 Kato Katawa, Asalaamu alaikum. Welcome to this very timely Australian Evaluation Society panel discussion on Afghanistan, taking stock and looking forwards. I am Marina Sankar, the regional co-convener of AES Outer Error, New Zealand. Before we begin, I acknowledge the traditional custodians of the diverse lands that we all represent today. I'm hosting this from Wellington, Outer Error, and I pay homage to our leaders, past, present, and emerging. And just some housekeeping before I introduce the panelists. This session is being recorded, and it will be uploaded to YouTube at some stage in the near future. So except for the panelists, if I can ask you all to keep yourself muted. And if you wish to, you may turn off your cameras. If you're not comfortable being on YouTube, please feel free to do that at any time. And also feel free to enter any questions you have in the chat function. My co-host Andrew Collins will monitor them and read some of them out towards the mid to late section of this discussion. And we are really, really fortunate to have the perfect lineup to discuss the current situation faced by many civilians under the Taliban regime and what went wrong. We have three wonderful speakers. Originally a citizen of Kabul. But zooming in from California, we have Dr. Hafizah Jastani. Hafizah is a gender and peace education specialist with several years of experience working with international bodies, such as the World Bank, UN Women, USAID, and the Swedish Embassy in Kabul to promote human rights, gender equality, and peace in Afghanistan. The doctoral research in peace and conflict studies investigated peace education in Afghanistan. Andrew, can you please let the seven people in the waiting room end? Thank you. Zooming in from the UK, we have Professor Jonathan Goodhand from the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London. Jonathan is an expert in conflict analysis and international development in South and Central Asia, especially in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Jonathan's research includes peacebuilding, reconstruction, and the political economy of aid and conflict as illustrated by his project on the OPM trade in Afghanistan. Also zooming in from Wellington out to Yaroa, we have Joseph Schumacher. Joseph is an international development expert who is currently the Senior Evaluation Advisor for USAID's Afghanistan Monitoring Evaluation and Learning Activity. He was also the M&E Director of USAID's largest stabilization program in Afghanistan from 2019 to 2012, and he drafted DFIID's monitoring strategy for Afghanistan after the 214 withdrawal. So we are extremely lucky to have such a knowledgeable, distinguished cohort as our panelists. And I welcome you all, and thank you so much for being part of this panel discussion. And I'd like to contextualize today's discussion by opening the floor to Hafizah. Hafizah, if you can please tell us a little bit about your experience about what it was like growing up as a young female under the Taliban regime and what it was like to have a professional career under the US occupation and also your views on the current challenges faced by civilians today. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. Depends where you are. Great panelists and also great participants. Mari, thank you so much. And thanks to you for calling for organizing this discussion. Very friendly discussion. I hope we continue this kind of discussion and talk to contribute for advocates and also to raise Afghanistan's people wise in this hard situation. And let's continue to be wise of Afghanistan's people for a better change. It's a really hard time right now. If I start saying like this year, from very beginning, it was not a good time for us in Afghanistan, particularly for those who were in Kabul or in big cities. We had bad news from district level, provincial level. When Taliban took over the district level very easily, it was alerting news. It was alarming us in Kabul. Yes, when Taliban took over the fourth time, I was the senator of 13 or 14 years old. Very different experience. I was at the school. But because it was in a war time, internal war, before Taliban took over fourth time, I think it was something similar, but not as hard at this time. Because this time we had 20 years of progress going on in the country. And then at once, Taliban took over. So it was a totally different experience. This time I'm a professional woman working in an international organization. And I experienced the 20 years of good social progress among people's lives, living in Kabul. But of course it was difficult. Talking about challenges, I start saying that we have a government in Afghanistan right now for the last three months that is not recognized internationally. And I hope the international community continue not to recognize them. The second challenge is, the biggest challenge is economic crisis. People who are working did not receive their salary. People have lost their jobs. Women lost their jobs. There's no money in the bank. People who have money in the bank, it's just a start. So even they could not access it, or cannot access it right now. The third point that I'm going to say repeatedly, this is a big issue right now, is about women and girls' education. Girls in school are closed. Girls cannot go to school. Women are not allowed to work. They lost their jobs. So education sector is a question mark. The education sector is not active. People who were educated, people who were active and contributed to a development program in the last 20 years, whether they left the country, whether they are leaving the country, or they are on the way to live. So it's very hard. These people are the human resources of this country. Depression at the family level. I give an example of myself. I, with my husband, my two children, we are in California. My father and my mother are still in Kabul. My siblings are all over the world now. They are receiving trade. It's human rights. No tolerance and no respect. Psychologically, people are in very bad situations. It's a really hard time. Also, we lost the social development that we gained or we achieved it in the last 20 years. We lost it at once, like God. How many other challenges are going on? But I say here, because you put it as my personal experience, so I put it in this way. My father received trade, and he is hired in a place because his children work for international organization. I myself and my sibling were working for an international organization for more than 10 years. But now my father is under threat of Taliban in Kabul. This is my personal experience, Mali. And I stop here. Thank you. Hafizah, thank you so much. And I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry to hear that your father got a threat like that. It's a horrendous situation that most of us living in the comfortable West cannot imagine what people are enduring. And Jonathan, this sort of segues into your area of speciality. We all know that Afghanistan has been colonized and taken over several times over many decades. Could you talk to us a little bit about how you think the whole liberal peace building model played out and what your views are on in terms of its failures, in terms of state building? Okay, thanks, Marie. And evening here, good morning to other people. And it's a pleasure to be on this panel and with a really interesting group of people. I'm gonna just, before I launch into a very short set of thoughts on history and lessons, I'm gonna start with one, I think, really salient and very urgent point. And in some ways, thinking about history and stop taking seems to me at this present moment almost a self-indulgent kind of thing to do, given the incredible urgency of the situation Afghanistan now as Hafizah has kind of been touching on. I think Hafizah and I have different positions in terms of the implications of this, but I think we both share a great concern for the kind of crisis that Afghanistan is now facing, which is based on a kind of long-standing drought, kind of skyrocketing levels of poverty and malnutrition, huge levels of displacement in the middle of a pandemic. And in a situation where there's a financial crisis and the international community is freezing the reserves of the Afghan government. And that those kinds of actions have been described by Barney Rubin recently as almost a form of war crime in the sense or crime against humanity because of the implications of holding back those reserves for the Afghan people at this present moment in time. So I think just to be all of us be conscious and cognizant of this situation now. And for me, the question of recognition is really almost irrelevant. It's about how to engage in this current situation to help the Afghan people. And I'm afraid there's no easy options here. There has to be some kind of engagement with the ruling authority in order to deliver assistance at scale. So that's kind of my first kind of big point which we all need to keep in mind. So I'm gonna make three or actually four points about history and taking stock. The first thing to say is about thinking about the nature of the Afghan state. And it's a very simple but really quite salient point in that the Afghan state has always been what we might call a rentier state. A state that has always been dependent on external infusions of resources. Whether this came from the Russian and the British empires or whether in the Cold War context from the US and the Soviet Union. It's always been dependent on external aid. It's always been externally facing and it has never created the tax base to rent itself. And therefore what has never happened in Afghanistan that we've seen in the kind of the state building processes in Europe historically is emergence of a fiscal contract. A state which taxed its population and through that process developed reciprocal kinds of institutions. And that's how democracy kind of emerged in kind of Europe in the 1800s and 1700s and 1800s. And so the product of that this rentier state is something that we see today in the way that Afghan society is bifurcated between what Barney Rubin described as a kind of an enclave urban society increasingly westernized, increasingly educated and literate. Dependent on this drip feed of external resources and then a rural more conservative agrarian based population originally kind of based on subsistence and more conservative in its outlook and worldviews detached from those kinds of modernization processes. And in many ways the Taliban emerged from this second kind of constituency from the rural borderlands. And that fault line remains today in Afghan society and we see it now when we look back on assessments of what happened over the last 20 years and how to engage with the Taliban. And we need to really be conscious of those kinds of fault lines because we see them around gender politics, we see them around modernization and Westernization is seen around democracy. We see them in relation to tribal society and religious values. We need to keep that in our minds. So let's move on now to 2001 and the Liberal Peacebuilding Project. And there's three things I want to mention here. One is what we might call the moment of original sin. And that is really the absence of an inclusive political settlement in kind of emerged through the bond agreement and the post bond agreement. What I mean by that is that major constituencies in African societies, particularly the Taliban, were not included in those negotiations. We know that in 2002, 2003, 2004, the Taliban just wanted to put down their guns. They wanted to retire into their villages. Some of them wanted to kind of be part of politics, but they weren't able to. And the US resisted that and so did members of the Northern Alliance. So that fundamental failure of politics at the beginning was a huge failing. There was an opportunity there to negotiate a more inclusive political settlement to reconfigure the 30-odd years of conflict that had gone prior to that. And the system that emerged, out of that political settlement, was fraught with contradictions. On the one hand, the new constitution was one of the most centralized constitutions in the world, a presidential system with power kind of centralized in this powerful figure of the president. Parliament really had very limited powers. So you had these formal institutions that are highly centralized alongside informal politics, which was, and de facto politics, de facto power relations, which were highly fragmented and decentralized. So there's massive misalignment between formal politics and informal and underlying configurations of power. You know, that kept playing itself out again and again over the next 20 years. Now, the second point that I wanna make is that as Western intervention kind of got rolled out and new kinds of objectives were piled on to counter-terrorism, including state building, democratization, counter-narcotics and so on. These kind of interventions met resistance. And the response was what Astri Sarki caused a kind of critical mass doctrine. So in order to overrun, overrule these forms of resistance from the borderlands, from Afghan society. And from the Taliban. What was needed in the kind of the ideas of critical mass was kind of more financial, diplomatic and coercive muscle to overrun and overrule these things. So it's more troops, more funding and more programs for development and governance and counter-insurgency and so on. And this critical mass doctrine just kind of reproduced these kinds of contradictions. And it funded and increased the kind of the rentier dynamics that I talked about. And it also accentuated the problems of corruption and the kind of the autoconsumption of aid, not only by Afghan political elites, but also by the international system as a whole. And it's a real bugbearer of mine how this discourse of corruption always points the finger at Afghans, but doesn't look at the responsibility of international actors in creating this environment. What do you expect to happen if you pump in huge amounts of resources into a resource-scarce environment where politics is fragmented? And not only that, something like over 40% of the aid never even reached Afghanistan. It was consumed by that way bandits in Washington or London or wherever by consultancy firms. So there's a huge amount of corruption within the international system as well. Not just about Afghans and the domestic political economy. So this kind of critical mass doctrine, I think was fundamentally problematic. And what Sastry Cerke argued was that you need to do more with less. You need to calibrate funding much more closely to local realities, work with the grain of local politics and open up spaces for political negotiation at the domestic level to happen. And there was a fundamental failure in allowing that to happen and a reliance more and more on kind of coercive power on fighting the Taliban. And kind of in many ways, Afghanistan suffered from aid shock in terms of the amount of funding that was being channeled into Afghan society. Okay, so the critical mass doctrine was a problem. The final thing I want to mention is the withdrawal. Because this was a fundamental failure of responsibility on the part of international actors. There is a contradiction in the sense that it's clear that international state building, international funding is not the answer to bringing about sustainable peace in Afghanistan. At the same time, the sudden withdrawal of that funding when the whole political system, the whole political economy is now reliant on funding flows is an incredibly irresponsible thing to do. And it was obvious what would happen if you did that. It would be a descent into spoil politics and the whole pack of cards would fall down. And this is precisely what happened. And it was incredibly responsible by the US to engage in the so-called Doha peace process which basically emboldened the Taliban, undermined the government, undermined any kind of confidence in the future. And then all these patterned structures started to unravel as it became obvious that the US was not going to stay, that the military power would be pulled back. And so pulling a plug on this led to this kind of scenario. And we are now in this situation to finish off. Which goes, you know, going back to my first point, the humanitarian crisis, the financial crisis, all these things that are now happening, Western actors need to take some responsibility, a major part of responsibility for creating this situation. And it is absolute aggregation of responsibility now to stand by and say, we can't deal with the Taliban. We can't legitimize them. We're not going to engage. When these national actors have created this situation and there are a huge amount of responsibility to the Afghan people for helping to mitigate these circumstances in which a lot of people are going to have a very, very difficult winter. And we are on the brink of kind of mass starvation. Absolutely. Jonathan, thank you so much for that. I have one very quick question for you before I move on to Joseph. What's your view on the former government? Did you think they did their job well governing the nation? Well, short answer is no, they didn't do their job well. But it's not a case really of individuals. It's about a political system that was created in which all the incentives operating were towards kind of making money now. And there is no kind of long-term confidence in the future. In that kind of a situation, then, yeah, you try to make money. You invest your money in Dubai or Europe. And so, yeah, it's some, yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Jonathan. And for everyone on this call, please feel free to enter your questions into the chat section. We would love to hear from people who work in the international development sector and your workers. We would really love to hear your questions or comments. And Joseph, it brings me to you. You've lived and worked in Kabul as a development practitioner for so long. Can you please tell us about your experiences working for USAID? Did you think the aid was very Kabul-centric? Or did you think it was dispersed well across the nation? What are some of the lessons learned or not learned? We would love to hear your viewpoints. Thanks, Murray. Yeah, it's a real pleasure to be here today. And I just want to say to Javisa and Jonathan, you know, it's a really pleasure to be on this panel with you. Jonathan, that was fascinating. I'd actually love to travel to London and take your course now, I think. And I actually really agree with everything you had to say. And I probably come from this from a slightly different angle, which is the sort of development professional and, you know, working for these different donor organizations. Yeah, I mean, the last year has been really difficult, you know, for everyone, obviously in Afghanistan. And less so, I guess, for the international donor community and those involved with that. And I think, you know, everyone sort of kind of picking themselves still off the floor. It was a very traumatizing experience, I think, for the organizations involved and for the individuals. And I think we're only sort of now beginning to do that kind of stop taking and actually sort of absorbing the lessons. And it's really difficult because you've sort of got the, you know, there's so many different ways of looking at it. You've got the dimensions of the political economy dimension, which Jonathan, you know, really succinctly and sort of just did such a great job, I think, in describing. And you've got the kind of pre-academic sort of, you know, dimension of actually how, what mistakes did we make? And they were copious. And I think, you know, we've got years and years to try and actually, you know, it's going to take a long time to actually sort of work through that. And then just, you know, at the same time, there's also the ongoing tragedy and our responsibilities, I think, in the world's responsibilities now to actually not just leave Afghanistan in this, you know, really dire moment. I guess what I can add to the discussion is that at the same time, we've also got to talk about, you know, there has been this effort over the last two decades to create a modern state in Afghanistan with all the trappings that involved. And so things were achieved, you know, and I think if you want to talk about what was achieved over the, you know, with the help of the donors over the last 20 years, that's also a valid discussion. And, you know, I think, you know, the human security indices, especially in health and education, really did improve over the last 20 years. And I think, you know, you can't, that's a, you know, fairly sort of, you can look at that objectively. And then that discussion about everything that's gone wrong and all the mistakes, this sort of, you know, this need to kind of almost kind of take into account the political where obviously it was fairly disastrous, the military and the development and how they intersect is really important. I think if you're just sort of looking at from the kind of, an evaluation point of view and development, you know, I think those improvement in the human development indices, a lot of that was actually down to the donor work over the last 20 years. And what I would say is that, you know, that basic package for the health services that provides all of the medical care to Afghans in all 34 provinces and getting those nine to 10, you know, nine to 10 million Afghan children into school that otherwise wouldn't have been in there over the last 20 years. You know, these are things that shouldn't be forgotten. And I think what you have to look at is sort of it's really important to understand what systems have been built over the last 20 years that have improved the lives of Afghans. And then, and it's important to sort of understand how those systems and how they improve services so that we can understand what's important to try and preserve now and how to actually save those systems that will be built. So I can sort of give you like, you know, just from my limited experience, sort of a brief overview of some of the systems that I know of and, you know, how evaluation can play its part as well. That would be wonderful, Joseph. And, you know, I think what the other part of the discussion is also sort of look at how donor investment has actually really transformed the attitudes and expectations of many Afghans. And here's where, you know, we're, Jonathan, we're talking, we're, Jonathan was talking about those fissures in society. That's really very important to also keep in mind. Because there's just been sort of so much work, you know, Afghanistan's almost been this petri dish in terms of actually public surveying about expectations and attitudes. There's been so much work done, you know. So I think some of those systems that I've sort of had personal experience evaluating, you know, I would sort of talk about the basic healthcare packages from the Ministry of Public Health. The really important improvements in the reproductive maternal newborn child and adolescent services. And all of these are sort of underpinned by like a whole array of different systems. You know, you've got training for midwives, you've got the accreditation programs for nurses and doctors. And that's leaving aside, of course, all of the infrastructure that's been built and the equipment, surfaces around the health, what's called HMIS, that's the Health Management Information Systems. So that's this kind of huge IT effort, you know, where essentially, you know, so there was this incredible effort to almost sort of drag Afghanistan, drop them into like a 21st century modern IT centric world. And so obviously, there were massive mistakes made and some programs were better than others. And what was achieved? I mean, you have to sort of look at the end of, you know, at the specific individual evaluations, I think, to actually, you know, ready to understand that. I think other things such as, you know, there was this sort of this real effort to actually kind of introduce professionalization to these social service sectors, whether it was nurses or midwives or doctors or teachers, home health care workers, social workers. For the first time, there was a, you know, a sense that actually these are professional industries. Sorry, one second. Should I make sure I didn't run out of power? And I think that's like a really important dynamic that was going on. The use of CSOs and NGOs in the service care as service care providers and contractors, you know, which is something we're very used to here in New Zealand, but that's a fairly radical transformation. And it almost sort of, it was one really important driver into civil society, you know, because suddenly there was this plethora of contracts being offered at the very local level. And it actually gave some, I think, you know, it's sort of, you've got this dynamic where you've got some NGOs and CSOs which were just suddenly sort of mushroomed up and would disappear. But the ones that stayed and certain donors, you know, had sort of this kind of, you know, we're going to find our champions and organizational sustainability. And these were all very, I think, you know, sort of important things that we're going to have to try and better understand as we seek to find those local organizations and local actors that can still work, you know, the international community can hopefully engage with in Afghanistan because, you know, really we do have to have local solutions now. The medical chain, sorry, the medical supply chain and the distribution systems that were built, these were really important with ASMO. And all of these things, you know, probably, I don't know, but I imagine they'd be teetering right now. So, you know, hopefully the international donor community is figuring out how we can, you know, carry on to support those systems and not, you know, let all those gains and just disappear. The school book supply system, we were doing an evaluation on that, you know, that was really important. Dabs, which is the national electricity provider with the P-TECH main trunk line going sort of north to south down through the country. You know, that electrification, we've just done a huge evaluation on how electricity changes life outcomes for those households. And we've seen, you know, electrification had gone from, you know, I don't know, I don't have the figures on my head, you know, on the top of my head, but it was like less than 10% to, you know, towards the 30s and 40s now and much higher in urban areas. And that electrification was beginning to go to those rural areas. And what that does to households, to, you know, children's illiteracy or to the use decision-making around heat sources and all of those things. And just, you know, so that's all very important to understand. And it'll be, you know, really critical to keep engaging with Afghanistan almost. I think there are certainly lessons around donor coordination and evaluation. And the ARTF program, I think, was a really important one. This was the large trust fund. Because I think, you know, if you sort of talk now to, I think, at some stage, we're going to have this reflection period. And maybe this is the beginning of that, you know, and how we do, how the donor communities actually work in these very fragile states in a better way. And I think discussions around trust funds, rather than sort of, you know, for donor coordination is probably really important. In regards to gender and democracy and governments programs, you know, it's been a lot more difficult to evaluate. And it's proved a lot more ephemeral because it's so vulnerable to the wider political environment. And that's probably a very worthwhile discussion around having. I will say that, you know, while some programs were better than others, there was a lot for people to be proud of and a lot of changes did take place. And at the same time, now that they've changed expectations, because that's what they've done, you know, they really created an aggregate. You know, they created a new vision for two generations of Afghans about what they expect from the state and their lives in terms of, you know, that gender empowerment, the democracy and governance programming. And then to suddenly have that sort of pulled away from them as Hafisa alluded to is, you know, beyond words. In terms of the tragedy, so, you know, I think we do have to sort of take a step back and I think networking and actually figuring out what local networks still exist and how we can work with them without putting them in any further peril is going to be really important. And then there's a sort of very large discussion around coin and counterinsurgency and whether any of those theories change, whether any of those theories of change which we were using for 10 years about, you know, the economic transformation in the rural South that we were seeking around moving farmers into like high value crops and whether that was going to have any effect on the interrelationships and dependencies between different groups and whether they have, you know, pulling people out of conflict and into productive lives, whether that has any validity down. And obviously it was a catastrophe and I think, you know, the whole, that whole era is thankfully gone and the donor community themselves have pivoted away from it five years ago or so, but certainly of historical and academic and pre-academic interest. But I'll finish there because I think hopefully we have some time for discussion. Thank you. Thank you so much, Joseph, for that very illuminating eye-opening window into the lessons in the aid sector. Andrew, I will hand it over to you to ask some questions of the chat function and everyone. Andrew Collins is a PhD candidate from King's College London in the Department of War Studies. Over to you, Andrew. Thanks, Marie. And thank you to all of the panelists and the audience for being here. I'm just going to try to summarize some of the questions people have been sending me through direct messages as well as putting into the global chat as well as asking if you have my own. And these were all really interesting and varied perspectives. And I think you've raised some important issues. I want to start with something perhaps, Joseph, you picked up on the space for evaluation now because Hafizah and Jonathan, you sort of outlined a profile of a crisis in full swing right now with the drought, the pandemic, the economic problems and people not being able to get their money from banks, the trade flows drying up and supply chains being disrupted. And all of this is very problematic for daily life in Afghanistan for the ways people do business and expect things to happen in the future. Is evaluation what people need in a crisis and how do we make space for reflection and give people opportunities to actually learn the lessons from history? I don't know if you'd like to speak on this one by one or if I can throw a few more questions at you and different people can have a go at choosing the ones they like. But I'll just put a couple more on the table. Is there a way that the international community can use conditionality at this point to prioritize certain aspects of the agenda they'd like to see for political reform and to sort of keep the Taliban vaguely in line with international norms on human rights things like this? Is there a space for conditionality to be used around preserving the gains made in the education sector, for example, and around women's rights? And to what extent do you think there's a trade-off between that and pursuing counterterrorism and radicalization agendas? Is the political capital of the donor community expended as they gain concessions from the Taliban in one area such that they would be less able to manage to persuade them in other areas? Hoping this makes sense. And I'll put another one out for now. There's a few more, but I'm wondering what's the fate of the people who've remained behind in Afghanistan? Are these possibly people who can be worked with without necessarily engaging directly with the government? These mushroom NGOs and CSOs and some of the medical leaders and legal professionals and university lecturers and so forth who didn't leave the country or who may not have had that chance. Are these people who can provide alternative sites of intervention? Do you want us to come in now and join? Oh, sure. I was just hoping that... Sorry, but I thought you were waiting. I didn't know what you were reading, though. Sorry, no, my monitor just froze for a second. Could we go through in perhaps the order in which the panelists spoke and we'll begin with Hafiza and then Jonathan's and then Joseph's opinions about any of these you'd like to comment on? Thank you. Thank you so much. Start with working with people who are in Kabul and over all Afghanistan right now as a possibility supporting those people who are in the country right now. Yes, of course. There are many group of professionals left in the country and they all, of course, want to help people, first help them themselves and then the people around them in the community. There are still people who are in big cities and also in the provincial level. Like last time, the first time the Taliban took over the country, they had these angels working with local people. And of course, this time, as Joseph mentioned, we have very good networking among the several societies. I totally agree with Joseph. We have some angels who are really good and sustainable work for the development of the country. They all are still in the country. Some of them are even we have some of the angels who like the work mushroom he mentioned. Yes, they all have to get help to the people. I think some of the international actual or activists already started working them with them. I know some group of people already start teaching online to students at the university level and working together. So these work possible. Still possible to work with them. And your question about putting to a Taliban working with the Taliban government maybe other or not agree with me or maybe I'm coming from Afghanistan as a woman experience all these things in the country. I'm saying not to recognize Taliban government. And the reason why I have some points to mention later on in the discussion. Instead of working with Taliban, it's better to make a joint effort and fighting with them. Why this extremist group should exist in a country like Afghanistan or any place in the world. In a state of working with them, I think it's better to fight with them. I put it in this way. Maybe I'm so emotional. I come in from the country. But this is my perception right now about Taliban. Because within Taliban, there's al-Qaeda group, very extremist group, and they are in power and they are acting. So that's what I'm saying. Working with them instead of working with them or putting on the condition, it's better to make a joint effort. Fight with them. I have some other reason. I will share that later on. That's not here. Thank you. Thank you Hafizah. And if Jonathan and Joseph have anything to add, or I noticed there's a little bit of disagreement over the level to which it's worth pursuing the fight against the Taliban or recognizing them or partly conditionally recognizing them or the degree of importance which should be attached to this. But perhaps the other panelists have some opinions they would like to share on that. Yeah, I realize I'm on sensitive ground here as a non-Afghan, but as somebody who has worked on Afghanistan and lived there for over 30 years and with a lot of Afghan friends, I do have a strong feeling for the country and commitment towards it. But I respectfully differ from what Hafizah said just now. I think it's a fact that the Taliban are the ruling authority. It's also a fact that any alternative to the Taliban at this moment in time is far worse than the Taliban. You only have to see Daesh and what they're doing at the moment. Not only that though, any forms of armed resistance to the Taliban would be an absolute disaster for the Taliban. Sorry for the Afghan people at the moment. The last thing any of my Afghan friends want at the moment is more fighting. So I think the issue is not about international recognition. International recognition is not on the table and the Taliban are not even expecting international recognition anytime soon. The issue at the moment is around engagement and that leads me to the second question about conditionality. The track record of conditionality in any context, internationally in the context of aid or state building, has been pretty appalling. And I would challenge anyone to kind of show examples where conditionality has consistently worked or credibly worked. What has to happen now is some form of engagement because I was an NGO worker myself for many years. So I am a strong supporter of NGOs. So NGOs by themselves are not going to deal with this current crisis. To go to scale as UNICEF and World Food Program are arguing, this involves talking to and engaging with the kinds of systems that Joseph was talking about. There are some systems in place and the Taliban, there's an interesting question in the chat as well about what about the people leaving the country who have kind of helped set up these systems. The Taliban is falling over backwards to say it doesn't want these educated people to leave and it wants to engage with the international community to deliver these things. It has a vested interest in addressing this crisis. Now you could argue that okay, well, we undermine the Taliban so that it collapses and use the crisis as a way of doing that. For the Afghan people, that would be an absolute disaster and a total abrogation of responsibility. So I think we have to look at interest kind of creative ways of kind of working with systems that are in place and that will involve conversations with this thing called the Taliban which is not monolithic by the way. There's differences within the Taliban. Our past experience of megaphone diplomacy and sanctions is that it simply strengthens up hardliners. That's what happened in the 1990s. So there has to be some kind of engagement with certain groups within the Taliban and recognize actually there are a lot of divisions between more radical groups and more moderate ones, those who believe more in politics and diplomacy in the States and those who have come from a military and a much more radical background. The final thing to say about NGOs and civil societies, as I say, I've worked with them for them for many years and one of the kind of stories about NGOs that is not very often told is how the support for NGOs in the 1980s and 1990s was very important in holding in cold storage a kind of class of educated people who re-emerged in 2001 and became people like Hani Fatma became ministers. So I think investing in these people, which is where I definitely agree with Hafiz, investing in those people and protecting them is a very important investment in the future and they may be space for them moving into government positions, into positions of authority in the future. But it's not going to happen if we kind of shout conditionalities and use sanctions to try and leverage and get what we want because it's just not, it's going to happen perversified. Makes sense and Joseph, anything to add? Yeah, I just sort of say that obviously the first thing to acknowledge is that there is a humanitarian crisis and that has to be dealt with first. Growing into winter, like already there's food shortages and over the next year the economy could contract 20, 30, 40 percent. We've sort of seen these kind of figures being bandied around. So we are sort of dealing with the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff kind of stuff and we just have to hope for the international community. And I believe they are, they are rallying around and they're trying to figure out how they deal with that crisis first. And all the other questions about recognition, I think are sort of hopefully on the back burner. I don't know, but I imagine that's how they're proceeding. In terms of evaluation, I think it's really interesting, actually says how it's not a monolithic country, it's a very complex country. Though certainly in the North, I believe, the Taliban are somewhat of occupying power still in terms of the ideology and in terms of the sentiment of large swaps of the people and actually how the international community can begin to work with the forces of moderation. I'm sorry, that's a very sort of fake term, but there will certainly be ordinary people out there who will want to work with whoever to improve their lives and the lives of their local communities. Now for evaluation, I think I guess it's sort of figuring out as actually these things, and they will happen organically as the international community at the governmental level, but also how the international NGO community actually engages figuring out when things are working and why and how to sort of empower those forces of moderation. And also then as reform agendas sort of organically crop up in different areas of Afghanistan, how what we can do to help them and whether it's sort of online learning for girls or interfaith dialogues, I don't know. We can't really sort of prognosticate now as to what we're going to be, but certainly as evaluators there will be a role for us to play. And it'll be sort of more research rather than programmatic evaluation, but there'll be interesting hybrids cropping up I'm sure. And also a lot of stuff will be happening behind closed doors, behind the doors of homes and things like that. And how, so Khafisa mentioned, these very powerful, no, very real networks of women and NGOs and moderate religious leaders and just networks because that's Afghanistan. It's a very highly networked society. So whatever we can do to help those forces of moderation, we have to do. Speaking of networks and the whole financial crisis, there is a question in the chat about what your thoughts are in terms of unfreezing the assets. How difficult is it? And what are the chances of that happening anytime soon so that people won't starve and freeze? Jonathan, would you like to have a go at that? Yeah, I mean, it's not my expertise, but it's very easy to do it. What's stopping it from happening are a set of kind of political kind of calculations and pressures. And I mean, I think it's also important to say unfreezing these assets is not the key, is not the answer to this crisis. It's part of potentially the solution. I mean, the former finance minister, Payenda, has had a very interesting interview with the African endless network. And he was arguing not for a carte blanche kind of releasing of these funds, but perhaps releasing installments of it as part of a kind of a conversation and part of the bargain process. But I mean, my understanding is the U.S. in particular, but the EU, they're against releasing the funds and they're taking a position of a circumspect form, a circumspect about any form of engagement with the Taliban. That is part of the picture anyway, then it's important part of the picture. The other part of the picture is the one that Joseph has mentioned about the humanitarian aid and getting that delivered at scale as quickly as possible. And that will have to involve some kind of disagreement with the Taliban and sectors of the state that have kind of capacity to deliver services. Absolutely. Since we only have about two minutes left, I would like to open it up to the panel. Just to ask you, how do you think the international community, we being part of the international community, can do our best to help the people of Afghanistan? Hafiz, would you like to comment on that? Thank you, Mary. And thank you, Jonathan. Very impressive responsibility for mission. Again, I start with my point like, first of all, continue to not recognize Taliban as a government because they're not inclusive. And I'm saying not inclusive because minority group are under pressure, first of all. Minority group own money, but Hazara group is first. I am in Hazara community as well. We are under pressure, they kill us on spot. So that's what I'm saying. And working with this government in Afghanistan, not a good solution. Women are not included. Taliban group do not respect human rights, do not respect women's rights, do not respect children rights. When you put conditionality, like international community, put conditionality and recognize them or not recognize them, even make a way of communication, dealing with them or working with them, then how they will stop these things like pressuring the minority group in Afghanistan. This is, I think, not possible. As for the international community, that within the Taliban group, quite a group is very active and in power, and practicing power right now. So now it's Afghanistan, but similar will happen, similar threat will happen in the world. Of course, we have Daesh group going on, and they are experiencing their power in the country as well. But how international communities work with this one, the Akhazag group? As Afghan women, I request from international community that please do not take violence. Please do not leave Afghanistan alone. It's a matter of millions of people there. I said, do send your humanitarian support. People are really in need to receive that. But more important, it's better that they come together and make a decision and make an adjoint effort fighting with terrorist groups. Is it Daesh or Akhazag or Taliban? They are similar groups, but similar objective. They are the threat of the world, not in Afghanistan. I said, now it's in Afghanistan, Afghan people are experiencing this crisis, this threats or this hard life experience. But soon, the international community will experience the threat from this group. So, better that they come together than later. Not this year, it's next year, or two years, or three years. Let's all soon, they are a threat for all the world. People will not be agree with me, but this is me living in Afghanistan. Even right now, physically, I'm not in the country, I'm out of the country. But I know how people are experiencing Taliban government in Afghanistan. I know how the pressure people inside the country, the minority group. Thank you so much for your honest response there. Joseph and Jonathan, do you have any final words before we have to close this wonderful panel discussion? Jonathan, do you want the last word? Why don't I just quickly go ahead? I think you do a bit of job summing it up. Go ahead, I don't necessarily want the last word, but go ahead. Okay, I was just going to say, I hope the international community doesn't look away, that's all. I think the Afghans are incredibly smart, savvy, resilient people, I love them. I think history is going to move pretty fast, and I don't think we don't really know what's going to happen, but it's not going to be a repetition of previous eras. I just don't know what's going to happen. I just think expectations and attitudes within of the Afghan people have changed after the last 20 years, and the world's moving too fast with the kids in their cell phones and stuff. Who knows? Anyway, so I just hope we don't look away. That's all. Yeah, we're going over time, so I'll be really quick. I'd reinforce the point that Joseph just made about not looking away, because last time international actors did look away, Afghanistan descended into civil war and what we got. So I think engaging, and I think there's two key areas where things have got to be done. One is aid and the humanitarian crisis, and major funding at this moment, and we're talking about over the next weeks and over the winter period. The second thing is the political process. We haven't really talked a lot about the political process and what it might look like, but I think there is a, Hafiz is absolutely right that the Taliban are not ruling inclusively. They don't represent all Afghans, and there's a need for a political process to bring about greater level of inclusion and international acts as an important role to play. And I guess something we haven't talked about is how regional actors are a very important part of this kind of power constellation, and in many ways Afghanistan in some ways could be seen as this a manifestation of this shift of power eastwards and the growing importance, obviously, of China. And I think engaging with regional actors around a political process, which will involve the Taliban, who are not the same as Al Qaeda, who are not the same as Daesh. We have to be clear about what we're dealing with here and not conflate them with other actors. They will have to be part of this political process, as will other actors in Afghan society, including of course minorities, including of course women, but there has to be a political process that's supported over the medium to longer term. Thank you so much, Jonathan, Hafizah, Joseph, and Andrew. Thank you for being a great co-host, Andrew, and for helping me out with the chat section. I'd like to thank the panelists for their intelligent and thought provoking provocations and answers to our questions. We learned so much from listening to your sometimes diverse viewpoints. And from the bottom of my heart, I really hope the people of Afghanistan would not suffer, would not continue to suffer for too long. And on that note, I'd like to thank everyone for your time. Thank you for joining us in this panel discussion. I'm sure you all do fantastic work in your normal private lives, if it's in the NGO sector or the academia or in government. And yes, let's hope for the best. Hope for the best and keep Afghanistan in our thoughts and minds. Thank you, everyone.