Afghanistan

The Taliban's return to power on August 15, 2021, ending UNAMA's two-decade-old mandate to support a very different Afghan government, left the Security Council with a mission whose founding premise, a post-Taliban reconstruction, had been inverted overnight. The Council's response over Kenya's remaining term settled into a familiar shape: periodic formal briefings and Arria-formula meetings, a single substantive resolution in December 2021 carving out humanitarian exemptions from Taliban-targeted sanctions, and a running argument, never quite resolved, over what engaging the Taliban should actually require.

Kenya's own statements return most often to two conditions the Council never formally imposed but Kenya's own delegation stated repeatedly: that any international engagement or recognition be predicated on the Taliban ending discrimination against women and girls, and on severing its ties to listed terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State's regional affiliate.

The starkest expression of the file's central grievance came collectively from the Council's full cohort of elected members: a joint E10-and-incoming-members press stakeout, issued exactly one year after the Taliban barred girls from secondary school, noting that Afghanistan had become "the only country in the entire world where girls are banned from attending secondary schools."

Not every session on this file was public. An October 2022 Arria-formula meeting convened by Norway on "Engaging Afghanistan" was explicitly convened as a closed, informal session: its own talking points instruct the speaker to thank Norway for the meeting's "informal and closed character." This is a genuine exception to this archive's usual treatment of Arria meetings as open by default, and a reminder that format has to be checked session by session rather than assumed from the meeting type alone.