NERMEEN SHAIKH: We go now to Afghanistan, where a deepening humanitarian crisis is being largely overlooked by the international community following the withdrawal of NATO troops in 2021 and the return of the Taliban. The crisis is most severe for women and girls, whose basic rights to education, freedom of movement and access to services have been severely restricted over the last five years. Afghan women are banned from outdoor parks, among other spaces, and books written by women have been removed from libraries. Women venturing beyond the home must be accompanied by a male guardian, and so-called morality laws curtail their rights to speak, sing or recite out loud in public.

AMY GOODMAN: Nearly 6 million Afghan refugees who had been living in neighboring countries, including Pakistan and Iran, have returned to Afghanistan following mass deportations and have been met with very little support following the withdrawal of U.S. troops. International aid dropped from $3.3 billion in 2022 to $1 billion last year. The U.S. [sic] this year has given half a billion dollars.

For more, we go to Kabul, where we’re joined by Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council. This is his fifth visit to Afghanistan since 2021.

Jan Egeland, what have you found on the ground in Afghanistan right now, as we speak to you from blocks from ground zero 25 years after the 9/11 attacks?

JAN EGELAND: Well, I’ve been these last days together with the poorest people on Earth, really, and people who have especially then come back from Pakistan to Kandahar in the south of Afghanistan, also here to Kabul and to elsewhere. These are people deported, as you rightly said, 6 million in three years. It’s one of the biggest deportation processes on Earth in this generation.

And the world is not here. The international community is not really here to help them. There are some nongovernmental organizations and U.N. partners on the ground, but we’re so overstretched and underfunded.

So, these women with children who have been 30 years as refugees in Pakistan come empty-handed back. They get 48 hours to leave. They’re dumped at the border. And then they are in desperate search of shelter, of water, of food, of some protection. We’re able to help some, but we would like to help many more.

And that’s why we’re calling on all of those countries who promised to stand with the Afghan civilian population, girls, women, families in particular: Don’t forget your promises when you went for the door abruptly five years ago.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Jan, could you talk about, specifically, the situation in rural areas, as well as whether — given these severe, harsh and actually quite unfathomable restrictions on women, whether women are still allowed to do humanitarian work, provide social and health services to Afghan women and children?

JAN EGELAND: Yeah, I mean, the poverty, the deprivation is, of course, particularly big in the countryside. I was in areas outside of Kandahar, and people are living under plastic sheeting and were longing for the home that we were now building to them. One woman I met, a mother, several other children, cried when she told that she sold her 12-year-old daughter as a child bride for $600. I mean, she loved this girl, and she had to sell her to get food for the rest of the family.

The rights of Afghan women have been — have been destroyed, really. There is no doubt about it. There is 100 edicts from the supreme leader, the emir, curtailing right to work, right to education and freedom of movement. Of those, the right to education is possibly the worst, because after sixth grade, primary school, girls cannot get further education, which means we will not have female — new female teachers, doctors, nurses, midwives in some time from now.

That’s why I went to Kandahar and met the Taliban leadership. That’s why I met the Taliban leadership here in Kabul, to confront them with this factor, saying to them, “You promised us there would be education. You said it would just take time for you to organize it in the Islamic and Afghan fashion. It’s five years now. And you cannot have an economy which only involves half of the population.”

Where are the other diplomats? Where are the other countries that should come here and fight with us for the women of Afghanistan? We’re too alone on the ground here in Afghanistan now.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to correct something I said, Jan Egeland. I said that the U.S. had given half a billion dollars to the Taliban this year. 

JAN EGELAND: Yeah, I wish.

AMY GOODMAN: But in your news release, you said $500 million U.S. have been provided for the humanitarian response. That’s not necessarily from the United States, right?

JAN EGELAND: Yeah, there is zero funding from the United States of America to humanitarian work, that I know of, here in Afghanistan this year at all. And, you know, I remember what Barbara Bush promised when she was the first lady, when what one politician after the other from both parties promised. They said, “We will stand with the women and girls of Afghanistan.” Well, I don’t see that here, because the reason we have to lay off female aid workers, female teachers, teaching primary school girls, is because of lack of funding. It’s not because of the Taliban. We have been able to negotiate a return of all of our female colleagues, aid workers. They work as Afghan women to Afghan women in all of the provinces where we operate.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Jan, you mentioned this extraordinary mass deportation campaign from Pakistan and Iran, 6 million refugees in total. If you could say a little bit more? Where are they? And how are they being assimilated back into Afghan society, many of whom were, in both Iran and [Pakistan], with refugee status — 

JAN EGELAND: Yes.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: — some of whom had asylum status, the others who had gained, effectively, citizenship?

JAN EGELAND: Yeah, they had all sorts of rights, which is natural, because they had been there for decades, both in Iran and in Pakistan. And I met these refugee communities. Of course, again, the rest of the world did not help Iran and Pakistan that much in hosting all of these refugees. There is a lot of talk in the United States and in Europe — perhaps even more in Europe — that, “Oh, we have too many Afghans. We have to get them back,” and so on. There’s a very small number of Afghans in North America and in Europe compared to Pakistan and Iran.

So, in the last three years, Pakistan and Iran said, “We will not anymore shoulder this on our own. We will send people back.” So, they give one day, two days’, three days’ notice, and then they come and, by force, take people. And in many cases, it’s only the women and children they find, the grandparents. The father of the household may be out searching for work or being in the market or being traveling. So, then they are dumped at the border by Pakistan, by Iran, on the other side.

And there, we are, some humanitarian groups, trying to help them. And there is then some transport to the places where they want to go. And then they are often helped to distant relatives that are too poor to really be able to absorb them. So, they would be next to a relative’s house, but with no real shelter. And there’s where I found many of the families, because we were already giving them some cash assistance, and we will now give them shelter and water and sanitation.

By the way, none of these girls that — women that I met, who had been in Pakistan 30, 40 years, had ever had education, ever. And their children had not had education, neither boys nor girls. So, it’s a crisis for human rights, really. It’s a crisis for humanity, this.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Jan, very quickly, I just want to make one clarification: Neither Iran nor Pakistan granted citizenship to Afghan refugees or the generations who were born in either of the two countries. Amy?

JAN EGELAND: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Jan Egeland —

JAN EGELAND: No, they had temporary status.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you so much for being with us, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, joining us from Kabul, Afghanistan.

Up next, Spencer Ackerman, author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: “John Walker’s Blues” by Steve Earle in our Democracy Now! studio.