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The Biden administration is considering measures to punish the Taliban for their treatment of women and girls, possibly including cuts in American aid, even as officials acknowledge that the US withdrawal has left them little power to stop the group’s leaders from sending them imposing their harsh vision on Afghan society.
Officials are scrambling to respond to restrictive announcements by the Taliban-led government in Kabul last month that women were not allowed to attend university – meaning women after the age of 12 are heavily dependent on outside assistance.
The decisions sparked international outrage, including among some Muslim leaders, and prompted prominent aid groups to halt their work in Afghanistan. The Taliban have previously taken steps to bar school girls from secondary education, require women to wear head-to-toe coverings in public, and otherwise severely restrict the lives of women and girls.
But more than a year after the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan that precipitated the collapse of the US-backed government and handed the militant group a overwhelming victory after a two, US officials are struggling to find ways to influence the exercise the Taliban’s top decision-makers – decade war.
Officials and experts now believe efforts to help Afghan women and girls regain their rights will be a long-term endeavor that may have severely marginalized millions in the meantime.
“US government influence is extremely limited,” said Scott Worden, an Afghanistan researcher at the US Institute for Peace. “This needs to be addressed both multilaterally and with a strategy that takes into account the interests of the Taliban and what may affect them over time.”
After its withdrawal in August 2021, the United States had little leverage in Kabul, despite being the largest humanitarian donor to Afghanistan — humanitarian aid topped $1 billion during that period — and the custodian of frozen Afghan reserves, some of which were placed internationally became a managed fund. Washington is also influencing other countries’ decisions on whether to ultimately grant official recognition to the Taliban government, something the group continues to yearn for.
But officials have so far been reluctant to change or limit US aid as part of their attempt to defend the rights of women and other groups, arguing that such cuts could worsen the suffering of Afghans. And as late as December, a senior US official said US humanitarian aid would remain unconditional.
That approach could change, as Taliban leaders show Willingness to defy global condemnation and make delivery of needed medical, food and other assistance more difficult without female assistants. A government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity like others to deal with internal deliberations, said that while US options and influence may be limited, there is consensus that the Taliban’s actions are unacceptable.
“Among the many options on the table is examining the type and amount of aid that will be sent through international partners,” the official said, declining to elaborate.
The United States could also express support for the United Nations to maintain travel bans on Taliban leaders, or possibly impose new sanctions or other measures to restrict their finances and movements.
Deliberations on Afghanistan come as the Biden administration touts its leadership of the coalition opposed to Russia’s war in Ukraine, which officials say is a testament to President Biden’s foreign policy credentials. The wide international praise his position has received contrasts with the criticism he faced after the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which plunged the country into an economic crisis and left millions of Afghans, including many US allies during the war, in stranded in a country ruled by oppressors left hostile regime.
The Taliban have otherwise defied US hopes, excluding broad sections of Afghan society from their government and harboring the al-Qaeda leader in Kabul before he was killed in a US drone strike last summer. The group’s record to date suggests that Western officials misjudged the influence of the moderate Taliban, who for years had promised foreign interlocutors that the organization had abandoned practices seen as most problematic during its previous rule in the 1990s .
The Biden administration has already taken some punitive measures in response, temporarily halting cooperation with the group after deciding to bar girls from secondary school and imposing visa restrictions on Taliban officials believed to be responsible for the oppression of genders are responsible.
Foreign Minister Antony Blinken promised after the Taliban’s announcement on higher education that the group would face “consequences” for its treatment of women and girls. “If this is not reversed, there will be costs,” he said.
This week, State Department spokesman Ned Price said officials were discussing options.
The Taliban “can’t expect to take these draconian, barbaric moves that deny women and girls opportunities, but more recently are causing such tremendous suffering to all people in Afghanistan, and still expect to see a path to improved relations with the rest of the world Find. ” he has told reporters. “Our goal is, with the response we develop internally and with our allies and partners, to prove to them that will not be the case.”
Halima Kazem, who is part of the Together Stronger advocacy coalition, said some Afghan women she spoke to urged the United States to use the support cut as pressure on the Taliban to change its policies. Many of them say they don’t get much of that help anyway, Kazem said. Others disagree, she added.
in one last letter to Blinken, Together Stronger urged the US government to adopt several steps including limiting its involvement with the Taliban; establishment of a liaison office to support the coordination of aid and advocacy work in Afghanistan; and helping persecuted Afghans resettle in the United States.
For now, Kazem said, the best hope is to sway the Taliban’s moderates and hope they eventually gain more clout within the organization against hardliners like Haibatullah Akhunzada, the ultra-conservative cleric and supreme leader of the group.
In a speech in November 2021, Akhunzada said that God and not the Taliban would provide food for the people of Afghanistan.
“There is a very hard-line ideology that wants to establish a modern caliphate, that wants to prove at all costs that this type of society has a place in the modern world,” Kazem said. “This group doesn’t care about that pressure.”
As the Biden administration looks for ways to help Afghan women amid their worsening plight, senior officials are stepping up their support for the president’s decision to leave the country. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan recently described Biden’s withdrawal decision as an important part of the administration’s foreign policy approach, suggesting that it allowed the United States to focus on the future rather than the legacy of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Now the government hopes to strike a balance between maintaining its role as a major donor of aid and “also doing what we can to prevent the humanitarian situation from deteriorating further as a result of the difficult operational environment created by the Taliban.” a said a spokesman for the State Department.
“These things take time,” the official said. “You mean business.”
James Dobbins, who served as senior US diplomat on Afghanistan issues noted for several decades that the US government may not know enough about the Taliban’s internal dynamics to assess in advance the impact of punitive measures and whether they might strengthen or weaken the hand of hard-liner militants.
Dobbins recommended continuing to speak to the group and exploring ways to influence them where possible. He described the current situation as a predictable outcome of the American exit, which exposed the Afghan state’s weaknesses and handed millions over to a group that had waged a 20-year insurgency to establish its extremist state.
“It’s very disappointing,” he said. “But it was a foreseeable fact that I left.”