A year ago, as we in India, celebrated the 75th year of India’s independence, the Taliban were preparing to move into Kabul. The rest of that joyous day was spent watching in horror as US forces made a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, leaving behind military equipment worth billions. Worse was the sense that the Afghan people had just been left to their own fate, abandoned by the rest of the world to face the onslaught of the Taliban who rolled into Kabul almost in tandem with the withdrawal of the American troops. The culmination of the horrors of the day were videos of people falling down aeroplanes flying westerners out of the country, as desperate Afghans who had tried to stow away on the aircraft wheels fell down when the wheels were pulled in.
There were fears in India too. A large number of people worked on the many Indian development and infrastructure projects and there was concern for their safety. There was also concern about the use of the abandoned US military equipment. Given the deep links of the Taliban with Pakistan, especially the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), it was a fair assumption that India would feel the heat.
Much that has happened in Afghanistan over the last one year is reminiscent of the brutal Taliban rule in the late 1990s. Crack down on protesters, reports of detained and beaten journalists, restrictions on the rights of women, and re-establishment of the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice have aroused much concern.
Hunger and poverty have reached alarming proportions in the country. According to a May report by the International Rescue Committee (IRC), 43% percent of Afghans are living on less than one meal a day. 90% surveyed, reported food as their primary need. After one year under Taliban 2.0, Afghanistan has become an isolated nation, increasingly impoverished.
UN Women and others have highlighted that over the past 12 months, human rights violations against women and girls have mounted steadily. Despite initial promises that women would be allowed to exercise their rights within Sharia law—including the right to work and study— Taliban have systematically excluded women and girls from public life. Women hold no cabinet positions in the de facto administration, which has also abolished the Ministry of Women’s Affairs—effectively eliminating women’s right to political participation. Taliban has also banned girls from attending school past the sixth grade and barred women from working most jobs outside the home. In May, the Taliban decreed women to cover their faces in public and instructed them to remain in their homes except in cases of necessity. Women are banned from travelling long distances without a male chaperone, and unchaperoned women are increasingly being denied access to essential services. In a statement, the Executive Director of UN Women bemoaned that decades of progress on gender equality and women’s rights have been wiped out in mere months. She was harsh on the “Taliban’s meticulously constructed policies of inequality” that have set Afghanistan apart as the only country in the world where girls are banned from going to high school.
The Taliban blame a lack of female teachers and the need to arrange the segregation of facilities. While primary school education has been permitted for girls, and some public universities reopened for both men and women in February, women's participation in the labour force has dropped since the Taliban takeover last summer, according to the World Bank.
It was terrorism emanating from Taliban controlled Afghanistan that resulted in the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. With the return of the Taliban, the world worried about Afghanistan becoming a safe haven for the growth of terrorism once again. These fears were fanned when the Taliban’s new thirty-three-member caretaker cabinet included men considered terrorists by the United States and sanctioned by the United Nations. In 2021, a report by a UN team monitoring the Taliban said that the group still has strong ties with al-Qaeda, while adding that the Taliban had started to “tighten [their] control over al-Qaeda by gathering information on foreign terrorist fighters and registering and restricting them.” Media reports claim that Taliban continue to provide al-Qaeda with protection in exchange for resources and training and that between two hundred and five hundred al-Qaeda fighters could be in Afghanistan. The leaders are believed to be based in regions along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Apprehensions about Taliban sheltering/working with terrorist groups were reinforced after the killing of Al Qaeda leader, Ayman Al Zawahiri in a US drone strike, though Taliban do not acknowledge either Zawahiri’s killing or his presence in Kabul. The situation is worsened by the fight between Taliban and their rival, the Islamic State Khorasan, a terrorist group with up to 2,200 members in Afghanistan, which has claimed or been credited with bombings and killings.
Majority of the embassies of Afghanistan, including the one in New Delhi, continue to function under the banner of the former Republic while engaging with the Taliban’s acting government in Kabul to carry out humanitarian assistance and meet the demands of their diaspora. In a statement issued to the Taliban interim government in Kabul, the Afghan missions stated that they will continue to follow the erstwhile ‘Republic’ and use the tricolour flag, while blaming the Taliban for bringing back “draconian policies and directives”. Nearly every Afghan embassy said that the Taliban have “failed” to deliver in the past year and have called for reimposing the travel ban on the Taliban leadership by United Nations,
India has a civilizational relationship with the people of Afghanistan. Many of us grew up with the image of the Pathan in Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Kabuliwala'. India has, therefore, continued its humanitarian support to Afghanistan. In order to closely monitor and coordinate the efforts of various stakeholders for the effective delivery of humanitarian assistance and in continuation of the engagement with the Afghan people, an Indian technical team reached Kabul in June this year and has been deployed in the Embassy there, an MEA statement announcement.
