Afghanistan, after the Taliban takeover, is a waiting game. And for Afghan women, the waiting game is agonizing.

The last time the Taliban held power, in the late ’90s and early 2000s, repression was a feature of their rule. This was especially true for women. Girls could not attend school; women could not hold jobs or leave their homes without a male relative accompanying them. Those who defied the Taliban’s directives and their fundamentalist interpretation of Islam were punished, often brutally, with floggings or beatings.

The US invasion of Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks put the Taliban’s worldview under scrutiny. The war became about more than terrorism; things like the expansion of women’s rights became embedded within the US mission there. In November 2001, first lady Laura Bush said the Taliban’s retreat meant “the people of Afghanistan, especially women, are rejoicing.” In 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a group of female Afghan ministers: “We will not abandon you, we will stand with you always.”

Twenty years later, the United States is departing, and as it executed those plans, those earlier justifications fell away. President Joe Biden has said, in the military drawdown, that the US objective in Afghanistan was to defeat terrorism there. He said last week, “the idea that we’re able to deal with the rights of women around the world by military force is not rational.”

That sentiment comes 20 years late, after the mess of two decades of conflict and the still-unfolding fallout of the US’s military intervention. All of it leaves Afghan women facing a precarious future, once again, under Taliban rule — and a question of what role, if any, the US has in that future.

The US used women’s rights to help justify the invasion of Afghanistan

The uncertainty facing Afghan women comes after 20 years of US intervention — which itself followed decades of foreign intervention by the Soviet Union and others — where women’s rights were packaged as another justification for the war in Afghanistan. The gains were real, if uneven and often tenuous, undermined by the insecurity that the decades-long conflict brought.

The struggle for gender equality didn’t start with the US arrival in 2001: Women in Afghanistan fought for their rights long before the Taliban arrived in the 1990s, and some Afghan women’s activists opposed the US intervention.

But women’s rights got inserted into the rallying cry for war regardless of whether Afghan women wanted them, and at times, they became a cause célèbre. “The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women,” Laura Bush said in November 2001, a few weeks after the US invaded Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks.

“The central goal of the terrorists is the brutal oppression of women — and not only the women of Afghanistan,” President George W. Bush said in December 2001, around the signing of legislation for Afghan women and children. “The terrorists who help rule Afghanistan are found in dozens and dozens of countries around the world. And that is the reason this great nation, with our friends and allies, will not rest until we bring them all to justice.”

Saving Afghan women from the Taliban also helped make the case for continued US war, said Saadia Toor, a sociology professor at the CUNY College of Staten Island. Even among lawmakers who generally support the withdrawal, hints of that rhetoric continue today.

The US intervention brought attention and it brought development money, much of it well-meaning but not always suited to success. Afghan women did enter public life in a way that was impossible during the Taliban’s rule. “The most drastic shift with respect to women’s rights came formally, legally, constitutionally, and how they manifest within the formal sectors,” said Maliha Chishti, former director of the United Nations’ Hague Appeal for Peace and professor at the University of Chicago. Women’s rights were enshrined in Afghanistan’s 2004 constitution; women held a certain percentage of seats in Parliament and entered sectors like law, government, and media.

International aid — severely limited during the Taliban’s rule — improved some social, economic, and health outcomes for women. Girls and women had access to education, though the instability and Taliban resurgence in recent years has threatened that. In 2020, of 9.5 million students, just shy of 40 percent were girls, according to USAID.

Still, when it came to women’s rights, they were most tangible in cities like Kabul, which, Chishti pointed out, were also the centers of international funding and foreign militaries that could protect those efforts. Meanwhile, grassroots efforts led by Afghan women sometimes conflicted with what Toor called “NGO-ized feminism” — think conferences on women’s empowerment and other kinds of Western-values activism that wasn’t sustainable and didn’t necessarily fit with Afghanistan.

Mariam Wardak, an advocate and former senior Afghan government official, pointed out that for traditional, religious, and cultural reasons, in many parts of Afghanistan “there is a resistance for women to speak out, for women to hold a certain structure in our society.”

And as the war ground on, the US commitment to women’s rights sometimes visibly waned. Amie Ferris-Rotman, who reported for Reuters from Afghanistan for two years and founded an organization to mentor and train Afghan women journalists, noted for Vanity Fair that “there have long been signs of betrayal” of America’s stated commitment to women’s rights:

There was the time a senior American official described issues of gender as “pet rocks in our rucksack taking us down.” Then there was the method deployed by the CIA of exchanging Viagra pills for intel on Taliban whereabouts, so that, in the words of an Afghan journalist friend, “old men can rape their wives with America’s blessing.” Let’s not forget the polemic two years ago by academic Cheryl Benard, wife of the Afghan-born American Taliban negotiator, Zalmay Khalilzad, chastising Afghan women for not fighting for their rights, which they are not owed “by someone else’s army or taxpayer dollars.” And when Joe Biden was asked last year by CBS if he bears “some responsibility” should Afghan women lose their rights under a Taliban takeover, the U.S. president responded to the reporter, Margaret Brennan, with “No, I don’t!”

Ultimately, one of the biggest challenges to women’s rights in Afghanistan was years of war. It’s hard to get girls to go to school when they’re displaced by airstrikes or their schools are getting blown up. The Taliban’s advance across the country in the past years meant women in positions of authority were often under threat of kidnapping and violence.

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Yet the full return of the Taliban deepens that threat, and threatens to stall or unravel the progress Afghan women have made. Zubaida Akbar, a 31-year-old Afghan activist who’s been in the United States for three years, said the lives of Afghan women have improved, even if that improvement has been slow.

Zahra Nader, a journalist and PhD student from Afghanistan who’s based in Canada, said the US talked about “saving Afghan women from misogynist forces, this gender apartheid.”

“That did not happen,” she said. “That did not happen at all.”

Yes, she said, she went to school, she went to university in Kabul — an opportunity she recognizes that many other Afghan women did not have. But she and other Afghans were working to determine what came next for their country.

“We were hoping that we’re going to build a society, we’re going to build a better future for Afghanistan, and we will be the ones that decide the future of the country,” she said. But she argued that US intervention, whatever the justifications, was always about US interests, and those are what prevailed: “What was going on in Afghanistan wasn’t really our choice.”

And now the women in Afghanistan are left to deal with the consequences of that, collateral in a war outside their control. “The international community has failed us,” Akbar said, “and they have made it clear that our lives don’t matter.”

What the waiting game is like with the Taliban’s return

The Taliban have sought to rebrand themselves as a bit more moderate, especially with the world watching. The Taliban spokesperson has assured the public that women would be allowed to go to work and school, “according to Islamic law.” Part of the waiting game is seeing in practice what “according to Islamic law” really means.

This week, the Taliban spokesperson has made assurances that “there will be no violence against women.” Few believe him.

“We see them as how we know them,” Akbar said. “The Taliban are who they are.”

There are already signs the Taliban are who they always were. One TV news anchor in Afghanistan said she was turned away from work. “You are not allowed, go home,” she said she was told.

As they began retaking territory, the Taliban reportedly sent home female students and professors in Herat. A female university student in Kabul told the Guardian that she would have “to burn everything I achieved in 24 years of my life. Having any ID card or awards from the American University is risky now.” There are reports of the Taliban going door to door looking for any unmarried woman between the ages of 14 and 45 to marry off to Taliban soldiers. A few women I reached out to in Afghanistan declined to speak because they said, almost uniformly, that they are afraid.

“Women are not even leaving their homes because they don’t feel safe,” Lida Azim, an organizer with Afghans for a Better Tomorrow, said. “They might be allowed to go to work or school, but it’s a huge intimidation tactic.”

Akbar’s volunteer organization works with children who have lost their parents, often from conflict, and with mothers, including some who’ve escaped domestic violence. Her group connects people with support services like counseling, medical checkups, and food. The goal, Akbar said, was to create social reform through volunteerism. As the Taliban rushed through Afghanistan, the work stopped. “Because of the type of work that we were doing, our volunteers do not feel safe continuing to work in Afghanistan, unfortunately, and their lives are at risk,” she said.

Others who work with nonprofit organizations or networks in Afghanistan also do not know what will happen to their female staff and volunteers. They fear that if the humanitarian situation worsens in Afghanistan — banks are closed, services are scarce, thousands of people were displaced by the Taliban offensive, the threat of hunger looms — those services will be desperately needed. Some said they are still unsure whether or how their ability to deliver aid might be affected and what that means for the families who rely on it.

But defiance accompanies this fear and uncertainty. Afghans, despite the threat of violence, have protested the Taliban takeover. Women are among them, leading them.

Even women who are intimidated are trying to go to work. Wardak, who also founded HerAfghanistan, a network of women in Afghanistan, mentioned one girl in her network who went to her job last week in Kabul. “She went — terrified. But she went,” Wardak said.

Nader said that even if women couldn’t go to their jobs, they are leaving their homes, just to go outside. They go with a sense of fear, not knowing what is going to happen or what the reaction of one particular Taliban soldier might be, she said. “But they do go out.”

“Just to tell [them] that we are here, we are not gone,” Nader said.

Some Afghan activists told me they see this as an opportunity for women to push back, especially as the world is watching. “Right now, because Taliban wants international recognition, we have to push boundaries to see how far we can go,” Wardak said.

The Taliban will need foreign money if they want to stay afloat. This could be a place of leverage, as international legitimacy will depend on whether the Taliban meets its commitments on human and women’s rights. At the same time, activists worry that sanctions or other policies to put pressure on the government will trickle down and increase the suffering of the Afghan people.

Activists said they still want the Taliban held accountable, but the US and coalition allies have ceded some of their leverage as they depart. Military intervention did not bring lasting peace or democracy or rights. But that does not mean the United States or the rest of the world can wash its hands of it all.

Getting those under Taliban threat out should be an international priority

Akbar spent last week fielding calls, filling out visa forms, writing letters. After one day of this, when she looked at the spreadsheet she uses to record her efforts, she counted more than 100 people, all desperate to leave Afghanistan.

Many of the people she is trying to help are women, though not all. The return of the Taliban has put many lives at risk, including those who worked with the US military or coalition forces or international organizations or the Afghan government. Ethnic and religious minorities also face real threats. Women, of course, cut across all those categories or are associated with those who do. There are also the women who became leaders in the past two decades — activists, advocates, and political leaders, who fear they may become direct Taliban targets. They can’t, activists say, stay in Afghanistan and be safe.

Which is why many activists say that what many women need most in Afghanistan is a way to exit, as soon as possible. “The lives of these women are at risk,” Akbar said. “They will get killed if they stay in Afghanistan.”

Since August 14, the US says it has evacuated more than 37,000 people; the pace has increased in recent days, with about 11,000 or so leaving each day, reports the New York Times. Still, in the past week, the chaotic scenes outside the Kabul airport, and report after report of the difficulty of getting through, have revealed how desperate people are. The United States is now deploying troops to get Americans and their allies who are unable to make it to the airport.

Many Afghans who helped the US military or government may be eligible for Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs), but as the New York Times reports, many of those jobs, like interpreters, were filled by men.

Which is why many activists fear that women may be left out of some of these programs, especially the activists, journalists, and political leaders who are directly at risk now that the US is leaving. Advocacy groups are calling on the Biden administration to prioritize and expedite the evacuation of women’s rights activists, journalists, lawmakers, and other public figures, as have some members of Congress.

“As a global community, not just United States, we need to talk about how do we let them in, how do we open our doors?” Homayra Yusufi, with the Afghan-American Council and the Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans, said.

As many pointed out, the US and its coalition allies have a moral obligation. There is an emergency right now, and whatever happens in the future can’t be completely separated from the decades of conflict and intervention. As Azim, of Afghans for a Better Tomorrow, said, for the US and Western allies, the responsibility is “on their hands.”

Of course, not everyone can — or wants to — flee Afghanistan. Activists say there’s still a role for the international community in helping people who remain in the country: international aid, specifically, to help the coming humanitarian crisis and try to shore up grassroots groups that do provide health and other support services.

International support may depend on what the Taliban might do around women’s rights in Afghanistan. But right now, there is an immediate emergency — to evacuate women who are being targeted by the Taliban or fear they might be very soon. Those in Afghanistan, desperate to leave, likely believe they have no other choice.

“I am getting calls back to back,” Yusufi said, “as are all of the organizations that work on refugee issues — or just getting bombarded from calls from family members, calls coming in from Afghanistan, being like, ‘I need help, I need to get out right now.’”

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The biggest question since the Taliban recaptured Kabul on August 15 has been whether the group’s return to power means the same thing for Afghans that it did 25 years ago.

The last time the Taliban controlled all of Afghanistan, from 1996 to 2001, was marked by brutal oppression, particularly of minorities and women. Their proclivity for violence, which continued throughout their post-9/11 resurgence as an insurgent force, has resulted in civilian massacres, human trafficking, and an environment dictated by fear.

But since announcing the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the group’s leaders have downplayed that history, saying they have evolved with the times.

In the group’s first press conference, Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid promised amnesty for Afghans, that women would have rights “within Islamic law,” and that the group’s days of harboring terrorists are over. Mujahid has been astute about optics as well — a TV interview with a Taliban official was anchored by a woman journalist.

So which version is more likely to be true? The Taliban government is still in its early days, but experts say there are several indicators that observers can look to — the group’s willingness to power-share in a government, proactiveness in distributing aid, and treatment of women — to suss out how it might rule.

Right now it’s not just the Taliban’s history that’s in direct contradiction to the moderation they are outwardly projecting, experts say. It’s their current behaviors, too — including violent crackdowns of protests and door-to-door manhunts for people on their blacklist.

“It’s a charm offensive on one side and a terrorist offensive on the other side,” said Rina Amiri, a senior fellow at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation.

Will the Taliban share power?

When the Taliban took over Kabul in 1996, the city’s infrastructure was battered and its population of several hundred thousand people, traumatized by a decade of civil war, had no expectation of government services or facilities. The Kabul of today, by contrast, has nearly 4.5 million people, who are used to being able to participate in democracy, demonstrate, receive schooling, access health care, and connect with the rest of the world. To be sure, over the past 20 years, the democratically elected government and the sectors of the economy flush with foreign aid experienced a lot of corruption. But the country did urbanize; the economy did grow.

While the Taliban have recent experience ruling mostly rural provinces, city governance is an entirely different task.

“Only [having] experience in shooting guns is not going to work if you are expecting a peacetime environment where you are responsible to provide your people with public services in an orderly way,” said Sher Jan Ahmadzai, the director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. “And this is a challenge for the Taliban to lead.”

So one of the first things experts are looking at is whether the Taliban can commit to working with former enemies, including members of the deposed democratically elected government, and actually enforce the amnesty policy they claim to support.

Those decisions are still in motion, Ahmadzai said. There has been some level of outreach to former President Hamid Karzai and former Afghan peace delegation leader Abdullah Abdullah, who have sought to be mediators.

“They’re thinking of how to rule, who to bring into the government, and how they can coax previous people from previous governments back into this system,” Ahmadzai said.

William Nomikos, a professor of political science at Washington University in St. Louis who studies violent extremism and civil wars, said a truly moderate, modernized Taliban would be willing to make concessions in order to effectively run the country.

“The real distinguishing mark between a rebel force that takes control but is really trying to be a government is, are they willing to make concessions to former adversaries,” Nomikos said. “Are they willing to establish a formal power-sharing agreement?”

Ahmadzai said that would require incentivizing people to want to work with the Taliban. But so far, they have allegedly targeted some of those who worked with the US. The mere fact that tens of thousands of Afghans are risking their lives to get to Kabul International Airport and onto flights speaks to their fear, at least, that the Taliban’s ability to work with former enemies is nonexistent.

“Government is not done by force, and cannot be done by force,” he said. “It’s going to be a huge challenge for the Taliban. Government is not easy. It is not fun. It is not as easy as destruction.”

Can the Taliban deliver food and water aid to its population?

Another indicator experts plan to follow is monitoring how the Taliban handle Afghanistan’s emerging food and water scarcity crises.

With foreign governments and NGOs alike pulling aid so as not to empower the Taliban, the group will have to figure out if it wants to provide services that give people the ability to see a doctor and other necessities. And they’ll have to do it while navigating a burgeoning economic crisis and a severe drought across the country that is expected to impact farmers’ and herders’ ability to provide food.

Estimates in June from the International Rescue Committee found that 80 percent of Afghans rely on agriculture and cattle-grazing for their incomes, which requires rain. The scarcity crises have begun in earnest, with 40 percent of the IRC’s survey respondents already experiencing negative impacts from a lack of water.

Even before the drought, estimates from the US Agency for International Development in 2020 found that 8.2 million Afghans need emergency food assistance, and 11 million can be classified as food-insecure.

“If the electricity fails, that’s a real problem,” said Thomas Barfield, president of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies. “Food is a real problem. Afghanistan has suffered from a drought. You’ve got to feed the population.”

Food aid was primarily the job of NGOs and is quickly drying up. Attempts from the Taliban, or lack thereof, to re-secure or provide that aid will be an important signal to experts about their interest in helping their population.

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International aid is vital to that task, but that would require recognition from foreign governments, which could provide some food or water aid. China, which has both business and security interests in Afghanistan, has been floated as a potential source of legitimacy. The Taliban could make a deal with China to allow them access to minerals in Afghanistan in exchange for some level of aid, Barfield said.

But China, with concerns about how to protect its engineers and policy of giving infrastructural rather than humanitarian aid, as it does with Pakistan, could be reticent to provide actual material help, Barfield added. Another signal that the Taliban are serious about feeding the population could be allowing in the United Nations — but that would require a serious compromise of their anti-Western ideology.

The hunger situation was so dire in the 1990s that, in a rare moment of pragmatism prevailing over ideology, the Taliban did allow the United Nations World Food Program into Kabul. At the time, a quarter of Kabul residents received bread from the UN or the Red Cross. Barfield said a similar allowance today would be an acknowledgment from the Taliban that providing basic aid to Afghans is a priority.

“They need the cooperation of the outside world,” he said. “No Afghan government can stay in power if it allows its people to starve.”

How is the Taliban already treating women?

Finally, the most critical indicator of whether the Taliban’s rhetoric is real or just lip service to the international community will be the group’s treatment of women.

The US-led military intervention over the past 20 years has a complicated legacy when it comes to women’s rights, as Vox’s Jen Kirby detailed. But over the past two decades, women have gone to school, become part of the workforce, and held positions of power in the government.

Reports already exist of the Taliban returning to its harsh past, with women in provinces the Taliban captured in months and years past being forced out of their jobs, and once again being required to have a male relative accompany them outside the house.

Experts are watching to see what women already are and are not allowed to do.

“Will there be women in government?” Nomikos said. “Will there be women in positions of power? Will women be allowed to go to university, to go to school?”

Amiri said that the Taliban are already providing an answer. Her contacts on the ground say that as the Taliban have taken over different provinces, they are showing up with lists of women activists, journalists, and government collaborators to systematically harass and intimidate their families.

Continuing those practices would be a clear sign that the Taliban are prioritizing ideology over pragmatism. Excluding women from society would also be indicative of a Taliban that is not interested in concessions for the sake of governance or in keeping its population afloat.

“Kabul, particularly, couldn’t function if they said no women could work,” Barfield said. “Let’s watch. Schools are going to be opening; offices are going to be opening. They’re going to have to make some decisions, and we’re actually going to be able to see.

“There’s women doctors,” he continued. “There’s people who know how to run the electrical system, the water system. You’ve got to come to some kind of modus operandi with these people, because if the system collapses, you’re sort of responsible.”

Failure to compromise could spell trouble for the Taliban

As Kirby explained, there are real pressures on the Taliban to be more pragmatic; some level of international legitimacy is needed in order to gain access to the aid the state depends on. But right now, Ahmadzai said the Taliban’s behavior indicates the creation of a security state, where the military functionally dictates society — no matter what they are saying publicly.

“There might be some development work, nominally, but behind the scenes, [it could likely] be a security state that would be suppressing the rights of women and human beings, suppressing condemnations of the system, and not letting people criticize,” Ahmadzai said.

But maintaining that depends on military monopolization of control. Within days of the Taliban reentering Kabul, Afghans were already protesting, raising the government flag, and openly defying Taliban rule — not just in Kabul but in Jalalabad and Khost as well.

Experts said armed resistance to the Taliban over the coming months is possible, too, particularly given the weaponry that warlords and their militias have, depending on how the Taliban proceed.

“This time, you’re coming into the most open and progressive period in Afghan history, and you’re going to shut that down,” Amiri said. “I don’t think that’ll go over very well.”

There are Afghans, particularly in rural areas, who might support or at least sympathize with Taliban ideology and be wary of running afoul of such a dangerous group. Additionally, the Taliban were able to get this far through cutting deals with warlords — a lesson they learned from their failures in 2001. But if the Taliban pursue devastating policies and people lose access to the grants that allowed them to pursue livelihoods or the aid that kept them alive, those deals could be off, their support could wither, and the country could descend into civil war, Nomikos said.

The Taliban must decide over the next several months, as the US leaves for good and international aid is diverted, if they actually intend to pursue pragmatism. Their level of commitment to amnesty in governance, aid, and women’s rights will be indicators of their decisions. And a failure to adapt could lead to their destruction.

“The Taliban have never shown the capacity to govern, so how are you going to manage the expectations of the people?” Amiri said. “If you’re oppressive, and you [also] can’t deliver basic services and goods, that’s not going to work.”

But experts also cautioned against underestimating the Taliban’s ability to rule purely by force and fear — that very miscalculation has undermined the US’s efforts at every turn.

A vast majority of Americans across the political spectrum — 90 percent of Democrats and 76 percent of Republicans — support resettling vulnerable Afghans in the US amid the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan. The Biden administration is surging resources to make that happen, speeding up visa processing for Afghans employed by the US government to support the 20-year war effort and trying to secure humanitarian aid for refugees. But it still seems as though many of them could face a monthslong wait before they can start a new life in the US.

Roughly 88,000 people who worked for the US government during the war, as well as their family members, are in the application pipeline for special immigrant visas (SIVs). Some are being sent to other countries to wait; others who are further along in the process are being sent to the US directly for resettlement.

There are also many thousands more who aren’t eligible for those visas but who might try to apply for refugee status through a recently created US priority program. But they will have to stay in third countries — where they will need financial support, among other kinds of aid — for months while they are being processed. US vetting requirements, capacity limitations at refugee resettlement agencies, and a finite number of slots available under the current refugee admissions cap could all contribute to delays in bringing them to American soil.

With better preparation, this last-minute scramble to set up the infrastructure to receive Afghan refugees may have been averted. Though the task might be more challenging now than it would have been a few months ago, the Biden administration has acknowledged that it faces a moral obligation to ensure those people not only get out of Afghanistan but also are able to access humanitarian protection in the US.

“This was completely foreseeable,” said Yael Schacher, a senior US advocate at the advocacy group Refugees International. “We could have gotten these people out months ago. It’s really uncertain now.”

Afghan allies are being transferred to third countries or sent directly to the US

After announcing the withdrawal deadline in April, the Biden administration put its faith in the SIV program, which has existed since 2006, as its primary means of bringing Afghans to the US. But an intense, 14-step application process and a significant backlog that piled up during the final months of the Trump administration have made it an onerous immigration pathway for many who aided the US war effort, even before Kabul fell to Taliban control.

Applicants are required to submit significant documentation, including a recommendation letter from their senior US-citizen supervisor. But many Afghans who would otherwise be eligible for the program have difficulty obtaining that recommendation letter, especially in cases where they worked as contractors.

Even if an applicant can gather the required documents, they have faced lengthy wait times before they are ultimately approved for a visa. By law, SIVs are required to be processed within nine months, but in practice, the average processing time has always been longer than that.

The Trump administration actively stonewalled the program, meaning that not a single SIV was processed between March 2020 and January 2021. In response, a federal judge ordered the government to come up with a plan to process these applications in a timely manner after thousands of SIV applicants sued. Yet it’s still been taking about two years to process the applications.

Now, the Biden administration is surging resources to speed up processing of SIV applicants, who are being sent to third countries temporarily before being brought to the US. According to the State Department, the US government has been issuing SIVs at a rate of more than 800 per week — an eightfold increase over the course of a few months.

“Even before [the evacuation operation started], we were undertaking an interagency effort to clear a backlog of applicants, to identify how and where to relocate SIVs in various stages of the application process, and to work with Congress to revise qualifications for the SIV and streamline our processing requirements,” a State Department spokesperson told me in an emailed statement.

SIV applicants are staying in intermediate way stations at the Al Udeid and As Sayliyah military bases in Qatar, the Ramstein US Air Base in Germany, and in Italy, Spain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain. The facilities in Germany, Italy, and Spain have the capacity to house up to 15,000 people at any one time, according to the State Department.

Though the US has agreed not to house Afghans at its German air base for longer than 10 days, it’s not clear how long those sent to the other countries will stay there. Some advocates, however, are concerned that Afghans will end up waiting in third countries for prolonged periods and have argued that the US should instead just bring all of them to the US directly, through what is called “parole,” and complete processing on American soil.

The Biden administration has started allowing certain SIV applicants who have already passed background checks and a medical screening, but have not been issued a visa, to come to the US on parole — which allows them to live and work in the country for up to two years — but it’s not clear whether that is happening on a wide scale. An August 23 Department of Homeland Security memo indicates that people who are likely eligible for the SIV program will also be paroled into the US on a case-by-case basis.

Refugees are being flown to one of three army bases in the US: Fort Bliss in Texas, Fort McCoy in Wisconsin, and Fort Lee in Virginia. Those bases are preparing to receive as many as 22,000 Afghans altogether, providing them with temporary housing, medical screening, food, religious support, and other necessities.

Some immigrant advocates have raised concerns that they could stay in those bases on a long-term basis, possibly for more than a year, before being transferred to their final destination. The choice to send Afghans to Fort Bliss, which also houses thousands of migrant children, is particularly worrisome, given that the facility is the subject of an ongoing government watchdog investigation over allegations of abuse and poor conditions.

SIVs can choose their final destination themselves, either opting to be near family members already living in the US or selecting from a list of 19 cities spanning from Phoenix to St. Louis. Alternatively, they can request that a refugee resettlement agency choose a placement that would suit them best.

Once issued a visa, they also become eligible for the same kind of services offered to refugees to help them get their footing in the US and become self-sufficient within six months: basic necessities, temporary housing, cash assistance, job training and placement, and English classes, among other forms of aid.

But the availability of those services could be scarce given the constraints on the refugee agencies that operate these programs, many of which were gutted by President Trump, who slashed the annual refugee admissions cap from 110,000 to just 15,000 during his time in office.

Under Trump, refugee agencies saw their federal funding reduced, forcing them to scale back their infrastructure and staffing to keep their resettlement programs afloat. More than 100 resettlement offices — nearly a third of the nationwide total — closed, and many government staff tasked with processing refugees abroad were laid off or reassigned.

Now, those agencies will have to find landlords willing to rent out affordable accommodations amid a national housing shortage. They also need to rebuild relationships with employers willing to hire refugees. And they will have to recruit and train volunteers to help furnish apartments for newly arrived Afghan families and drive them to medical appointments, English classes, and job interviews.

Congress should allocate additional funding to ensure that those agencies have the resources they need to accommodate the arrivals of thousands of Afghans, Dan Kosten, assistant vice president of policy and advocacy at the National Immigration Forum, said in a press call.

“[Refugee agencies] have resettled tens of thousands of refugees every year, and can do this,” he said. “But their infrastructures have been reduced over the last several years, given the record low number of refugee arrivals, and they need the resources upfront to rapidly rebuild those infrastructures.”

Afghan refugees could face a long path to reaching US soil

In addition to the SIV program, some Afghans have the option of applying for refugee status in a third country.

The Biden administration recently opened up a new pathway for Afghans (and their families) who have worked for a US government-funded program, US-based media, or non-governmental organizations, but who don’t meet the narrow requirements for the SIV program, to come to the US as refugees. But they would have to overcome some significant hurdles.

First, the eligibility criteria for this so-called “P-2” program is still fairly narrow. Individuals can’t even apply for themselves — US employers have to refer a qualified individual for the program. That means that, for example, a local construction crew that built a school run by a US-funded aid group might not be afforded refugee protection. Some US-based advocates have called on the administration to broaden the scope of the program.

But even those eligible under the current criteria would somehow have to arrange travel out of the country on their own, and not all of those under threat might be able to make that dangerous and potentially expensive journey, especially if they live in the nation’s outer provinces, where neighboring countries have recently reinforced their borders in an attempt to deter potential refugees.

So far, it seems that Pakistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkey have seen the largest number of Afghan arrivals. But even if these people are eligible for refugee status, they might find themselves stranded abroad for 12 to 14 months without humanitarian assistance, in places that have less-than-pristine human rights records.

During a press conference at the White House on August 20, President Biden said the administration has discussed the need to “work with the international community to provide humanitarian assistance, such as food, aid, and medical care for refugees who have crossed into neighboring countries to escape the Taliban.” He recently allocated an additional $500 million in emergency funding that will in part provide that kind of assistance.

But there remain a lot of unanswered questions in terms of what kind of support Afghan refugees might expect to receive once they reach a third country, and how the US will go about processing them.

“It can be a good path for thousands of people, but it’s not an immediate one,” Schacher said. “Many people probably won’t be able to find work and support their families. So having US funds available for that could be helpful if it’s going to be a long wait.”

The US could increase the number of US Citizenship and Immigration Services officers it sends abroad to interview Afghan refugees or conduct more of those interviews virtually in order to speed up processing. But there might also be a bottleneck stateside. The annual refugee admissions ceiling is 62,500 for this fiscal year, which ends in October. Just 4,000 of those spots can go to refugees from Europe and Central Asia, which includes Afghanistan.

This means that most Afghans applying for refugee status will be waiting until at least October, when Biden has pledged to raise the refugee admissions ceiling to 125,000. It’s likely he will drastically increase the proportion of those spots that can go to Afghans. But how quickly approved Afghans can be resettled might also depend on the capacity of refugee resettlement agencies in the US.

It’s also possible that Biden could implement a program allowing for private sponsorship of Afghan refugees that he previewed in a February executive order. In that case, private individuals and community groups, not just refugee resettlement agencies that receive government funding, could support additional Afghan refugees exceeding the 125,000 cap.

“A lot of people are volunteering to sponsor refugees, so I do think it would be a good idea to channel that energy into a private resettlement pilot,” Schacher said.

But the Biden administration has yet to articulate its plans on that front, leaving much work to be done in the coming months to make refugee resettlement a viable pathway to the US for Afghans.

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The United States issued a warning this week amid the crush and chaos at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan: Avoid the area because of a possible ISIS terror attack.

On Thursday, the threat bore out. The full tragedy of the attack is still unclear, but at least 170 Afghans and 13 US service members were killed in an explosion around Kabul airport, the deadliest day for American combat troops in Afghanistan in a decade.

The Islamic State in Khorasan Province, or ISIS-K, claimed responsibility. The organization is an offshoot of the original group in Iraq and Syria, and it emerged in 2015, not long after ISIS had consolidated territory in Iraq and Syria. In Afghanistan, ISIS is building toward its goal of establishing a global caliphate.

Ex-Taliban filled ISIS-K’s ranks early on, and the two groups have morphed into enemies, fighting each other and trying to sell their competing ideologies to recruits. The United States-led coalition in Afghanistan also battered ISIS-K in recent years — occasionally even ending up on the Taliban’s side of the battle against the ISIS offshoot. Those efforts weakened the group but never dismantled it.

Thursday’s attack was a reminder of that ongoing presence — and a reminder of ISIS’s ability to sow chaos and confusion, says Andrew Mines, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University.

ISIS-K is doing this right as the US is leaving because, Mines says, facilitating “an increased US and international footprint” aligns with their bigger goal of discrediting the Taliban.

“If ISIS-K can force that [international presence], it makes the Taliban both look as collaborators with the West — which is really good for ISIS-K messaging — but also like failed collaborators, right? ‘You can’t even provide security, you’re incapable of ruling this nation, we [ISIS] are the viable alternative,’” says Mines, who is co-authoring a book on the Islamic State Khorasan with Amira Jadoon, an expert on the group. “It is almost certainly to discredit the Taliban and their ability to hold power and deliver security.”

Vox spoke to Mines about that rivalry with the Taliban, plus ISIS-K’s origins, the possible motivations behind Thursday’s attack, and what America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan might mean for the terror group.

Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

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Jen Kirby

Let’s start with the basics. Who, or what, is ISIS-K?

Andrew Mines

Islamic State’s Khorasan Province — ISIS-K, IS-KP, IS-K, it goes by a bunch of different acronyms. It’s the official affiliate of the Islamic State group in Afghanistan. It was the official affiliate in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but in 2019, there was a split, and now it has distinct provinces for Afghanistan and Pakistan. So right now, ISIS-K is focused solely on Afghanistan. It’s been recognized by the Islamic State group leaders in Iraq and Syria and was officially founded in January 2015.

Jen Kirby

What was the impetus for starting an ISIS offshoot in Afghanistan?

Andrew Mines

In 2014, there were all these background discussions going on across different local groups and emissaries on behalf of the core group in Iraq and Syria. They were traveling and reaching out to different groups that already existed in Afghanistan and Pakistan to see about exactly that — to see about establishing a local affiliate, an official beachhead for ISIS in Afghanistan and Pakistan. ISIS looks at that as the crux of its broader jihad in Central and South Asia. It really sees it as a beachhead to launch attacks and pursue the vision of the global caliphate.

Jen Kirby

Does ISIS-K operate independently? Or do they report to — or have their activities coordinated by — ISIS in Iraq and Syria?

Andrew Mines

It’s kind of a mixed bag. The leader of the group, the governor of the wilayat [the province, in this case Khorasan] is nominated by others in his organization and then approved and appointed by the caliph and his delegating committee in Iraq and Syria. That nomination process means the group in Iraq and Syria, in theory, has control over the group in Afghanistan. But when it comes to the operational components, they’re pretty displaced from the day-to-day. There are core operators in Afghanistan — previously in Pakistan, not just Afghanistan — that are trying to figure out how to launch attacks and all this stuff by themselves.

At the strategic level, ISIS-K aims to implement much of the same the group in Iraq and Syria does. It pursues sectarian attacks against groups like the Hazaras [a predominately Shia ethnic group in Afghanistan] and Sikhs. It seeks to consolidate territorial control. In fact, that’s one of the qualifications that a group needs to hit to be acknowledged by the core group in Iraq and Syria — what it calls “territorial consolidation.” Once that happened, they were like, “Okay, check, you can be a province now.”

Jen Kirby

You qualify, basically.

Andrew Mines

You qualify, right? There are a few others on that list, but that’s one of the big ones.

The other biggest one is coming forward with a leader that can be appointed by the delegating committee. It looks different in Somalia, it looks different in Yemen, it looks different in Afghanistan, but whichever groups or sets of individuals are coming together need to nominate a leader that the core leadership can vet first and then appoint.

Jen Kirby

This is probably not the best example for a terrorist organization, but it almost sounds like franchising? You have an ISIS branch in Afghanistan and then you have the corporate headquarters in Iraq and Syria.

Andrew Mines

I mean, that’s exactly it. One of my colleagues calls it the “routinization” of the Islamic State movement.

Jen Kirby

So who is in charge of ISIS-K right now?

Andrew Mines

There’s a great article by one of our colleagues, Abdul Sayed, in Lawfare that addresses this issue. Right now, it’s a man by the name of Shahab al-Muhajir. He’s believed to be a former and experienced Haqqani network [an Islamist militant group affiliated with the Taliban] operative. He has a lot of experience with the makings of a terrorist organization, when it goes from a low-level insurgency, and it’s trying to pursue re-expansion. He’s a bit of an urban warfare expert.

He’s also reportedly appointed as the first non-Afghan or non-Pakistani national to head the group. That’s pretty significant, to be headed by a non-Afghan, or non-Pakistani, or non-Pashtun is a pretty big deal. He’s tasked with overseeing the group through this period of relative decline and relative uncertainty.

Jen Kirby

What is Shahab al-Muhajir’s background?

Andrew Mines

Other ISIS-K leaders were super well-known, and through ISIS’s own propaganda, they did these backgrounds on the first governor [Hafiz Saeed Khan]. They did this whole interview in ISIS’s main magazine with him.

This newest governor [Shahab al-Muhajir] was shrouded in a little bit of uncertainty. It took him a while to issue his first statement. There was confusion about whether they were trying to hide his accent because he’s not Afghani, not Pakistani. So there’s a lot of mystery when he was first announced as governor.

Jen Kirby

And Shahab al-Muhajir has been governor since when?

Andrew Mines

Since 2020.

Jen Kirby

Okay, so he’s fairly new to the job then. But who exactly makes up ISIS-K’s ranks?

Andrew Mines

ISIS-K starts in 2015 — and, obviously, those discussions [about its formation] were going on in the background in 2014. This was a time when there’s a little bit of disgruntlement with the Taliban as a movement — especially once news got out that [Taliban founder and leader] Mullah Omar was dead and had been dead for some time.

ISIS, as an entity, had just established the global caliphate, and that was a huge messaging boost. The Taliban, as an entity, their aspiration is for a government focused only on Afghanistan, within the boundaries of Afghanistan. When these guys get in fights with each other and when they diss each other in their propaganda and their narrative messaging in how they recruit people, that’s how ISIS-K brands the Taliban. They brand them as “filthy nationalists.”

Jen Kirby

It’s like ISIS was the cool, new, hip group in town. The Taliban has been around for a while; it’s kind of fusty, and so ISIS-K was trying to capitalize on their success in Iraq and Syria to recruit in Afghanistan.

Andrew Mines

Definitely. We’ve got founding members from the Pakistani Taliban. We’ve got founding members from the Afghan Taliban. We’ve got members from the Islamic movement of Uzbekistan, and then over time, a bunch of other groups start to join them.

But what kind of happens in these first few months and, then over time, is that the Taliban catch on to this really quickly, and they start to clamp down on all of their commanders and anybody who’s thinking about joining ISIS-K.

Really, 2015, was a pretty crazy year that saw, across Afghanistan, in different provinces, major Taliban commanders switching flags and joining ISIS-K. This is a huge pivotal moment because the Taliban realizes if the dominoes start to fall, ISIS-K becomes the preeminent jihadist organization in the country.

Jen Kirby

I do want to talk more about the relationship with the Taliban, but when we talk about ISIS-K 2021, how big is it?

Andrew Mines

Starting in 2016 to 2018 is when the coalition really hammers down on ISIS-K. That piggybacks off the Taliban routing ISIS-K in different places. Sometimes they coincide. Sometimes it’s just the Taliban; sometimes it’s just the coalition.

In one sense or another, by 2019, the group is pretty decimated — at the end of 2019, over 1,400 fighters and their families surrendered to government forces in northeast Afghanistan. This is really where we start to see this messaging, especially by the Afghan government, that ISIS is defeated in the country, and that there’s no more ISIS here. That’s when we really see ISIS-K go back to this survival mode, like low-level insurgency.

At that point, a lot of ISIS-K’s recruitment messaging is starting to localize. Historically, a lot of its rank-and-file members have come from across the border in Pakistan. More recently, there’s other good evidence of recruitment of young urban Afghans who have become disillusioned with the peace process and just don’t think it’s going anywhere. So ISIS-K is really kind of a mix of the core hardened guys, who managed to survive the onslaught of coalition targeting, and then newer recruits, and then attack operation cells spread throughout different Afghan cities.

Jen Kirby

I do remember in 2017 when the US dropped the “mother of all bombs” on ISIS caves in Afghanistan, which stands out as the big example, in my mind, of that US-led campaign.

Andrew Mines

It was a big bomb. The purpose of it was to clear this cave tunnel complex to allow forces to get into a valley where they had been set up, basically, since their inception in 2015. But it’s also a messaging thing in its own right, which is, “this is what happens, and so be prepared, because we’re going to use this kind of ordnance on you guys.”

Jen Kirby

Let’s talk about this strategic rivalry. Why are ISIS-K and the Taliban enemies?

Andrew Mines

The biggest one is over the distinction between emirate and caliphate. This goes all the way back to 2015. There were actually talks between senior leadership in the Taliban and [ISIS leader Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi himself and his delegating committee. [The Taliban is] basically like, “why are you instructing these guys to do this? Call your guys off.” And Baghdadi is like, “Well, recognize me as caliph and then we’ll be good, right?” So that beef goes back a long time. But the crux of it is really about emirate or caliphate — global movement or national confines.

Jen Kirby

The emirate is Taliban-style and caliphate is ISIS-style?

Andrew Mines

Yes, exactly.

Jen Kirby

Okay, and during this past five-plus years, the United States was bombing ISIS-K targets, and the Taliban and ISIS-K were also fighting on the ground.

Andrew Mines

Yes, extensively.

Jen Kirby

And what are the dynamics of that fighting between the Taliban and ISIS-K?

Andrew Mines

The dynamics of that took a bunch of forms. It was really a bit more positional fighting, so the Taliban attacked ISIS-K positions. That went all the way down to skirmishes in the outskirts of districts and in rural areas, to targeted attacks against individual units and individual fighters.

But the majority of ISIS-K attack campaigns, in late 2020 and throughout this year, have been focused on some of the same stuff that we saw in Iraq and Syria, which is called a harvesting campaign — which is a horrible name — but that’s how they view it.

ISIS-K goes after journalists, they go after aid workers, they go after intelligence and security personnel that they can identify. They go after government facilities and government targets and anything they can do to prove that the governing power is not able to provide security to anybody, and to sow confusion and chaos.

Jen Kirby

The US and the Taliban both don’t want ISIS-K in Afghanistan. I’m wondering if there was any coordination or collaboration on ISIS targets during the war at all? Or do we just not know that information?

Andrew Mines

It’s actually a really difficult question. Wesley Morgan is really the guy on this one. He wrote this piece in the Washington Post about how there was unofficial coordination. It wasn’t cooperation, per se, but it’s basically, “we’re about to hit ISIS-K here, just so you know.”

It falls very far short of strategic cooperation between the Afghan Taliban and the US armed forces and Afghan forces to root out ISIS. But it’s in both of their interests, and when made sense, it seems like there was kind of unofficial cooperation.

Jen Kirby

Now we just saw the Taliban go on this rout through Afghanistan. What has ISIS-K been up to in the last few months as this was unfolding?

Andrew Mines

If you look at ISIS-K attack numbers, in terms of their operational tempo, it was a lot lower than 2020 and early 2021. A lot of people interpret that as they’re either lying low to see what happens, or they’re pooling their resources and just biding their time for what we saw at the Kabul airport on Thursday.

The question becomes: What is their interest in conducting an attack like we saw Thursday?

Jen Kirby

And so what is their interest in conducting that attack we saw?

Andrew Mines

The first is simply just do the same thing that’s coming out of the Iraq and Syria textbook, which is to sow chaos and confusion and create those conditions that insurgent groups like these try to fill.

The second is to encourage and, in their view, hopefully facilitate an increased US and international footprint, which would be reneging on the withdrawal process.

If ISIS-K can force that, it makes the Taliban both look like collaborators with the West — which is really good for ISIS-K messaging — but also like failed collaborators, right? “You can’t even provide security, you’re incapable of ruling this nation, we [ISIS] are the viable alternative.” It is almost certainly to discredit the Taliban and their ability to hold power and deliver security.

Jen Kirby

What does the attack say about the relative power of ISIS-K? I’m trying to understand if this was its coming-out party to say, “we’re back!” Or is the group still relatively weakened by years of US bombings and Taliban fighting? Or do we just not really know the answer to that question at this point?

Andrew Mines

It’s certainly been weakened in 2019 and 2020. That’s why we see them really pursue these kinds of attack campaigns.

At the same time, some of the more credible estimates of the group’s force size show them gradually increasing; they are trying to continue recruiting, trying to reconsolidate some semblance of territory. Their attack cells are also carrying out these really vicious campaigns throughout last year and this year and so they maintain that capability.

Jen Kirby

President Joe Biden said Thursday that the US would retaliate for the attacks. But putting aside the US withdrawal for a moment, is ISIS-K a big threat to the Taliban and the Taliban’s ability to govern Afghanistan?

Andrew Mines

Yes, yes. The short answer is yes.

Jen Kirby

Okay! How so?

Andrew Mines

We look at three things. The first is, again, that message, it has the playbook of the group from Iraq and Syria, which was effective. We saw that in 2011, and onwards.

It has the personnel and the core membership necessary to stay relevant but also to expand and go through this period of, “okay, this is the low point.”

The third part is the conditions. It really is early days, and I’m not one to really speculate. But when Amira and I looked at the kind of fatalities, and then casualties occurring to ISIS-K, over time, the vast majority of them are coming from the US-led coalition, Afghan airpower, and ground operations. The Afghan Taliban is routing ISIS in areas, sometimes by itself, but when we look at how ISIS-K suffered over time, a lot of that’s been at the hand of US forces, alongside Afghan partners, and especially US airpower. Without that, I don’t know what that’s going to look like. Biden’s into an “over the horizon” posture. But it is just early days, so we don’t know what that’s going to look like yet.

Jen Kirby

As you’re saying this, I’m having flashbacks to Iraq a little bit. I know you don’t want to make predictions, but it does seem like there’s the possibility of history repeating itself?

Andrew Mines

It’s sad, and you hate to see these kinds of things play out, and obviously, there are different dynamics — there’s no Taliban equivalent in Iraq, of course. But those predictions so far look like they’re on track.

Again, it’s early days, and we’ll see, and I know the US’s primary mission is getting people who have helped us and our people out of there. But ISIS-K has ambitions beyond this evacuation timeline. We need to treat them with the seriousness of their ambitions.

Jen Kirby

Okay, so I know it’s early days, but what are you watching for in regards to ISIS-K?

Andrew Mines

That depends on what the US does next. It really does. But if we stick to where we’re at, and we don’t put too many more assets on the ground, more or less we’re out of there in a real meaningful sense, very, very rapidly, as in within the next week or two. My safe bet is that you just replace the Afghan government as a target with the Taliban as a target.

If the Taliban is now going to be the guarantor of security in the country, who does ISIS-K need to attack to make sure that they are seen as the viable alternative to some power that can’t provide security to the people? That’s going to be the Afghan Taliban.

At the same time, they will still need to stick to their brand messaging, so: targeting minorities, check. Targeting government infrastructure and government personnel, and in this case, it will be Taliban-run and Taliban personnel, check. Targeting civilian spaces to create that panic and chaos and confusion to show that the Taliban can’t protect, check. That’ll be the playbook.

Jen Kirby

So what does corporate headquarters think about all this? Where does Afghanistan fit in terms of ISIS’s larger dynamics?

Andrew Mines

Afghanistan, from the start, was really important to this group — the greater region, Khorasan, has this huge lore in Middle East history, and I won’t bother you with the boring details of that.

But it’s always had this lore for them. And the legacy of [al Qaeda’s No. 2, Abu Musab al-] Zarqawi and the legacy of bin Laden is there. They try to seize that legacy. They try to seize that mantle. “We are the jihadist group; there’s no alternative. Al Qaeda, they failed; they are not the true inheritance of Zarqawi and Bin Laden’s legacy, we are.” And so Afghanistan has always been important to them.

From ISIS’s perspective, it’s really about how you allocate resources. Especially as Africa has become just as huge, the movement starts to dedicate a lot of resources. The same thing we saw with Afghanistan — share money a little bit, but also trainers, advisers. And so there’s a clear precedent and clear historical interest for them to send advisors, to send assets and money that they can get into Afghanistan to make sure that ISIS-K has what it needs to pursue this next chapter.

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