Leniency towards Taliban will prove disastrous, says Former Afghan Minister

Afghanistan's former Minister of Mines and Petroleum, Nargis Nehan suggested that leniency towards the Taliban would be perilous as it could embolden fundamentalist groups elsewhere to stage similar takeovers.

Speaking at an interview with European Foundation for South Asian Studies' Director Junaid Qureshi, Nargis Nehan who now lives in Norway as a political refugee said, the 'new' Taliban were even more dangerous than the 'old' Taliban as they held political grudges against democratic elements in contemporary Afghanistan, including media outlets, political activists, and former members of the security forces.

At the same time, this new version of the Taliban is a lot more fragmented, including lack traditional chain of command that would allow the Taliban regime to coherently develop and implement policy throughout Afghanistan, she said.

Describing her personal life, Nehan outlined that she belonged to a non-political family background. After her family fled to Pakistan during the Afghan-Soviet War, Nehan began attending school in Pakistan and later obtained a job in an international organization active in Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban regime.

From 2002 onwards, she worked in a variety of humanitarian positions in Afghanistan before entering the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Finance. In 2010, Nehan left the public sector and founded the NGO Equality for Peace and Democracy before returning to governmental affairs in 2014 in an advisory role for Afghanistan's then-President Ashraf Ghani.

Nehan remains actively engaged in finding solutions to the problems in Afghanistan. Now based in Norway, she was invited to the recent talks between Western and Taliban officials held in Oslo but refused to attend on the grounds that the Taliban never really bought into political negotiations in the past.

She outlined that she did not oppose negotiations with the Taliban per se but that talks should be held based on the Taliban fulfilling predetermined conditions. If these conditions were not communicated or upheld, she suggested, negotiations merely legitimized and emboldened the Taliban and its tactics of holding the Afghan population hostage.

In 2017, Nehan was appointed Minister of Mines and Petroleum, a position from which she resigned in 2019 after the Taliban and the United States began engaging in bilateral peace talks that excluded the Ghani government. Within the public sector, Nehan narrated, she faced discrimination by equals and higher-ups, further motivating her to focus on the advocacy of female rights outside of the public sector.

She was critical of the State-building enterprise that Afghan governments engaged in between 2001 and 2021. Adopting a highly centralized constitution and political system that did not devolve political power to Afghanistan's various political and ethnic groups, she argued, was a major shortcoming of the Republic's post-Taliban political order that further allowed the Taliban to capitalize on opportunistic elements in the Afghan population.

She contended that the responsibility for Afghanistan's (renewed) fall to the Taliban lay with both internal and external actors. On the one hand, government-internal corruption and conflict rendered the government incapable of successfully offering the Afghan population an alternative vision for the future by failing to develop functioning public institutions and national security forces.

Corruption and issues associated with centralization were so endemic that they paralyzed the Afghan State and ultimately facilitated the government's collapse. At the same time, a host of regional and extra-regional actors, ranging from Iran and Pakistan to the United States, are responsible for using Afghanistan as a staging ground for proxy wars and ideological conflicts.

She rejected corruption allegations against her. These allegations, she suggested, were false and had been raised as a reaction to her highlighting corruption and sexual harassment within the administration. In regard to former President Ghani, Nehan contended that Ghani was more driven by the desire to establish and hold onto political power than by the financial gains his position would produce.

As time went on, however, President Ghani was said to become increasingly reliant on a network of corrupt affiliates that would shore up political support for his regime while extracting funds from the government.

Turning to the current situation in the country, Nehan argued that extrajudicial killings and incarcerations had once again become pervasive. The hope that pressure from the international community would produce a more moderate form of the Taliban has turned out to be futile.

Regarding the Taliban's treatment of women, she highlighted that violence against women was present outside of the ranks of the Taliban as well and that the Taliban, in particular, was shaped by a lack of exposure to empowered women, normalization of violence following decades of civil war that has isolated Afghanistan from female rights gains elsewhere, and the patriarchal norms that continue to shape Afghan society.

Anxious to not lose control over Afghanistan, the contemporary Taliban has not officially announced the oppression of girls and women as it did between 1996 and 2001, also in order to project a more positive image to the international community.

Despite this, Nehan emphasized, that atrocities continue; although social media has helped to create some coverage, restricted media access to parts of the country has also limited information concerning the Taliban's conduct.

The discrimination of women, she argued, was more associated with the cultural norms of the patriarchal system than the Islamic belief as such. Indeed, the Taliban has increasingly referred to their interpretations of Afghan culture rather than Islamic scriptures as a justification for their marginalization of women. She remarked that Afghanistan's social fabric has been severely shaped by decades of conflict and the influx of arms and foreign ideologies.

For Nehan, this external element in Afghanistan illustrates that a resolution of the conflict in the country must involve both Iran and Pakistan, especially as the Taliban takeover has also empowered the Pakistani Taliban. The interconnectedness of militancy in the region may motivate attempts to develop regional responses to shared security threats in the coming years and decades, she said.

In the future, Nehan concluded, the Taliban will struggle to accommodate domestic demands for a more inclusive political order within their political ideology. She predicted that the country is moving towards a renewed civil war between the Taliban and other non-State actors that are backed by foreign powers.

Some of these actors, she argued, will seek to engage Afghan women, and enhanced competition between groups may make women in Afghanistan key to generating political support for the respective groups, allowing Afghan women to extract sociopolitical concessions.

She said, for the Taliban, the internal influence of the Haqqani Network is likely to limit the extent to which the group can make concessions on women's rights.

Lastly, Nehan spoke about the international dimension of the conflict in Afghanistan; the Western withdrawal has limited American and European capacity to shape developments in the country. If militancy is not contained, migration issues will be exacerbated.

The United States, Nehan proposed, has to once again play an important role in Afghanistan, for instance by empowering civil society actors that can put pressure on the Taliban to create a more inclusive government.

( With inputs from ANI )