Manizha Bakhtari is on a mission to show that resisting the Taliban doesn’t mean “wanting a war” again in her home country. As the last serving female ambassador from Afghanistan anywhere in the world, she is at the forefront of efforts to deny the Islamist group the international recognition it badly craves.
The UN still refuses to recognise the legitimacy of the Taliban regime in Kabul, in place since Nato forces withdrew from the country and the last democratically-elected government collapsed in August 2021. Individual countries are following the UN’s lead, but many now host Afghan diplomatic missions led by Taliban appointees, often out of practicality rather than ideology.
Austria, where Bakhtari leads the Afghan embassy, has held firm. And from there, Bakhtari is trying to spread the message across Europe that it would be a mistake to recognise or deal with a Taliban regime that fosters extremism and denies women many of the most fundamental rights.
Her story has started gaining attention, and is now the subject of an 80-minute documentary entitled The Last Ambassador that received a standing ovation at last month’s Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival. It follows her journey from first being appointed as envoy to Austria from the previous Ashraf Ghani-led administration to her present status as head of a mission disowned by Kabul. It also shows her activities running secret classes for Afghan girls banned by the Taliban from attending school.
In an interview with The Independent at a conference on Afghanistan’s future hosted by Madrid earlier this year, Bakhtari explains what resistance means for her.
“Resisting the Taliban doesn’t mean that I want war in Afghanistan,” she says. “That is how many politicians treat us in this world, believe me – they see [the word] resistance and they’re like ‘you are warlords and you want another war in your country’. It is very painful, you know, because resistance does not mean to take arms again. It means to stand against injustice.”
The Taliban has done its best to get rid of critical voices from the previous administration, and like in many countries it issued a diktat firing Bakhtari shortly after capturing Kabul. But Austria still recognises her accreditation, and so she continues to represent the interests of Afghan nationals in the country.
“I am not taking orders from them – Taliban men,” she says. “My legitimacy is not coming from the Taliban approval. Whatever they say, whatever their rule, it is their problem. Not mine. I don’t have to accept their words because they have not been recognised within and outside of Afghanistan. They do not even have legitimacy among our own people.”
Over the past four years Taliban representatives have steadily taken over more and more missions around the world, with Norway the latest European nation to accept an appointee from the group last month. India held out until the tenure of the last Afghan ambassador reached its time limit, and then quietly ushered in an official agreeable to the Taliban in late 2023. And the Afghan embassy in the UK was closed in September 2024, at the request of the British government, after the Taliban sacked all its staff.
Asked whether it is inevitable that foreign governments will be forced to deal with the Taliban as Afghanistan’s de facto rulers, Bakhtari is adamant. “Let’s forget the fact that the Taliban have been a terrorist group and put it aside, because right now the international community wants everyone to forget this,” she says,
“What about their policies today? Not 20 years back – let’s concentrate on the past four years – forgetting their suicide attacks and atrocities. What have the Taliban done for the prosperity and welfare of Afghans? Jobs? Respected basic human rights? Forget about girls’ education for a second. What about boys’ education? What are our boys studying?” the ambassador asks.
“They do not have proper education or educated teachers. The Taliban has long altered the curriculum and is teaching regressive subjects to millions of Afghan boys who earlier studied under working Afghan women. So yeah, I am not taking orders from them who are yet to be recognised by even one authority,” she says.
Though Bakhtari is the only female Afghan ambassador still standing, she is not alone as a woman working through diplomatic channels for the interests of the old Afghan republic. At the Herat Security Dialogue in Madrid, The Independent also met Nigara Mirdad, deputy head of mission at the now shut-down embassy of Afghanistan in Poland.
Mirdad was in hospital in September last year with her 11-year-old daughter, who has diabetes and needed insulin, when the ambassador informed her that their Warsaw mission was being closed. She says she tried to fight back but in vain, and without any funds coming in from Kabul, she appealed to the diplomatic missions in Canada, Germany and the UK to help her pay for gas in the bitter sub-zero Polish winter.
She recalls how it felt when she watched TV coverage of the Taliban sweeping Kabul in 2021. “I didn’t eat for days and the tears wouldn’t stop rolling down my face,” she says.
Both Mirdad and Bakhtari knew what was coming for Afghan women under Taliban rule – the same horror they endured as young women in their early 20s.
In 1996 when she was just 12 years old, Mirdad recalls, Taliban militants entered the Panjshir valley and her neighbourhood prepared to fight. “People said girls and women should be killed and thrown in the rivers to prevent the Taliban from touching them and the Afghan men should go and fight the Taliban. And from that time, it stayed in my mind – if the Taliban comes closer, me and the women of my family will be killed and thrown in the river,” she says.
Like Bakhtari, she has received threats from the Taliban in recent years. “I received many messages from the Taliban supporters and even the spokesperson of the Taliban’s interior affairs ministry after they came to power. He said: ‘Okay, you wait when we take the all the embassies in Europe, we will see you’,” she says.
Bakhtari says women like them are seen by the Taliban as a “threat to their control”. “They hate women. [They] fear that educated and empowered women will confront them and the structures of oppression they have built. With education, with empowerment and with the ruling society, women will question them,” she says.
She says women cannot afford to give up their country, or the idea that things can change. “We cannot afford to lose hope,” she says. “That is the only thing keeping millions in Afghanistan alive.”