Afghanistan goes from bad to horrific: ‘This country is like a jail’
More than 100 days after the Taliban marched through the gates of Kabul, ending its deadly two-decade campaign to regain control of Afghanistan, the country is on the brink of collapse and famine.
More than 100 days after the Taliban marched through the gates of Kabul, ending its deadly two-decade campaign to regain control of Afghanistan, the country is on the brink of economic collapse and famine.
Millions of girls are forbidden from going to school, many women have been told not to come to work, and others have been beaten for protesting their right to do either, despite a Taliban undertaking to uphold their rights.
Its promise of amnesty for all who opposed it has also proven empty, with former soldiers, government officials and critics turning up dead or being brazenly executed in public.
Yet with millions of Afghans now out of work, many businesses and banks shuttered and billions of dollars in foreign aid and cash reserves frozen, the predominant fear now is not the insecurity that has dogged the population for four decades but hunger as the savage winter sets in.
The Taliban is yet to fill thousands of government positions following the dramatic exodus that emptied Afghanistan’s cities of its educated and professional class.
Those public servants who are still turning up to work have not been paid in months.
US, Australian and allied forces helped evacuate some 123,000 Afghans and foreign citizens immediately after the Islamist takeover. Tens of thousands more have poured over land borders seeking asylum. Still, 35 million people remain in Afghanistan. While many had no option, others refused to join the “brain drain” and chose to stay behind.
SOME days, Obaidullah Baheer wakes up in Taliban-held Afghanistan and wonders whether the living or the dead are more fortunate.
The 31-year-old academic stayed when the militants seized control on August 15, believing they would need the assistance of educated Afghans to govern a country that has changed drastically since the Taliban was ousted from power in 2001.
As thousands raced for the exits, the grandson of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar – a former Afghan prime minister and the one Mujahideen warlord who cheered the Taliban’s return – gave cautiously hopeful interviews on the need for national reconciliation.
Raised in exile – in Pakistan and then Australia, where he studied at the University of NSW – Baheer didn’t want to leave again.
If Afghanistan was ever going to see peace, he reasoned, it would start with people such as himself bridging the two worlds that they lived in.
But the Taliban didn’t want outside help and Baheer spends most days tackling crises, whether it’s delivering food to starving families, negotiating the release of civilians in Taliban custody, or organising hospital admission for a critically-ill baby.
“Sometimes I feel very alone,” he tells Inquirer. “A lot of the educated and those working for a more moderate Afghanistan have left, which means I have to take on more responsibility.
“There are literally life and death situations happening 24/7. It feels like the train is coming and there are people tied to the tracks on one side and people tied on the other and you have to decide where to turn the train. How do you make such a decision?”
He runs an informal welfare group helping address Afghanistan’s ballooning humanitarian crisis, and still lectures at Kabul’s American University – though the acute lack of currency means it can pay only a fraction of his wage.
“More than 50 per cent of students have left the country and another 25 per cent don’t see the utility of education anymore. Either they can’t afford it or the female students don’t see the point in a country where women are barely allowed in government sectors,” he says.
“I have to keep messaging students to convince them to participate in class.
“I have tried to sound hopeful … you don’t tell a terminal patient they’re done for. My message was ‘there is much we can do’, but this was linked to how the Taliban acted.”
With the new rulers still targeting their critics, Baheer has toned down his political activism, dialled up his welfare activity and turned back to academia to try to find a way to help navigate Afghanistan through its current crisis.
His UNSW Masters thesis looked at how to negotiate with Taliban insurgents, but he says what’s needed now is a road map for how to engage with religious extremists once in power.
He is looking at PhD options abroad to work out how best to chart that path.
“When I first crossed the border a few years ago I knew I would give everything to this country and I will keep doing that, no matter where I go and what I do.
“(Afghans) have suffered for decades and it’s time we figured out a way to stop that.”
WARNINGS of impending disaster in Afghanistan are coming in relentless waves; 23 million Afghans face starvation this winter and a million children may die as the country hurtles towards “unprecedented fiscal shock” from a forecast 20 per cent drop in the country’s GDP.
Can the Taliban pull Afghanistan back from the brink of catastrophe? Mahbouba Seraj – one of the country’s most respected women’s rights activists and a familiar name on 2021’s “most-influential” lists – gives a surprising response.
“They might be able to because to tell you the honest truth I don’t see that much difference” between them and their US-backed predecessors, she says.
“They’re both power hungry. The last government wanted to take everything. The Taliban say they don’t but let’s see what happens when they get their hands on the money. Let’s see how different they will be.
“I’m not saying something good can come out of this. I’m just hoping for something liveable.”
The 73-year-old founder of the Afghan Women’s Network, who moved back to her home country in 2003, has barely stopped for breath since August 15 as she fights to keep one of Kabul’s last remaining women’s shelters open, as well as for the rights of Afghan women and girls.
She gives regular media interviews to keep Afghanistan in the news and continues to push the Taliban to allow women back to work and girls back to school.
“They say after these winter holidays they will start school for girls again. When I see it I will believe it,” she tells Inquirer.
The cataclysmic changes in Afghanistan over just 100 days have made everyone’s heads spin, but none more so than its 18 million women and girls.
Almost everything they worked to achieve over 20 years – legal protections, a women’s ministry, the right to work, to education – has been lost, Seraj says.
As a US citizen, she has the option to leave but stays “because I’m responsible for the women and girls in my shelter, people in my office, my adopted daughters. I can’t just leave everything.
“I represent the side of Afghanistan that I don’t want the world to forget. My shelter survived because I stayed. There are things we do in life for our country, for our people, and if we just drop it, it will disappear.
“Why people left is their business, but the people who have stayed feel so abandoned.
“We have a country that’s broken. Fixing it won’t take a miracle, but it will take resolve from the people who are running the country now.”
Babies will be born regardless who is in power, which is why Dr Najmusama Shefajo – president of Afghanistan’s Society of Gynaecologists – stayed, although she has come to regret that decision.
Her profession is still considered essential, but not the education of her daughters who are now confined to home as she tries to school them and keep her maternity clinic running.
“I wanted to stay because I love my country and I didn’t want to leave my patients,” Shefajo says.
“I thought, if I leave the country I will be nothing. But I have three daughters who are now not at school.
“I want to leave, for their education, for their future, but there is no way right now.”
Her extended family – many also doctors in Europe and central Asia – have tried to help, but without visas, or foreign embassies from which to secure them, little can be done.
Her two youngest could return to primary school but she worries about security, and the effect on her 14-year-old – a bright teenager who tells Inquirer she wants to be a surgeon or a politician – if she has to stay home while her sisters go to class.
The family is also running out of money as fewer patients can afford even heavily discounted fees.
Among those who can still scrape the money together, there are many more anaemic mothers-to-be and low-birth-weight babies thanks to basic medicine shortages and the collapse of the banking system that is forcing millions to go without meals.
Shefajo is using her own money to keep the clinic going but she knows that cannot last.
Her husband still works at Kabul’s biggest pubic hospital even though he hasn’t been paid in five months.
“I push him to go for the sake of his patients because he’s such a good doctor,” she says.
With billions of dollars in foreign health funds stalled for fear of it falling into Taliban hands, 2331 clinics have closed, leaving 25,000 health workers unemployed and millions of Afghans with no access to medical services.
“That has put unimaginable pressure on those still operating,” says Shefajo.
Skeletal children crowd onto single beds and women give birth on the floor.
In such dire circumstances, more people are threatening to report doctors to the Taliban if they won’t admit relatives, she adds.
“For now doctors are working for God but one day our energy will be finished. There is no solution to these problems right now.”
WHERE many see hopelessness and struggle, Obaid Azimi (not his real name) sees opportunity and the chance to live under a true Islamic governance system, though not the brutal theocracy the Taliban ran when it was last in power from 1996 to 2001.
He hopes a more classical Islam will one day underpin Afghan society, where women and girls may freely access all levels of education and go on to work in schools, health, business and “specific government positions that Islam provides”.
The former public servant, who quit his job in 2019 over government corruption to start an energy consulting business, says little has changed for his family since the Taliban seized power.
His wife does not cover her face, though after years of suits and clean shaves he has grown a beard because “it is considered stylish now”.
“Our family are happy. The kids go to school, watch cartoons, go out here and there. My wife has a social life. Thousands of families are like ours in Afghanistan,” he tells Inquirer.
“I understand what others are going through. Many have lost their jobs, businesses have shut down and they can’t take their money out of the banks. But that’s not an issue for me.”
Azimi withdrew his money from the bank as cities began falling to the Taliban in July.
Though an ethnic Tajik, and not from the majority Pashtun tribe from which the Taliban arose, he now has close links to senior regime figures through former university classmates.
Yet he’s unwilling to use his real name or pose for photographs, for fear of jeopardising his future prospects in the country.
“There are opportunities for everybody here to do something good,” he says, although admits that it would be difficult for someone with a “Western world view” to see that.
“In the previous government, there were hundreds of things that weren’t permissible under Islam. Women and men worked in the same office, gathered together for live music.
“The government must provide separate work environments, separate educational environments. It is not an excuse for the Taliban to say they don’t have the budget.
“Everyone should be literate. We have to have doctors, inventors. We have to nurture girls’ talents … of course under the frame of Islam.”
‘THE Taliban don’t know how to run the government. Most of them are illiterate or religious scholars,” says Mohammad Rahman Danish, who surrendered his district of Dangam, in northern Kunar province, two days before the fall of Kabul.
“In three months they have dragged us back to the dark ages.”
The former governor finds it painful to discuss the capitulation, a decision made with local forces who were surrounded by militants and running out of ammunition after weeks of fighting.
Having promised a peaceful transition, the Taliban disarmed and savagely beat the men under his command.
Danish spent three difficult days in their custody before he was liberated by dozens of elders from his ancestral village.
He’s been on the run ever since, staying ahead of his Taliban hunters with the help of an informant. But every day brings more target killings.
“Yesterday they killed a judge in Kunar. No one can raise their voices against the Taliban. There is no law, no justice department, just terrorist groups,” he says.
“My family is in hiding. Our children (five under 18) aren’t going to school. All night they stay up and sleep during the day. They’re scared. We all fear someone will come at night while we sleep so it’s better to stay awake.”
The 42-year-old turns his phone on only to use encrypted messaging apps.
The Taliban now have the technology to monitor Facebook and LinkedIn, though a former intelligence officer told him they can now also trace WhatsApp.
As a former government administrator who worked with US forces in some of Afghanistan’s most heavily contested districts, he’s been told he’s on a hit list and says evacuation is their only hope. But his wife and kids have no passports and going in to apply for them would be a death sentence.
“There are so many people like me who are in danger. Afghanistan has turned into a jail for us.”
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout