Schooling the Taliban

The Taliban recently escalated its assault against human rights by imposing new restrictions severely limiting education for girls and women. The decree predictably met immediate and broad condemnation from the international community. Even neighboring Pakistan criticized it as another backward step in the regime’s effort to court international recognition and attract development aid. By further isolating the country, the ban victimizes the entire population of Afghanistan, male and female, and adds even more misery to decades of misrule and conflict.

Diehard optimists may hope the courageous example of Iran’s women —who have been protesting in opposition to the country’s morality police and oppressive policies— will spill into Afghanistan and challenge the Taliban’s latest outrage but that seems unlikely. Iran and Afghanistan share a geographic boundary but little else. Iran is more developed, better educated and remains susceptible to secular values and ambitions. It is a player. It may curry favor with the wrong side, but Iran cares about its influence and place in the world and there are fault lines its leaders are wary of crossing.

The Taliban, on the other hand, is not bound by those constraints or by any other red lines outside its own tortured religious imagination. It will not be swayed by grassroots movements, especially those dedicated to women and girls, or by stern messages from the international community. Rhetoric condemning Taliban excesses does not worry the Kabul regime, especially after having already outlasted its most powerful adversary.

That intransigence leaves the international community, and particularly champions of human rights, in an all-too familiar quandary: What to do about regimes that consistently abuse their own citizens.

Defending human rights generally has not been treated as a good enough reason to directly violate even a relatively inconsequential nation’s sovereignty. If it were, there would be no shortage of candidates to target, and Afghanistan likely would not top the list.

Instead, the usual response to governments that abuse human rights is to issue proclamations and denunciations — already done in this case — and perhaps to impose sanctions aimed either at specific individuals or at key national interests. It is worth asking how well that approach by the United States worked against Cuba or in other cases where the sanctioned government was able to exploit seams among competing powers or to take advantage of gray areas in multi-national arrangements. The likelihood additional sanctions will reverse the education ban or prevent future abuse is little to none, particularly with Russia and China standing by as potential spoilers.

The Talban regime acts with impunity because it can. It neither threatens its neighbors nor offers reliable advantages for its friendship. As long as its bad behavior remains domestic, reacting to it from the outside is a matter of conscience and choice, not necessity — and few countries are still interested in taking a gamble on what history suggests is a losing proposition.

But if the facts coming out of Kabul look grim, there is a broader context that offers some hope. As the Taliban tightened the screws against women and girls, it also reportedly released two American citizens from captivity, including a journalist. There is no connection between the two events. That is the point.

Publicly shaming a government and condemning its malicious behavior does not preclude conducting necessary business with it. Working with a renegade regime to find and develop areas of common interest neither confers legitimacy on it nor betrays higher, more commonly accepted values and norms. Instead, quiet diplomacy often produces surprising results that can influence future behavior.

The proper response to the Taliban’s indefensible attack against women and girls besides publicly and privately condemning it is to continue compartmentalizing the relationship and exploiting small areas of cooperation that produce mutual benefits without enabling or endorsing further abusive behavior. Diplomacy is about defining the rules of engagement that accomplish that difficult task. It is about slowly developing leverage until the rights of women and girls becomes an internal crisis for the Taliban itself.

Expressions of moral outrage are the necessary reassurance among responsible members of the international community that they remain united in their commitment to human rights, but they will not directly help the women and girls, or the men and boys, of Afghanistan. Quiet diplomacy might. 

Former Ambassador David Robinson is a retired emissary to Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Venezuela, Bolivia and Guyana.