Why the UN can't afford to disengage with the Taliban

The United Nations will stay in Afghanistan, for now, to help millions of desperate Afghans despite the Taliban's restrictions on the international body's female staff, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Tuesday.

Guterres was speaking to media after holding closed-door talks with world powers in Qatar on how to deal with Afghanistan's Islamist rulers.

"We stay and we deliver and we are determined to seek the necessary conditions to keep delivering ... participants agreed on the need for a strategy of engagement," Guterres said.

Normal Afghans are heavily dependent on UN operations, especially because most other international relief organizations have already left the country following the Taliban takeover of Kabul in August 2021.

The Taliban have already drawn condemnation from human rights organizations and foreign governments over their anti-women measures, including the ban on girls' education beyond sixth grade.

"We will never be silent in the face of unprecedented systemic attacks on women's and girls' rights," Guterres pledged after the Doha talks.

During the two-day dialogue in Doha, Guterres wanted to assess the complex situation on the ground in Afghanistan before deciding on whether or not to continue UN activities there. 

Envoys from the US, China and Russia, as well as major European aid donors and regional countries, are among the representatives from some 25 countries who participated in these talks.

Taliban officials were not invited to this summit, something that shows the complexity of the issue.

Warnings from Taliban and rights groups

The Taliban had already rejected the UN Security Council's demand to reverse the ban on women from working in UN agencies, saying it was interference in domestic matters. The group also denounced the UN's decision to exclude it from the Doha conference.

"Any meeting without the participation of IEA (Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan) representatives — the main party to the issue — is unproductive and even sometimes counterproductive," Suhail Shaheen, the head of the Taliban political office in Doha, said in a statement.

"How can a decision taken at such meetings be acceptable or implemented while we are not part of the process? It is discriminatory and unjustified," he added.

Prior to the Doha conference, Afghan civil society organizations had conveyed their reservations to the UN, as they feared that the Doha meeting could prove to be a step toward the recognition of the Taliban administration in Afghanistan.

"We are particularly concerned about the prospect of the meeting opening the door to future international recognition of the Taliban regime, as highlighted in recent comments to the media by UN Deputy Secretary-General Ms. Amina Mohammed: 'We hope that we'll find those baby steps to put us back on the pathway to recognition [of the Taliban], a principled recognition,'" Afghan civil society organizations said in an open letter, titled "Afghan people demand that world leaders: 'Talk to me, not about me.'"

"Apart from their attempts to put in place a gender apartheid regime, the Taliban have been responsible for a catalogue of human rights violations since seizing power in August 2021," the statement added.

The UN, as well as the US, categorically said that the Doha summit would not discuss the issue of Taliban recognition.

To engage or not to engage with the Taliban?

The reassurance has still not allayed the concerns of rights groups.

"I hope that the outcome [of the Doha conference] will be a unified approach toward the Taliban, rather than individual and opportunistic policies pursued by some countries," Sima Samar, a former minister for women's affairs in Afghanistan, told DW. "The approach should not only focus on the matter of UN female staff but the larger issue of women's rights in the country," she added.

Samar, however, recognizes the importance of engaging with the Taliban. "They [Taliban] should have been engaged from the beginning with a clear message to them that the violation of human rights is not acceptable and won't be tolerated," Samar underlined, stressing that engagement should not be confused with international recognition of the Taliban as Afghanistan's rulers.

Recognition or no recognition, the Taliban in Afghanistan are a reality — a harsh one, though. The international community has faced this dilemma since the Islamic fundamentalist group overthrew Western-backed President Ashraf Ghani's government in 2021, following the withdrawal of NATO forces.

The Taliban comeback not only reversed the social and economic gains made in the two decades since 2001 but also presented a new challenge to the international community in terms of rising poverty, famine, malnutrition and a collapsing economy.

"Given the dire economic and livelihood conditions facing millions of impoverished Afghan families, [Doha conference] participants need to review the sanctions regime imposed on Afghanistan, assess the effectiveness of engagement in the hopes of coming up with a more effective approach, and consider alternative policies in case the outstanding issues are not resolved," Omar Samad, a fellow at the Washington-based Atlantic Council and a former Afghan ambassador to Canada, France and the EU, told DW.

"I think that the thorny 'recognition' issue will end up being a dangling carrot at the end of a stick in case there is some clear progress shown with the women and girls' restrictions," he added.

Taliban's desperation

The Taliban are eager for international recognition as Afghanistan's "legitimate" rulers. It would solve their financial issues as well, as the group is in dire need of cash.

The Taliban's recent announcement that they killed the leader of the Islamic State-Khorasan responsible for the August 2021 Kabul airport bombing, which killed 13 US soldiers and some 170 Afghan civilians, also shows that they want to appease the West. "Islamic State" (IS) and its affiliated groups operating in the region continue to pose a threat to Western interests.

But all will likely depend on how much the Taliban are ready to budge on women's rights issues. Pakistan, the group's closest ally, could possibly persuade them to show some flexibility. But it is not clear how much influence Islamabad now wields over the Taliban. Hina Rabbani Khar, Pakistan's minister of state for foreign affairs, is participating in Doha talks and could play a crucial role in this regard.

Additional reporting by Haroon Janjua, DW reporter in Islamabad.

Edited by: Srinivas Mazumdaru