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HOLLY KUZMICH: Yeah.
What message do you have for policymakers in the US about what they can and should still be doing to support Afghan women?
LAURA BUSH: Well, I think that they just should still be doing what we do already, which is give some financial support—a lot of financial support, actually, to the government; not to the Taliban. They’re dependent, really, on that as they build their economy, but they have been able to build an economy. And they’ve been able to build an economy because everyone can participate in it now, not just men.
HOLLY KUZMICH: Right.
LAURA BUSH: And I think that—you know, we’ve given aid to countries for many, many years, and I think it’s in our moral interest and I also think it’s in our security interest to continue to try to fund—send money to Afghanistan for a legitimate government and legitimate projects that are going on there.
HOLLY KUZMICH: Right. And we really have the ability to condition that aid–
LAURA BUSH: That’s right, we certainly do.
HOLLY KUZMICH: –on representation by women in the peace talks–
LAURA BUSH: That’s right, that’s right.
HOLLY KUZMICH: –and in the government, and in society in Afghanistan, and that’s important.
Well, LAURA BUSH, any words for the women of Afghanistan because this is going to be livestreamed and you might have women in Afghanistan paying attention to what you’re saying.
LAURA BUSH: Well, I think the women of Afghanistan know that I’m standing with them, that I have been for all these years. And President Bush I know would also say that he’s standing with you all and hopes for the very best for you. And I also want you to know how much I admire the way the women of Afghanistan have been able to step out and secure their rights and be real full contributing members to their economy and to their society in every way.
HOLLY KUZMICH: Yeah. OK. Well, Mrs. Bush, thank you.
LAURA BUSH: Thanks so much.
HOLLY KUZMICH: Thank you for your continued leadership.
LAURA BUSH: Thanks to the Atlantic Council. Thank you for hosting Mrs. Ghani, especially.
HOLLY KUZMICH: Yes. Thank you. And we will send it back to Ambassador Dobriansky.
LAURA BUSH: Sounds great. Thanks a lot.
PAULA DOBRIANSKY: Thank you so much, Holly, for a great interview. And Mrs. Bush really, thank you so much again not only for being with us here today, but also for your longstanding dedication to Afghan women.
It gives me great pleasure, by the way, first, before we go to our featured guest, I’d like to mention that here in Washington, DC we are very, very fortunate to have Afghanistan’s ambassador to the United States, Roya Rahmani. She has been a great partner with the Atlantic Council, supporting the causes of Afghanistan, and we’re particularly grateful today for her making today’s discussion with Afghanistan’s first lady, Rula Ghani, possible. Thank you so much, Ambassador. We are really appreciative of all your efforts, and thanks for being with us.
And I’d also like to mention that we are also joined today by one of the Council’s great partners on Afghanistan, and that’s Stephen Heintz of the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation. Thank you, Stephen, for your support. We’re really grateful. And also, the importance of the Afghan taskforce. We just are grateful to be partnering with you and glad that you could be with us, as well, here today.
STEPHEN B. HEINTZ (Rockefeller Brothers Fund): Thank you very much.
PAULA DOBRIANSKY: Thank you.
I would like now to turn to Her Excellency First Lady of Afghanistan Rula Ghani—(audio break)—who is director of the Enabled Children Initiative, a charity that supports and advocates for Afghan children with disabilities who have been abandoned or orphaned.
Now, since assuming the office of the first lady in 2014, First Lady Ghani has worked very closely with Afghan women to create a more fair and just society. This has been really a core goal and objective of hers. Recently, Her Excellency First Lady Ghani has been a vocal advocate of ensuring that women are represented at the highest levels of the peace talks in Doha, and continues to work to ensure that women’s rights and participation are preserved and also elevated throughout this process. We are just thrilled to have you with us today, Your Excellency First Lady Ghani.
With that, I would like to give the floor over to you and to Mrs. Mohib. Welcome.
FIRST LADY RULA GHANI: Thank you, Paula. Thank you for all the things you said. You’ve given me much too much credit, but I agree with you that women have made incredible strides. But it is through their own volition and their own—their own hard work.
But please also accept my thanks. The Atlantic Council also should—I should say that I’m extremely grateful that they’ve given me, again, another opportunity to speak to their fellow members.
And I would like to also say that I’m also very grateful for Mrs. Laura Bush to have accepted to join in this program. And I—she never disappoints. She really spoke so well about Afghanistan. And it’s true: It comes from the heart, and you can tell.
You want to go ahead?
LAEL MOHIB: Thank you, Mrs. Ghani.
And thank you, Paula. Thank you to the Atlantic Council and all of the viewers who are joining us virtually today.
And most importantly, thank you, Mrs. Ghani, for being here –
RULA GHANI: You’re welcome.
LAEL MOHIB:—for this very important discussion at this important time. I’ll jump right in with a first question.
RULA GHANI: Let me—let me first say there are a few things I would like to say in terms of being a first lady, I’m neither elected nor selected. So I consider myself a listener, a facilitator, an advocate. But I still live very close to the seat of power in Afghanistan. And as an old-school journalist, I like to bear witness to what happens around me. So I will be—I’ll be glad to speak about the things I know.
But also I would like to say that we have been going through a period of heightened violence that is really very disturbing. And to the families of the fallen soldiers and citizens, I want to assure them that I will try my best so that we get a durable and just peace. They will not have died in vain.
LAEL MOHIB: Thank you, Bibigul.
I want to come back to the issue of increased violence and the peace process later in the conversation, but I want to start by setting the scene for the viewers today. It’s difficult to really appreciate the progress that has happened here in Afghanistan if you haven’t been here to live it. And for the past six years, you’ve had an open-door policy in your office. You’ve met literally thousands of women. You’ve traveled to the provinces. You’ve listened to their issues. When I walked into your office this evening, the corridor is full of photos from these meetings, from the floor to the ceiling. It’s really something to see.
So if you can just give us your perspective on the progress made by Afghan women and girls in society and politics.
RULA GHANI: Sure. Well, three years ago I had my annual report to the CSW at the UN; you know, this Conference on the State of Women in the world. And three years ago I said they’re now visible. You can see women everywhere—in the streets, in offices, in the government and all that.
Today what I can add is that not only are they visible. They’re also active and effective. And there’s not one day that goes by that I don’t hear about a new woman that I hadn’t heard from or I meet a new person. And so in order to illustrate that, I went back to my schedule for the past week and I picked up four women that I met for the first time last week. And maybe we could have the first picture.
So I’m going to speak about two young women—I mean, young. They’re in their early thirties. Palwasha from Helmand. This is a picture you’re seeing. And she had come to my office because she wanted to give me a booklet she had written about breast cancer. Her sister had died from breast cancer. And she’s the daughter of two doctors. She lives in Helmand, in Nad Ali, which is one of the districts where violence erupted recently. But still she felt it was her duty to write this booklet, to put it together, to compile it, so that her own sisters can be informed of what to look for and when to go and reach out for help, for treatment.
Let’s have the second picture.
The women you see sitting on the couch are all the board members of the Afghan Cancer Foundation, which we founded almost four years ago now. And I—as a facilitator, this is—you can see how I try to facilitate. I asked them to come when Palwasha came to give me her booklet. And they were very interested in meeting her. And I think they will be printing her booklet, to distribute it all around Afghanistan.
Next picture.
In this picture—well, this is an Afghan tradition. You bring a shawl to put it on the shoulders of a woman that you’re visiting. And Marya, the person who’s putting the shawl on me, is an Uzbek from Faryab. She started as a schoolteacher, and then very soon after became a monitor and an implementer in the NSP, the National Solidarity Program and its successor program called Citizen Charter.
She—let’s go to the following picture that you can see her. She is—it has been now two years since she is DoWA in Faryab. DoWA means director of women affairs. Which means she represents the Ministry of Women’s Affairs Faryab. Interestingly enough she’s an ambitious lady. And she came to see me to discuss how she could accede to a national position. So these two young women you can see are really trying to make every opportunity they have to be able to fulfill their own potential.
Next picture, please.
This is Zarah Sepher. She’s a Hazara who grew up in Iran and became an activist at the age of twelve, working in Afghan schools—I mean, schools for the Afghan migrants there. She came back to Kabul, became a writer and having studied law she also was a bona fide public defender. She founded an organization for the protection of women and children. And she still writes from time to time for the local press and the international press. She is now the advisor to Vice President Danish. She is his advisor for human rights. She had been very affected by the attack on the maternity hospital, you remember, a couple of months ago, where women and babies were killed in the process of delivery. And she came to discuss with me two proposals, one for creating some kind of social security for families and the other to create—to decide how to take care of children that have lost their mothers—I mean, newborns who have lost their mothers. It was really very touching from her.
Next picture.
This is the last picture I’ll be showing you. This is a fourth woman. Her name is Karima Faryabi and she is—she is older than all the other three. She studied medicine. She graduated from the School of Medicine in Balkh and has then worked with UNICEF and with Doctors Without Borders. And then when the Taliban came, she just decided to have a free clinic and just work as a free—I mean, as a doctor, with helping all her compatriots. All this in the province of Faryab. But she’s also known to have—I mean, she has some sort of fame to have alerted her compatriots to the possible harms of the medicine of oxytocin. At the time it was used totally without real understanding of its effects. She is slated to become our minister of economy. And she had come to visit me to get to know—it was a get to know each other visit, a courtesy visit. Thank with the pictures.
What I want to say is that you can see here is four women, four different trajectories. And yet, they’re all trying to make the best of all the opportunities they have around themselves to be able to become strong and effective, and to be able to be actors—real strong actors in the rebuilding of the country. It’s really very rewarding to meet them.
LAEL MOHIB: And of course, these are women who have access to education. Others, particularly in the rural areas may not.
RULA GHANI: I’m glad you’ve asked this question. We do have still a very large proportion of women who are—who cannot read or write. And we’re trying to do something about it. It’s taking a lot of time. But these women also can think. And you find that out. Last year we had a program where we were consulting women about what they thought about peace. And we visited—when I say “we,” it was my office but with other institutions, both governmental and civil society institutions. We visited all thirty-four provinces and sat down with women and asked them what did they think about peace, what were the obstacles for peace, and what—how do they think we could avoid or resolve these obstacles.
They were incredibly sophisticated. They really knew—they knew not only what was happening around them, but they knew what was happening in the country, in the region, in the world. They had very good opinions. If you’re interested in knowing what these women—we consulted with 15,000 women—what these women’s opinions were, you can go to my office’s website, which is firstlady.gov.af, and look up Women for Peace. And there you will see and you have in English a whole summary of what were their demands and their observations.
So Afghan women are really very, very much aware of what’s happening. And I think they are progressing very, very fast. It’s almost exponential. And I’m very proud of them.
LAEL MOHIB: You’ve taken us to the peace process talking about the Women’s Consultative Jirga–
RULA GHANI: Yes.
LAEL MOHIB: –which I wanted to ask you about. But before I get to my question, I just want to do a bit of stock-taking on where things are right now in the peace process. The Taliban are in violation of their February 29th agreement with the US government. They have ramped up violence across the country—you mentioned Helmand—and citizens are bearing the brunt of that. At the same time, this week a senior al-Qaida commander who is on the FBI’s Most Wanted List was found and killed. He was being harbored by the Taliban here in Afghanistan. And the word from Doha is that they are—they are refusing to negotiate in earnest with the Afghan negotiating team.
So women—Afghan women are watching this unfold. What are they telling you? How are they feeling about the process unfolding in Doha?
RULA GHANI: They’re not just telling me; they’re telling the world. They really are very active, ever since they figured out that they were being sidelined by the Doha talks because, unfortunately, in its first appearance it had no space for women. And they are—they really have made their voices heard and protested very clearly and reactivated all their networks, even networks with Europe and with the American—with the US
Don’t get me wrong: Women—Afghan women want peace. Afghan men, too. We all want peace. Who wouldn’t, after living for forty years in such a situation of insecurity and of violence at every corner? But we don’t want peace at any cost, and we have some very clear ideas of how we want—how we conceive that peace.
As I said, we did consultations with women over a period of six or eight months, and we went everywhere, every corner of Afghanistan. This is for the women, but the men, too, have started realizing what they want for peace.
The Taliban have to understand that we have no problems for them coming back to Afghanistan. They are our brothers. They are our sisters. And if they are Afghans, they have the right to live in Afghanistan. And actually, some of them already do live. And you know, there is nothing that says on their forehead that they are Taliban, and probably in the street there are quite a few people that might be Talib that we are seeing. But they need to understand that if they want to come and live back in Afghanistan, they have to adhere by the law of the land. They cannot come and impose their own convictions, their own brand of religion on the rest of the population. Let’s do the math. We are almost 36 million people. They are, I don’t know, 100,000, 200,000, 300,000? So where do they come from wanting to impose on us certain things they believe in?
There is—so, actually, finally, what I would like to say is that there is a lot of confusion in what’s happening in Doha. A confusion—as I said, at first it was not known; it was said, that maybe women should not be there. It was really. Then it was not known who they wanted to negotiate with. They said they would not negotiate with the government. It was a big charade. I personally never called it Doha peace talks. I called it the Doha charade.
And up till now we’re still not really clear about what the Taliban want. If ever you—if you have followed carefully, you’ve seen that our team of negotiators is there with them. They’ve been there for almost more than a month. And they’re trying to set up procedures. And so they’re—when they were discussing on what base should the negotiations go, the Taliban said, oh, but we have this agreement with the US. We want that to be the basis for negotiation.
Our team said, well, we also have an agreement with the US It’s a different agreement. So let’s negotiate instead on the basis of the Holy Quran and the Islamic precepts. They wouldn’t. They wouldn’t accept. They still want to do it on the basis of that agreement.
Well, that agreement, which was signed, I think, in August—I’m not really quite sure when it was signed—anyway—
LAEL MOHIB: February.
HOLLY KUZMICH: Yeah.
What message do you have for policymakers in the US about what they can and should still be doing to support Afghan women?
LAURA BUSH: Well, I think that they just should still be doing what we do already, which is give some financial support—a lot of financial support, actually, to the government; not to the Taliban. They’re dependent, really, on that as they build their economy, but they have been able to build an economy. And they’ve been able to build an economy because everyone can participate in it now, not just men.
HOLLY KUZMICH: Right.
LAURA BUSH: And I think that—you know, we’ve given aid to countries for many, many years, and I think it’s in our moral interest and I also think it’s in our security interest to continue to try to fund—send money to Afghanistan for a legitimate government and legitimate projects that are going on there.
HOLLY KUZMICH: Right. And we really have the ability to condition that aid–
LAURA BUSH: That’s right, we certainly do.
HOLLY KUZMICH: –on representation by women in the peace talks–
LAURA BUSH: That’s right, that’s right.
HOLLY KUZMICH: –and in the government, and in society in Afghanistan, and that’s important.
Well, LAURA BUSH, any words for the women of Afghanistan because this is going to be livestreamed and you might have women in Afghanistan paying attention to what you’re saying.
LAURA BUSH: Well, I think the women of Afghanistan know that I’m standing with them, that I have been for all these years. And President Bush I know would also say that he’s standing with you all and hopes for the very best for you. And I also want you to know how much I admire the way the women of Afghanistan have been able to step out and secure their rights and be real full contributing members to their economy and to their society in every way.
HOLLY KUZMICH: Yeah. OK. Well, Mrs. Bush, thank you.
LAURA BUSH: Thanks so much.
HOLLY KUZMICH: Thank you for your continued leadership.
LAURA BUSH: Thanks to the Atlantic Council. Thank you for hosting Mrs. Ghani, especially.
HOLLY KUZMICH: Yes. Thank you. And we will send it back to Ambassador Dobriansky.
LAURA BUSH: Sounds great. Thanks a lot.
PAULA DOBRIANSKY: Thank you so much, Holly, for a great interview. And Mrs. Bush really, thank you so much again not only for being with us here today, but also for your longstanding dedication to Afghan women.
It gives me great pleasure, by the way, first, before we go to our featured guest, I’d like to mention that here in Washington, DC we are very, very fortunate to have Afghanistan’s ambassador to the United States, Roya Rahmani. She has been a great partner with the Atlantic Council, supporting the causes of Afghanistan, and we’re particularly grateful today for her making today’s discussion with Afghanistan’s first lady, Rula Ghani, possible. Thank you so much, Ambassador. We are really appreciative of all your efforts, and thanks for being with us.
And I’d also like to mention that we are also joined today by one of the Council’s great partners on Afghanistan, and that’s Stephen Heintz of the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation. Thank you, Stephen, for your support. We’re really grateful. And also, the importance of the Afghan taskforce. We just are grateful to be partnering with you and glad that you could be with us, as well, here today.
STEPHEN B. HEINTZ (Rockefeller Brothers Fund): Thank you very much.
PAULA DOBRIANSKY: Thank you.
I would like now to turn to Her Excellency First Lady of Afghanistan Rula Ghani—(audio break)—who is director of the Enabled Children Initiative, a charity that supports and advocates for Afghan children with disabilities who have been abandoned or orphaned.
Now, since assuming the office of the first lady in 2014, First Lady Ghani has worked very closely with Afghan women to create a more fair and just society. This has been really a core goal and objective of hers. Recently, Her Excellency First Lady Ghani has been a vocal advocate of ensuring that women are represented at the highest levels of the peace talks in Doha, and continues to work to ensure that women’s rights and participation are preserved and also elevated throughout this process. We are just thrilled to have you with us today, Your Excellency First Lady Ghani.
With that, I would like to give the floor over to you and to Mrs. Mohib. Welcome.
FIRST LADY RULA GHANI: Thank you, Paula. Thank you for all the things you said. You’ve given me much too much credit, but I agree with you that women have made incredible strides. But it is through their own volition and their own—their own hard work.
But please also accept my thanks. The Atlantic Council also should—I should say that I’m extremely grateful that they’ve given me, again, another opportunity to speak to their fellow members.
And I would like to also say that I’m also very grateful for Mrs. Laura Bush to have accepted to join in this program. And I—she never disappoints. She really spoke so well about Afghanistan. And it’s true: It comes from the heart, and you can tell.
You want to go ahead?
LAEL MOHIB: Thank you, Mrs. Ghani.
And thank you, Paula. Thank you to the Atlantic Council and all of the viewers who are joining us virtually today.
And most importantly, thank you, Mrs. Ghani, for being here –
RULA GHANI: You’re welcome.
LAEL MOHIB:—for this very important discussion at this important time. I’ll jump right in with a first question.
RULA GHANI: Let me—let me first say there are a few things I would like to say in terms of being a first lady, I’m neither elected nor selected. So I consider myself a listener, a facilitator, an advocate. But I still live very close to the seat of power in Afghanistan. And as an old-school journalist, I like to bear witness to what happens around me. So I will be—I’ll be glad to speak about the things I know.
But also I would like to say that we have been going through a period of heightened violence that is really very disturbing. And to the families of the fallen soldiers and citizens, I want to assure them that I will try my best so that we get a durable and just peace. They will not have died in vain.
LAEL MOHIB: Thank you, Bibigul.
I want to come back to the issue of increased violence and the peace process later in the conversation, but I want to start by setting the scene for the viewers today. It’s difficult to really appreciate the progress that has happened here in Afghanistan if you haven’t been here to live it. And for the past six years, you’ve had an open-door policy in your office. You’ve met literally thousands of women. You’ve traveled to the provinces. You’ve listened to their issues. When I walked into your office this evening, the corridor is full of photos from these meetings, from the floor to the ceiling. It’s really something to see.
So if you can just give us your perspective on the progress made by Afghan women and girls in society and politics.
RULA GHANI: Sure. Well, three years ago I had my annual report to the CSW at the UN; you know, this Conference on the State of Women in the world. And three years ago I said they’re now visible. You can see women everywhere—in the streets, in offices, in the government and all that.
Today what I can add is that not only are they visible. They’re also active and effective. And there’s not one day that goes by that I don’t hear about a new woman that I hadn’t heard from or I meet a new person. And so in order to illustrate that, I went back to my schedule for the past week and I picked up four women that I met for the first time last week. And maybe we could have the first picture.
So I’m going to speak about two young women—I mean, young. They’re in their early thirties. Palwasha from Helmand. This is a picture you’re seeing. And she had come to my office because she wanted to give me a booklet she had written about breast cancer. Her sister had died from breast cancer. And she’s the daughter of two doctors. She lives in Helmand, in Nad Ali, which is one of the districts where violence erupted recently. But still she felt it was her duty to write this booklet, to put it together, to compile it, so that her own sisters can be informed of what to look for and when to go and reach out for help, for treatment.
Let’s have the second picture.
The women you see sitting on the couch are all the board members of the Afghan Cancer Foundation, which we founded almost four years ago now. And I—as a facilitator, this is—you can see how I try to facilitate. I asked them to come when Palwasha came to give me her booklet. And they were very interested in meeting her. And I think they will be printing her booklet, to distribute it all around Afghanistan.
Next picture.
In this picture—well, this is an Afghan tradition. You bring a shawl to put it on the shoulders of a woman that you’re visiting. And Marya, the person who’s putting the shawl on me, is an Uzbek from Faryab. She started as a schoolteacher, and then very soon after became a monitor and an implementer in the NSP, the National Solidarity Program and its successor program called Citizen Charter.
She—let’s go to the following picture that you can see her. She is—it has been now two years since she is DoWA in Faryab. DoWA means director of women affairs. Which means she represents the Ministry of Women’s Affairs Faryab. Interestingly enough she’s an ambitious lady. And she came to see me to discuss how she could accede to a national position. So these two young women you can see are really trying to make every opportunity they have to be able to fulfill their own potential.
Next picture, please.
This is Zarah Sepher. She’s a Hazara who grew up in Iran and became an activist at the age of twelve, working in Afghan schools—I mean, schools for the Afghan migrants there. She came back to Kabul, became a writer and having studied law she also was a bona fide public defender. She founded an organization for the protection of women and children. And she still writes from time to time for the local press and the international press. She is now the advisor to Vice President Danish. She is his advisor for human rights. She had been very affected by the attack on the maternity hospital, you remember, a couple of months ago, where women and babies were killed in the process of delivery. And she came to discuss with me two proposals, one for creating some kind of social security for families and the other to create—to decide how to take care of children that have lost their mothers—I mean, newborns who have lost their mothers. It was really very touching from her.
Next picture.
This is the last picture I’ll be showing you. This is a fourth woman. Her name is Karima Faryabi and she is—she is older than all the other three. She studied medicine. She graduated from the School of Medicine in Balkh and has then worked with UNICEF and with Doctors Without Borders. And then when the Taliban came, she just decided to have a free clinic and just work as a free—I mean, as a doctor, with helping all her compatriots. All this in the province of Faryab. But she’s also known to have—I mean, she has some sort of fame to have alerted her compatriots to the possible harms of the medicine of oxytocin. At the time it was used totally without real understanding of its effects. She is slated to become our minister of economy. And she had come to visit me to get to know—it was a get to know each other visit, a courtesy visit. Thank with the pictures.
What I want to say is that you can see here is four women, four different trajectories. And yet, they’re all trying to make the best of all the opportunities they have around themselves to be able to become strong and effective, and to be able to be actors—real strong actors in the rebuilding of the country. It’s really very rewarding to meet them.
LAEL MOHIB: And of course, these are women who have access to education. Others, particularly in the rural areas may not.
RULA GHANI: I’m glad you’ve asked this question. We do have still a very large proportion of women who are—who cannot read or write. And we’re trying to do something about it. It’s taking a lot of time. But these women also can think. And you find that out. Last year we had a program where we were consulting women about what they thought about peace. And we visited—when I say “we,” it was my office but with other institutions, both governmental and civil society institutions. We visited all thirty-four provinces and sat down with women and asked them what did they think about peace, what were the obstacles for peace, and what—how do they think we could avoid or resolve these obstacles.
They were incredibly sophisticated. They really knew—they knew not only what was happening around them, but they knew what was happening in the country, in the region, in the world. They had very good opinions. If you’re interested in knowing what these women—we consulted with 15,000 women—what these women’s opinions were, you can go to my office’s website, which is firstlady.gov.af, and look up Women for Peace. And there you will see and you have in English a whole summary of what were their demands and their observations.
So Afghan women are really very, very much aware of what’s happening. And I think they are progressing very, very fast. It’s almost exponential. And I’m very proud of them.
LAEL MOHIB: You’ve taken us to the peace process talking about the Women’s Consultative Jirga–
RULA GHANI: Yes.
LAEL MOHIB: –which I wanted to ask you about. But before I get to my question, I just want to do a bit of stock-taking on where things are right now in the peace process. The Taliban are in violation of their February 29th agreement with the US government. They have ramped up violence across the country—you mentioned Helmand—and citizens are bearing the brunt of that. At the same time, this week a senior al-Qaida commander who is on the FBI’s Most Wanted List was found and killed. He was being harbored by the Taliban here in Afghanistan. And the word from Doha is that they are—they are refusing to negotiate in earnest with the Afghan negotiating team.
So women—Afghan women are watching this unfold. What are they telling you? How are they feeling about the process unfolding in Doha?
RULA GHANI: They’re not just telling me; they’re telling the world. They really are very active, ever since they figured out that they were being sidelined by the Doha talks because, unfortunately, in its first appearance it had no space for women. And they are—they really have made their voices heard and protested very clearly and reactivated all their networks, even networks with Europe and with the American—with the US
Don’t get me wrong: Women—Afghan women want peace. Afghan men, too. We all want peace. Who wouldn’t, after living for forty years in such a situation of insecurity and of violence at every corner? But we don’t want peace at any cost, and we have some very clear ideas of how we want—how we conceive that peace.
As I said, we did consultations with women over a period of six or eight months, and we went everywhere, every corner of Afghanistan. This is for the women, but the men, too, have started realizing what they want for peace.
The Taliban have to understand that we have no problems for them coming back to Afghanistan. They are our brothers. They are our sisters. And if they are Afghans, they have the right to live in Afghanistan. And actually, some of them already do live. And you know, there is nothing that says on their forehead that they are Taliban, and probably in the street there are quite a few people that might be Talib that we are seeing. But they need to understand that if they want to come and live back in Afghanistan, they have to adhere by the law of the land. They cannot come and impose their own convictions, their own brand of religion on the rest of the population. Let’s do the math. We are almost 36 million people. They are, I don’t know, 100,000, 200,000, 300,000? So where do they come from wanting to impose on us certain things they believe in?
There is—so, actually, finally, what I would like to say is that there is a lot of confusion in what’s happening in Doha. A confusion—as I said, at first it was not known; it was said, that maybe women should not be there. It was really. Then it was not known who they wanted to negotiate with. They said they would not negotiate with the government. It was a big charade. I personally never called it Doha peace talks. I called it the Doha charade.
And up till now we’re still not really clear about what the Taliban want. If ever you—if you have followed carefully, you’ve seen that our team of negotiators is there with them. They’ve been there for almost more than a month. And they’re trying to set up procedures. And so they’re—when they were discussing on what base should the negotiations go, the Taliban said, oh, but we have this agreement with the US. We want that to be the basis for negotiation.
Our team said, well, we also have an agreement with the US It’s a different agreement. So let’s negotiate instead on the basis of the Holy Quran and the Islamic precepts. They wouldn’t. They wouldn’t accept. They still want to do it on the basis of that agreement.
Well, that agreement, which was signed, I think, in August—I’m not really quite sure when it was signed—anyway—
LAEL MOHIB: February.
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