Taliban must bridge vital gap in taking reins of Govt
Over much of nation, most of important Afghan departments are not functioning
Sitting in the home of the spy chief of the fallen Afghan government, cradling a Beretta submachine gun in his lap, Mawlawi Habib Tawakol recounted how he and his fighters were surprised at how quickly they were ordered to enter Kabul on August 15, even after the Taliban’s rapid advance across Afghanistan.
That morning, Tawakol’s Taliban unit arrived on the outskirts of the Afghan capital, expecting to camp out there possibly for weeks while a formal handover was negotiated.
But the flight of President Ashraf Ghani and many other senior officials caught everyone off guard.
“That afternoon, our leadership ordered us to enter the city in order to prevent looting,” Tawakol said.
Taliban intelligence chief Haji Najibullah told him and his men to rush to the headquarters of the National Directorate of Security spy agency to secure equipment and documents. Prison cells, offices, security posts were all abandoned.
“There was no one there except a deputy director, who handed the building to us,” Tawakol said. “All the prisoners had already escaped.”
Two weeks later, the Taliban are expected to formally announce their new government as early as today, including naming the insurgency’s top religious figure, Sheikh Haibatullah Akhundzada, as supreme leader of Afghanistan. But there is still an important gap between naming a government and fully taking up its functions, as Tawakol and other Taliban officials have found.
In Kabul, as in much of the country, most important government departments, apart from street-level security, are not functioning.
The Taliban have urged officials with the former government to stay in their roles, and some have. But in the face of a looming economic crisis, including a worsening cash shortage that has strained the availability of fuel, food and other staples, the Taliban have scrambled over the past two weeks to establish themselves, both in the public eye and in practice, as the country’s new governors. Much of the Afghan public remains deeply distrustful, given the harshness of the Taliban’s last government.
Although surprised by the rapid surrender of the Afghan government, the Taliban have been preparing to take power for more than a decade, steadily expanding their shadow government in waiting. Over the years, they have formed national commissions for sectors like health care and education, appointing officials down to the district level across much of the country.
While much of Kabul’s elite fled the country ahead of the Taliban, a few senior officials chose to stay. Wahid Majrooh, the Afghan minister of public health, said he turned down an offer to escape with Ghani.
“I stayed in the office and took the risk,” he said. “If I leave, my directors and advisers will leave.”
The morning after the militants entered Kabul, Majrooh went to his office, where he was visited by the Taliban’s provincial health commissioner from neighbouring Logar province. “He was surprised to see me. His behaviour was respectful, but he had no clear message.”
Majrooh, worried about an outbreak of violence or a mass casualty attack, wanted to ensure his hospital network stayed open. He suggested he and the Taliban official rally the staff at two hospitals in a Hazara Shiite neighbourhood in western Kabul, where residents would be most fearful of the Taliban’s arrival. “He said, ‘Great idea, let’s go!’” Majrooh recalled.
For a fortnight, he has shared his office with Mawlawi Abdullah Khan, head of the Taliban’s health commission, whose co-operation he credited with helping coax staff back.
“Most ministries are locked, their services are disrupted,” he said. But for health services, “90 per cent of our staff have come back.”
Yet the public health ministry now faces the same imminent financial crisis as the rest of the government, and much of Afghanistan’s bank funds and other financing remain frozen by the US and Western governments. The health-care sector is particularly dependent on donations. Majrooh says most organisations he works with have already suspended operations and halted contracts.
“We were not expecting them to stop funding so suddenly. I get calls from hospitals that they are running out of fuel, oxygen, and electricity.”
Even as the Taliban have established control over Afghanistan’s formal institutions, their leadership has pursued more traditional methods, including an outreach by the power
ful Invitation and Guidance Commission, led by Amir Khan Muttaqi. Its events included a gathering of religious scholars in Kabul last week.
Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban’s chief spokesperson, said the new government would be founded on its religious legitimacy.
“The people of Afghanistan have fought hard for 20 years for the establishment of an Islamic system,” he told the New York Times last week. “We had five elections and they were all corrupt. Each time an American minister had to come and decide the result. In Islam, we have the principle of the shura to represent the people.”
He said although the Taliban would ensure a strict segregation between genders in schools and workplaces, women would be free to study and work, as well as leave the house unaccompanied.
This week Taliban officials said the government would be announced imminently, with Akhundzada as the supreme authority. Still unclear was the role of a leadership shura, or council, and whether its membership would fulfil the Taliban’s promise of building an inclusive government.
It’s also unclear whether leaders from previous governments, such as Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah, who have remained in Kabul for talks, will be included.
But Mujahid emphasised the new government envisioned by the Taliban would not be a democracy.