistemology, understanding, of Afghanistan that has been developed by both the state and also colonial modes of knowledge production.

Question:

It is really fascinating to listen to what you explained about these different modes of knowledge production. I was curious to know why is it important to understand or distinguish between these modes of thinking about Afghanistan. Early in our conversation, you alluded to the relations between this scholarly or intellectual exercise and the policy implications. So what is the relevance of these distinctions to the current situation of the country?

Dr Ibrahimi:

Well, I think, again, if you go back to August of 2021, I think these kinds of modes of thinking, portraying and representing Afghanistan and its people and its historical events has real-world implications. I think for those of us who are interested in serious thinking and scholarship about Afghanistan, it is also a question of, you know, justice, right? Because in a certain kind of mode of thinking is creating historical narratives, ideas, social imaginaries that provide justification for real-world exercise of power on Afghanistan and its people and because of that, the state has, again, you can unpack the state here, historically, in the 20th century, there were different approaches to historiography and all of those things, but there are certain kinds of, I think, deeply held views that continue to shape not only our understanding of Afghanistan, its people, but also provide justification for certain kinds of behaviour, policy prescriptions and a certain mode of action with regards to Afghanistan.

And therefore, I think it is really important for those of us who are in the business of serious academic thinking and scholarship about Afghanistan, its people, we should, you know, interrogate the knowledge production itself, right? We should problematise certain kinds of narratives and question, you know, unquestioned claims about knowledge, about truth, about Afghanistan because, again, it is both kind of historical in the sense that, you know, you know, both of those kind of narratives either state-led or colonial are doing incredible level of injustices to Afghanistan, its people. There are a certain episodes, actors, groups, communities and perspectives that are completely sidelined, you know, especially if you look at official historiography, or sometimes when, you know, official historiography is also, colonial knowledge is also appropriated by official historiography.

Maybe I can give you an example here of their continued relevance here. We saw, you know, the listeners may remember like in 2012, in Kabul, the Academy of Sciences, produce an atlas of ethnography of, you know, tribes of Afghanistan, which are non-Pashtun tribes there, right? And that is, you know, kind of, you know, example where I think a state institution or a state backed, you know, institutions are, you know, drawing on those kind of historical modes of thinking about Afghanistan, including the colonial modes of knowledge production. And some of those claims go back to the 19th century writing about Afghanistan by British colonial administrators, writers and political agents and so on.

So therefore, I think it is important for us to and engage critically. It is not just a nice thing to do for us in the academic world, but also, I think, given that they have in the real-world implications in terms of their policy prescription, both in Afghanistan, but also internationally.

Question:

You already mentioned some of the implications of colonial knowledge on understanding Afghanistan. One of these implications is that this kind of thinking has not disappeared with the end of colonial rule. So first of all, what are the major implications of colonial knowledge production about Afghanistan? And second, why it has not disappeared and continue to influence scholarship or thinking about Afghanistan?

Dr Ibrahimi:

Well, I think to reflect on that, we should also reflect a little bit about the historical context in which colonial writing about Afghanistan emerged in the 19th century. I think I alluded to it earlier, you know, those kinds of writing and the texts were produced within the context of colonisation, the primary purpose of which was either to make sense of these new societies. They were seeking to control or exert influence over these new kind of territories and areas. And then use that kind of understanding of the societies for the purpose of exercise of power to control, to bring these kind of territories under control of colonial powers.

We know that Afghanistan was not directly colonised as most other states around Afghanistan was, but there was a kind of fascination, right?, with understanding Afghanistan and how that kind of knowledge could be used to you know control Afghanistan, right? So now, you know, why do this kind of narratives, you know, continue to emerge, you know? First I think, you know, given the extensive depth and the scope of that kind of writing in that period, you know, and Elphistone’’s book was has been, you know, printed multiple times since then. It was translated into, you know, other European languages there as well. And, you know, you know, books like Elphinstone, The Account of Kabul, was also serving certain kinds of interests, as I mentioned, right? You know, this whole idea of Afghanistan and its people as ungovernable, you know, society and geography has kind of provided convenient justifications for international foreign intervention or withdrawal from Afghanistan. If you look at, again, the period of 2001 to 2021, you see some elements of that kind of thinking about Afghanistan you know being used either for intervention in 2001 in Afghanistan is a kind of exotic country where people are you know in a stack in this kind of pre-modern way of life you know where they oppress women one another so therefore there’s a kind of need for military intervention to bring Afghanistan out of that kind of historically, you know, historically conservative state of mind and society.

And then in 2021, you know, that kind of narrative is being twisted to justify withdrawal from Afghanistan because Afghanistan is seen as a country that’s hopeless, it’s ungovernable because, you know, the whole country is tribal. And because of that, you know, no amount of international goodwill or support or intervention or assistance can help Afghanistan bring out of that kind of historical situation. So therefore, you know, there’s no hope, right, for Afghanistan, its people.

So therefore, you know, it is used in this kind of context to absolve the US and other international actors from their own responsibility in creating the mess and the crisis and the situation in which groups such as the Taliban emerged in Afghanistan in the first place and reorganised after 2001.

Question:

But isn’t there some truth to the claims that Afghanistan is tribal, backward and ungovernable?

Dr Ibrahimi:

Well, I think if you look at again the whole idea of tribe, I think there is a lot of new scholarship that is emerging to you know, critically engaged with the idea of tribe in what a tribe is a mode of social organisation and what kind of you know, implications it might have for Afghanistan’s social and political organisation. But I think as everything else, you know, you know, a discourse, a historical narrative, a mode of thinking is based on certain kind of, you know, claims that might be true, right, partially, you know. Afghanistan is I think a traditional country, it was in a traditional country in the 19th century, you know, I think that is, I think, no one would really question that, you know, you wouldn’t see that Afghanistan was, you know, a very liberal country in the 19th century or even now right but to take it as a claim of fact and generalise it about Afghanistan as a whole, I think that’s when it becomes very problematic. So I think if you go and travel around Afghanistan, you may find very different ways of understanding what a tribe is, what a tribal social organisation is, even across the Pashtun provinces from the southeast to the south of Afghanistan, I think you may have very different kind of social organisations that are often described as a tribe, right?

To give you one example, in the southeast of Afghanistan, I think the arbaki was a kind of very socially acceptable form of local policing historically in Afghanistan, which was deeply rooted in the social organisation and context of those provinces of Afghanistan, where I think the local communities were also providing important oversight about how those groups were operating. But, you know, if you try to take that out of the context of those specific provinces and from what in other places, like arbaki police, right?, in other parts of Afghanistan. I think in a lot of really good reporting by Afghanistan Analysts Network where you were also working really showed how when taken out of context in other parts of Afghanistan, you know, they, you know, serve, you know, it performed very differently, you know. It became an instrument of influence of power and of and very abusive power by actors in other provinces. So therefore that idea taken out of context from one-two provinces to implement in other parts of Afghanistan. Therefore, I think Afghanistan is a very diverse country, right, a country of dozens of ethno-cultural groups, I think different kinds of environments, you know, different kind of geography, which are I think shaping the way people have organised themselves socially and politically over time. But I think to take one label and apply it to the whole of Afghanistan, that’s, I think, when it becomes really problematic.

Question:

Yeah. I want to return to the three modes of knowledge production that you explained. And in that introduction, you note a shift in state-led knowledge production during King Amanullah Khan. My question would be, how did the state-led knowledge production change under King Amanullah Khan? And what were some of its implications for national identity and state building in Afghanistan?

Dr Ibrahimi:

Well, I think the period of Amanullah Khan from 1919 to 1929 is a really fascinating and important period in the history of Afghanistan. It is during his period, 1919, after this third Anglo-Afghan war, Afghanistan is formally becoming an independent sovereign state. We often forget that. You know, until then, you know, the British Indian, you know, was effectively exercising control over Afghanistan’s foreign policy. So while the ruling elites in Kabul had, you know, freedom to exercise power the way they wanted in Afghanistan, but they had no independent foreign policy. So therefore, during the period of, I mean, of Ahmadullah Khan from 1919 onwards, we see an Afghanistan emerging as a sovereign independent state establishing diplomatic relations with other parts of the world. And therefore, it has the opportunity to assert its national identity, both domestically, but also internationally project some kind of national identity.

And we also know that Amanullah Khan was also a highly modernist figure, you know, who was using the state power, you know, under his control to modernise Afghanistan, right? I mean, the style of, you know, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in Turkey, you know, or Iran, you know, he was borrowing some kind of ideas from there. But at the same time there were also intellectual movements that were, that had emerged in Afghanistan beginning from the early 20th century, you know, what we often see as junbesh-e mashrutiyat or constitutionalist movement of Afghanistan that were calling for some kind of you know both modernisation but also some kind of limitation to constitutional leverage to the power of the ruler at that time.

And some of the most prominent figures of this period is becoming quite influential in the way Amanullah Khan articulates his modernisation agenda and implements it during those years. So when it comes to the articulation of national identity there, you know, first is, you know, this really big push to modernise Afghanistan and the first constitution is adopted during his rule and there’s a kind of legal system being laid out, you know, to the constitution, but also legal decrees, you know, royal decrees, but also we see some writings, right?

You know, I think, you know, Mahmud Tarzi, you know, become really an important um influential figure in and you know articulating that kind of sense of national identity, you know, how do you define national identity uh it is this time to also important to remember that you know terse was you know a member of you know um the ruling dynasty family you know who were forced out of Afghanistan uh during the rule of amir uh from uh Abdul Rahman Khan and he spent a lot of time for many years in the Ottoman Empire and he came back with that kind of Islamist modernist ideas to Afghanistan and he published the newspaper Seraj al-Akhbar and those kind of writings you can see we engage with some of the writings this kind of tension how do you define Afghanistan its national identity while he talks about din [religion], milat [nation], you know, watan [homeland] as kind of, you know, core elements of national identity, he’s also emphasising Afghaniyat, you know, for the first time as a core element of international identity, which, you know, has been, you know, a running theme of discussion, you know, ever since about Afghanistan, whether you define Afghanistan as a kind of you know geographical kind of entity which is home to very diverse you know society with different ethno-linguistic groups or you define the national identity around, you know, Pashtuns as a dominant ethno-linguistic groups in Afghanistan and I think you see in a similar discussions, you know, in the period of the Republic about the national identity, about how people could be identified in the national identity card and so on and so forth. So I think a lot of discussions are also happening online.

So I think, therefore, I think that’s quite an important period because it lays out the kind of first debates about how the national identity of Afghanistan can be constructed and the way those national identity questions are addressed had quite important implications in defining subsequently how people related to ethnicity, national identity, all of this kind of identity categories.

Question:

This is really fascinating. We could go on and on. But maybe my last question. In your chapter or in that introduction, you rightly mentioned the despair within the policy discourse after the fall of the Republic and the return of what you call the Taliban’s repressive and totalitarian rule and instead encourage long-term forward-looking discussion of Afghanistan’s internal and external political dynamics. In that introduction, the book, or you also say that it’s it challenges the assumption that the Taliban regime will determine the future of Afghanistan. How?

Dr Ibrahimi:

Well, I think that is a hard and challenging question, right? The Taliban is currently in power. I think they have a firm grip on power in Afghanistan for almost five years since August of 2021. And because of that, I think we have seen, you know, a sense of despair, hopelessness, right? about Afghanistan and its future, I think, which was also a quite profound in 2021 when we saw the Taliban turning to power and the Republic collapsing. So obviously in August of 2021 meant different things for different actors, right? While for the U.S. and NATO, Western allies, Afghanistan was in one chapter in the long history of intervention, it didn’t work out, so they can just move on, right?

But that period of 20 years from 2001 to 2021 was also an important period for Afghanistan and its people, right? When We saw the society, you know, reorganising itself for the first time, education expanding again. You know, civil society becoming quite a prominent force. And for the first time, I think we also see really the largest probably, you know, class of educated people in Afghanistan, you know, historically. You know, people with higher education in Afghanistan, but also from outside Afghanistan and also domestically. And Afghanistan is also during this period experiencing profound changes. Some of those changes are due to the intervention, the US policy objectives and priorities, but I think a lot of those other changes are, I think, deeper that are the results of just societal changes in a group, in a society, embracing opportunities to catch up with the rest of the world, right? You know, if you remember Afghanistan of 2001, Afghanistan was really pretty much isolated, you know, from the rest of the world. There was no internet, there was no connection, and there was no phone line between Afghanistan that was accessible to the people to make their own phone calls.

But therefore, I think Afghanistan has come a long way. So now I think in the kind of longer historical thinking, if you see the Taliban in power, is the current Taliban with its gender repression, the repression of the most fundamental human rights of every citizen of Afghanistan, especially groups such as the Hazaras, is it the future of Afghanistan? Is Afghanistan predestined to remain under a kind of Taliban authoritarian or some people would say totalitarian rule, right?

But I think, you know, again, looking at those kind of social changes in Afghanistan, but also a long term historical thinking, if you see Afghanistan from the early 20th century, regimes have come and gone and often in a very surprising manner. You know, sometimes those kind of regime changes might be precipitated by international changes as in August as in 2021 or sometimes it could be domestic it could be a combination of both domestic and international. So therefore I think it is important both for Afghanistan and its people but also for international actors to still maintain a kind of long-term thinking vision for Afghanistan in which the Taliban may still be a factor, but not the only actor that will shape the future of the country and its people.

Question:

On that promising note, thank you very much, Dr Ibrahimi, for this really fascinating conversation about knowledge production on Afghanistan.

Dr Ibrahimi:

Thank you very much for having me. Pleasure.

Introduction

Thank you very much, Dr Islomkhon Gafarov, for joining me for a deep-dive conversation on the Taliban-Uzbekistan relations. You are a Senior Lecturer at the University of World Economy and Diplomacy in Tashkent and previously worked as the head of the Centre for Afghanistan and South Asia Studies. You hold a PhD in political sciences from The University of World Economy and Diplomacy where you currently teach.

Question:

Let’s begin with Uzbekistan’s engagement with the Taliban. In an article titled “Uzbekistan’s evolving northern Afghanistan strategy” published by The Diplomat in March 2025, you described Uzbekistan’s engagement with the Taliban as “a proactive foreign policy toward Taliban-led Afghanistan based on its own strategic interests.” You also highlighted that Tashkent had replaced “its longlasting obsession with a security-oriented approach” with “a pragmatic, economy-first foreign policy in relation to Kabul.” I wanted to ask: What are those strategic interests that drive Uzbekistan’s policy toward the Taliban? And how does the Taliban’s control of Afghanistan align with Tashkent’s long-term goals?

Dr Islomkhon Gafarov:

First of all, thank you so much, Mr Adili, for inviting me to this interview regarding a very hot topic, I mean, Afghanistan-Uzbekistan relations. First of all, I should mention that we should pay our attention to the main foreign policy transformations of the Republic of Uzbekistan, which began after 2016. Before this year, the foreign policy of Uzbekistan was mostly oriented through the prism of security. But after 2016, we began to look to all our neighbours through the prism of pragmatism and economic opportunities. So Afghanistan also, as a member of Uzbekistan, became part of pragmatism. So Uzbek government began to have relations with current regime even in 2020 during the Doha negotiations. So Uzbek diplomats could see that Taliban would come soon to the power. So by the one hand, we began the relations with the Taliban regime too.

So nowadays, what kind of interest and what kind of long-term policy Uzbek government see in Afghanistan? First of all, I think it’s Afghanistan for Uzbekistan is economic opportunity. So nowadays, according to some data, the population of Afghanistan around 40 million. So 40 million, that’s a big number. It’s like a number even bigger than population of Uzbekistan. So we are nowadays like 38 million and population of Afghanistan much bigger than Uzbekistan. So that’s a market for Uzbek investors, for Uzbek business. So first of all, we look to Afghanistan through the prism of economic opportunities.

Second one, Afghanistan is not only a place of economic opportunities, but also a transit territory for Uzbek business and for Uzbek investments in the South Asian direction. Afghanistan opens to Uzbekistan a whole South Asian region countries like Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and others. And we look to Afghanistan as a transit territory. The third one and one of the crucial one, I think that’s the transit. Afghanistan is a transit territory in order to get world seaports. We are like all Central Asian countries, including Uzbekistan and Afghanistan, we are landlocked countries. We don’t have access to the world seaports. And nowadays, Uzbekistan looks to Afghanistan as a transit territory. And we want, through Afghanistan, get [to] the world ports like Gwadar, Karachi, or others. And the next one, I think the issues of security still in the agenda of foreign policy of Uzbekistan, because like if security situation will not [be] in a high level in Afghanistan, it will definitely influence impact on the all Central Asian governments. So that’s why we take into account also security issues in Afghanistan.

And the next one, I think it’s regards to the lost historical ties between Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and between Central and South Asia, because If we remember, in the territory of Central and South Asia, there were so many countries like Empire of Timurids, empire of Baburids. For example, the person who is so admired in Uzbekistan, a great statesman and poet, Ali-Shir Nava’i, he actually was born in Afghanistan and he devoted all his life to the development of this country. But he is so adorable in Uzbekistan and we name it the biggest our region after this great person not only in the history of Central and South Asia, but also in the world. And so by developing our relations with Afghanistan, we see also developing our lost historical and cultural ties.

And the last one, I think we see in Afghanistan and in a broader all South Asian countries kind of diversification of our economy. Yes, like we are mostly dependent from [on] Russia and China. These two countries are our first economic partners, but foreign policy of Uzbekistan rely on multilateralism and we want to widen our economic partners and emerging economic countries like India and Pakistan, we see kind of new economic partners. So Afghanistan is a transit territory for us. This aims.

Question:

Yeah, thank you, Dr. My question had a second part, which is how does the Taliban’s control of Afghanistan align with Tashkent’s, the interests or long-term goals that you just highlighted? Do you think the Taliban’s government or the Taliban’s control of Afghanistan can serve those interests?

Dr Islomkhon Gafarov:

I guess I lost the internet for a second, so can you repeat your question?

Question:

Okay, the second part of my question was how does the Taliban’s control of Afghanistan align with the interests of Uzbekistan that you just highlighted?

Dr Islomkhon Gafarov:

Nowadays, from my perspective, the Taliban’s foreign regime differ from the first regime. So it became more pragmatic. For example, in the first period, Taliban mostly relied on only Islamic world. So it was recognised by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. But current government [was] firstly recognised by Russia. So it means like in the foreign policy approaches of Taliban became more pragmatic. And nowadays, Taliban regime also looks to Central Asian republics as countries of new opportunities. So recently I have been in Afghanistan and I talked with experts, scholars, and even ordinary people, I came to the conclusion that the Afghan people and Afghan society really want the engagement with Central Asian countries. So we have similar values, we have similar languages and similar history. So I came to the conclusion like Afghan government [is] in a good position about Central Asian countries. So nowadays we have big several projects. I guess we will talk about.

Question:

Yeah, we will discuss it in more detail. In another article titled “Russia’s Taliban Recognition Signals Potential Domino Effect” for Geopolitical Monitor in July 2025, you wrote that Russia’s official recognition of the Taliban in early that month could trigger a domino effect and a broader process of normalisation. Specifically, you said that on the same day the President of Uzbekistan held his first-ever meeting with the Taliban’s Deputy Prime Minister Abdul Ghani Baradar on the sidelines of the 17th ECO Summit. However, so far Uzbekistan has not followed suit. What is holding back Uzbekistan from extending an official recognition to the Taliban?

Dr Islomkhon Gafarov:

I remember like in September 2021, like in a month after coming Taliban regime to the power, it was the first person the leader of Uzbekistan who delivered speech in SCO summit and he said like Taliban regime is a real acting force in Afghanistan and we should take it into account. So nowadays like the relations between Uzbekistan like de facto, I guess all of the recognised Taliban regime. So we have Taliban representatives in the level of ambassador and our relations like developing day by day and from the vision of Uzbekistan, Afghanistan is a part of Central Asia and yeah there are so many like scholars who can say Afghanistan is part of South Asia and some even can say that Afghanistan is a part of Middle East but for Uzbekistan Afghanistan is a part of Central Asia and we added it to Afghanistan as one of the closest partners. And if we look to the numbers, the turnover between Uzbekistan and Afghanistan this year, became more than one and one billion dollars and soon it’s going to be three billion dollars. So you have mentioned also the meeting between Uzbek leader and Taliban deputy prime minister. It was in Azerbaijan and also Uzbek officials like in the level of Uzbek prime minister or in the level of the leader of national security service or in the level of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs several times paid official visit to Kabul. So all of this means like Uzbekistan de facto recognised the Taliban government and the Uzbek approach was official recognition. I think rely on to unified approach. For example, like, yes, like today Uzbekistan officially recognised Taliban. So I think it will not give any like domino effect, which showed a Russian example. So it will stay like this. But Uzbekistan, like always in foreign policy, circles, like in the foreign international organisations always raise the Afghan issue and call to countries to make a unified approach to Afghanistan. So if that’s happened, So Afghan government will be recognized by same time by several countries. For example, it can be within the framework of SCO or within the framework of organisation of Turkic states. So main aim of Uzbekistan, in my opinion, the official recognition of Afghan government by same time by several countries, not only by Tashkent. So in this case, if Tashkent recognised, it will not give any changes. Okay. What was happening in the Russian example. So if we call our neighbours or the members of SEO countries or Turkish state countries, so if it will happen simultaneously within these organisations. So I guess there will be visible changes.

Question:

Okay, I wanted to come to Uzbekistan’s support for construction of religious madrasas. As you underscored in your May 2025 article, Tashkent is funding construction of madrassas, especially in northern Afghanistan. For example, in August 2024, Uzbekistan provided a 6 million dollars funding for the construction of a religious madrassa called “Khair al-Mudaris Imam Bukhari” in Mazar-e Sharif, which is the largest religious school in Afghanistan, according to Taliban officials. In your article, you suggested that it is part of Uzbekistan’s efforts to combat radicalisation. But Afghans, including religious researchers, believe that the expansion of Taliban-style religious madrasas will likely turn Afghanistan into a breeding ground for religious extremism. For example, Mohammad Moheq, a former Afghan ambassador to Egypt and a religious affairs researcher, told Etilaat Roz in January 2022 that “the growth of madrasas in Afghanistan is tantamount to digging the country’s grave. Madrasas in the Taliban’s vision will convert Afghanistan into a huge storehouse of religious explosives, ultimately detonating the country.” How do you reconcile these two different viewpoints? How does, exactly, sponsoring religious madrassas help Uzbekistan fight radicalisation?

Dr Gafarov:

So not only building of madrassas, but the development of all educational system of Afghanistan nowadays in the point in the focus of Uzbek foreign policy. So we are very sensitive in this issue and we want to provide religious and secular education by the same time. For example, in the northern, in the southern part of Uzbekistan, in the city of Termez, which has the same borders with Afghanistan, we have Termez Educational Centre, especially for Afghan nationals. So in this centre, Uzbekistan teach to Afghan students Uzbek language and literature and also engineering. So we want to provide not only religious but also like secular education because we see the improving situation in Afghanistan through the prism of developing of education.

And me especially, as I told, I have been in Afghanistan and I take part, I took part in the conference devoted to the improving high educational system of Afghanistan. This event was in the Jami University in Herat, so Afghan government gathered specialists from Central Asian Republics, from India, Pakistan, Turkey, even Singapore, and we shared our vision for the next development of Afghan education system. The religious education is also part of Uzbek policy in Afghanistan, and nowadays we are building madrasa in the Mazar-e Sharif and it will be constructed for Uzbek funds and will have around a thousand Afghan youngsters. And why we are doing this? As you told, we see in the process of building madrasas and in the religious education, as an instrument of combating radicalisation. And if we take into account religious perspectives, so they are a bit similar in Uzbekistan and in Afghanistan.

For example, as I know one of the main directions in Afghanistan is Deobandi school, which is part of Hanafiyah, Sunni mazhab [denomination]. And so this Deobandi school actually very close to the Maturidiyah and Maturidiyah was born in the territory of Uzbekistan. So in some cases, like I mean, religiously, the perspective of the visions of Uzbekistan and Afghanistan, they are too close. And in some cases we should discuss all of this and explain and give explanations to each other. And I think in this case, we come to the truth. So building of madrasas and education of Afghan youth, I think will give the answer to the common questions because, you know, like when I was in Afghanistan, I got that some people in Afghanistan thought that Central Asians, they’re not Muslim. They asked me, what’s your religion? So, and I came to the conclusion that some Afghan people even don’t know that the majority of Central Asians, they’re also Muslim. So with building of madrasas, these madrasas can be kind of hubs, not only for religious answers, but also for social issues. And it will stop radicalisation if we come to the common ideas, we will start teachings in these madrasas. So we are hoping there will not be any like radical radicalisation. And I should underline that there is like after the coming of new Taliban regime, there is no any export of radicalisation from Afghanistan to Central Asian republics. So it was said by several officials in high level meetings. And this kind of situation improve our relations and will give us more opportunities to develop our relations. If there is no any radicalisation, so it can open opportunities for business plans, like investments, etc.

Question:

Thank you. Now I’d like to turn to the issue of security before I come. I asked about Termez Dialogue and some other regional initiatives. You mentioned that security is still important for Uzbekistan, but Uzbekistan has replaced its security-centric approach with a kind of economic-centric approach. But according to the February 2026 report by the UN Security Council Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team in February, Islamic State-Khorasan Province (ISKP) was comprised of militants from nearly all ethnic groups in the region, including from Central Asian countries and Russia. The report said that Tajikistan and Uzbekistan were worried about the role of their nationals in ISKP and the establishment of what they call “sleeper cells” in those countries. In late February, Pakistan’s Special Representative Sadiq Khan, after a virtual meeting with his Uzbek counterpart, said that “the number of Uzbek terrorists stationed in Afghanistan is over 2,500 - possibly the second-largest group of terrorists after TTP.” Do you agree with these assessments? How grave are the security threats posed to Uzbekistan by militants allegedly based in Afghanistan?

Dr Islomkhon Gafarov:

Security situation in Afghanistan still concerns Uzbek government. And even recently in Kabul, there were meeting by representatives of all Central Asian republics and Afghanistan. So I guess a new C5 plus one, I mean like, or C6 format, like Central Asian countries plus Afghanistan emerging nowadays. And even in this platform, the security issues were rising [raised] by the sides and still it's a matter not [only] for Uzbekistan but for all Central Asian countries and we are very concerned that there is still militant groups like ISKP or TTP or like al-Qaeda and what's happening between Afghanistan and Pakistan border, it also concerns Uzbek government. And relating to the information about those Uzbeks in ISKP, as I know, they belong to Uzbek ethnicity, but they are not from Uzbekistan. They are Afghan Uzbeks, and maybe they are Uzbeks from other Central Asian republics, but they are not citizens of Uzbekistan. Yes.

Question:

So you kind of reject the assessment by the UN sanctions monitoring team. They said that Uzbekistan is worried about its nationals in ISKP.

Dr Islomkhon Gafarov:

As I heard from other reports, they are Uzbek, but they are not from Uzbekistan. And we are very concerned in any way. We are very concerned to this situation because like security situation in Afghanistan and in the region, it’s indivisible. So relating to the ideas of regional complex theory by Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver, we can say like if something happens in the territory of Afghanistan, it will give its impact to the region, I mean, to the Central Asia and South Asia, and one day it can also give impact to the world security. That’s why we’re still concerned about security situation in Afghanistan.

Second thing, I think like why we are so concerned because sometimes it relates to the economic issues because like if there is still terrorist group in Afghanistan, so it will give idea to the world society that terrorism developed in all Stan countries. So Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, so it negatively affect to our foreign policy image. So if in one of the Stan countries there is still terroristic attacks or terroristic groups, it will negatively affect to our image. For example, nowadays Uzbekistan promoting itself in the in the world agenda, we try to attract more and more investments. And in the last year, we got a new record on it. But if there is something in Afghanistan, like relating to the terrorism, so it will serve as an obstacle to the world investments to all the region. So that's why we care about the situation in Afghanistan too.

And the next one, if there are still terroristic organisations like TTP or ISKP, which serves as an obstacle and between Afghanistan and Pakistan, there will not be any big projects like trans-Afghan corridor, how we can build trans-Afghan corridor if there is still a border conflict between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and if there is activity of Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan. So, actually, the railroad partially built nowadays, so we have direct railroad from Termez to the Mazar-e Sharif, And nowadays, like we’re discussing to continue these buildings to till Kabul and then till the Peshawar. But in the circumstances when Afghanistan and Pakistan in conflict because of terroristic groups, so it will definitely, it is actually definitely negatively affect to our common efforts. And overall, if there are still terrorist or militant organisations in Afghanistan, all our ideas about connectivity will be just nice. So if we want to rebuild our historical cultural crisis with Afghanistan, with other South Asian countries, but if there are still terroristic countries, all of this, our efforts will become just nice.

Question:

Yeah, I was just going to ask about this Trans-Afghan Railway. And we also know that Russia is involved in that project. What is Russia’s interest in that project? If you could answer very quickly. Thank you.

Dr Islomkhon Gafarov:

Yeah, we know like because of crisis in Ukraine, Russia nowadays isolated, and Russia also see in South Asian countries like in India and Pakistan new economic partners. And Central Asian republics and Afghanistan serves as a transit territory for Russian interests. So I guess Russia probably support the idea of building Trans-Afghan Corridor because it serves for its interest for exporting oil and other energy resource to South Asian markets.

Ali:

Thank you so much, Dr. Gafarov, for joining me for this insightful discussion about the relationship between Uzbekistan and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Dr Islomkhon Gafarov:

Thank you, thank you so much.

Introduction:

Thank you very much, Dr Abbas Farasoo, for joining me for a deep-dive conversation about the relationship between the Afghan Taliban and Pakistan. You are a researcher at La Trobe University, Australia. Your academic research explores the intersections of proxy wars, state fragility, governance, and regional security in South Asia and the Middle East. More importantly, you are the author of a fascinating book titled “Proxy War in Afghanistan: The Politics of State-Wrecking,” published by Manchester University Press in 2025, in which you conceptualise Pakistan’s proxy engagement in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2014 as a state-wrecking process. So, I believe you are probably the only scholar who has studied the relationship between the Taliban and Pakistan very systematically.

Question:

So before I turn to the current relationship between the Taliban and Pakistan, which, according to the Pakistani Defense Minister, is characterised by an “open war,” I would like to begin this conversation with their relations before August 2021. In your book, you use the terms “proxy war” and proxy relations” to describe the Taliban-Pakistan relations during the Taliban insurgency against the former government in Afghanistan. You consider proxy war studies as a subfield of international security (p.9). Can you explain proxy war, proxy relations and how they defined the relationship between the Afghan Taliban and Pakistan during the Taliban’s insurgency against the former government in Afghanistan and its international backers?

Dr Farasoo:

Thank you very much. I think there’s many questions and your questions to be answered. First, let me start by Pakistan and Taliban relationship. So their relations goes back to 1990s, when after the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, so the Pakistan and the US and other allied countries, they supported the Mujahid at that time in the 1980s and in 1990s. So that was a classic example of proxy war during the Cold War, toward the end of the Cold War. So that’s a historical background. So and then the Pakistanis [began] to support the Taliban in the late 1990s to basically control Afghanistan as a puppet state in its north part. And that gave Pakistan a sort of confidence that it can project the same sort of proxy war in Kashmir and the regional level and influence, expand influence and strategic influence in the region and have a better geopolitical position through proxy wars and supporting different extremist groups in the region. So we can see Taliban in that context and we know the details of what happened between Pakistan and India. It was mainly conceivable in the context of historical relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan and also the rivalry between Pakistan and India in the context of South Asia security complexity. So we can see in that context.

But what happened after the 9-11 and the change of security discourse at international level, so then Pakistan had no choice but to join the US at that time under the shock of 9-11 attack in the US, So Pakistan did two strategic moves. First, they tried to buy opportunity for the Taliban to reach it back to Pakistan as key commanders and leadership. At the same time, [they] tried to align with the US to be in the picture, to basically was concerned about the Indian alignment between the US and India at that time. So that was the historical background between in the region, how Pakistan supported the Taliban and how historically this relationship worked in the context of security complexities in the region. That’s the historical background.

Come to your core question about proxy war and proxy relations. So proxy war is an old phenomenon in international politics. But recently, there is a significant attention about proxy war studies, a subfield of international security studies. So in this context, people try to conceptualise what is proxy war and how we really explain proxy war and how we conceptualise that. So previously, particularly in the context of a Cold War, proxy war mainly conceived in the context of big power politics. and as an instrument of big powers like the US and the Soviet Union, and then come to a regional level. So most of the studies focus on the strategic motivation and strategic functionalities of proxy war in the context of international politics and rivalries But recently, the efforts have been made to conceptualize what is proxy war and how we really understand that. And I try to focus on the nature of proxy relations at the same time focus on the consequences of proxy war within the target state instead of just reducing that to the strategic motivations of the big power.

So in my book, I conceptualise the war in Afghanistan as a state-breaking process. I will talk about that later with more details, what I mean by that state-wrecking process conceptualisation. But the key focus is that I shifted the focus from the big powers strategic motivation to the proxy wars as a phenomena within the context of broader rivalry and its impact on the target state, how we can understand that within the target state, what it does within the target state. That’s the shift in the scope of proxy war studies. But just one point about proxy relation. In the context of the Cold War, because the key focus was on big power strategic motivation, so proxy relations or proxy war somehow conceived a sort of 100% task delegation to non-state actors to do some job within the civil war or in a target state. But I think that sort of conceptualization cannot capture the whole dynamics of proxy war.

My argument is that proxy war is a sort of mutual enterprise between different actors, external actors, which can be original power or global power or a neighbor state against the target state. In that context, the proxy actors, they have their own ideological and political interests. But there is a power imbalance between supporting state and proxy actors. As far as the supporting state has upper hand and more power, and the supporting actors has a stronger dependency on the principal actor, probably they listen to them and keep the alignment stronger and functional. But it depends in different contexts. If there’s not a stronger strategic and ideological alignment, then that relationship could be fragile and could be vulnerable. So all the time, the supporting instead of the time, one of the complexity of the proxy war is that they try to maintain their control over the proxy forces. And that’s always a complicated dynamics.

If you see in the context of Afghanistan, In the 1980s, Pakistan supported different actors in the war. But after 2021 and toward the late 90s, Pakistan did learn a lesson that in a theater like Afghanistan, in the war zone country, they should keep their strategic focus on one single strong actors under control. probably militarily and strategically, that functions better. So that was a shift in their strategic approach, but still they deployed those experiences from the 1990s and 1980s in the context of supporting the Taliban in post-2001 in Afghanistan.

Question:

I know the focus of your book is the impact of this proxy war on the dynamic of the war and state-building in Afghanistan. However, you also argue that the proxy alignment between Pakistan and the Taliban shaped the entire dynamics of the war as the Taliban continued their insurgency and significantly weakened the Afghan government (p.89). What were Pakistan’s objectives and how did they align with those of the Taliban in this proxy alignment?

Dr Farasoo:

Oh, thank you. That’s a good question. I try to argue or conceptualise that argument in the way that the alignment basically happened in the context of securitisation. So securitisation theory is basically talking about how actors define threat, existential threat as a concern that undermine countries or actors’ security and stability. So actors, when they align that security concern, they can work together. Basically, that simple idea is that within the context of securitisation, alignment between Pakistan and Taliban.

So empirically, talking about a specific case like Afghanistan and the Taliban, what happened after 2001, when the US came to Afghanistan and established a new political setup, which we know as an Afghan republic, the government at that time, from 2001 and 2021 for two decades. So this political setup was securitised by Pakistan security intelligence as something pro-India in the region, provided footprint for India in Afghanistan, in the north part of Pakistan, which was a security concern. At the same time, they conceived that this political setup would be strong to create problem for Pakistan based on historical uh tension between Afghanistan and Pakistan on Durand Line and Pashtun nationalism so they basically securitise this political setup in Afghanistan the process of a state building in Afghanistan as a security concern On the one hand, let’s run after the US attack on Iraq. So the presence of the US and the region also tend to be security constant that what will happen next after Iraq in the region. So regional countries come this sort of consensus that the US should leave the region because it is a security threat. and that has been securitised. That’s the security, securitisation line and securitisation association of different securitisation in the region that undermine state building in Afghanistan. Parallel to that, what align [with] that, the Taliban securitise the Afghan, the new Afghan state as something against them in fight with them and also in terms of [value] system, it was a liberal democratic against Sharia based on the Taliban ideological framework. So this securitised in terms of ideological securitisation and also the political entity, something against anti-Taliban. And the Taliban see no future for themselves in that kind of political setup. They securitised that.

These two lines of securitisation align in the region, especially between the Taliban and Pakistan, plus the Pakistan had a strong historical ties with the Taliban in the past and keep the Taliban somehow functional to -to have a role in post-US in Afghanistan, because Pakistani strategies, they were thinking that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan will be short after the 9-11 shock, they will attack on some parts and over to the Taliban regime, and they will leave the country. Especially when they move to Iraq, that signals the Pakistanis that they will expand their ambition and they will not be able to control Afghanistan. And once the insurgency arise in Iraq, that gave hope for both the Pakistanis and the Taliban that the US is stuck in the region and there is an opportunity for them to enforce their activities.

So there was a historical background that I mentioned at the beginning, plus this security, securitisation alignment that emerged from the post 2001 and all this secularisation alignment and violence undermining the opposite side, which was the projection of state building in Afghanistan. So basically, there was a counter-effort or state-wrecking process against state building process. And that undermined the whole state building process in Afghanistan, So the war basically undermined all of that on the way that created other dynamics like corruption, war economy. and social division, so that the whole profoundly undermines state building in Afghanistan.

So that’s why in my book, I call that state-wrecking process that undermines the whole process. We can go to the details of that, if you like

Question:

Yeah, I was just going to turn to that question. You basically take issue with the actor-centric approach to the studies of proxy war and call it reductionist and instead emphasise the need for considering the impact of proxy war on the target state (p.25). You argue that the impact of proxy war on the target state is the destruction of the state, which has implications for international security. For example, you mention that the proxy war in Afghanistan in the 1980s led to a state failure, turning the country into a safe haven for al-Qaeda (pp.27-28). So I just wanted to ask: how Pakistan’s proxy support for the Taliban led to state destruction in Afghanistan? In other words, what are the causal links between the proxy war and state wrecking in the target state?

Dr Farasoo:

I think there’s a clear causal link, but just a footnote, it’s really always a contested a concept in a call about causality because how we understand causality. So positivist people have a different definition of causality. I didn’t want to go in that direction. But here to make it simple, in most of cases, most of cases around the world internationally shows that when there is external support for insurgency or in the context of civil war, the political settlement is difficult and hard and that prolonged the war. So basically that pointed toward the causation because when the actors, they have safe havens outside and have ideological support, they feel some sort of victory and they feel they can sustain the war.

So that makes the war difficult against the other side. And probably over the time, the other side will lose the significant support to maintain the war. That’s why in the context of Afghanistan, Taliban was so certain that they can continue the war and they will fight because of ideological reason, but mainly because they had sanctuaries in Pakistan, they feel safe that they can continue that. So that could be defined as sort of a causal process in this context. At the same time, proxy war is not a single cause in the war that can maintain and prolong the conflict. On the way, that link to ideological aspects, that link to internal social divisions, that link to historical unsettled issues, and also that undermining estate building process, creating a cascade in the society that people think they are not certain whether they support the estate or support the insurgency because they’ve stuck in between. And this is that if they feel that the insurgency or the proxy force is stronger, they don’t want to be in the losing side. They just want to support them. So there’s a complexity of causal relation, how the proxy support undermines the state in the context of countries like Afghanistan. That’s one aspect.

The second point, you mentioned al-Qaeda, and within the proxy war literature there is discussion about blowback. So, which basically refers to unintended consequences of proxy war. For example, in the 1990s, in the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, so the Western countries plus their region allies like Pakistan, they supported the Arabs to come to Afghanistan and fight against the Soviet Union. And later on, the al-Qaeda becomes a powerful organised attack in the US. That’s called the classic example of blowback. And currently, we have the TTP in Afghanistan. And this is mainly about in the context of terrorist groups or insurgencies. But at the same time, it has huge social and cultural impact. You can imagine the radicalisation in Pakistan. Some people call that as Talibanisation in Pakistan. Because during the Cold War, they established tens of thousands of madrasas in Pakistan to produce violent fighters for the war in Afghanistan.

So that is a huge social and cultural impact. That could be also called a sort of generative, social generative mechanism for the next crisis that will be then defined as sort of blowback in the future. But we have this case like al-Qaeda and TTP.

The third point you mentioned in your questions about is state-centric. I think that’s more or less related to theoretical discussion. Because in the context of the Cold War, when people are talking about proxy war, they mainly focus on actors. who is the principal actors, the Soviet Union and the US in the Western block, and who is the proxies like actor X, actor Y in different regions, they are the proxies of actor B and C and D. So this kinds of approach and discussion is very actor-centric. But I tried to shift that focus to process-centric, phenomena-centric, to basically look at its impact, the procedure of the war, how it really work on the ground, rather than just focusing on actors. In that approach, I tried to integrate both actor-centric and phenomenon-centric to basically cover both sides and also looking at different actors’ alignment and also its impacts on the region and on the target state, which kinds of phenomena we are dealing with when we are talking about proxy war and its practical procedures within the target country.

Question:

I guess you explain the three major dimensions of these procedures, these mechanisms in your book. For example, this proxy support contributes to the expansion of violence, which somehow impacts the state’s monopoly of violence. And the second one is that it also affects the state’s territorial control and also, I think, the bargaining power of the state. Would you like to elaborate [on that] a little bit?

Dr Farasoo:

Yeah, so that’s, so to just unpack what I’m... When we are talking about a state-wrecking process, we’re conceptualising proxy war in specific contexts like Afghanistan as a state-wrecking process. Basically, what this concept means, we need to unpack that. So first of all, what is state and statehood? So based on very well-known Max Weber definition of state, is that the state should have three key functions, monopoly over violence, territorial control, and political legitimacy, or legitimate control over violence, what it means. So I was looking at how proxy actors basically undermine these three key pillars and key functions of the state in the context like Afghanistan. For example, when the insurgencies were actors like the Taliban by external and proxy support, challenge the state’s monopoly over the violence. Basically, it targets the key function of the state, that the state no longer able to have control over the means of violence and monopoly over violence. So it shows to the people that they can project violence and can undermine the state. And then at that point, I argued that because that contestation on monopoly or violence turned to political currency. Any actor that demonstrates more violence, they will have more political currency to show their power. And they will have more reputation of power. Because we have learned from the, and Hobbes says correctly, that reputation of power is power. So they try to demonstrate that they have the capability of power. That’s one.

The second pillar is general control. They try to expand power. contestation of our territories. So, you know, Taliban was not able to really control some specific provinces or big cities for a long time, but they turned those cities and those territories and districts as a contested areas. So basically challenged the government to not control. If they themselves cannot control, they make it difficult for the government, make the whole territory ungovernable for the country, for the state.

The third pillar is political legitimacy. They try to undermine political legitimacy. They try to build an alternative narrative about politics, about the country to create distrust and undermine political legitimacy. And that’s mainly conceivable when it comes to really political bargaining, political talks, because the government tried to, at that time, we remember government referring to constitution, democracy, and also peace, tried to make peace with the Taliban. The Taliban consistently rejecting any sort of peace and talk with the Afghan government. And the base of that was that this government doesn’t have any legitimacy. It’s the puppet government. It’s supported by the occupier. So basically targeted the legitimacy of the actor.

Basically, the Taliban was not ready or didn’t want to recognise the Afghan government as a legitimate actor for negotiation. So the underlying point is to undermine its political legitimacy. So that really put the government in a difficult position to have territorial control, boost its political legitimacy. And the Taliban also targeted different election to undermine its legitimacy and also undermine the government to enforce law, deliver services. And do you know, over 60% of the Afghanistan’s budget went to security. That’s huge. And that created war economy and corruption. And over 60% of the US funding and international money went to security issues, created contract and subcontract and corruption and spending to basically secure the country dealing with the war. So the war was the key factor undermining state building.

So I know many people talking about corruption and stuff like that. Yes, corruption really was a key factor undermining the state [service] delivery and law enforcement. But that happened in the context of the war and the government didn’t have that opportunity to basically in the normal context to deal with the corruption. that many governments in the regions are corrupt and the corruption didn’t directly contribute to any other collapse in the region. So it really can function in the context of war if there is a bigger factor, a bigger cause to undermine the whole state process and the whole state apparatus and political legitimacy and institutional functionality.

Question:

I know your book is fascinating and we could continue to talk about the topics you discuss there. But now I would like turn to their relations since August 2021. In your book, you trace the root of the proxy war to the disputes over the Durand Line and Afghanistan’s support for Pashtunistan, which is defined as a “hypothetical state which the Afghan government leaders [wanted] to create on the Pakistan side of the border between the two countries”. But I want to add a point here that it is not really just hypothetical, because in the late 1940s, after the formation of Pakistan, the Afridi tribe declared an independent state in Tirah Valley. And the government in Kabul extended recognition very quickly to that government [tribe]. You also mention that Pakistani prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto said in 1973 that both Afghanistan and Pakistan could play the same game because Pakistan knew Afghanistan’s weak points, just as Afghanistan knew Pakistan’s” (p. 47). So could you explain how these two issues, the Durand Line and Afghanistan’s support for Pashtunistan, remain as the root causes of the proxy game? Do you think the Taliban now play the same game by exploiting the weak points of Pakistan supporting the TTP and other groups?

Dr Farasoo:

From the last points of your question, yes, the Taliban play the same game, but we will come back to a bit details how it works. But going back to the historical context, Context that you have mentioned, yes. But just I would like to add a point here that the Durand Line has really become a significant point in the context of Afghan nationalism. It’s in the 1930s, 1940s, significant point in the context of Afghan nationalism. It’s in the 1930s, 1940s, when the Pakistan’s, when the India, when the partition happened in South Asia between, and we witnessed new countries of Pakistan. So it is the time that we have Pashtun nationalism in Afghanistan, very ethnocentric nationalism. And the Durand line had a different meaning for people in the, for this Pashtun nationalists inside Afghanistan. And for example, the time of Abdurrahman Khan. It was not the same thing for Abdurrahman Khan and those people. This was just, they tried to control a territory and have political stability and try to uh be the king and the power see he was not very uh interested in other side of the Durand Line but that things happen within the context of Afghan nationalism uh which is what I mean Afghan nationalism Afghan nationalism is mainly an ethnocentric nationalism the center is basically uh passion nationalism

Yeah, but that became really radical and impacted Afghan foreign policy when the Daoud Khan came to power. So that really created significant tension between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It’s the time that proxy... the option of proxy war between the two countries became an option to undermine each other’s stability. That’s what you mentioned. So that’s the historical background about how the Durand line became really significant in the context of Afghan nationalism, because Pakistan has perceived support to Pashtuns on the other side of the Durand line within Pakistan, and to some extent, the support to Baloch separatists as kinds of irridentist approach and from doubt on explicitly that he claimed that uh the other parts of their online is parts of the Afghanistan just the simple reason is because they are Pashtun they have the same blood the same identity as we are passionate in other side of Afghanistan but the unintended consequences of that was that Afghanistan hold stability and remind Afghanistan pay a huge cost for that because the coming subsequent years of proxy war happened in Afghanistan. And that impacted Daoud Khan’s approach toward the Soviet Union at the time, get close to Russia.

He had that kind of ambition in foreign policy and also domestic policy ambition. His five years plan to develop Afghanistan without having enough resources, enough funding. So that’s also pushed him go to incline toward Russia and that provide the opportunity for Russia to expand its influence inside Afghanistan and Russia. They all the time supported his position. And after that, when the communists come to power, the country, the same sort of language with support from Russia. So Russia was seeing these things in the context of his brother, regional geopolitics. So that really impact the whole Afghan stability that experienced under Zahir Shah somehow. So that stability gambled under Daoud Khan, basically put it that way. And another consequences of that was inside Afghanistan. that really divided Afghan society, especially the non-Pashtun. They found themselves that this is foreign policy and everything is for just a Pashtun ethnocentric approach. And we are not part of that. And that doesn’t serve the national interest. And we don’t have any definition of national interest. The national interest is basically an ethnic definition of international interest. That’s another consequences. The third consequences impacted Pashtuns in the other side of the other line in Pakistan. And they become a sort of victims of this policy because Pakistan tried to have intervened. and used that region for proxy war in Afghanistan, and that became the center of proxy war to project violence in Afghanistan during the Cold War. That really contributed to radicalization of that region, and one of the direct consequences of that is today the Cold War. That really contributed to radicalization of that region, and one of the direct consequences of that is today the TTP and the radical movements in that region, and also the Afghan Taliban on our side. So those things are connected to that historical process that you mentioned. Yes.

So basically, come back to today’s TTP problem and the problem between Afghan Taliban and Pakistan. Yes, because the Pakistan support the Taliban to control Afghanistan. One. because Afghanistan should not be an anti-Pakistan political establishment and should not be an area of influence for India. At the same time, supporting Islamic extremism to transfer Pashtun ethno-nationalism to kinds of Islamism, to be aligned with Pakistan’s bigger ideological approach since Zia ul-Haq, that playing with this Islamic ideology and presenting Islamic world, stuff like that. But what happened, that had two consequences. One, yes, it created an ideological movement like the Taliban, but we know that the Taliban is now a hybrid movement. Hybrid means it has two pillars of ideological pillars. One is Islamic extremism. The second one is still Pashtun ethnic identity. On the other hand, that created radicalization and radicalism inside Pakistan. So now it is a problem for Pakistan. That’s why within the proxy world literature, that’s known as a sort of a blowback. unintended consequences, because these things are kinds of social engineering.

They are not mechanical to really 100% certainty predict the outcomes of some policies and strategic moves.

Question:

Just my last quick question, you somehow said that Pakistan securitised India’s presence in Afghanistan but don’t you think that the current growing alignment between the Taliban in India is more than like a securitisation by Pakistan.

Dr. Farasoo:

Well, that is securitization is a very a very radical move in a strategic dimension.

And Clausewitz’s word is the law of extreme, to define something as enemy I think they secretize Taliban in certain ways. The first thing is the Taliban doesn’t have any security alignment in Pakistan anymore. So they are close to India, and India is the biggest enemy of Pakistan in the region. So that’s the concept. Second thing is that they provide sanctions for the TTP. And TTP keep killing Pakistan security forces and keep organizing attacks inside Pakistan. So these two is significant. The third thing is that Pakistan historically dealing with Afghanistan tried to have a weak political entity in Afghanistan with least capability to create a strategic problem for Pakistan. There’s not a single reason. There’s several aligned reasons that can be conceivable in the context of broader Pakistan securitization of Afghanistan historically. So the Taliban now is a problem for Pakistan because of those reasons, those factors that they have mentioned.

Question:

Thank you so much, Dr. Farasoo, for this amazing conversation. It was really fascinating to read your book and to listen to you.

Dr Farasoo:

Thanks for having me and thanks for reading my book.

Since 26 February, the Afghan Taliban and Pakistan have been locked in what the Pakistani Defense Minister called an “open war.” Pakistan has carried out airstrikes in Afghanistan’s major cities, including Kabul and Kandahar, while the Taliban have retaliated through cross-border incursions against the Pakistani military posts. This afternoon, I had a deep-dive conversation with Michael Kugelman, a Resident Senior Fellow for South Asia at the Atlantic Council and a leading expert on Afghanistan and South Asia, about this dangerous escalation. Below is the transcript of our conversation:

Introduction

Thank you so much, Michael Kugelman, for joining me for a deep-dive conversation about the ongoing conflict between the Afghan Taliban and Pakistan.

You are a Resident Senior Fellow for South Asia at the Atlantic Council and non-resident senior fellow at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada and write Foreign Policy magazine’s weekly South Asia Brief. You have also edited or co-edited 11 books and are a leading expert on Afghanistan and South Asia and their relationship, relations with the United States.

Question:

So let’s begin with an overview of the latest hostilities. You wrote for Foreign Affairs in late January that “the most worrisome flashpoint” in South Asia was along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, not between nuclear-armed rivals, India and Pakistan. On the night of February 26 and 27, the cross-border tension developed into what the Pakistani defense minister described as an open war after the Taliban attacked Pakistani military posts across the border in retaliation to air strikes by the Pakistani military a week earlier.

Is this what you feared or warned about? Could you provide an overview of what has been happening between the two sides since then?

Michael Kugelman:

Yeah, so, you know, I think that as an analyst, one always hopes that when they come out with assessments predicting what could happen down the road, that they’ll be correct. And I think that in this case, unfortunately, I was correct. I mean, I published the piece in Foreign Affairs back in, was it the end of January? And I was essentially arguing that there was a very good chance that there could be uh conflict between Afghanistan and Pakistan and I laid out a number of reasons which we could, which we could certainly discuss um but um you know what we saw happen was essentially what I had uh predicted since that there had been a number of steps diplomatic steps taken to try to eat tensions between two these tensions had been in place really since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021. And yet the diplomacy didn’t work and that there was a good reason to fear that there could be conflict. And indeed, this is what we’ve seen play out. And, you know, it’s been several weeks now that there’s been hostilities between the two sides and certainly the most serious hostilities that we’ve seen between Afghanistan and Pakistan since the Taliban returned to power.

Question:

Yeah, and some Pakistani journalists have been discussing Pakistan’s objectives since the declaration of the open war. For example, Sayed Talat Hussain, a Pakistani journalist, wrote that these objectives are destroying border area infrastructure and knocking out the arsenal the Taliban use to create border trouble and occupying strategic posts beyond the border to create a buffer zone and some other objectives. If true, these are beyond counter-terrorism operations. Do you agree? If not, what are Pakistan’s objectives in expanding its airstrikes inside Afghanistan?

Michael Kugelman:

Well, yeah, I mean, it’s true that the stated objectives of the Pakistanis throughout this crisis, throughout this conflict, have been exclusively counterterrorism focused. According to the Pakistan side, it’s about targeting facilities used by Pakistan Taliban, by Tehrik-e Taliban, Pakistan, by TTP. Of course, the Taliban has said that civilians have been hit in every round of strikes coming from Pakistan. I think that we, it’s sort of an important question to consider is what could change, what would have to happen on the ground to prompt Pakistan to shift the goalposts, so to speak, and expand its objectives beyond only targeting terrorist facilities, as well as some military facilities used by the Taliban, into something that can go much broader than to that, including the idea of an actual regime change operation carried out by Pakistan.

And I think that one would have to see continued indications that what Pakistan has been trying to do up to this point has not worked. And, you know, we’ve seen there’s been an exponential rise in terrorist attacks in Pakistan over the last few years, including cross-border attacks carried out from Afghanistan into Pakistan. Pakistan has also been conducting counterterrorism operations on its side of the border, near the border with Afghanistan, and yet the attacks have continued, maybe not with the frequency that we had seen in previous weeks and months. I do not think, my sense is that the Pakistani side would not want to expand its objectives, its military objectives, beyond targeting terrorist facilities, as well as select facilities of, used by the Afghan Taliban.

However, you know, just if you look at what’s happened over the last few days, you know, there are indications that Pakistan has started to target airport infrastructure inside Afghanistan. And one could argue that that’s not necessarily just a military facility. That’s civilian purposes as well. But given what Pakistan is dealing with, right, it’s very concerned about the Iran war. And we could talk about how that’s impacting this conflict. Pakistan is concerned about its border with India, which remains very hot. So I think that Pakistan, as much as it wants to deal with what it describes as its problem of cross-border terrorism based in Afghanistan, I think it’s going to want to be very careful about taking steps that could end up provoking even more instability than it’s already experiencing right now with this surge in terrorist attacks in Pakistan.

Question:

So coming to these ties between the Taliban and the TTP, Terik-eTaliban in Pakistan. In your Foreign Affairs article, which we mentioned, you underscored two major calculations that could explain why the Taliban do not want to expel or use force against the TTP. These are like maintaining cohesion among the Taliban’s various factions. And if they act against the TTP, they risk sparking internal rebellions within their ranks. And acting against the TTP would drive them into the arms of Islamic State Khorasan Province or ISKP. And you also mentioned that politically defying Pakistan would earn them legitimacy at home because of the unpopularity of Pakistan among much of the Afghan public. I wanted to take it further, a bit deeper, and ask why would acting against a foreign group threaten the Taliban’s internal cohesion? What is it in these ties between the TTP and the Taliban?

Michael Kugelman:

That’s a fair point. I think that one has to understand or acknowledge the depth of the ties, institutional linkages between the two Taliban, right? And I get into this in the article as well. I mean, they’re two groups that don’t only share a name. I mean, they share much in common. There’s been operational collaborations between the two groups in Afghanistan. They’ve carried out operations together in Afghanistan in the past. And if you look at individuals, you know, one of the more well-known connections here is that Baitullah Massoud, who, of course, was the first supreme leader of the TTP, he had been a member of the Haqqani Network before there was a TTP, before he was a part of the TTP. And so the linkages between the two groups are quite extensive. And I think one could argue that the ideological convergences are strong as well. I mean, obviously, TTP has always targeted Pakistan. The Taliban had targeted Afghanistan. But setting aside the issues of geography, you know, ideologically, they’re quite closely aligned, right? I mean, the TTP was very inspired by what the Taliban did by essentially destroying the Afghan security forces or prompting them to collapse and then expelling the American and the NATO military forces. And the TTP wants to try to do that in Pakistan, even though it can’t do that. Anyway, there’s a lot of when i say can’t do it it doesn’t have the capacity to do that there’s just a lot of convergences and linkages between the two groups and it’s true that certainly one could argue that the average foot soldier or former foot soldier of the Taliban might not care about the ttp and might not care what the taliban leadership intends to do about it but i would argue that there’s enough institutional memory within the Taliban and enough awareness of this very close tie link between the two Talibans that the idea of the Taliban curbing the group or or you know going after militarily you know could cause a lot of issues with the rank and file not to mention this gets to another important issue you know for all we talk about the deep uh alliance with the oh yeah the alliance between the Taliban and the Pakistani security establishment for essentially the entire uh US flood war in Afghanistan You know, the Pakistanis were the Taliban’s patron. The Taliban depended heavily on Pakistan for support. I’d argue that within the Taliban there’s never been wholesale support, much less love for Pakistan. You know, I think in line with broader views in Afghanistan about Pakistan, you know, for instance, I think many in the Taliban would not support Pakistan’s position on the border. The Taliban leadership has never supported Pakistan’s position on the border. No government in Afghanistan has ever supported Pakistan’s position on the border, which is too—and Pakistan’s position, of course, is that it’s a legitimate border. From the Taliban’s perspective, it’s not. So I think that there’s also the issue of there being many within the Taliban rank and file that are not fans of Pakistan. And so in that sense, would not like the idea, and I hate to put it this way, would not necessarily like the idea of the Taliban going after a group that has made life difficult for for Pakistan over the years. So a variety of a variety of ways, I think, to answer your question.

Question:

OK, thank you. And What should Pakistan expect from the Taliban? In November, the Taliban’s chief spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, listed several actions that he claimed the Taliban had taken since seizing power in August 2021.August 2021. These, for example, included issuing fatwas forbidding individuals from leaving Afghanistan to engage in jihad abroad, and facilitating direct negotiations between the Pakistani government and the TTP.

Over the past five months, Pakistan has been insisting that the Taliban should give written assurances. I mean what else the Taliban can do and do you think written assurances will be the panacea or the solution for the insurgent attacks in Pakistan?

Michael Kubleman:

Yeah, I mean, clearly Pakistan doesn’t trust the Taliban when it gives assurances that it will do things or that it has done things, that it wants to see something more formal. And it has not seen that. And perhaps one could argue it’s telling that the Taliban have not been willing to provide written assurances that they’re going to address Pakistan’s concerns. And we can get into it all the many reasons why, in my view, the Taliban have not addressed these concerns and why the TTP continues to have a significant presence in Afghanistan and that Afghan soil is used for as a springboard for attacks in Pakistan. I think that there’s been some talk over the last few years about how the Taliban has taken some steps to relocate some TTP fighters away from the border with Pakistan to elsewhere in Afghanistan. But it hasn’t really endured. It really hasn’t, it really hasn’t worked because it’s not like they were all moved. It’s just sort of like a token gesture, so to speak. And I think that the best argument that one can make for whatever the Taliban has done, if anything, hasn’t been enough, is that the attacks have continued in Pakistan.

Now, for sure, TTP has a presence in Pakistan as well. And there are attacks carried out in Pakistan by the TTP that are staged from Pakistani soil. But it’s very clear that particularly these attacks that are carried out targeting Pakistani security forces near the border These are heavily militarized areas. You know, these are cases where you are seeing continued cross-border operations, TTP, coming into Pakistan.

So, you know, I think that from Pakistan’s perspective, what it most wants to see is what’s not going to happen. And that’s for the Taliban to essentially go after the group militarily or expel them or do something like that. That’s not going to happen.

But I think that I think what Pakistan might want to see sort of below that, maybe a bit more realistic, is some indication that the Taliban is acknowledging Pakistan’s concerns. I mean, because the Taliban’s official position for quite some time has been that there is no, that Afghan soil is not used as a springboard for attacks in Pakistan. One reason why that might be said is that if the Taliban were to acknowledge that Afghan soil is being used to by violent groups to carry out attacks in Pakistan, could be accused of violating the Doha deal, which is something that not many really think about that much anymore.

But of course, that was the deal that the Taliban signed with the U.S. the first Trump administration in advance of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan that stipulates that Afghan soil not be used um uh to target the US or its allies. Is Pakistan an ally of the U.S.? Perhaps that’s how the Taliban would perceive it. And the Doha deal is very important for the Taliban. It was something that led to a result where US forces left Afghanistan, which is what the Taliban wanted. So I think that’s a reason why I think the Taliban might not want to acknowledge that it’s providing that space for the group. But bottom line, I think that Pakistan appears to have given up on the Taliban doing what it wanted to do. And, you know, we can get into this. There has been mediate. There has been talks between the Taliban and Pakistani government, which has been mediated by outside actors. And the conclusion is, after those talks is that the Taliban has not agreed to address Pakistan’s core concerns. Now, Pakistan’s taking an increasingly hard line. And, you know, you hear some of the messaging from Pakistan’s army chief, who’s always been particularly hard on Afghanistan. I think that it’s going to be more difficult for the two sides to find a common ground. And even for the Taliban to make some mid-grade or like compromise, sort of a mid-ground response to what Pakistan is looking for, that might get more difficult, especially with the conflict continuing to play out.

Question:

I just want to turn to the India factor. Again, in your article and other pieces that you have written since then, you described the Taliban’s deepening relationship with India is most alarming to Pakistan. I had a conversation with Pakistani analyst Amina Khan, who said that, yes, Pakistan’s first airstrikes in Kabul in October coincided with the Taliban’s foreign minister Mutaqi’s visit to India. But Pakistan had witnessed major security incidents in the days leading to his visit. She also said that Afghanistan is a sovereign independent country and has the right to engage with any country as long as it’s not detrimental to Pakistan. So why do you think the Taliban’s warming relationship with India is alarming to Pakistan?

Michael Kugelman:

I think that, first of all, anything involving India is going to be concerning to Pakistan, I mean, given the nature of the India-Pakistan relationship. So naturally, Pakistan is going to worry about the Taliban, which has essentially become an enemy of Pakistan, warming up its ties with India now let’s keep in mind this is not new it was pretty soon after the Taliban returned to power when you started to see outreach uh between the two sides it was slow but you know it was it was there and the Taliban had had been very clear at least in their public messaging that they welcomed friendly relations with any country other than Israel. The Taliban made that proclamation after they came back to power sort of part of this idea of kind projecting themselves as a more moderate version of their former selves, you and I and other knowledgeable observers never fall for that.

But anyway the outreach began fairly soon after the Taliban returned to power. But for the Pakistanis, what’s really concerning is that, and I mentioned this in the Foreign Affairs piece, the upsurge in terrorist attacks in Pakistan carried out from Afghanistan uh essentially um has played out at the same time that India has been scaling up its ties with with Afghanistan, with the Taliban so essentially that means that Pakistan which is always going to assume the worst with India and i would argue that some of its fears about it some of its quite a few of its if its fears about India are exaggerated and hyperbole but you know i think that Pakistan seeing this upsurge in attacks in Pakistan carried out from Afghanistan, where the Taliban is in control, and seeing the Taliban warm up in its relations with India, it’s very easy for Pakistan to conclude that India must be colluding with the Taliban in sponsoring these TTP attacks inside Afghanistan.

And as you know, Pakistan has long accused the Indians of sponsoring Baluch separatists, so BLA and their ilk. More recently, Pakistan has officially accused India of sponsoring TTP. And of course, TTP has allied with the Afghan Taliban. So if you sort of move all these pieces together, and I’m articulating this from how Pakistan would see this, you know, it’s the logical conclusion from Pakistan’s perspective is that, well, this constitutes a double threat because not only are we dealing with the Taliban sheltering the TTP, we’re also dealing with India warming up its ties with the Taliban. And India is also sponsoring violent acts inside Pakistan. So it’s sort of a double threat in that sense, as seen by the Pakistanis. And of course, India has, it’s fully reopened its embassy in Kabul. That happened after one of the recent summits between Taliban and Indian officials. And that’s alarming to Pakistan because it’ll fear that India will be in a better position to continue to build on the influence it has in Afghanistan. And that’s obviously going to concern the Pakistanis in a big way as well. So I think that you have to sort of recognize the way that Pakistan, and particularly the security establishment, perceive India, always fearing the worst, viewing it as a so-called existential threat. And this is the view within the security establishment. So any case of India doing anything with a country or an entity that has become problematic and threatening for Pakistan, and the Taliban has, it’s going to cause alarm bells to go off everywhere in Islamabad, and especially in Rawalpindi.

Question:

At the beginning of our conversation, you mentioned the implications of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East for Pakistan and Afghanistan. And of course, you also highlighted it in your Foreign Affairs brief. Specifically, you mentioned that the Taliban’s trusted partners like Qatar and Saudi Arabia would not be able to mediate in this conflict. And it seems that the imports from Iran have also been affected, the imports to Afghanistan from Iran have also been affected. I mean, how grave are the implications of the Middle East war for Pakistan and Afghanistan? And are there ways to mitigate these consequences?

Michael Kugelman:

Yeah, I think that there is significant negative implications. for both Afghanistan and Pakistan separately and also for the conflict itself, right? So I think that in terms of implications for Pakistan, I think refugee flows are something that Pakistan could well see if the conflict continues in Iran and if it intensifies in a big way. And, you know, as we know, I mean, Pakistan has has changed its policy toward refugees in recent years, particularly toward Afghan refugees who had previously been there have been more of them in Pakistan than any other country in the world. And it’s taken a harder line on on Afghan refugees, you know, because of economic volatility and other things. Pakistan does not want to see a large influx of Iranian refugees coming into Pakistan. So that’s one negative implication for Pakistan.

Another is the fact that its southwest border could get much hotter. So Pakistan is already dealing with a hot border with Afghanistan, a hot border with India. But now its border with Iran could heat up. And keeping in mind that you have a number of insurgent groups and violent actors on both sides of the Pakistan-Iran border. You know, a few years ago, Pakistan and Iran had a brief war when you had cross-border attacks. So, you know, you’ve got the likes of the BLA and you’ve got the likes of Jaish al-Adl, groups that are violent and would be able to benefit and exploit conditions provoked by conflict in Iran. That could embolden the likes of the BLA and The BLA could be in a position to get even stronger than it’s already become. That would be very concerning for Pakistan. And then also just the commercial, the economic issues, all the energy that Pakistan depends on coming from the Middle East. You’ve got several million Pakistani expatriates mainly in the GCC countries, some in Iran as well.

Turning to Afghanistan, Afghanistan is dependent on Iran for energy as well to an extent, particularly for electricity. uh that’s that’s that’s very significant but then turning to the the implications that the Iran conflict has for the war the conflict between Afghanistan and Pakistan yeah i mean you hit on the main one and i think that it’s true that we’ve seen these um these talks mediated by countries that are now going to be in over their heads with the war in Iran I mean the Saudis and the the the Qataris are not going to be in a position to uh to mediate in ways that they had. And even the Turks, who had also been mediating talks between the Taliban and Pakistan, they might not be in a position to either. Now, several months ago, President Trump had said, this was in October after that last round of violence between the Taliban and Pakistan, he had said that he was aware of what was going on and he’d like to try to help end it. He didn’t. But, you know, I would think that the US would, in principle, be inclined to try to mediate this conflict between Afghanistan and Pakistan if it starts to fear threats to its interests. And that would happen if you start to see terrorist attacks sponsored by the Taliban in major cities in Pakistan where Americans are based. But now with this war happening in Iran, it’s unclear if the Trump administration would even have the bandwidth for that. I don’t know if the US would actually have and we could talk about that I don’t think the US is necessarily the best mediator in this case because it doesn’t really have much of a relationship with the Taliban. But that’s another thing that one notable potential key mediator, the U.S. is probably not going to be involved, would not be involved in mediation either.

Final point I’ll make. You know, I said before that the Pakistan’s border with Iran could become more inflamed with the conflict there. And if that happens, and if we start to see violence and BLA picking up its activities, capitalising on this increased tensions on the border with Iran, that might cause a challenge for Pakistan’s military posture vis-a-vis Afghanistan. If it’s carrying out airstrikes, continued airstrikes in Afghanistan, and the Taliban continue to retaliate with attacks on Pakistani border posts, Pakistan could be distracted by its southwest border, especially if you have significant levels of violence carried out by the BLA. And that’s something that I think could be very concerning for Pakistani military planners.

Question:

You mentioned that the United States could potentially mediate sort of talks between Pakistan and the Taliban. I just wanted to raise that the Taliban also accuse Pakistan of helping the United States regain control of Bagram. What would be your response to that accusation? And if we subscribed to that accusation, then could the US be a trusted mediator in this case?

Michael Kugelman:

Yeah, I mean, as I said, the Taliban doesn’t have much of a relationship with the US. And yes, there’s been some engagement. As you know, there is at least one case of a U.S. government official traveling to Kabul to finalize negotiations, resulting in the release of a U.S. citizen being held captive by the Taliban. Adam Boehler the hostage envoy he was in Kabul was it several months ago last year at some point um but there’s not much of a relationship and of course you know just recently the u.s state department announced that uh you know Afghanistan is going to be put on this list of countries engaging in harmful detentions um whatever the term is so um yes i i think that um it’s getting to the Bagram issue it’s always been you know sometimes the president trump says things that he’s actually serious about, sometimes he’s not serious, it’s hard to know. You know, his stated reason for, quote, wanting Bagram back was to, because of concerns about China and its nuclear facilities, thinking that it would position the US in a better position to watch out for that. Honestly, my thinking all along has been that the main reason why Trump, if he actually wants Bagram, it really relates more to Iran than anything else, because having the U.S. in a position to be in Bagram would put it in a better position to monitor Iran. And now with the war happening in Iran, one could argue that gives the U.S. an even stronger incentive to want to regain Bagram, if it actually does want to and if that’s the reason for it.

In terms of Pakistan’s position, I don’t know. To me, that sounds like a terrible idea for Pakistan to want to work with the U.S., in some way to capture Bagram. Pakistan hasn’t learned the lessons of the past, so to speak, in terms of what happened in Afghanistan and how that impacted Pakistan. But, you know, we do know that this civilian and military leadership in Pakistan is very keen to be in Trump’s good graces, and it resorts to some of the most overt forms of flattery that one could ever expect to see from a government. So, you know, I don’t know. I can’t rule out what the Americans might want to do. But I think that with the war happening in Iran now, I think that, you know, unless there starts to be concerns about regime leaders in Iran fleeing to — oh, sorry about that. I don’t know why my hand is raised there. i can’t get it to go down anyway um let’s see it’s okay well it’s okay i will disregard [accidentally clicked on raise-hand option] — the point I was making um is that unless you start to see indications that Iranian regime leaders are fleeing Tehran and moving to areas of Iran close to the border with Afghanistan I don’t think that you’re going to see the Trump administration turn its attention to Afghanistan, though it is notable that the State Department at this moment decided to designate Afghanistan as a country engaging in harmful detentions because that that announcement was then accompanied by some very interesting statements from US government officials including Adam Boehler the hostage envoy who said well you know don’t hold Americans captive or else it could be another event as well it could be another Iran so that could just be hyperbole I don’t know but you know, there’s always conspiracy theories. There’s always coincidences. But I think the timing of that announcement is notable.

Question:

Yeah, thank you. Maybe my last question about a potential role for China. The Chinese ambassador in Kabul met with Muttaqi last week to discuss the recent situation. And today, the Chinese foreign minister called Mutaki and told him that China was ready to play a constructive role in bringing about understanding and trust between the Taliban and Pakistan. But we also know that yesterday, Reuters reported that Chinese mediation efforts, including a message from President Xi Jinping, have helped ease the worst fighting between Pakistan and Afghanistan. And [then] just last night, Pakistan conducted airstrikes in four provinces. And moreover, you are aware that there is a China, Afghanistan, Pakistan Foreign Ministers Trilateral Dialogue. But in its last annual meeting, they failed to issue a joint statement because the Taliban refused to include any reference to the TTP. Do you think China can play any role this time? If yes, how?

Michael Kugelman:

Yeah, this is an important point. I’m glad you brought up the China factor. I’ve thought for quite some time, and I mentioned this in the Foreign Affairs article, that with any country that would have the capacity to be an effective mediator in this conflict, it would be China for several reasons. One, China has put itself out there as a mediator. It mediated the Saudi-Iranian rapprochement deal some time ago. It’s been involved in several other issues, in in mediation a few other things over the last few years it’s publicly depicted itself as a mediator and this is part of its effort to to grow out its power so unlike a country like India which has sort of been cited as a potential mediator in a number of conflicts including Russia Ukraine it’s not going to do that unless it’s asked to but Beijing has been willing to proactively put itself out there that’s one thing too China is the only country, so far as I know, that has skin in the game in the ways that Pakistan does. China has been targeted by TTP, right? Chinese investments, its CPEC investments in Pakistan, as well as Chinese workers overseeing those investments, have been hit and killed by TTP. And, you know, not only that, China indeed wants to try to pursue investments in Afghanistan. It’s held back because of security concerns, not necessarily because of ISKP, though that’s definitely part of it. ISKP has targeted China in Afghanistan in the past, but also TTP, which doesn’t stage attacks in Afghanistan, or at least hasn’t done anything since the war ended there. But ETP is present in China, and it views China as an enemy because of what it’s done in Pakistan, working closely with Pakistan and CPEC and so on. So I think that China feels that it would have a particularly strong interest in having this conflict ended so that it could be less concerned about the security of its investments in Pakistan and also be less concerned about threats that it could face in Afghanistan if it looks to push out more of its investment goals there.

The problem for China is that its close alliance with Pakistan might discredit I in the eyes of the Taliban, even though I would argue that China has leverage. This is another thing. China has considerable leverage over both parties, over Pakistan because it’s a close ally. It provides significant levels of military and economic and infrastructure support. But the Taliban wants China’s capital, it wants China to invest in Afghanistan but even with that you know the Taliban is no fan of Pakistan right now and it knows how close China and the Taliban are as well and sorry knows how close China and Pakistan are so that I think might make it difficult for uh the Taliban to accept China as a mediator final point i’ll make here I know we need to to wrap up very briefly um the mediation won’t necessarily work because at the end of the day, we haven’t seen any outside mediator get the Taliban to stop doing the things that Pakistan wants it to stop doing. Pakistan wants the Taliban to stop curbing the TTP. It wants the Taliban to curb the TTP. The Taliban’s not going to do that.

It’s not going to get it’s not going to get that reaction. It’s not going to get that action as a result of mediation. So it’s not a surprise that we heard in one report that China has been mediating tensions. And then we heard in the next report that Pakistan started bombing Afghanistan again. Pakistan, I think, has lost all hope that diplomatic solutions can work.

Ali:

Thank you very much, Michael, for this insightful discussion. I really appreciate your insights.

Michael Kugelman:

Well, thank you very much. It was a great conversation.

Yeah, many thanks, Dr. Raghav Sharma, for joining me today for a deep dive conversation on the evolving relations between India and the Taliban in Afghanistan. You are a professor at the School of International Affairs, O.P. Jindal Global University, India, where you also lead the Center for Afghanistan Studies. You have written the book “Nation, Ethnicity and the Conflict in Afghanistan: Political Islam and the Rise of Ethno-politics [1992-1996].” And finally, you have worked in the humanitarian sector in Afghanistan. So I believe you have developed a deep knowledge of the country.

Question:

And let’s begin with an overview of the current level of diplomatic relations between India and the Taliban. When the Taliban captured power in August 2021, India, unlike many neighbouring and regional countries, closed its embassy in Kabul, which indicated that it did not consider Afghanistan under the Taliban to be safe for Indian diplomatic personnel. However, four years later, in October last year, New Delhi hosted the Taliban’s foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, for a week-long visit during which the two sides announced that they would upgrade their diplomatic missions to ambassador level. And this happened against the backdrop of a historically hostile relationship. For example, the Taliban were considered complicit in India’s worst plane hijack in 1999 and responsible for the attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul in July 2008, which killed several Indian citizens, including two senior diplomats, and the attack on the Indian consulate in Herat in May 2014. So, could you lay out when and how this rapprochement and diplomatic engagement between two historically hostile parties came about, and what the current level of diplomatic relations is?

Dr Sharma:

Well, I mean, you’re right in pointing out that India was one of the few countries in the regional level, which essentially held out against engaging with the Taliban and was very hesitant to the idea of rehabilitation of the Taliban in Afghanistan’s political landscape. In fact, in the London conference in 2010, if you go back, which opened the door to negotiations with the Taliban, India was one of the few countries that was an outlier in the sense that it opposed the idea of, you know, political engagement and rehabilitation of the Taliban. It was, you know, firmly opposed to the idea and was one of the last countries to jump onto the bandwagon of, you know, engaging with the Taliban diplomatically. And it did so hesitatingly.

You know, by around 2019, 2020, there was certainly a growing realisation in the policy establishment in Delhi that the political and military ground in Afghanistan was shifting, and were shifting increasingly in favour of the Taliban. And that is what necessitated, I think, a rethink in terms of, you know, reaching out to the Taliban. So, preliminary contact with the Taliban had gotten underway prior to the fall of the Republic, but much later than what, you know, other regional players had been engaging in for the last several years, including countries like Russia and Iran, which were traditionally, you know, diametrically opposed to the Taliban and all of what they stood for. So yes, India essentially was an outlier in that sense.

And, you know, 2021, India sort of shuttered its embassy and, you know, closed all its missions, unlike the BRICS countries, which was Pakistan, Russia, Iran, China and Saudi Arabia, which again was a testament to the fact that these countries, with the exception of Iran and Russia, they had enjoyed historically good relations with the Taliban. The Chinese had always kept the door open via the ISI in the 1990s. They perhaps had one of the best working relations with the Taliban outside the three countries that recognised them. So that was not a surprise at all. But the shutting of the embassy underscored that, you know, while India had hesitatingly engaged the Taliban because the situation demanded so, there was clearly also a trust deficit because the view in India was that the Taliban essentially are proxies of the Pakistani state, specifically the generals in Rawalpindi. And there was a history essentially behind it, as you very rightly indicated, you know, from the Taliban rule in the IC814 hijacking in 1999 to not just the 2008 embassy bombing, but also attacks on other Indian interests in Afghanistan throughout the 20-year period that the republic was in existence. So there was a history behind why there was this distrust.

But clearly, four years down the line, what we’ve seen is there’s been a dramatic reconfiguration. That has to be situated in the larger, both geopolitical context, but also in context of the internal reconfiguration of the Afghan political landscape. Foremost, India is not geographically contiguous to Afghanistan. Historically, for India to undertake any kind of intervention, to have any consequential outcome, any tangible outcome, it has had to align its actions and its interests with other consequential regional players, namely Iran and Russia. Go back to the 1990s, when the so-called Harkat-e-Shamal was kept going. It was kept going essentially by an alliance of India with Russia and Iran, right? India doesn’t have geographical contiguity, unlike Pakistan or Iran, for that matter. So they’re always dependent on the other players. And both Iran and Russia had long sort of realigned their interests with that of the Taliban, for a multitude of reasons. And we can go into that at some stage, if you like. But the reality was that they had opened channels with the Taliban and had warmed up to the Taliban long before India did.

Practically no regional country, including the Tajiks, who initially were the most strident critics of the Taliban. None of them essentially have held out against the Taliban. They’ve all been engaging with the Taliban. So geopolitically, this left India with very few options. Indian presence in the 20-year period was largely contingent on a large American military footprint, which evaporated overnight. And with this large geopolitical context changing in the neighborhood, India didn’t have much of a choice because it couldn’t do anything consequential to alter the situation in Afghanistan. Coupled with that, unlike the 1990s, this is, of course, a very different Afghanistan. It’s a very different society from the 1990s, but it’s also a changed political landscape.

Unfortunately, you have a situation where many elements associated with the Republic were discredited; going to, you know, a very unsavory legacy that they built up over the last 20 years, which meant Afghans were not willing to just sort of go and die for a lot of these people whose own kids were having a good life abroad. Most of the leaders, none of the Tanzim leaders, actually, of any consequence are in the country. They’ve all fled the country. And none of the neighbouring countries are willing to support them. If anything, they’ve all been told you can have refuge, you can enjoy your political asylum, you can enjoy your holiday, but nothing more than that, effectively. So you have a situation, essentially, where there is no meaningful opposition of any consequence to the Taliban. And India, therefore, felt it is imperative now, in order to secure its own interests, and in order to have any kind of engagement with the Afghan people, the political reality of the day dictated that it has to engage with who is in power.

Question:

The rapprochement coincided with the deterioration in the relations between the Taliban and Pakistan, their historical patron. And since Muttaqi’s Indian visit, Pakistani officials have been increasingly accusing India of using Afghanistan as a conduit to conduct proxy activities against Pakistan. And therefore, some observers believe that India’s establishment of diplomatic relations with the Taliban is a reaction to the tensions between the Taliban and Pakistan. But you somehow indicated that it is part of a broader geopolitical dynamics in the region. What could be some of the components of those regional dynamics or regional posturing that India has adopted? And how does China’s influence in Afghanistan factor in this evolving triangle of Islamabad, Kabul and New Delhi?

Dr Sharma:

That’s many questions actually packed in one. We’ll take it sort of one at a time. You know, as far as the Pakistan-Taliban dynamic is concerned, you know, the Taliban-Pakistan relationship, in my opinion, has never been a black and white relationship. Yes, the Taliban have been perceived as proxies of Pakistan in an asymmetrical and, many would say, in a subservient relationship to Rawalpindi. They’ve been cultivated consciously by them essentially to further their own geopolitical lens, which in a nutshell has been that they wanted historically to sort of nurture amongst the Pashtuns Islamist constituency, a Sunni Islamist constituency, and essentially nip Pashtun nationalism in the bud because they have felt threatened by, you know, territorial irredentism that Pashtun nationalism has fostered. And they feel that the best weapon, essentially, to neutralise that has been to nurture a religious constituency. So, therefore, even before the Taliban sort of, you know, arrived in the scene, if you look at, you know, the period of the Afghan Jihad in the 1980s, they very consciously made a choice to actually deny political space to any royalist or nationalist elements who had patronised any form of Pashtun nationalism against the Pakistani state. And they nurtured certain kinds of political parties in Pakistan during the jihad years. And the Taliban essentially, in that sense, is a continuation in some ways of that policy because they felt that, you know, the Taliban, once they’re in power, they’re going to be grateful to Pakistan for all the good things they’ve done for them, the fact that they’ve enabled them to seize power. And this will translate into incremental gains, into influence for Pakistan, into leverages for Pakistan.

But that is not how it panned out even in 2001. If you look at the relationship, yes, you know, the Pakistanis bankrolled the Taliban. They supported them in terms of coming to power. They planted advisors. Yet the relationship was never one that was always a neat black and white relationship of a master and a client. The Taliban had their fair share of distrust about Pakistan, and that distrust essentially came into full bloom once the Taliban regime in 2001 was toppled. And the Pakistanis handed over a lot of the Taliban people to the Americans for a multitude of reasons.

Even today, the relationship is not a black and white relationship. The Pakistanis were gloating, when the Taliban entered Kabul. They felt they’ve achieved the desired political end. But clearly, in the four-plus years that the Taliban have now been in power, the relationship has only gone south. It’s nosedived. And it’s nosedived due to a multitude of reasons, including Pakistan’s sort of neocolonial behaviour, as many have pointed out, of lauding over Afghanistan, of wanting to dictate matters ranging from cabinet formation to a whole range of other issues, which has not sat down well with the Taliban. So that has certainly created an opening. It’s allowed space for manoeuvre for other countries like India. I mean, India was looking for an opportunity to reset ties with the Taliban. And this friction in the relationship with Rawalpindi allowed that room for manoeuvre. You know, and the Taliban were happy, of course, to play along because (a) it demonstrated to their internal constituents that, you know, they are not proxies of Pakistan and they will engage with who they wish to and who they think will be beneficial to furthering the interests of the state. And they are not going to essentially to the line that Pakistan wants them to be. And (b) it also allowed the Taliban to, you know, use that as a leverage against Pakistan. That, look, I mean, don’t think that you’ve gotten us into power and that, you know, you can sort of always dictate terms to us. There are certain red lines. There are certain issues we are not going to compromise on. And we’ll therefore also engage with people who you consider your rivals, you know. And uh that certainly allowed um some more room for maneuver to both sides as far as engagement is concerned, uh but you know pakistan has long sort of argued even when the republic was there uh that India is using its diplomatic missions to stir up uh trouble in Nalochistan and it is supporting the TTP right Now, when the Republic fell, actually all the Indian consulates disappeared. Basically, they had to be shut down.

Yet, what you see is a secular increase in TTP activity and TTP attacks across Pakistan, which essentially blunts the whole Pakistani propaganda that it was Indians who were bankrolling and supporting the TTP to stir up trouble in Pakistan. Now, the Pakistanis themselves have been admitting that no, it’s actually the Taliban which is giving sanctuary.

So I don’t think there’s much sort of credence to that idea of India using Afghanistan as a staging ground to stir up trouble in Pakistan. There’s not enough substance in the public domain to back up those allegations. Yes, I mean, both countries have engaged in rivalry and competition. They have both tried to also undercut each other because there are concerns and there are issues of trust between the two. But a lot of the troubles that Pakistan is facing at the moment are, in a sense, I believe, of their own making. You know, the TTP came up not because of Indian bankrolling. It came up because of Pakistan’s own mismanagement of, you know, what I refer to as the tribal areas over the course of the war on terror, you know. And that’s true actually for any state, you know.

Question:

But is it possible that India has been trying to co-opt [the] TTP, regardless of how they rose?

Dr. Sharma:

See, there’s been very little evidence essentially so far to substantiate the idea that India has co-opted. India has had informal links to other people associated with movements like the PTM. But with the TTP so far, there’s been scant evidence actually to demonstrate any credible kind of linkage between the TTP and India so far.

So I think that really doesn’t hold water, so to speak. And the whole narrative in Pakistan had been that the Indian consulates are actually supporting TTP activities. With the closure of the Indian consulate, those activities should have taken a hit. But what we’ve seen is that there’s been a surge, a secular surge in TTP attacks across Pakistan. And this is worn off by their own data. So I think there’s very little evidence essentially to support that claim.

Question:

Just to follow up on my previous question, I also asked about China’s influence in Afghanistan, how it factors. And also, if I add to that, you mentioned some of the benefits that the Taliban gain from this evolving relationship with India. And they are also seeking formal regional and international recognition as the government of Afghanistan. And as you mentioned, they also somehow want to hedge against their fraying relationship with Pakistan. But what does India gain from this diplomatic engagement with the Taliban within that broader geopolitical shifts?

Dr. Sharma:

Okay, so I’ll come to your latter part first, what does India gain, and then go on to look at China’s role. So one you know, Pakistan essentially was happy that Indian presence had been negated because they saw any kind of Indian presence as a security threat. And therefore, they were absolutely delighted that India had been completely cut out of the picture because over the last 20 years of the Republic, what we had seen was a substantive increase in the Indian footprint in Afghanistan across multiple sectors. And that had made Pakistan deeply uncomfortable. So they were essentially happy that they had achieved their political end state. They would have a client regime in Kabul, and they had managed to essentially ensure that the Indian footprint had virtually evaporated overnight with the victory of the Taliban. And they had not foreseen the possibility of such a dramatic realignment between the Taliban and the government in Delhi, particularly given the ideological dispensation of the government in Delhi. They were hopeful that this is not going to fructify into a good working relationship. And India is sort of out of the Afghan theater for good. But clearly, that is not how things have panned out.

And India essentially hopes that with engagement, through engagement with the Taliban, it’s going to achieve two ends. One is going to allow India a direct interface with people in Afghanistan, because, you know, India has wanted to position itself, you know, as a neighbourhood first country, which is a first responder to crises unfolding in its immediate neighbourhood. So therefore, you know, it’s been rushing aid, whether it’s in Sri Lanka, whether it’s been in Nepal or been in Afghanistan in the wake of humanitarian disasters. Now, you can only do that if you have some form of engagement with whoever is in power that necessitates engagement with whoever is in power. Second, India does not want to be caught in a situation like in the 1990s, when it had absolutely no communication with the Taliban and was faced with a sort of black hole of sorts when it came to grappling with the hijacking of the Indian airliner. It wanted to make sure that it has a channel of communication, it has some ears and eyes on the ground, and it sensitizes the Taliban or whoever is in power to at least be mindful of what the security concerns of the Indian state are. And given the sort of change in the overall geopolitical and internal political context of Afghanistan, the reality that the Indians have accepted is that the Taliban are here to stay for some time and they are the new reality of Afghanistan. And therefore it is imperative, if you want to engage, if you want to have any relationship with the Afghan people, if you want to secure your own interests, that you have to talk to the Taliban, you have to engage with them. There is no other alternative to it.

The third essentially reason why India essentially chose to engage is that India was very clear that it did not want to give Pakistan and China a free run to the northwest of its neighbourhood. India has had no engagement with Pakistan. um and you know with Afghanistan essentially being taken over by the Taliban essentially what you would have had is a huge landmass to the northwest of India’s borders wherein you know the Chinese essentially would be having a complete free run and this is not something uh that augur very well uh for India and therefore it chose essentially to recalibrate its strategy of engaging with the Taliban. It calculated the risks and the benefits that were to eschew from engagement. And the reason why China is something that India has viewed with concern is that while China and India both have had security concerns, the definition of, for instance, what constitutes terrorism, who constitutes a security threat and who doesn’t, they’ve been very different. Because in India, and many Afghans have spoken to agree with that, including ones in the Republic who were in the security apparatus.

The problem in China is that China has tended to see Afghanistan through the lenses of Rawalpindi to the extent that they have been willing to stake their international reputation by blocking resolutions in the Security Council, categorising certain elements as terrorists because they’ve been patronised by the Pakistani state. So the feeling in India has been that, you know, if the Chinese and the Pakistanis get a free run and there’s no counter, essentially, to them, essentially what you want to see is India acquiescing any kind of role and influence in Afghanistan, which has long been regarded as a country of strategic consequence. So therefore, there’s been a desire to recalibrate relations.

Question:

Yeah, maybe my last question before we end the conversation. Happy Jacob, Happymon Jacob, if I pronounce his name correctly, in an article for Time magazine in October, kind of painted an unpleasant picture of India’s geopolitical position. He argued that the military confrontation between India and Pakistan, China’s active support for Pakistan and Russia’s lukewarm response to that confrontation, despite its historical defense ties to India, and Washington’s recent embrace of Pakistan have created a claustrophobia for New Delhi. And in an October paper about Russia’s Afghan policy, you argued that Russia’s current engagement with the Taliban is underpinned by pragmatic realism. In some sense, many observers also think that Russia’s recognition of the Taliban was like a reaction to its loss of geopolitical position in the Middle East, and so they kind of draw parallels between Russia’s posturing and India’s policy behaviour shifts towards the Taliban. So how would you characterise India’s growing engagement with the Taliban? Is it also a pragmatic realism, if yes, or how do you define it?

Dr. Sharma:

I think not just India, I think all states in the region are in a pragmatic transactional relationship with the Taliban. Whether you look at New Delhi, whether you look at Moscow, whether you look at Tehran, whether you look at Dushanbe, they’re all in a pragmatic transactional relationship with the Taliban. So is Washington DC for that matter.

I mean, let’s not forget, you know, that Washington essentially is also said to be sharing actionable intelligence against the Daesh with the Taliban. Many European states that had long engaged in the rhetoric of human rights and women’s rights. All of that seems to have petered out with a lot of them now normalising the Taliban and entering into talks with the Taliban to deport Afghan refugees from Europe. So the engagement with the Taliban for many, many countries around the world, including India, it’s a pragmatic transactional relationship based on the realisation that the Taliban are here to stay. Fortunately, unfortunately, they’re here to stay for the medium term, at least, if not the long term. And therefore, it is imperative that they engage with the Taliban. So I think in that sense, that’s a sense that is characteristic of engagement with the Taliban across the geopolitical spectrum, so to speak. Yes.

Question:

One maybe last question. You know, Muttaki remains on the UN sanction list and he had to secure a waiver to travel ban for his visit to India and the ICC has also issued arrest warrants for the Taliban leaders. So Since India is considered to be the world’s largest or most populous democracy, how does its deepening relationship with the Taliban align with India’s democratic image and identity? And how do the opposition parties in India view it?

Dr. Sharma:

Clearly, engagement with the Taliban, which is an unsavory regime, doesn’t sit very well with the rhetoric of India being the largest democracy. But on the other hand, the fact is that realpolitik very often is an unsavory business. And very often states tend to engage with regimes whose worldview and ideology doesn’t necessarily augur very well with the democratic ideals and other social norms that we subscribe to. And that is equally true of India’s engagement with Myanmar or with Saudi Arabia or America’s engagement with Saudi Arabia or our engagement with Iran, a lot of what these regimes practice doesn’t sit well with what we claim we stand for. But realpolitik is an unsavory business, and ideology and ideals seldom tend to dictate the trajectory of policy choices that states make.

Question:

Thank you so much, Dr. Sharma, for joining me today in this deep dive conversation on India and the Taliban relationship. Thank you.

Dr. Sharma:

I hope I was able to answer your questions.

First, since Pakistan’s airstrikes in Kabul and Paktika province on 9 October, the Taliban and the Pakistani forces have engaged in eight rounds of cross-border fighting or airstrikes. I asked Amina about the immediate backdrop to this escalation? What does Pakistan want from the Afghan Taliban? To what extent is the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) is an internal issue requiring a political solution from the Pakistani government?

Second, Pakistan’s airstrikes in Afghanistan on 9 October hours after the Taliban’s foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi arrived in New Delhi for his first official visit to India. The timing suggests it was more than a mere coincidence. So why should Pakistan prevent the Taliban that claim to be the government of a sovereign state from establishing independent diplomatic relations with India?

Third, the Taliban and Pakistani delegations reached a preliminary ceasefire in talks hosted by Qatar in October. It has been extended in the subsequent rounds of negotiations hosted by Türkiye and Saudi Arabia, but this ceasefire remains fragile. What are the key obstacles to an agreement and what are the prospects of reaching a definitive and lasting ceasefire?

Fourth, talk of “regime change” in Afghanistan has surfaced within certain Pakistani circles. Are they part of Pakistan’s coercive campaign to pressure the Taliban? Or do they signal a growing realisation in Islamabad that a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan cannot contribute to regional peace?

Finally, a week after the first round of clashes between the Taliban and Pakistani forces, the Pakistani government on 17 October decided to expedite the expulsion of Afghan refugees and shut down all Afghan refugee camps in the country. What does Pakistan gain from the expulsion of refugees against the Taliban?

The following is the full transcript of this conversation:

Introduction:

Thank you, Amina Khan, for joining me for a discussion about the ongoing tensions between the Afghan Taliban and Pakistan. You are the director of the Center for Afghanistan, Middle East and Africa at the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad. You have edited five books, three of which directly relate to Afghanistan: “The Evolving Situation in Afghanistan: International and Regional Perspectives,” published in 2022; “The Return of the Taliban: International and Regional Perspectives,” published in 2024; and “Transnational Terrorism from Afghanistan to Africa.” You wrote your PhD dissertation on the Afghan Taliban, so I guess you have been following Afghanistan very closely for about 19 years or so.

Question:

Let’s begin with an overview of what has been happening between the Taliban and Pakistan over the past two and [to] three years [months], since 9 October, when Pakistan carried out airstrikes in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, and Paktia province. Since then, the Taliban and Pakistani military have engaged in a series of other cross-border fighting. For example, on 15 October, heavy fighting took place in Spin Boldak. Two days later, on 17 October, Pakistan conducted airstrikes in Paktia province. Can you help us understand the background to this escalation and what triggered it?

Amina Khan:

First of all, thank you for having me. You put me in a difficult position because it’s not easy to speak about the Pakistan-Afghanistan bilateral relationship. I’ve always said that it’s a very interdependent but very complex relationship. And hence we see that even 20 years down the line, the relationship is as complex as could be and, you know, as difficult as it is the situation that we’re currently facing. Coming to your question, look, let me just say that post-August 2021, when the Afghan Taliban de facto authorities took over in Afghanistan, Pakistan, you saw, was at the forefront, whether it was in terms of the evacuation process or even the humanitarian assistance. But I think more importantly, in terms of regional engagement, I think Pakistan was very forthcoming where it was saying that, you know, it was time for the international community to engage with the current dispensation in Afghanistan, not only for the people of the region, but more importantly, for the people of Afghanistan.

So Pakistan was very much at the forefront. And we saw even in the bilateral relationship, relations did improve, trade was at its peak, more, by the way, in favour of Afghanistan. because we were importing coal. And of course, our transit trade with Central Asia improved by - increased by about 70%.

But unfortunately, since then, we have seen, you know, a downward [trend] in the relationship. And this primarily has been because of unfulfilled expectations, primarily the inability of the current dispensation in Afghanistan to deliver on their pledges of reform, primarily on counterterrorism assurances. You’ve seen that since August 2021, there has been a spike in terrorist activities by the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan. And of course, this has triggered the relationship for the worse, where we have seen an unprecedented increase in casualties, primarily for security forces. And I think this is one of the reasons why we see the relationship now at its lowest, because the Afghan Taliban have not been able to deliver on the one pledge that they themselves agreed to, which was that they would not allow any terrorist entity to operate from the Afghan soil. Now, I know we have been hearing from the Afghan Taliban that the TTP does not exist in Afghanistan, that they do not support it. But I think, you know, events on the ground suggest something else, primarily because if we go back to August 2021, soon after they took over, they were able to help negotiate an agreement between Pakistan and the Taliban, sorry, the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan, where we saw a very brief ceasefire between the TTP and the government of Pakistan. But then in November 2022, again, the TTP ceased, you know, or rather they continued with the hostilities and they put an end to the ceasefire.

Also, the Afghan Taliban say that they don’t have leverage. But the fact is that if they were able to bring about a ceasefire, if they still offered to relocate the TTP and they still offer negotiations, this means that they do have leverage. And this also shows that the TTP is very much active, sadly, in Afghanistan, and it continues to attack, you know, security forces in Pakistan. So this is where the situation is. And unfortunately, as you can see, the relationship is at its lowest because of this very particular issue, which primarily revolves around security.

Question:

Okay, just on that, on 8 November, the Taliban’s chief spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, first of all, he said that the TTP existed before the Taliban’s capture of power in August 2021. And then he listed like several actions that he claimed the Taliban had taken since seizing power. I think three of them that stood [out] to me were relocating tribal refugees living near the Durand line, whose presence caused concerns in Pakistan, to central areas within Afghanistan. Second, issuing fatwas forbidding individuals from leaving Afghanistan to engage in jihad abroad without authorisation from their leader, Mullah Hibatullah Akhunzada. And finally, supporting conditions, as you mentioned, for direct negotiations between the Pakistani government and the TTP.

In fact, the Taliban believe they have done their part and the rest is Pakistan’s internal matter. And there is also the suggestion that the TTP and the Pashtun Tehafuz movement or PTM are simply two different responses to long-standing grievances of the Pashtuns in Pakistan. And the Taliban spokesman Mujahed said at the end of October that Pakistan wanted to pave the way for the return of the United States to Afghanistan, which in turn wants to regain control of Bagram Air Base. So the question is, what else does Pakistan want from the Taliban? Does the TTP issue not require an internal political solution from the Pakistani government? And do you see any political influence at play in Pakistan’s positions toward the Taliban as Mujahed claimed that Pakistan is playing on behalf of the United States?

Amina Khan:

OK, well, first of all, I think the- let me start with your last point about Bagram base, because we have been hearing a lot, you know, from Kabul over concerns that Pakistan is helping Washington in its aspirations to regain the Bagram base. I think the United States doesn’t need Pakistan’s help in this regard because they have a direct relationship with the Taliban. And we’ve seen this, you know, numerous times. Yes, it’s a transactionary relationship, but it certainly exists. And we’ve seen it whenever there is an exchange of prisoners. They directly engage with the Afghan Taliban. Besides, they’re still the largest contributor in terms of developmental aid. And that certainly doesn’t come through Pakistan. It goes directly to Kabul. So I think this is slightly disingenuous of the Afghan Taliban to say that, you know, Pakistan is interested in helping the Americans regain the base.

Coming to the TTP, let me be very honest with you. When we say Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan, this means that we need to take ownership because they are Pakistani Taliban. There is no doubt about it. And certainly it is a Pakistani problem and Pakistan needs to deal with it. And Pakistan has been dealing with it in its own way. But at the same time, and you know, when you have a neighbor that is enabling the movement of this particular group, it does create problems.

And I think what Pakistan is expecting from Afghanistan is not something extraordinary. It is simply asking the Afghan Taliban to adhere to those, you know, pledges of reform that they themselves agreed to, which was not allowing any terrorist entity to operate from Afghan soil. Now, again, we’re going to get into this vicious blame game of, you know, whether they’re allowing it to happen or not. But I think, you know, numerous United Nations security reports also talk about how the TTP have been empowered.

And I think it is important to understand and differentiate when we talk about the PTM and the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan. But the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan does not have popular support or does not have a popular support base within Pakistan. If they did, they would be very easily able to take over because, you know, whenever you have a movement, unless and until you don’t have domestic support, you really can’t flourish. And initially, if we go back to 2007, when they initially did come to now erstwhile FATA, there was popular support for them because they promised speedy justice and whatnot. But once they showed their true colors, the domestic population turned against them, including the tribals.

And another distinction I think we need to make regarding the TTP is that their goalposts keep on changing. What is it exactly that they want to bring about? First, they were against the state of Pakistan because we were a part of the so-called war on terror. Then they said they wanted to establish Sharia. Now, what kind of Sharia are we talking about? Because if you see, yes, we are the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, but we don’t follow strict Sharia in its true sense. And then again, there’s a question mark over whose interpretation of Sharia. And does the domestic audience actually want Sharia in the tribal areas? I think we need to distinguish between the conservative nature of the people and Sharia. There are two different things.

And also now the last demand of the TTP is that, you know, they want the reversal of erstwhile FATA. So how do we take a group like this seriously? So yes, it’s a domestic problem. Pakistan is dealing with it. I still think that there needs to be a concrete and comprehensive debate within Pakistan on what to do with the TTP. In the past, we have seen negotiations. We have seen certain TTP members becoming a part of the mainstream. I know this is a very unpopular topic to deal with in Pakistan when you talk about the concept of negotiations. I still feel that certain elements within the TTP can be approached and I think there should be negotiations because kinetic operations is not necessarily the answer. But again, that’s a Pakistani prerogative and solely it lies with us.

But then the Afghan Taliban certainly do have a responsibility. And unfortunately, they’re not fulfilling that responsibility. And yes, the TTP came into power or, you know, their inception dates back to 2007, way after the creation of the Afghan Taliban. But the Afghan Taliban cannot deny that the TTP did play an instrumental role in their insurgency and they do take ideological inspiration from the Afghan Taliban. Certainly, they cannot be equated, but they do take inspiration from them. So I think the Afghan Taliban need to make a decision, Ali. It’s a difficult decision, but they need to decide. They can’t have, you know, the best of both worlds. If they want to be accepted as a responsible member of the international community, they have to adhere to certain norms and regulations. Or if they want to continue to appease terrorist entities like the TTP, it’s very temporary. And I tell you, it’s a matter of time before the TTP eventually will turn against the Afghan Taliban, because the TTP are not religious in any sense of the word. They’re mostly crooks and criminals that actually jumped on the bandwagon of this whole Taliban concept.

So I think it’s important for the Afghan Taliban to realise the responsibility they have. And we are not asking them - what have we been asking them for the past four years? We’ve shown a lot of strategic patience. But when we have these high casualties where the TTP is constantly killing our security personnel, you know, there is no justification for it. If the Taliban were fighting, they were fighting against foreign forces. What is the TTP fighting against? They’re not foreign forces. They’re Pakistani soldiers that are defending their country. So I think the whole dynamic needs to be understood and there has to be a difference between the TTP and the PTM. And this is something that I think we tend to confuse or rather Kabul seems to be confused about.

Question:

Yeah, just going back a little bit, you mentioned that there was an escalation or intensification of attacks in Pakistan before the sort of the ongoing tensions. But about four months before the Pakistani airstrikes in Kabul, like on 30 May, Pakistan’s foreign minister announced that Pakistan would upgrade its diplomatic mission to an ambassador level. And the Taliban welcomed the decision and reciprocated. What happened during these four months between the end of May and 9 October? And I think one theory is that it is because of the warming relations between the Taliban in Afghanistan and India and Pakistan’s air strikes in Kabul and Paktia on 9 October, took place like hours after the Taliban’s foreign minister Amir Khan Mutaqi arrived in New Delhi for his first official visit to India. So it really did not seem to be a coincidence. Why should Pakistan prevent the Taliban that claim to be the government of a sovereign state from establishing relations with India?

Amina Khan:

No, first of all, let me just clarify. I think, you know, people seem to forget that every single day before, you know, FM Muttaki’s visit to India, we had major incidents across the border where every single day Pakistani soldiers were being killed. It’s just another issue that this was not being reported. If you look at mainstream Pakistani media and, you know, I encourage you and your viewers to do so, to do their research, you will see that we had several attacks where we had more than 10. I think the last attack was, I think it was between 16 to 18 soldiers that were martyred in attacks. And hence, you saw this reaction from Pakistan.

Let me just clarify on the India equation, because this is something that time and again comes up, regardless of whoever is sitting in Kabul. Look, I think in the past, certainly, you know, you’ve had these concepts of strategic depth and whatnot. Pakistan just expects to have a friendly government in Afghanistan, a non-hostile government. But this does not mean that Pakistan wants to dictate or dictate Pakistan, sorry, Afghanistan’s foreign policy or foreign relations. Afghanistan is a sovereign and independent country, and it has the right to engage with any country, as long as it’s not detrimental to the role of any other country. I think this is, you know, fair to say. I think, you know, this was completely blown out of proportion, because before that, if you see, you know, you did have the trilateral meeting that also took place between Kabul. In fact, FM Muttaki first traveled to Tehran, where he attended the Tehran Dialogue Forum, and I was there myself. And then he proceeded to Beijing, where they had the trilateral meeting, if you remember. And then after that, they had another trilateral meeting in Kabul. And I think the concerns initiated, because usually if you see the trajectory of the China-Pakistan-Afghanistan trilateral, there has always been a joint communique in which all of the three parties have talked about ETIM, TTP, and CPEC’s extension to Afghanistan. The last trilateral that did take place in Kabul, the Afghan Taliban refused to give a joint statement. And then you saw individually every country giving a statement. And the statement that was given out by the Afghan Taliban did not talk about ETIM, did not talk about TTP. And they themselves said that they no longer want to be a part of CPEC as it, you know, travels through disputed territory. So I think you can already see the changes that came about from Kabul itself.

And I honestly think that, you know, both countries need to move beyond the Indo-Pak crisis. If you remember when the tensions took place between India and Pakistan, I personally saw many people from Kabul themselves trying to bring Afghanistan into the equation. This has nothing to do with Afghanistan. Pakistan and India are two sovereign countries that have their differences. But that does not mean that a third country needs to be involved or that a third country needs to jeopardize its relationship to either keep Islamabad happy or New Delhi happy. So I really think that this is an understanding that needs to mature in the Afghan mindset. Honestly, I think, you know, a lot of water has flown under the bridge and Pakistan has accepted that Afghanistan and India have a historical relationship and it has always existed. It should exist as long as it’s not detrimental to Pakistan.

So I think it was just pure coincidence. But I think more importantly, the facts seem to be, you know, brushed under the carpet where we were facing attacks left, right and center, even during the days of Muttaki’s visit to India.

Question:

How do you see some of the statements, especially, for example, from your defense minister who said, who said that the Taliban are like India’s proxy.

Amina Khan:

Ali, you know, yes. No, you know, I just feel that I am not a spokesperson for our defense minister. He’s entitled to his opinions. But let me just say that I do not agree with a lot of the things that our defense minister says. Likewise, you have people sitting across the border in Kabul who also make, I think, careless statements. And I think this is, you know, sitting in such positions, I think we have to be very careful about the bigger picture. And we have to not let emotions get in the way. So, you know, I will leave it at that. You know, I’m sure you can always try and get an interview with our defense minister, you know, who can answer why he says what he says. I don’t necessarily agree to, you know, the statements that he has given.

Question:

I think there have been four rounds of talks so far mediated by Qatar first, and then two rounds of talks mediated or hosted by Türkiye in Istanbul, and the last one was quietly mediated by Saudi Arabia. It was not publicly acknowledged and this is probably because the third round ended in failure in Istanbul. So could you explain where they stand in terms of negotiations? What are the obstacles to an agreement or what are the prospects of an agreement on a more sustainable ceasefire? Of course, after the negotiations in Qatar, they agreed to a preliminary ceasefire which has been extended in the subsequent talks. But we really do not have a more sustainable ceasefire. And the ceasefire is not holding because on 5 December, there were reports of cross-border attacks. So, what is the role of the mediators? And you also mentioned the Afghanistan, Pakistan and China trilateral dialogue of foreign ministers, which has been taking place since 2017 and resumed under the Taliban in 2023. Is there a chance for China to play a role? So- taken together?

Amina Khan

Well, yes. Let me start from your last point. Sadly, you know, the ceasefire hasn’t held its place because on and off we have seen continuous attacks from the TTP across the border. And, you know, we continue to see casualties amongst our security forces. So to be very honest with you that I don’t feel that Kabul has been then fulfilling its promise of a ceasefire. But to be fair, I think Pakistan has continued to follow, you know, on the advice of the negotiators and exhibit strategic patience. But my concern always is that, you know, again, if the attacks continue to increase naturally, then you’re going to see a reaction from Pakistan. And I think that’s obviously going to be detrimental to the ceasefire, number one.

Number two, I think, yes, you know, while we welcome Qatar’s role, Turkey’s role and Saudi Arabia’s role, but I actually think that too many cooks spoil the broth. To be very honest with you, this is a situation that can only be resolved between Kabul and Islamabad. But there has to be willingness. No matter how many mediators get themselves involved, if you do not have, uh, commitment on either side, this relationship cannot move forward. Again, I will say that the only problem that exists between these two countries is the expectation that Pakistan has that there will be at least security from its western side. The Afghan Taliban do not seem to take this particular concern of Pakistan seriously. And I just feel that unless and until this issue isn’t [is] taken seriously by those sitting in Kabul, I don’t feel that any sort of mediation can help because, again, why did the mediation process or the facilitation process fail? Because Kabul was not willing to pen down written commitments. regarding this particular issue. And unless and until we don’t have full commitment from Kabul, I feel that this is going to be an exercise in futility. And my concern is more about the people of these two countries, because at the end of the day, it’s the people that suffer. We’ve seen with the closure of the border, it has affected both sides tremendously. The trade, you know, communities on both sides are constantly reaching out to their government saying that, you know, you have to move beyond this and reopen the border.

Afghanistan already is in a very difficult situation in terms of the humanitarian crisis. also with the repatriation of the refugees and, you know, the winter months. So I really think that, you know, focus should be on the common man, which is always, you know, compromised in this particular situation. The Chinese, again, you know, they have, they did, if you remember, the trilateral, again, was reinitiated because Pakistan and Afghanistan had problems on this very issue of the TPP. And they were able to bring about engagement. But I think the last trilateral and I think Kabul’s signals were very, very, you know, showing of where Kabul is headed right now in terms of the fact that they did not mention the TTP or the ETIM and they did not mention Afghanistan’s. Again, I will go back to that particular statement where they did not talk about Afghanistan’s extension, sorry, CPEC’s extension to Afghanistan. I think that’s very telling of where the Afghan foreign policy is headed and if they feel that it should be aligned with India, so be it. But I think they are going to then obviously lose out on relationships because let’s not forget, post-August 2021, one of the major countries that was engaging with the Afghan Taliban was the Chinese. And the Chinese don’t seem to be very happy with the Afghan Taliban right now because, you know, the investments that they had made have been taken back because the differences have arisen between the two, where the Taliban are saying that the Chinese weren’t able to deliver, the Chinese are saying that the Afghan Taliban certain individuals have been involved in corruption. So that relationship isn’t also toying well. And, you know, this whole India factor, I think it’s important to realise that since FM Muttaki’s visit, I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but every time, well, you know, there are statements coming out from Kabul and Pakistan, you now have statements coming out from India where India is very openly taking a position and going back to its old mantra of Pakistan being a sponsor or supporter of terrorism. So even if Pakistan does not want to consider the India equation, it has no other choice because now India is very blatantly making these statements in favour of Kabul. So I think we’re back to square one, as it was 20 years ago. The only difference is that now we have a new actor sitting in Kabul. But again, I will say that the only way this issue can be addressed is if Kabul and Islamabad sit together and find a common ground.

And here I have to say that the Afghan Taliban, again, have to make a decision. I understand it’s difficult for them because they are concerned that if they do take any action, whether it’s kinetic or otherwise, there will be a repercussion in terms of the TTP joining the ISKP [Islamic State -Khorasan Province]. This is a concern, and we do realize this concern. But I think they have to see the bigger picture in line. What is more valuable for them? A stable regional environment where Pakistan, whether the Afghans like it or not, is an important player, primarily because of the geographical and ethnic and religious linkages, or if they again want to invest in terrorist elements like the TTP.

And let me just add here, sorry, briefly, that it’s not just the TTP. If you see now, there’s this whole transnational terrorist link that exists within the region, whether it’s PTIM slash TIP, whether it’s, you know, I’ve heard Al-Qaeda, certain remnants of the IMU, then you have the PLA, then you have the TTP. You know, this is a very dangerous trend that is being set. And again, I will say that unless and until there is a collective approach towards counterterrorism and dealing with these terrorist elements, I really don’t think we can see this region flourish. And not even Afghanistan. We talk about connectivity projects, trade projects. How do they actually come into being if you don’t have a stable or at least workable relationship between Pakistan and Afghanistan?

Question:

There are a lot of like talks of regime change in Afghanistan. The New Lines magazine reported in November that Islamabad is already planning a regime change, and partly because of the Taliban cultivating closer ties with India. And then there is a platform called the Ambassador’s Lounge. I think it’s [run] by Pakistani diplomats. They had a talk show and the title was “Should Pakistan Go for Regime Change in Afghanistan?” including with the former ambassador or Pakistan’s former ambassador to Afghanistan. So and then I think we had, yeah, we had John Achakzai, caretaker minister for information and public relations for the government of Balochistan. He said that efforts are underway to unite the armed groups in Afghanistan to fight the Taliban and that with the help of regional countries, they will launch their campaign in the spring. And he said the realignment was happening rapidly. And the anti-Taliban armed groups had already started receiving support, weapons and money to fight the Taliban.

Do these reports and talks really reflect Taliban’s actual intentions and - Pakistan’s actual intentions and plans? Or they are just like part of Pakistan’s coercive efforts against the Taliban? Or do they really signal a growing realization that Afghanistan under Taliban control cannot contribute to regional peace? And many Afghans might have been already saying that Pakistan is now regretting supporting the Taliban.

Amina Khan:

Well, let me just say here that, yes, you know, sadly, it’s an open truth that Pakistan did support the Afghan Taliban. But let’s be very honest here. The Afghan Taliban came in through a process. That process is debatable, but it was a Doha process. It was primarily between the Americans and the Afghan Taliban. And it was endorsed by the international community. So I think, you know, this is one point that I did want to raise that, yes, well, Pakistan has certainly supported them. If it was just through the support, then I think the Afghan Taliban should have come into power way earlier than August 2021.

But coming over to this whole concept of regime change, certainly not. This is not, at least from my understanding, something that Pakistan wants because it is not Pakistan’s job or role to decide who comes into power in Afghanistan, regardless of what has happened in the past. And I think all regional countries have played their role in choosing their favorites. And I don’t think this has delivered. I think this has backfired because there should be no favorites in Afghanistan. Whoever comes into power through the will of the people, that government should be accepted by the region. And Pakistan is no exception to that.

So this whole concept of Pakistan is now working with the opposition or is trying to bring about a regime change. I cannot speak for the government of Pakistan. But from what I know, I don’t think this is in the works. And this is not something that anybody in Pakistan favors. Certainly, Pakistan, I will still say, is willing to work with the current dispensation in Afghanistan as we speak in terms of regional stability and having Afghanistan contribute to regional stability. Now, this is now for the Afghan Taliban to decide whether they want to be a part of this whole, you know, regional stability aspiration of Pakistan or not uh I again would say here that any notion of having a regime change is not something that Pakistan should be a part of I think you know history has taught us a lot uh if something happens organically within Afghanistan, that’s different.

Question:

But that’s kind of your opinion, but do these talks.

Amina Khan:

No, not at all. Because I think if you weigh the pros and the cons, I think having a regime, the only way you can have a regime change in Afghanistan is going to be militarily. It is going to involve kinetics and it’s going to be bloody. And I don’t think the region has the appetite for it, including Pakistan, who despite the fact has a very, very difficult relationship with Kabul as we speak. But I don’t think that this is something that the region can afford. Pakistan is a major player of the region, and this is not something that Pakistan would like.

I think you will continue to see a very tense and, at times hostile, relationship, but certainly I do not think that this is something that is being contemplated by Pakistan. And again, as I said, it will involve the shedding of blood. And I don’t think any regional country, including Pakistan, would want that because you’re not going to have a peaceful, you know, transition of power.

Question:

Yeah, just the last question, we have only like two minutes. A week after the first round of clashes between the Taliban and Pakistan, there was a meeting of, I think, the Pakistani government presided by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, and they decided to accelerate the expulsion of Afghan refugees. Why Pakistan is using the refugees against the Taliban?

Amina Khan:

Let me just tell you, I think this is a policy that I personally do not agree with because I think Pakistan has been an exemplary host in terms of hosting refugees compared to other countries. And I feel that we have undone the goodwill that we have shown over the past 40 years. But at the same time, I do understand the domestic limitations Pakistan has, because you see, it’s a worldwide phenomena, countries that are much richer in resources and, you know, whatnot, are deporting illegal, you know, migrants. So I think it’s very difficult when you have countries in the West that are doing it because they say now that Afghanistan, you know, Afghan refugees are now economic migrants because they say apparently peace and stability has returned to Afghanistan. It then becomes very difficult for a country like Pakistan, you know, not to do this. I am not in favour of it, but I think there are domestic compulsions within Pakistan. And I think the domestic audience also feels now that they need to focus within and give their own priority, give their own people the priority they need. But I still feel that I think this is something Pakistan should rethink, because I don’t think expelling refugees will convince the Afghan Taliban to deliver.

Ali:

Thank you so much, Amina Khan. I hope we will be able to continue this conversation about the issues between the two countries.

Amina Khan:

Thank you so much.