A Nobel Nominee’s Controversial Call for Engagement With the Taliban

Women in Afghanistan have disappeared, said Mahbouba Seraj, a prominent rights activist and, most recently, Nobel Peace Prize nominee who stayed behind when the extremist Taliban stormed back to power 18 months ago. Every day, it seems, they issue new edicts that are systematically erasing women from public life. “We don’t exist anymore,” she said. “We are not being seen. We are not allowed to do anything, go anywhere, do our study, go to work.”

Taliban pledges during peace talks with former U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration to respect women’s rights were lies, she said. Since their return, they’ve repeated those lies to gullible Western officials whose demands for a reversal of anti-women rules are met with “more lies” and even stricter rules. 

And yet. As Afghanistan nears the precipice of economic and social collapse, Seraj, 75, told Foreign Policy the time has come for the world to engage with the Taliban.

The flight of prominent, educated, and capable Afghans is a brain drain that has helped rob the country of its future, she said. After 18 months of brutality, it’s time “to hear their [the Taliban’s] side of the story, too. We really have to come up with some agreement. Talks have to start with the Taliban. It’s not going to work this way. If we don’t sit down and talk to them and see what it is exactly that we can do and they can do, the ones who are going to be paying for it, and who are paying a huge price, are the poor people of Afghanistan, the women and children.”

Seraj is the niece of Amanullah Khan, king of Afghanistan from 1926 to 1929, executive director of the Afghan Women Skills Development Center, and runs domestic violence shelters in Kabul for women and children who she said the Taliban want to put in prison. Even under the republic government, girls and women were often imprisoned if they ran away from abusive fathers or husbands or were suspected of having affairs. Seraj said the Taliban expect her to continue looking after the women even if they do imprison them.

“Every time I talk to the Taliban, I say to them, ‘You have taken a country hostage. This isn’t going to work.’ I ask them, ‘How many people are you—300,000, 400,000, 500,000? And what’s the population of Afghanistan? Forty million. How many are women? Twenty million. How can you ignore us? What are you doing to us?’ I am saying the same thing to the world: ‘How have you allowed something like this, for heaven’s sake?’” 

Seraj despairs of Afghans who have fled into exile pronouncing on what is happening in Afghanistan under the Taliban. They should come back and see what life is like for those who cannot leave, she said. “They have their own agenda, but what I see is needed in Afghanistan [is that] we really have to come up with some agreement. Talks have to start with the Taliban. It’s not going to work this way, absolutely not, if we don’t sit down and talk to them and see what is it exactly that we can do and they can do.”

Her call for engagement is controversial, but it is not new. Former British politician Rory Stewart called for diplomatic recognition in late 2021, along with the lifting of financial sanctions, to deflect the Taliban’s ideological excesses. In exchange, he wrote for the Brookings Institution, the Taliban could meet minimum human rights and governance standards. “Negotiators could push hard for crucially important goals such as: education, even if separate, for girls and women; legal rights for girls and women, and for people from minority ethnic and religious groups; equal access to food, health care, and job opportunities for all elements of society; and denying terrorists safe haven there.” 

While that moment seems like a distant memory, Seraj’s suggestion of engagement comes as the United States appears to have run out of patience with the Taliban’s harsh abuses. Last week, the State Department announced expanded visa restrictions for “certain current or former Taliban members, members of non-state security groups, and other individuals believed to be responsible for, or complicit in, repressing women and girls in Afghanistan.” And at the United Nations, the United States called for a united international response to a ban on women working for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), in response to concerns that some U.N. agencies have complied with men-only aid delivery that further exposes women to abuse.

For former lawmaker Shukria Barakzai, the sort of engagement Seraj wants would give the Taliban a free pass and entrench the impunity they’ve enjoyed so far. 

“It’s time for those countries that have been engaged with the Taliban for the last few years to hold the Taliban accountable for what they are doing,” she said, referring to Pakistan, China, and Russia, among others. “Simply engaging with them gives diplomatic legitimacy to the Taliban without holding them to account. It is time for the Taliban to be held accountable for what they said during the negotiations in Doha, for what they said in the agreement, and for what they did before they were handed the country, and what they have done since. Otherwise, everything is just empty promises.” 

While Taliban abuses since their return to power in the summer of 2021 are far-reaching, it’s the treatment of women that grabs the headlines. Policies of the last Taliban regime, from 1996 to 2001, have been reintroduced and the republic’s laws replaced by a hazy interpretation of Islamic sharia law. They’ve banned women from gyms, parks, and universities (even from taking university entrance exams). The Taliban have introduced restrictions against women working for NGOs—as well as in clinics and health centers if they are not accompanied by a male chaperone. Women cannot leave their homes without male chaperones to travel long distances. In some regions, women cannot run businesses or visit male doctors, and they must wear all-covering clothing. Afghanistan is the only country where girls and women are banned from education beyond primary school.

In January, U.N. officials pressed the Taliban to reverse the ban on women working for charities and attending university. They emerged from meetings saying change was coming, only for the Taliban to then issue new edicts further restricting access to education and work. Many figures of the fallen republic in exile call for retaliation and urge the United States to demand accountability in return for humanitarian relief.

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) went one step further in its latest report, raising questions about the impact of U.S. humanitarian relief worth more than $2 billion since the Taliban took power. “It is SIGAR’s judgment that the Taliban regime’s institutionalized abuse of women raises the important question for policymakers of whether the United States can continue providing aid to Afghanistan without benefiting or propping up the Taliban,” it said. The group is making money from aid, it said, “in the form of ‘licenses,’ ‘taxes,’ and ‘administrative fees’ imposed on NGOs and their employees as a condition for operating in Afghanistan.” Aid “may inadvertently confer legitimacy onto the Taliban, both internationally and domestically.” With more than 28 million people depending on international food assistance, “the Taliban’s erasure of women from public life has substantially hindered or prevented the provision of humanitarian aid,” it said.

Some see the focus on the abuse of women’s rights and on hunger as a diversion from the rollback of rights for all Afghans. Far from urging engagement with the Taliban, many prominent Afghans in exile say existing sanctions, mostly on the financial and banking sectors, don’t go far enough. Abdullah Khenjani, formerly a deputy minister of peace, believes food aid is being prioritized over “liberty and rights” and said the Taliban “must face the consequences of their behavior through tailored sanctions.” 

“We have to find more creative methods, beyond economic sanctions and travel bans, to make the Taliban accountable,” including confiscation of assets and sanctions on family members similar to those imposed on Russian oligarchs after the invasion of Ukraine, he said. “We have to accept the fact that the ultimate goal of economic sanctions is to change the regime with minimum collateral damage on humanitarian grounds.”

For Seraj, though, doubling down on punishment is no alternative to engagement. She’s not a diplomat and doesn’t have any clear idea how to execute such a plan; all she has for now is a cri de coeur.

“We have to do it. There is no other way; we have no other choice. It should be only focused on the people of Afghanistan, on the needs of Afghanistan, on the men and women and how we can go forward. Because otherwise, Afghanistan, every single day, is moving 10 years backward,” she said.

Efforts must focus on “trying to make them sit down and have a discussion with us, with women, with the parties involved, with the stakeholders. They should sit down and talk and see what is really happening. And we should hear their side of the story, too. When we talk to the Taliban, they come up with stories of so much pain, how they were ignored, how nasty the world was toward them, how many of them got killed—which is the truth, it really is. And maybe we could take it from there.” 

Correction, Feb. 6, 2023: An earlier version of this article stated that Mahbouba Seraj is the niece of the last king of Afghanistan. She is the niece of Amanullah Khan, king of Afghanistan from 1926 to 1929.