Q&A: Can faith engagement help prevent Afghanistan's collapse?

The Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan has brought the country’s economy to a standstill, as many of its largest international donors withhold assistance and recognition of the Islamic fundamentalist group’s legitimacy.

While the U.S. Treasury Department has issued licenses to allow humanitarian aid for Afghanistan, broader development cooperation remains at an impasse as Western donors refuse any engagement that might benefit the Taliban.

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, global development institutions have grown increasingly aware that they can no longer ignore faith communities and religious leaders when carrying out their programs.

But in Afghanistan and elsewhere, development practitioners have too often overgeneralized these groups and systematically failed to view them as part of broader civil society, Azza Karam, secretary-general at Religions for Peace, told Devex in an interview.

That is a partial explanation of the dilemma facing development efforts in Afghanistan today — as well as a potential pathway out of it, said Karam, who is the first woman and the first Muslim to lead the international coalition.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How should the international community be thinking about potential cooperation with the Taliban, given our understanding that working with faith leaders is important in development?

It's not working with faith leaders, per se, that is supposed to be important and valuable. I've been working on this issue now for 30 years. I realize full well that we all, as a so-called international community, have gone off on a tangent a little bit about this issue of religion and engaging faith leaders. It is really not engaging with religious leaders in order to do whatever it is we need to do; no, it is fundamentally about working with faith communities together.

And the second point is — as part of civil society, so that religious leaders, religious institutions, religious NGOs, religious communities — they are part and parcel and therefore accountable to civil society. It's not that they can go off on this silo and become really, really, really important.

That leads us to where we are today. The Taliban worked as themselves. They were the religious guys in their community working as religious guys. They were not working or ever saw themselves as part of civil society. And they didn't need to because the rest of the world didn't see them as such.

[A better model is] religious leaders being civil rights leaders, being civil rights activists, being held accountable not just by other religious leaders and religious institutions for their religiosity, but being held accountable by the entire civil society as civil rights actors. It is them approaching their governments — elected or not — not as religious leaders only or as leaders of religious institutions only, but as civil rights leaders.

Why then even draw specific attention or make a specific concerted effort to frame this as working with communities of faith, as opposed to just working with Afghan civil society?

Because for the longest time, civil society was seen as though there's a secular space and then there's the religious guys and their space — and it's still like that.

If you look at the way that support to civil society went from the U.S. government to Afghanistan, it didn't go towards a broad civil society approach, a whole-of-civil-society approach that included religious leaders. In fact, it very rarely went to religious leaders and actors. It was about the secular civil society — the women's rights, the human rights [advocates] who were all speaking and thinking the secular language.

So when [the U.S. government, United Nations agencies, and European Union entities that gave international aid to Afghanistan] convened their civil society, they were convening secular NGOs, systematically. They were supporting secular women's rights organizations, secular human rights organizations. And the religious [part] was seen as, “We'll get to that later, because actually we're trying to support a vibrant, secular civil society.”

And this is not just in Afghanistan. This happened in so many cases. But in Afghanistan, it becomes particularly glaring, given what we're living through today. This is our responsibility as international actors. We divided the space [between] the secular and the religious.

What is the cost of not bringing the secular and the religious civil society communities together?

You've got to look at this notion of an alliance between the religious and the secular, because it strengthens the movement to attain rights. It strengthens the movement to hold accountable those who are taking away rights.

So you don't just have a group of Taliban folks who are saying: “Hey, wait a minute. We like women. We want to work with our women. We value women.” Alone, they won't do much. But if they can become part of a broader civic space in which they are standing shoulder to shoulder with others who are not part of the Taliban but are still religiously inspired, with the secular human rights actors — imagine the impact of that.

Instead of a handful of women protesting in front of the governance space in Kabul, you actually have a movement that's got religious clerics, that's got the secular women's rights and the human rights [advocates] who are going to argue for women's rights in particular. That would make for a much bigger segment of the population that has to be dealt with and reckoned with.

We cannot afford to keep our resistance siloed. We tend, as secular folks, not to distinguish between religious communities. … If you start looking at a much more diverse, heterogeneous reality, then you're able to actually identify who your allies are. But we rarely do that because we tend to paint the religious [groups] with one brush: “They're problematic.” Therefore, it's easier to just avoid them. The international development system for years completely avoided looking at these people.

Does the opportunity for the kind of approach you’re talking about still exist in Afghanistan, given the Taliban’s return to power and widespread hesitancy to work with them?

I think we have a few lessons that we could say we've learned through this experience and from what's happening right now.

Lesson No. 1, I would assume, should be that we don't see the Taliban as all the same. They're not all alike. They are absolutely not all alike. And they don't all maintain exactly the same opinions on every single issue under the sun. So we have to be able to understand much better what the composition of the Taliban itself is like — do a mapping of the Taliban, if you will.

Who are they? Who are the different factions? What are the different ideas? Where do they stand on certain issues, especially on human rights issues? How can we then work with the like-minded within the Taliban to be able to understand them better and not to put them aside as these awful, terrible people? Which is exactly what we're doing now — and which, by the way, we're doing with the full support of Afghan civil rights actors who are terrified and terrorized by what they've been through 20 years ago.

I also think that this means we have to be much more cognizant and learned about how we look at the rest of the religious composition, because the Taliban is not every single Muslim in Afghanistan. They are a political party first and foremost. But there are other religious leaders in Afghanistan whom we should not forget and overlook because we're so busy and engrossed with the Taliban.

We have to be much smarter and more strategic in our engagement. But in order to be smart and strategic, we have to understand what the lay of the land is, and we're not spending time on that. We're so busy being terrified and upset — understandably — with what some members of the Taliban are doing [that we say], “Let's just forget them and focus on the secular guys we need to save.” That's basically what we're doing now. And I'm saying that's not very helpful.

The third part is to find the regional multireligious and civil composition and see where there are alliances that are made already between some members of the Taliban and other religious institutions outside of Afghanistan. Find out where those partnerships are, what those alliances look like, and seek to engage the wisdom of those different religious actors outside of Afghanistan but still in the region. That's where most of the quote-unquote “pressure” — but also a clear understanding of relevance — is going to come from. It's in the region.

Devex, with support from our partner GHR Foundation, is exploring the intersection between faith and development. Visit the Focus on: Faith and Development page for more. Disclaimer: The views in this article do not necessarily represent the views of GHR Foundation.