Welcome back to Global Insider’s Friday feature: The Conversation. Each week a POLITICO journalist will share an interview with a global thinker, politician, power player or personality. For this week's issue, Senior Foreign Affairs Correspondent Nahal Toosi talks to the head of a leading aid organization about what it’s like to engage with the Taliban.

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Janti Soeripto, the president and chief executive of Save the Children U.S., says that being a humanitarian means never giving up. But that’s not easy in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Since taking over the country in 2021, the Islamist militants, in an echo of their harsh 1990s rule, have issued edicts barring Afghan women from working for NGOs and Afghan girls from attending secondary school or university.

Soeripto was among a delegation of aid leaders who recently visited Afghanistan to plead with the Taliban to reverse these edicts, which have already led many aid groups, including Soeripto’s, to stop or scale back their services. The aid leaders did not see Haibatullah Akhundzada, the reclusive supreme Taliban leader, but they met with Taliban officials from several government ministries.

The humanitarians stressed that they cannot effectively function without female workers, especially when cultural norms make it hard for men to interact with Afghan women in need. They asked the Taliban to at least grant more exemptions to the orders. For now, the Taliban appear unwilling to reverse course, and on Wednesday, the United States announced new visa restrictions on some of the militants because of their anti-women policies.

I spoke with Soeripto about her recent encounters with the Taliban. The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Can you describe your conversations with the Taliban leaders you saw?

Overall, I thought the responses were rather encouraging. Now, as always with these things, trust but verify. Actions rather than words will be good. But I think they did hear that we didn’t come to politicize aid. We didn’t come to proselytize about principles and values. We came here to explain how it is impossible for us to deliver good, quality, sustainable support without women in our teams. And we gave a number of examples around that, and we thanked them for where we have received authorizations or exemptions, particularly around health and primary school education.

We heard things that we discussed in one meeting come back in the next meeting, so they were talking amongst themselves — that was our impression.

We were also assured a number of times that the ban was temporary, not permanent: That they were working on guidelines to clarify how it could be possible to continue our work and that those guidelines would be coming now. We then said: “We don’t have much time. People are dying. It is winter, people are hungry.”

The Taliban have said this sort of thing before: “This is only temporary. We’re only going to do this for a while until we come up with some new system.” Why should we believe them?

Yes, we have heard all those stories before. As always when you’re there, you get the nuance better than when you’re sitting here.

They would say, “Well, we made the country much safer and secure.” Which is true, right? I mean, we’ve now been able to reach communities that before were simply inaccessible. So, we’ve actually widened our reach and our ability to work in these areas safely.

They said: “We’ve increased safety and security. We’ve increased tax revenue in our economy, so to be available for public goods. We’ve also taken care of the drugs economy.” Now, all of those things are to some extent true.

And then, of course, we say, “Here are our frustrations about secondary school for girls, further restrictions on public life for women, and then the latest ban.” But you have to continue that dialogue. Because to just have these opposing views and to not do anything about it is not a solution.

Are you suggesting that the Taliban feel like they’re not getting enough attention for the positive things they’re doing?

That’s certainly what they’re saying, that there’s a reduction in violence, increased safety, security, counterterrorism measures, reduction in drug trade. They’re better at collecting taxes. They say corruption is down. Some of these things are more true than others.

They felt they haven’t gotten positive reinforcement or acknowledgment of the things they have done.

Afghanistan, essentially, has left everybody’s radar, right? It also didn’t escape the attention of Taliban leaders that the moment they did something negative attention was back, right?

Is it possible that the international community is approaching this the wrong way? Should it engage more, give the Taliban government funding or couch the pressure not in feminist terms, but in terms of helping all Afghans, including men and boys?

Look, I’m a simple humanitarian. I won’t stray into all of the political options or tools on the table, but I do think we haven’t leveraged all those tools.

You have now a bunch of humanitarians, U.N. agencies as well as NGOs, local and international, who stayed and are trying to do whatever is possible under increasingly difficult circumstances. We have very few formal [diplomatic and donor] missions in country. It continues to be harder, therefore, to understand what’s really happening on the ground for all member states and donors.

Dialogue has suffered and mutual understanding has suffered.

The message that did come through, though, is that we said, “Look, this ban and your previous edicts are not helping give donors confidence that this is a country where we can actually work.” That risk of losing [aid] funding? That was definitely heard.

Aid dollars are leverage. But what other leverage does the international community have?

There’s a problem with the banking system: There’s no liquidity in country. The fact that the U.N. has brought in cash into the country helped prevent the complete slide of the Afghani to oblivion, right? So it’s held up the economy.

You can also look at the amount of money that aid organizations, the U.N. and international NGOs, are spending, even with the private sector — because we buy stuff in country from local, private sector companies — where women, by the way still work. It’s keeping that life going.

That economic argument, I think, is, well, not necessarily embraced by all Taliban leaders, but certainly heard by some.

What other things are there? It depends a bit on which ministry you talk to. We did hear a real desire to be to be invited to global health conferences.

The Taliban want to be invited to global health conferences?

There you go.

NGOs are in many ways, the most important foreign diplomatic actors in Afghanistan now. Do you worry that you’ll be increasingly seen as political and lose some of your influence with the Taliban?

I’m more worried that it’s going to be increasingly difficult for us to do our work in the way that we think is a principled way, which means with women and men. Which means no one telling us who to hire or not to hire, who to target for aid, assistance or who not to target.

And if we can only do that through an incredibly complicated, fragmented patchwork of authorizations that you have to renegotiate constantly because they’re not dependable, then it becomes incredibly costly. And over time, it also becomes ineffective.

What can the Biden administration do?

Continue to push, increase and maintain political engagement. Maintain funding, don’t walk away. Give us some time to see if some of these exemptions and authorizations can be achieved. Continue to push for the principle that principled humanitarian assistance can only be delivered with men and women, and not by men alone.

What’s at stake in the short term and long term?

In the short term, there are 6 million people in close to famine-like conditions in Afghanistan. Twenty-eight million out of 40 million people are in humanitarian need. It is the largest humanitarian crisis in the world. It is super cold, it’s winter, and there was very little resilience already in country. People were already food insecure. They’re weakened already.

Long term: sustainable economic development, to become a society where women and girls, in particular, but men and boys, too, can live up to their potential. Because if girls can’t go to school, if jobs can’t be created, then, yes, you can argue that throwing more humanitarian dollars after it is not leading to anything.

Thanks to editor Heidi Vogt and producer Hannah Farrow.

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