ISLAMABAD — The Taliban on Sunday asked the West to look beyond the measures it has imposed on Afghan women and girls in a bid to improve foreign relations.
Their chief spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said the Taliban upheld certain religious and cultural values and public aspirations that “must be recognised” to facilitate progressive bilateral relations rather than being met with disputes and stagnation.
Mujahid made his request on the opening day of a United Nations-hosted meeting in Qatar aimed at increasing engagement with Afghanistan and providing a more coordinated response to the country’s problems.
This is the third such meeting hosted by the UN in Doha. The Taliban were not invited to the first meeting and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said they had set unacceptable conditions for participation in the second meeting in February, including demanding that members of Afghan civil society be excluded from the talks and that the Taliban be treated as the country’s legitimate leaders.
Afghan women have been excluded from the current meeting in Doha.
No country officially recognizes the Taliban, and the UN has said recognition remains nearly impossible as long as the ban on women’s education and employment remains.
But Mujahid struck a defiant tone on Sunday, saying political understanding between the Taliban and other nations was steadily improving.
He said Kazakhstan had removed the Taliban from its list of banned groups and that Russia would take a similar step in the near future. Mujahid, who is meeting on the sidelines of the meeting with special envoys, said earlier that Saudi Arabia had expressed its intention to reopen its embassy in Kabul.
Relations with regional countries have demonstrated that the Taliban has the commitment and capacity to establish and maintain relationships, Mujahid said in his speech.
“I do not deny that some countries may have problems with some of the Islamic Emirate’s measures,” Mujahid said in his speech. “I think that policy differences between states are natural and it is the duty of experienced diplomats to find ways of interaction and understanding rather than confrontation.”
These differences should not escalate to the point where powerful countries use their influence to impose security, political and economic pressures that would significantly affect Afghanistan. He did not mention the harsh decrees on women and girls that have caused global outrage, but has already called them an “internal matter.” The Taliban have rejected criticism of their treatment of Afghan women and girls, calling it interference.
“Therefore, other nations, especially Western countries, can remove obstacles that hinder the development of relations with the Afghan government,” Mujahid said.
The decision to exclude Afghan women from the meeting drew criticism from human rights groups, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, and Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai.
Yousafzai, who was shot dead by a Taliban for campaigning for girls’ education, wrote on social media platform Last Thursday, she spoke to Guterres about the Doha meeting.
She said she was “alarmed and disappointed” that the Taliban had been invited to meet with UN special envoys while Afghan women and human rights defenders were left out of the main conversation.
Calling the meeting without Afghan women sent all the wrong signals that the world was ready to accede to the Taliban’s demands.
She added that what the Taliban were doing in Afghanistan amounted to gender apartheid.
Earlier, the top UN official in Afghanistan, Roza Otunbayeva, defended the failure to include Afghan women at the Doha meeting, insisting that women’s rights demands were sure to be raised.
