Taliban 2: What’s Next for Afghanistan

Tariq wanted to be a writer. Born in a remote district of Afghanistan, he belongs to a generation that dreamed. As he grew older, Tariq became more vocal in his support for equality, women’s rights and human dignity. “I only ever wanted to promote the virtue of kindness and dignity among my people,” said Tariq, who asked OZY to conceal his true identity and location to protect him from Taliban persecution.

When the Taliban re-seized control of Afghanistan one year ago, Tariq’s advocacy put him on the new government’s enemy list. He was detained. “They took me to Kabul, where I was brought to the senior Taliban leaders. For days, I was tortured and abused, and eventually they handed me a weapon and I was told to join them or be killed,” said Tariq. He eventually escaped and is now in hiding. “They replaced my pen with a gun I had spent my whole childhood fighting against. What future do you think I have left?”

That’s a question staring at millions of Afghans, as their country enters a second year after the Taliban’s return to power. With one of the world’s youngest populations — 63% are under the age of 25 — Tariq’s struggles over the past few months raise uncomfortable questions that will echo well beyond Afghanistan. Amid rising hunger, an economic collapse and few opportunities for growth, Afghanistan’s youth is also vulnerable to radicalization.

This is particularly concerning as the Taliban-controlled country once again threatens to turn into a hotbed of international terrorism. Earlier this month, U.S. drones killed al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri in downtown Kabul, where he was living in a house linked to the Haqqani family that’s a central part of the Taliban, whose return to power has emboldened other terrorist groups, raising security concerns throughout the region and globally. Also, many U.S. weapons given to Afghan security forces have fallen into Taliban hands, and are reportedly being recovered from militants in regional conflicts.

“The violent takeover of Afghanistan by [the] Taliban has served as a ‘proof of concept’ for other Islamist militant fundamentalist groups, who feel that it is possible to come to power or carve out territorial control using terrorism without incurring significant international censure,” Ahmad Shuja Jamal, a former Afghan senior security official and coauthor of “The Decline and Fall of Republican Afghanistan,” told OZY.

The situation is worse for women. With the Taliban banning girls over the age of 12 years from schools, women’s participation in universities will now come to a grinding halt. In decrees that are reminiscent of the previous Taliban era in the 1990s, they have imposed several restrictions on women’s employment, movements and even their clothes.

But hundreds of underground schools have emerged in recent months to help Afghan girls continue their education. “I have been working in education for many years — the only difference is that I have to now be cautious because what we are doing is no longer legal,” said Pashtana Durrani, executive director at LEARN Afghanistan, an NGO that operates some of the secret schools across the country.

Durrani’s schools cater to nearly 700 girls between ages of 13 and 18 years, covering the regular curriculum as well as vocational courses. The classes are taught in secret classrooms at homes of teachers, as well as online. “Earlier, our biggest concerns were fundraising, but now it is more than that; we are worried about security, students’ futures, and to ensure that we are doing the right thing by them,” she told OZY in an interview from exile in the U.S.

Despite these efforts, many Afghan girls remain out of school and vulnerable to early and forced marriages, which are expected to rise in the coming years. The deepening economic crisis facing Afghanistan, amplified by international sanctions on the Taliban, has left most families on the brink: Nearly 23 million Afghans are facing acute food insecurity, according to the United Nations.

“And yet, in the past year, [the Taliban] have issued 29 verdicts, limiting women’s freedoms,” said Fawzia Koofi, a former Afghan parliamentarian and one of four women on the 24-member Afghan team that was negotiating with the Taliban. “If they could focus only a fraction of that energy on tackling economic crises or social issues, the situation would have probably been different.”

The militant regime, Koofi told OZY, has rolled back “years of achievement we made challenging the patriarchy, which wasn’t easy even before the Taliban.” It will be difficult for women to return to political and public spaces under the Taliban, she said.