The Taliban will meet with United Nations officials at Qatar this weekend amidst criticism of the militant Islamic group’s failure to include women in its delegation — a big win for the Taliban. The question on analysts’s minds is whether the Biden administration will sit on its hands. 

“For the Taliban, half of their victory lies in simply showing up at the conference,” a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute, Javid Ahmad, tells the Sun. While the UN has led three such meetings at Doha, this will be the first one which the Taliban attends.

The UN is legitimizing the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan by inviting them. It is normalizing the regime’s abuses of women by allowing the delegation to attend without women in the mix. The Taliban knows it, too.

“We have developed good relations with neighboring and regional countries and are also actively pursuing positive and cordial ties with Western and U.S. governments,” the Taliban foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, is quoted by Voice of America.

The Taliban has already scored a win by getting the UN to concede to the Taliban’s demand of refusing to include women in its delegation. “UN bureaucrats have put the desire to have a meeting above any principles governing it,” a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Michael Rubin, tells the Sun. 

A former member of Israeli parliament, Einat Wilf, is not surprised by the UN’s concessions to the Taliban. “The UN, contrary to its still existing halo, is merely an organization that is based on member nations and the principle of one lousy misogynist, oppressive nation, one vote,” she tells the Sun, referring to Afghanistan’s role in the General Assembly. 

What the Islamic Emirate really wants, Mr. Rubin says, is cash. The international community, he adds, can either “calibrate its policy to the reality of Taliban subterfuge and terror support” or to the “wishful thinking” and “political ass-covering of the Biden administration which wants to insist the Taliban reformed and are actually an ally in the war against terror.”

Although some analysts argue that engagement may provide insight into the Taliban’s thinking, evidence suggests that the organization is less interested in dialogue than in trying to remake Afghanistan into a safe haven for terrorism.

Al Qaeda operates training camps in ten of 34 provinces in Afghanistan. Its de facto leader, Sayf Al-Adl, recently called on jihadists across the globe to travel to Afghanistan to join the fight against the West.

“This is the inevitable consequence” of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and years of “bad policies,” the director of the Allison Center for National Security at the Heritage Foundation, Robert Greenway, tells the Sun. 

Opposition movements in Afghanistan, meanwhile, suffer from the recognition afforded to the Taliban. Resistance groups, such as the National Resistance Front, “are clearly at a disadvantage — they are the primary losers,” Mr. Ahmad says.

The National Resistance Front has been fighting back against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, among other terrorist groups, since the American withdrawal. The NRF has also been working through the Vienna Process to provide an alternative to the Taliban’s control by building a politically unified vision for a “democratic future.”

“The Taliban is attempting to extract false legitimacy by coercing the international community,” the head of foreign relations for the NRF, Ali Maisam Nazary, posted on X. All countries involved must “abandon the failed policy of appeasement and wishful thinking.”

Afghans are “inching closer to political unity and consensus about their country’s future,” Mr. Nazary added. The claim that there is no viable alternative to the Taliban and engagement remains the only option appears unsubstantiated.

The Group of Seven nations — which includes America and other key democracies — threatened to boycott the Doha meeting if the exclusion of women and concessions to the Taliban are not addressed, according to an Afghan network, Amu TV. The Biden administration has an opportunity to respond directly to the Taliban’s appearance, but it is unclear if the administration will do so.

When President Biden was vice president, he famously brushed aside concerns over the treatment of women in Afghanistan when he was, in a private encounter, pressed on the issue by an aide to Secretary Clinton, Richard Holbrooke.

“When I mentioned the women’s issue,” Mr. Holbrooke is quoted by journalist George Packer as saying, “Mr. Biden erupted. Almost rising from his chair, he said, ‘I am not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of women’s rights, it just won’t work, that’s not what they’re there for.’”

“Ronald Reagan sent a black ambassador to Apartheid-era South Africa and a Jewish ambassador to Pakistan,” Mr. Rubin says, when asked whether countries should protest the Doha meeting. “It’s time for all democracies and freedom-loving states to do something similar and only send women.”