>> The problem is that the Taliban ruled but they did not govern.

We don't have a Taliban policy as to what they want to do regarding humanitarian relief.

♪♪ >> Hello and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer, and today it's been three months since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The Taliban remains firmly in control.

As the country faces a bitter winter, the United Nations says that nearly 23 million people will experience food insecurity by March.

Can the Taliban stave off starvation for the people it now claims to govern?

And is there anything the international community can do to prevent this countdown to catastrophe without emboldening a militant group known for its human rights abuses?

I speak with renowned journalist and author Ahmed Rashid.

He wrote the critically acclaimed book "Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia" way back in the year 2000.

And he says not a lot has changed with the group since.

And then I welcome back to the show activist Pashtana Durrani, who was hiding from the Taliban in Afghanistan the last time we spoke.

Don't worry, I've also got your "Puppet Regime."

>> ♪ Message to the world ♪ ♪ Angela is leaving ♪ >> But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

>> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... ...and by... >> On August 30, 2021, the last U.S. military planes took off from Kabul, marking the end to 20 years of war.

They left the Taliban to regain total control of the country, a militant group that now claims to have reformed.

Recently, the Taliban has tried to show their softer side to contrast with the barbaric scenes from last time they were in control from 1996 to 2001.

Since August, members of the group have been spotted riding bumper cars in amusement parks, pedaling swan boats at national parks and giggling on trampolines.

But people -- and by people I mean me -- are skeptical that Taliban 2.0 is anything more than a P.R.

stunt, and I expect more of the same human rights abuses and repression that the world witnessed decades ago.

In the 1990s, women couldn't work or attend school in Afghanistan.

They couldn't leave their homes without a male guardian.

They were required to wear burkas in public.

Today, the Taliban claims they will respect women's rights within the confines of their interpretation of Islam.

Kind of an important caveat.

They have also promised to uphold press freedom and adapt to a new and more modern country.

But three months after they took power, these promises seem to be all talk.

>> This protest Saturday violently suppressed by Taliban fighters.

Rifle butts and tear gas used against women asking only to work, go to school and to be included in Afghanistan's new government.

>> Taliban spokespeople claim that skirmishes like these have been caused by fighters not yet trained in their new, more enlightened Taliban governing style.

But even if that's true -- and it's doubtful -- the group's top brass has yet to develop a plan for women's full return to the classroom or for inclusion in a new government.

They've even dismantled the Afghan Ministry of Women and replaced it with the Ministry of Virtue, which sounds kind of Orwellian to me.

Burkas have been swapped for niqabs and abayas, which still cover everything but a woman's eyes.

Press freedom also doesn't seem high on the Taliban's to-do list.

Afghan journalists have been brutally beaten by authorities.

One even partially lost vision and hearing from the abuse.

Of the more than 700 female journalists that were working in Kabul before August, fewer than 100 remain active today, according to Reporters Without Borders.

And executions and amputations as capital punishment are likely to return soon according to one Taliban spokesman.

To further worsen matters, the country is on the brink of famine as Afghanistan heads into a brutally cold winter.

The Taliban says it is ill-equipped to respond to this crisis without adequate funds, and they've pleaded for the World Bank, the IMF, the Biden administration to unfreeze more than $9.5 billion in foreign reserves and loans.

That request is likely going to be ignored, even though 43% of the country's GDP under former President Ashraf Ghani came from foreign aid, according to the World Bank.

Even after a media blitz on Western TV outlets, the international community hasn't been quick to welcome the Taliban to the table after their takeover.

China, Pakistan and Russia have yet to recognize the new government, despite early reports that suggested that they might.

How can the international community help Afghan civilians avoid a dire humanitarian crisis without further legitimizing a group that the United States and allies fought against for more than 20 years?

I speak today to one of the world's top experts on Central Asia, journalist and author Ahmed Rashid, and here's our conversation.

Ahmed Rashid, thanks so much for joining us today.

>> Thank you for having me.

>> Of course, the headlines have moved far away from Afghanistan, and that's not to the advantage of the people living there.

Tell me so far to the extent that we can make any judgment how you think the political situation on the ground in Afghanistan is playing out now that the Americans are well gone.

>> Well, I think that there are enormous issues -- the drought, the COVID, the virus, possible starvation, which the World Food Programme is alerting people already that people could be starving in a matter of days or weeks, and the enormous reluctance of the Taliban to take on board what Western governments and the U.N. and other NGOs are suggesting that they ease up on women, on education, and they show some compatibility with Western demands.

The problem is that the Taliban ruled but they did not govern.

By the time the Americans went to war with the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, the Taliban were already hugely discredited and generally rendered hopeless by the Afghan population who had fled.

And we seem to be repeating that whole scenario once again.

And I think it's incredibly important now that the West should differentiate between recognition, which should not be on the cards for the time being, and actually supporting the food crisis and preventing millions of Afghans from starving to death.

>> Now, is there a mechanism?

I mean, we know that the Americans have frozen billions of dollars of Taliban assets.

Is there a mechanism that is credible that would allow for humanitarian aid at the scale that we're talking about is necessary that would not go through the Taliban government, that would not be siphoned away or stolen by officials that we can't trust?

>> I don't see that that $9 billion that is lying in U.S. accounts is unlikely to be freed, and I'm sure there are very complicated methodology which will be needed to free it.

Instead, what you're looking at, potentially, is fresh money from donors who could provide it to the U.N. to buy food.

Now, of course, there are all sorts of other things involved.

We desperately need medical aid.

Westerners need to be able to come and go freely from Afghanistan in order to run this aid program.

There's been no hint of any of this so far, and we don't seem to have an American strategy or a policy towards how the Americans are going to react towards this humanitarian crisis.

>> You know, you wrote the book on the Taliban back in 2000, known worldwide.

If you were writing that book again today, have they changed?

>> Well, unfortunately, again, we fall back on this issue of governance.

We thought for a long time that the Taliban would be educating and training the younger generation to become bureaucrats and handlers of civil society.

But we were wrong.

There are a lot of cosmetic changes, such as they use iPhones, they can take pictures, which, of course, photography was banned in the earlier Taliban government.

We don't have a Taliban policy as to what they want to do regarding all these very sensitive issues, which people are walking around, tiptoeing around and not wanting to face up to a Taliban decree which will ban this newspaper or that television station.

The other thing, of course, is the factionalism within the Taliban.

And for the time being, it seems, although it's very difficult to decipher exactly what's happening, but it certainly seems that the hard-liners in the Taliban who don't want to make changes in their style of government or in their ideology, they are winning out at the moment.

And leading the pack there are the Haqqanis.

There are two Haqqanis in the cabinet, two more minor officials in the cabinet, and they are, I presume, thinking of their own future.

They've got a $10 million reward for their capture or death from the Americans.

They are very confident because they seem to have rapped any kind of voices of moderation from the Taliban on the knuckles, and they seem to be now basically running the show.

And so it's very difficult for Western governments also to deal with the issues of factionalism and division and who's on top now, who's not on top now, and the failure really to cultivate in all the months of negotiation in Qatar, the failure to cultivate a more moderate Taliban.

>> Can we, at the very least say that the Taliban for now are still in charge of the whole country?

Or do you start to see real chaos in terms of different like in the north, for example, where it would be very hard for them to be able to impose authority where you're starting to see just lawlessness emerge again?

>> Well, I think again, it all depends on whether humanitarian relief is going to reach the Afghan civilian population.

If it just reaches the elite in the cities and just reaches the Taliban military machine and ignore the public, there will be two results -- one, there will be a massive walkout of the public as refugees in neighboring Iran, Pakistan, even Central Asia, and that will probably be stopped because both Iran and Pakistan right now are bankrupt, basically.

They have said very categorically that "we cannot accept any large numbers of refugees," and that's, you know, very much -- we've seen the situation in Europe, how it's getting back to us.

Many Afghans having reached Eastern Europe are going through Iran and Turkey, and nobody is in the mood to have another influx of refugees coming in from Afghanistan, no matter how bad the pictures of suffering we see on the TV.

Remember that the refugee crisis is acute because Iran and Pakistan are still holding refugees from the Soviet period and not counting those refugees who fled the first Taliban government 20 years ago and subsequent fighting.

>> So this is a matter of the next few months?

I mean, assuming that this continues to play out as it has since the withdrawal, winter, we're going to see both domestic implosion and very significant refugee flows out of this country.

>> You have a situation where armed resistance on the ground has petered out for the time being.

But I would say -- You used the word "chaos."

I would say there's enormous unrest at the moment, I think even in the cities regarding woman -- I mean, women have been coming out almost every day.

Women are facing enormous challenges because they have to get their jobs back and they are the the earners of families in many instances.

So I think we are going to see a lot of unrest and it's going to be much more easy for the opposition to organize unrest in the cities, demanding food and demanding, you know, services for the population.

And certainly, the Taliban are going to use probably harsher and harsher methods to deal with that.

And that, of course, will create its own snowballing crisis.

>> These women that are in an absolutely parlous state that are willing to, you know, effectively throw their lives in danger to get their message out and we're hearing it.

But at the other hand, the Taliban government allowing it to persist, I mean, in ways that certainly wouldn't have happened when you wrote your book.

And I'm wondering why you think that is.

>> Well, certainly the Taliban have not resumed beating women savagely in the streets the way they did back in 2000 when they took Kabul.

And any hint of any kind of protest would lead to always an automatic harsh treatment of women and anyone else who was protesting.

You know, that may not be happening, but what I'm trying to say is that as hunger increases, unrest increases and more people, not just women, but men and families come out onto the streets demanding wheat -- If you've seen some of the wheat that has come in from Iran and Pakistan being distributed, it's horrific scenes of people just throwing themselves at the truck, you know, trying to get a bag of wheat out.

Things like that are going to multiply.

And, you know, I do think it's very important that the Americans develop some kind of strategy as to how to deal with the situation.

>> And before we close, talk to me just a little bit about what you think ISIS and other terrorist organizations' capabilities and intentions are as it stands right now in Afghanistan.

>> There are multiple terrorist groups active in Afghanistan, and the truth of the matter is that they have been fighting with the Taliban against the enemies, against the Americans.

And these groups from Central Asia, Pakistan have been extremely active and helpful to the Taliban.

Many of them are living along the border with Pakistan.

Now, for me, the real issue is it's very easy for the world to say, "Well, the Taliban have to stop all these terrorist groups."

The first issue is, do they want to stop these terrorist groups?

Because these terrorist groups are their allies.

They've been their allies in the fight against the Americans.

And if they suddenly tell these groups to stop it, go home, go retire, whatever, there's a big chance that these groups will turn against the Taliban, just like ISIS has turned against the Taliban.

So that's the first, I think, really important issue.

And secondly, what do the Taliban do with these people, even if they would be willing to wrap them up?

What do they do?

Do they kill them?

Do they put them in jail?

Do they punish them?

Do they send them back to their own home countries?

Which, of course, would create -- Any one of these steps would create acute problems for the Taliban and acute problems for the international community because there's no sort of guideline as to -- I mean, Afghanistan is basically occupied by large numbers of terrorist groups.

>> Well, Ahmed Rashid, we didn't resolve it.

Not that I thought we were going to, but I really appreciate you joining us today, and I know that you've made us all a little bit smarter on what's happening on the ground.

>> Thank you.

♪♪ >> The last time I spoke to education activist Pashtana Durrani was in August.

She was on the move in Afghanistan, in hiding from the Taliban as the United States withdrew its last forces from Kabul.

>> I didn't do anything to the United States, right?

It was the Taliban who bombed them, right?

So then why don't you ask them to pay for the consequences?

Why do I have to be with my rights for those consequences?

>> Today, Pashtana has found a new home in the United States.

She's a visiting fellow at Wellesley College, where she continues her fight for girls education in the country that she fled.

I recently caught up with her in Washington, D.C. Pashtana Durrani, good to see you.

>> Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

>> When I spoke to you, you were in hiding and it was stressful as heck even to talk to you.

I couldn't imagine what it would be like for you in that environment.

How did you get out?

>> I had people, I had friends and I had an amazing people who followed up with me who had, like, you know, to take -- took care of me and basically everything I owe to them.

It's a huge team, huge team of lawyers.

All of them were amazing and they got me here.

>> I mean, you weren't in the capital when I talked to you.

Just tell me a little bit about how you escaped.

>> I had my university help me.

I had, the same time, a friend of mine who actually works with the military.

She was following up with my work and everything, and she was the one who got me out.

And then she got me to Pakistan and got my visa in Pakistan.

And then I'm here as the student on a J-1 as a researcher.

So yeah, it was pretty much legally.

I went and boarded a plane for Pakistan, Islamabad, through an NGO, and then they helped me get to Pakistan and then through Pakistan and got to U.S.

I'm still working on everything that I was working when we last talked.

>> You've been in touch, I assume, with all the people that you've been working with on the ground in Afghanistan.

How are they doing?

What kind of news are you getting out of the country right now?

>> We just launched an emergency response for the children who are staring at the, like -- you know, who are going through malnutrition and starvation.

And most of the cases that we hear are humanitarian crises, but also at the same time, the children are the ones who are starving, more who are malnourished.

Women are the second ones who are on that list.

And at the same time, the humanitarian crises in Afghanistan are on work and the schools are still not open.

Women are still barred from working.

That's the highlights I get every day from talking to my team.

>> Now, I mean, they're claiming, of course -- the Taliban government -- that they're going to allow women to go to school, that this is a reformed government.

Do you see any evidence that they are actually trying to, in any way, reform?

>> I'll believe them when they open schools for girls.

I will believe them when they open working spaces for girls.

I'll believe them when they actually walk the talk instead of them, like, you know, claiming whatever they do.

For me, it's more important every time they claim that "that's not happening and we are reformed," show me the reforms so that I can believe you.

I don't believe talks.

I believe actions.

>> Now, are you saying that no women are attending schools in Afghanistan right now?

>> So, from grade one till grade six, the schools are open, but at the same time, there is a huge problem of salaries that the teachers are facing right now.

At the same time, from class 6 till class 12 -- class 7 to class 12, the schools are still closed.

Teachers are not teaching.

Girls are not attending, so that's a huge part of Afghanistan that's sitting at home.

That's 50% of the workforce, but also at the same time, 50% of the academic force that's at home.

>> The Americans are moving on.

And it's hard to keep attention to Afghanistan.

What do you want the Americans to know?

What would you like them to still focus on over the coming months?

>> The only thing I'm going to ask the Americans right now, whoever is watching this, imagine everything you have worked for, tomorrow another government comes and takes over everything that you have worked for -- your jobs, your children's education, your women who are working in the workplace.

That's a long-term thing.

Would you be okay with it?

If you are not okay with it happening to you, why are you so okay with it happening to Afghanistan?

>> Now, you know, Pashtana, I mean, on the one hand, I'm really delighted to see you safe here in the United States.

And on the other hand, I'm sorry because it wasn't your choice to leave your country.

It was forced upon you.

Do you think that this will be a place that you can call home?

>> I'm definitely going to use this opportunity as a person who would grow, who would learn more, of course, embrace this place as a second home.

That's like, you know, that's something we as humans do.

We migrate and we get, like, you know, everything we could learn from the second home.

But at the same time, I do hope to go back to my home and make sure that whatever I have learned here and make sure that I bring the best of that learning back to Afghanistan because those are the people who need it the most.

>> Pashtana Durrani, thanks so much for joining.

>> Thank you for having me.

♪♪ >> And now to "Puppet Regime," where the world's most powerful muppet says auf Wiedersehen.

>> ♪ Eins, zwei, drei, vier, fuenf, sechs, sieben ♪ ♪ Message to the world ♪ ♪ Angela is leaving ♪ ♪ 16 years und now it's time to move on ♪ ♪ You know, you never know what you've got until it's gone ♪ ♪ This quiet chemist girl from the other side of the Mauer ♪ ♪ Rose to make Deutschland a very respected power ♪ ♪ Bush, Obama, Donald, Biden all reckoned with me ♪ ♪ But I'll always have a soft spot for my frenemy Vladimir P ♪ ♪ So cheers to it all ♪ ♪ I'm up to here and now I'm done ♪ ♪ You'll never find another like me ♪ ♪ This queen is one of one ♪ ♪ Eins, zwei, drei ♪ ♪ It's time to say goodbye ♪ ♪ Vier, fuenf, sechs ♪ ♪ I'm moving on to the next ♪ ♪ Eins, zwei, drei, vier, fuenf, sechs, sieben ♪ ♪ That's it, I'm done, I'm out ♪ ♪ That's right ♪ ♪ Yes, Angela is leaving ♪ ♪ When the [bleep] hits the fan, you'll miss me in your circles ♪ ♪ 'Cause no one handles crises ♪ ♪ Quite like Angela Merkel ♪ ♪ I kept the eurozone all in one piece ♪ ♪ Und everybody loved me for it ♪ ♪ Well, except for Greece ♪ ♪ Then a million Syrians came ♪ ♪ I said, yeah, there's room ♪ ♪ Even though it had to boost the neo-Nazi loons ♪ ♪ Now all across Europa, they know my name ♪ ♪ Yes, I guess I could have done a little more to help Ukraine ♪ ♪ Still with me around, you are all a little spoiled ♪ ♪ If things go wrong ♪ ♪ Once I'm gone, I'll feel some schadenfreude ♪ ♪ Eins, zwei, drei ♪ ♪ It's time to say goodbye ♪ ♪ Vier, fuenf, sechs ♪ ♪ I'm moving on to the next ♪ ♪ Eins, zwei, drei, vier, fuenf, sechs, sieben ♪ ♪ That's it, I'm done, I'm out ♪ ♪ That's right ♪ ♪ Yes, Angela is leaving ♪ ♪ Over Lady Europe now ♪ ♪ Where will it all go?

♪ ♪ Is it really up to that arrogant French beau?

♪ ♪ Und what is next for Deutschland?

♪ How will it all go now?

♪ ♪ What a shame that Laschet clown brought my party down ♪ ♪ So call me if you need me ♪ ♪ Though now I might not answer ♪ ♪ This is goodbye ♪ ♪ I'm no longer the mother-bleeping chancellor ♪ >> "Puppet Regime"!

>> That's our show this week.

Come back next week, and if you like what you see or think that Afghanistan would be a nice place for you to hang out, this is your place.

Check us out at gzeromedia.com.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... ...and by...