Afghanistan, sovereignty, and international law.  By Kevin Patrick Fitzgerald.  Published on Medium, October 2025, reissued by Mnoty Press, October 2026.

I have had the privilege to read a bunch of great work from a few blogs on Afghanistan recently, and I'm going to give some scattered thoughts on how I see the situation.

The blogs I've been reading are here:

https://substack.com/@ourforgottenhistory

https://substack.com/@aliadili

https://afghandigest.substack.com

You can access this essay free here: https://kevinpfitzgerald.substack.com/p/afghanistan-sovereignty-international

I'm increasingly thinking that a government in exile is the best way forward.

So, a couple of stats on Afghanistan might help frame the discussion:

In 2023, about 34 of 1,000 births resulted in death of the baby within the first 28 days. Total number of deaths of children under five years old: 80,507. (https://data.unicef.org/country/afg/) This is awful.

The statistics I've found on violence toward women are dubious, and surely under-represent the scale; especially when we consider the threat of violence as an act of violence, as we should. So, I think it is safe to say that 100% of women in Afghanistan experience violence 100% of the time.

The child death rates are telling, however, in that they speak both of the situation in which women live and the health care resources available in the country. Women's rights and healthcare in Afghanistan are in crisis.

A few more stats: 3 million people internally displaced, 6 million people seeking refuge in other countries (https://www.unhcr.org/where-we-work/countries/afghanistan). 1.9 million forced to return from Iran and Pakistan (https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/07/un-experts-appalled-mass-forced-returns-afghan-nationals).

So, what should we do? I really don't know.

Thomas Ruttig, in his 2023 analysis of Chinese investments in Afghanistan (https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/09/ChinaAfghanistanFINAL.pdf) wrote that the CCP is facilitating China-based companies' investments in Afghanistan's oil, gas, lithium, and copper. Such investments were favored by the US when they were attempting to impose a democratic government in Afghanistan. As Ruttig noted, related to a copper mine:

'In 2008, a Metallurgical Corporation of China and Jiangxi Copper Consortium (MCC-JCL) consortium was awarded a 30-year concession based on a three billion US dollar project.4 The deal was concluded through an open tender under the oversight of the United States Department of Defence's Task Force for Business and Stability Operations (TFBSO).5'

This was in line with the Bush administration's efforts to support a democratic government that would engage in the global economy, rather than being a rogue state and a hotbed of international terrorism.

Meanwhile, in Xinjiang, China, a genocide against ethnic Uyghurs was beginning quietly with more and more arrests, which showed an increasing willingness of the CPP to use mass violence in order to combat Islamist movements. The Russian Federation was also stepping up their violence in trying to combat Islamist influence. The rise of anti-Muslim Hindu nationalism in India was also well underway, and Pakistan was struggling with Islamist militants in the Northwest Frontier Province, while the Iranian government was struggling to ratchet up their internal control while being surrounded by the US military and an ever-growing slew of Islamist and nationalist militant organizations within and beyond its borders.

Afghanistan was, and still is, in the middle of a mess of international political-economic circumstances beyond the agency of the people of Afghanistan. And I want to deal with this concept of agency in a bit, but first I would like to dig back a little bit deeper into Afghanistan's history.

During the 1980s, there was a civil war and the Soviet Union intervened. The Soviet army got bogged down in a guerrilla war, and they responded with heavy bombardment, and the result was a ruined infrastructure and a traumatized population.

During this war, the Reagan administration in the US supported the Mujaheddin as freedom fighters against the Soviet-backed government.

Then the Soviet Union was dismantled and the first Bush administration was smartly reluctant to engage too closely with the emerging situation in Afghanistan. I say smartly because too much US influence is bad, as they continually prop up dictators.

Afghanistan in 1992 descended into another civil war.

Rival ethnic-regional factions fought over control of the federal government and the country-side, and in some ways this made sense. As we see today, while the ethnic group that runs the Taliban are in charge, important people of other ethnic groups are getting murdered in the streets. There's a long and violent history to many of these ethnic rivalries, some going back to British and Russian efforts to control the area in the 19th century.

The UN, in 1992, was unable to broker a stable agreement whereby the different factions would share power, and this is at the heart of my present research: the lack of institutional agency of the UN. They are good at gathering data and distributing supplies, but they do not have real political-economic agency. If it's worth keeping, it's gotta change a lot.

The civil war continued from 1992 to 2001, around ethno-regional blocs. The leaders of these blocs were called warlords in the West, but they were providing security, and maybe the people would be better off today with some kind of similar regional security forces. I don't know, maybe they would be worse off.

And, so, what do we, the global community of concerned citizens, do to help the people of Afghanistan now?

The Taliban are more in control of the country than they were before the US invasion. They are just as cruel to women as they were, and just as driven by ethnic-regional rivalry as any of the other factions from the 1990s.

I really don't know, but I have some ideas of how we can approach a search for answers. The main and perhaps obvious idea I have is to let people of Afghanistan move to and live and work and study in our countries. Sending people back there is atrocious.

Beyond that, the people lack institutions that give them agency. There are courts and laws, but they seem to be used to solidify the Taliban's power rather than to seek justice. I'm sure from some members of the Taliban, their power and justice are the same, but I don't believe that most of the people of Afghanistan agree.

So, maybe the international community can work together to encourage some kind of legal and judicial reforms, but anyone who supports such reforms is in very high danger of getting killed. Such also goes against the UN Charter whereby the sovereignty of the nation-state is the highest law.

The UN said recently that they plan to open an investigation into humanitarian crimes in Afghanistan, which should include those done by the US government, but probably will not. And that these would fall under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

Well, ok, so who will be accountable for what crimes, and how? I have grown to be very skeptical of the UN, and the ICC keeps issuing warrants, but only really goes after old and feeble people already ousted from positions of authority; and only from poverty-stricken countries of the global south. So, if they issue a bunch of warrants for some Taliban members, and the Taliban says they can't arrest them, then nothing happens. Maybe they can arrest some people in Germany, which seems unlikely to help the people in Afghanistan.

Maybe sanctions… and sanctions against individuals is better than sanctions against countries, but with all these shady banks all around the world willing to deal with secret investments, individual sanctions are just good for those banks and bad for no-one.

So, we can send food and medical supplies, and we do, and that's cool. And if the people administering the stuff have to deal with the Taliban, and are willing to do so, great. But, for the long term health and safety of the people, it's not really a solution.

The governments of Russia and India have recognized the Taliban as the sovereign rulers of Afghanistan, and I don't believe either is motivated by a desire to help the people of Afghanistan, but I'm not really against the political gesture. If there was an active widespread resistance movement and/or a government in exile claiming legitimacy, there might be an advantage to not recognizing the Taliban, but they are clearly in control of the country, and burying our heads in the sand ain't gonna fix that.

Still, recognizing them as the legitimate rulers of the country doesn't help either. It does not mean that the Taliban are less likely to use violence to control the population and to crush any criticism of their rule. It might help the Russian and Indian elites get more access to resources in Afghanistan, and I suspect this is their main motivation.

And so, we're back to the neoliberal fix. Bring in foreign investment and learn how to ignore human rights abuses, or sweep them under the rug, while imposing more military control for profit. Guided by the faith that once the elites in Afghanistan understand how much money they can make by exploiting the land and its people, they will become civilized leaders among the civilized world, and keep their atrocities quiet, as the CCP does with the Uyghurs.

Well, ok, that's a bit of an exaggeration as to how neoliberal theory works, but the point is that neoliberal ideology basically holds that money will fix it. When people can make more money, they will want more, and that will drive growth, which will enable taxation, which will help build roads, hospitals, and schools….

There is some merit to this argument. I mock it, but it's fine. My problem is not so much with the theory as with how it has been and continues to be used.

If Afghanistan becomes a lithium mining country, the companies that invest in those lithium mines are not likely to put humanitarian goals ahead of profits.

The governments preferred by mining companies, the ones that make the most money and thereby have the most to invest, are governments that guarantee security of the process of resource extraction. So, it is in their greedy interest that the Taliban have more control over the population, not less.

If the priority is, as I think it should be, to give the people of Afghanistan agency over their lives and their institutions of government, maybe it makes more sense to invest in small local businesses.

I mean grants to small farmers to improve their business somehow. Helping a truck owner-driver afford a new radiator for his beat up old truck. If the farmer's farm and the trucker's truck are more secure, they are a little less vulnerable to Taliban oppression. They can also maybe take the day off to take a family member to a doctor or something like that.

I don't know how to implement such a strategy. It would take an organization of Afghan diaspora to pull together the logistics and communications, and many of them will be killed if they enter the country. If people get caught trying to implement such a program among an ethnic-regional group the Taliban leadership sees as a threat, prison or murder will likely be the fruits for the farmer and trucker, and then the Taliban get the money.

I do like the idea of an international, or even non-governmental, military force holding a piece of the country as a safe haven, but such can not engage freely in trade, and it will be an isolated place where people can survive, but not really thrive. Maybe we should do something like that, though, and give people the choice.

If the Taliban get jets and drones, this might prove more challenging, and it might not work, anyway.

Maybe the country should be broken up into regions, although who would have the authority to make that, if the UN's determined to make the nation-state the seat of ultimate sovereignty, I don't know. But it's worth considering, or a loose confederation rather than a strong central government, but all these ideas are moot as long as the Taliban, such as they are, are in control.

So, maybe we should try to reform the Taliban. Heh. Ok, so we can argue religion and government and learn Pashto and Dari… maybe, the diaspora can do this; challenge them on their statements point by point. Shame them on twitter and whatnot.

Maybe there are ways to infiltrate the organization with people who secretly believe in human rights. Maybe there are ways to sabotage the institution of the Taliban from within, creating factions… I don't know, that one sounds pretty dangerous. Things can get worse.

Maybe it's wait it out. The elders will die, and the youths might have a more cosmopolitan outlook, but that doesn't sit right, either. The next generation might be more violent and controlling, especially considering the depths of their trauma.

Oh, and of course there's the age-old option of arming and funding a group of resistance fighters. Well, this keeps going horribly wrong. Let's not do that at all.

So, maybe we can start a government in exile. Fawad Poya made the suggestion in March, 2024 (https://www.fairobserver.com/world-news/afghanistan-news/legitimacy-revisited-can-the-government-in-exile-overcome-afghanistans-challenges/). He wrote:

'In the specific context of Afghanistan, an authority-in-exile would be a body with legal status, empowered to protect its nationals and act on behalf of the people of Afghanistan in the international arena. This authority may not necessarily function as a "government" in the strict sense of international law. Instead, it may serve as a means to protect and advance democratic values within Afghanistan. '

He wrote this before the governments of Russia and India recognized the Taliban and the German government invited the Taliban to for a semi-formal talk. Maybe it's too late, and maybe we should be putting more pressure on governments to not recognize the Taliban.

The government in exile might be worth trying, and I think it can be more robust than what Poya suggests above. We can recruit broad support through the internet, try to build a broad multi-ethnic, inter-regional confederacy with legal claims to sovereignty.

Six million people are in exile, probably more, and how many of them would be willing to participate in a series of online conferences, followed by a constitutional convention, and a bunch of elections? I don't know. Maybe we should find out.

A broad coalition that is not just one guy pretending to be president while living it up in France, or something like that, but a real representative institution, with agency within Afghanistan and among the diaspora, and that is prepared to actually govern the country if the Taliban regime falls apart; one that people can trust to protect the ethnic and personal sovereignty of the people.

And maybe that government in exile can help bring about the regime's demise through espionage and sabotage, or maybe if the less enthusiastic members of the Taliban get wind of what sounds like a better option, they'll consider joining.

I don't know. What do you think?

Anyway, thank you very much for reading. I hope you have a lovely, peaceful, refreshing day full of kindness and free from oppression. I also hope you have some good food. Thanks again. Please take good care.

Power to the People

Freedom of the Soul