Is it time to recognise Afghanistan’s Taliban government?

Debate about whether to officially recognise the Taliban has intensified after a senior UN official said the intergovernmental agency was ready to take “baby steps” to engage with Afghanistan’s caretaker regime.

Amina Mohammed, the region’s UN deputy secretary-general, argued that the militant group’s need for recognition could be used as “leverage” to tackle Taliban restrictions on humanitarian programmes that have brought the UN to the brink of withdrawing from the impoverished country.

In a speech at the Princeton School of Public and International Affair ahead of a UN-convened meeting on Afghanistan, Mohammed said that “out of that, we hope that we’ll find those baby steps to put us back on the pathway to recognition [of the Taliban], a principled recognition”.

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The agency subsequently insisted that the closed-door meeting, hosted by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in Doha at the start of May, would not focus on the possible international recognition of the Taliban administration. But Mohammed’s comments contributed to “widespread concerns” about “a lack of transparency” in the discussions, said HuffPost.

‘Baby steps towards recognition’

The Taliban’s rule over Afghanistan “is not recognised as legitimate by any country”, said The Independent. Afghanistan’s seat at the UN is still held in the name of the former government of Western-backed president Ashraf Ghani.

However, envoys at the Doha meeting, from which the Taliban were excluded, sought to find a “durable way forward” for Afghanistan.

The gathering in the Qatari capital “produced no results”, wrote Javid Ahmad, a former Afghan ambassador, and Douglas London, a former CIA operations officer, in an article for Foreign Policy. But recognition is the right path, the duo argued.

To endorse engagement with the Taliban is “not easy for us”, they added, “but the alternative – allowing Afghanistan’s dangerous descent into a hermit kingdom and forsaking the insight and means to influence or shape events – would mean more dire consequences for all”.

Many human rights activists disagree. In an open letter to the UN ahead of the Doha meeting, more than 50 NGOs, civil society organisations and academic institutions warned that “past experiences show that giving into the demands of such regimes by compromising on human rights will only strengthen their grip on power, and prolong the suffering of the people of Afghanistan”.

They also insisted that Afghanistan’s women should be “meaningfully represented” in all talks regarding their country’s future.

‘A violation of women’s rights’

Recognition could be granted in different ways. The US and its allies could recognise the Taliban without conditions, but this outcome seems “unlikely”, said the Brookings Institute, “given the Taliban’s unwillingness to meet democratic and human rights standards”.

Alternatively, the Washington D.C.-based think tank continued, various models exist in which “there could be extended negotiations with the Taliban over recognition”, forcing the group to meet certain conditions. This might be “the likeliest outcome in the near and medium term” as the US and its allies “try to use recognition as a carrot to urge the Taliban to undertake certain fundamental reforms”.

Critics fear the UN may seek to follow the second path. Ahead of the Doha meeting, a group of Afghan women staged a spontaneous march in capital Kabul, “in defiance of Taliban security forces”, to urge the international community not to recognise the militant group, said Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

A woman who was a lawyer before the Taliban takeover told Ms. magazine that since then, “job and profession don’t exist because the judicial system does not exist anymore under the Taliban”. She added: “I have lost my job at a time that is needed the most because women are being discriminated against the most.”

The unnamed woman added that forced marriages and street courts had become common again.

Another said: “We want the world to know what’s happening in Afghanistan and to Afghan women. We do not want the Taliban to be recognised.”