Don’t Work With the Taliban

Two years have passed since the Taliban completed their takeover of Afghanistan, but Western governments and nongovernmental organizations remain stumped about how to deal with the country. Hunger and poverty are rampant, and Western countries often end up accidentally punishing the Afghan people for the loathsome policies of their leaders. After the Taliban banned women from working in most jobs outside the home, some aid agencies scaled back their operations or threatened to withdraw from Afghanistan entirely. Continuing to work in the country, they believed, would mean abandoning Afghan women. But walking away from Afghanistan in defense of women’s rights hurts Afghan women most of all.

A better approach would be to focus on economic growth and development projects that will ultimately benefit Afghan women as well as men. Western governments can create jobs and revitalize the Afghan economy while mostly working around the Taliban regime. And by improving the country’s economic outlook, Western governments can reduce the dependence of ordinary Afghans on short-term humanitarian aid and strengthen their leverage over the Taliban.

BACK IN BUSINESS

Promoting economic development in Afghanistan achieves two important goals: uplifting the Afghan people and creating leverage for the West. The Taliban do not operate according to the classic logic of international relations. Carrots, including international recognition and humanitarian aid, and sticks, such as threatening to withdraw foreign nongovernmental organizations from Afghanistan, have repeatedly failed to change the Taliban’s behavior. Yet Western countries continue to recycle these faulty tactics.

Instead of simply punishing the regime in Kabul, Western governments should aim to bypass it as much as possible to improve the lives of the Afghan people. To that end, they should reconnect the Afghan economy to international markets, encourage private investors to return, and make the transition from providing emergency humanitarian aid to more sustainable development assistance that benefits local communities directly. Doing so might seem like a gift to the Taliban, but in fact it would create avenues for economic advancement uncontrolled by the group and enable Afghans to get out from under the group’s thumb.

When Afghanistan was taken over by the Taliban, there was no international protocol for engaging economically with a UN-designated terrorist group. Many countries froze Afghanistan’s foreign reserves and imposed sanctions on the Taliban. Capital fled the country, aid dried up, and the new regime in Kabul experienced a liquidity crisis, sending the economy into a freefall. Faced with a horrific famine and an explosion of poverty in Afghanistan, the United States and its allies allowed a slight economic opening. Western governments lifted some sanctions, and more critically, in February 2022, the U.S. Treasury Department issued a lifeline license that allowed Western banks and companies to resume some commercial and development activity in Afghanistan.

But barriers to economic recovery remain. Since the government is not recognized, Afghanistan’s central bank’s official functions are limited, including one of its core functions: facilitating foreign transactions. The Taliban do not need to have a role in resolving these issues. An independent entity, perhaps established by a multilateral institution such as the World Bank, could act as the clearing-house, effectively outsourcing the job of the central bank. Such an arrangement would allow business and foreign investment to again flow into Afghanistan, reviving the economy and creating much-needed employment opportunities.

The West should reconnect the Afghan economy to international markets.

Other important commercial activities remain unnecessarily inhibited by Western sanctions as well. A year and a half after the U.S. Treasury Department issued its game-changing license, it is time for Western countries to lift the remaining sanctions on investment and more actively encourage foreign investment and business operations in Afghanistan. Even with official permission to reengage, many organizations are wary of returning to Afghanistan for reputational reasons or for fear of accidentally violating sanctions. Clearer messaging from Western governments could help them overcome such hesitation.

The reentry of foreign capital is vital to Afghanistan’s development and requires little direct collaboration with the Taliban. For example, Western investors and businesses could play a larger role in developing and extracting Afghanistan’s vast mineral resources, which include a trove of rare-earth minerals and a large supply of lithium critical to the green energy transition. While Western countries take the lead on admonishing the Taliban for its human rights abuses, more ideologically permissive governments are investing in crucial commodities. China recently signed a $10 billion lithium contract and a $4 billion copper contract in Afghanistan. Although contracts this large require collaboration with the government, the West could still sidestep the Taliban by easing the way for smaller projects with companies already operating in Afghanistan. In doing so, the West could continue a dialogue on human rights while fostering mutually beneficial economic growth—a win-win for Afghan and Western economies.

At the same time, Western governments should shift their focus from supplying humanitarian aid, which can encourage dependence on temporary relief measures, to more sustainable and large-scale economic development initiatives. They should focus in particular on development projects that boost investment, trade, energy and transport infrastructure, the delivery of services, and Internet connectivity. Development finance institutions such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank can play an important role in making such projects less risky for private investors, for instance by providing guarantees and capital. Furthermore, national aid agencies, such as the United States Agency for International Development, do not need to reestablish an on-the-ground presence for Western governments to influence development. Instead, they can work more closely with multilateral institutions, the private sector, and nonprofits to shape policy initiatives.

For starters, Western governments should encourage the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank to resume regional infrastructure projects that were paused after the Taliban takeover. In particular, they could support the resumption of a planned $10 billion gas pipeline running from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and Pakistan to India, which would bolster Afghanistan’s economy and create hundreds of local jobs. Suspending this project did not delegitimize the Taliban in the eyes of Afghans. Rather, it delegitimized the international community that Afghans feel has abandoned them. It is nonsensical to give up on existing development projects out of fear that the Taliban will benefit. Anything that is good for Afghanistan—both humanitarian aid and development projects—will benefit the Taliban to some degree. But assistance will benefit ordinary Afghans far more than it will their government, ultimately weakening the Taliban’s grip over Afghan society.

INVESTING IN PEOPLE

As the Afghan economy grows, so will the range of opportunities for the Afghan people. But economic development is about so much more than capital investment and infrastructure development. It is about investing in human capital and pulling people out of poverty.

Education is a cornerstone of such efforts. Today, the vast majority of Afghan children, especially girls, cannot attend school. Many children are forced to work because of dire economic conditions. Many others have had their schools closed because their teachers have not been paid. Western governments and aid agencies can help pay teachers’ salaries and fund the vast private university network that existed before the Taliban’s takeover.

Western governments should also supply tablets uploaded with noncontroversial educational materials. As educational resources have become increasingly inaccessible to women and the poor, provisions such as long-life tablets that operate without an Internet connection could be an educational lifeline. The West can fight Taliban indoctrination by offering eye-opening regional and global educational exchanges for university students. At the very least, the U.S. Fulbright Program should resume scholarships for Afghan men and women.

Today, the vast majority of Afghan children, especially girls, cannot attend school.

At this point, Western governments cannot expect the Taliban to heed their demands to let women work. But they can find small, critical spaces where women can be reintegrated into public life, such as in distributing aid to other women. The Taliban have already allowed some women to participate in projects in which their services are necessary, such as delivering aid to widows. Donors should condition their aid on women’s participation in specific tasks, such as distributing infant formula, that the Taliban might be open to.

More broadly, women’s input needs to be sought on all development projects. This is not just to give them a stake but also because their knowledge is invaluable. Donor countries should form private women’s commissions to solicit information that only women have access to. For example, if the United States repairs a dam in Afghanistan, it should consult with Afghan women on what times of day homes need electricity the most.

Engaging women in these sorts of ways is the bare minimum, and progress will be a slow slog. But as economic activity picks up, the Taliban will hopefully be preoccupied with the attendant business opportunities, opening up more space for women to return to the public sphere. If male unemployment is low enough, women’s value as workers will increase. According to the charity Save the Children, around 121,000 Afghan children were sold as child brides, slaves, adopted children, or to have their organs harvested in the first seven months after the Taliban’s takeover to supplement the incomes of desperate families. Demand for female participation in the workforce might make girls more valuable and reduce the incentives for their families to sell them.

TALKS AND TANTRUMS

In their misguided effort to use carrots and sticks to influence the Taliban’s behavior, Western governments have gradually sought ways to work with the group. These efforts do not reflect an increased acceptance of the Taliban’s heinous ideology, but a growing desperation to reward the tiny concessions that the Taliban make.

This concessionary approach is misguided. The Taliban will never respect women or human rights. Policymakers cannot allow talks in Doha or minor commonalities in security objectives to beguile them into thinking progress is being made. The West needs to remain focused on practical projects that directly help the Afghan population.

After all, the Taliban know that acceding to the demands of Western governments, including letting girls go to school, will not unlock big enough concessions to strengthen their domestic position. On the contrary, they believe that such capitulations would only undermine their ideology and legitimacy. Some Taliban leaders see foreign denunciations as a form of political capital, which only entrenches the group’s hard-line stances. By that logic, whatever the West wants is the opposite of what the Taliban should do. To avoid falling into such a trap, Western governments should minimize engagement with the regime, instead focusing on programs that directly help ordinary Afghans. Top-down diplomacy will go nowhere; the past two years have proved that.

Furthermore, many of the issues that the West is most concerned about, in particular women’s rights, are oversimplified. The exclusion of women from public life is not just a gender issue but a security, economic, and development issue, as well. Seeing it as such is crucial to creating real change. For instance, some of the most effective ways to empower women include carving out central roles for them to play in development projects, establishing chambers of commerce for women, and launching independent study programs for women in subjects such as accounting so they can partake in resurgent business activity.

Finally, and most critically, the West should not consider disengagement an option. Every time the Taliban do something awful, Western governments respond by shutting down dialogue for months at a time. The Taliban see these stoppages as little more than childish tantrums—an approach that slows progress and achieves nothing in the end.

BEYOND SURVIVAL MODE

None of this means the international community should recognize the Taliban. It should not. The Taliban government is an illegitimate, brutal regime. But the people of Afghanistan cannot be abandoned. Rather than granting the Taliban a seat at the UN, which could not easily be revoked, Western governments should focus on economic engagement, which can be more flexible and targeted. If the West needs to punish the Taliban, it can suspend certain business and investment licenses. If security is not maintained, businesses will flee, leading to anger at the regime. If women are not integrated, economic potential is halved. These are powerful points of leverage. But regardless of how the Taliban responds to Western pressure, millions of people will be lifted out of horrific conditions and given the power to participate in the development of their country instead of remaining reliant on humanitarian aid.

A new way forward is possible. The people of Afghanistan can be supported. The economy can be revived. And in the process, the country can move beyond survival mode to start crafting a genuinely brighter future. The only real failure would be not to try at all.