Ahmad Nader Nadery on Afghanistan: Human Rights, Elections, and Transitional Justice

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/02/17

 Ahmad Nader Nadery is an Afghan human rights and rule-of-law specialist focused on accountability and transitional justice. He founded and later chaired the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan (FEFA), an election-observation group. He served as a commissioner of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, overseeing investigations into abuses and civilian-casualty cases. Nadery later chaired Afghanistan’s Independent Administrative Reform and Civil Service Commission and advised the president on strategic and human-rights affairs. In 2020, he joined Afghanistan’s government negotiating team for the Doha peace talks. He has since worked with international policy institutes as a senior fellow and commentator.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen speaks with Ahmad Nader Nadery about how coups, the Soviet invasion, and militia violence forged his commitment to rights and transitional justice. Nadery recalls his father burying books, his school burning, and rocket attacks that made accountability urgent. He explains founding FEFA to protect electoral legitimacy through observation, volunteers, and reporting, including challenging fraud in 2009. As an AIHRC commissioner, he outlines complaint-driven cases, investigations of civilian casualties under international humanitarian law, and a conflict-mapping project on past atrocities. He critiques Soviet and U.S. errors and warns that Taliban rule now enforces repression, especially against women and girls.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: As a quick preface, how did your early experiences of conflict shape your commitment to universal human rights and transitional justice?

Ahmad Nader Nadery: They played an essential role in the way I approached the question of conflict and justice. The early years of my life, as far back as I remember, included the coup and the Soviet invasion: planes in the sky, my father nervous, hurriedly putting his books into plastic bags and digging a hole in the yard to bury them. That memory raised questions for me: why the fear, why bury the books? Because under the new system of government after the Soviet invasion, anyone who thought differently could be persecuted. My father, being an elder respected in the community and a thinker, feared he would be targeted for his books.

Later, my school was set on fire by the mujahideen, who were fighting the Soviets and supported by the United States and Western allies. There was only a wall between our school and our house, and I saw the flames while I was in grade three. A few years later, rockets hit our streets. I was in grade seven, helping get injured children into a taxi converted into an ambulance to take them to the hospital.

All of this — the injustices and atrocities committed by warring factions — influenced how I thought about stability and the importance of accountability and transitional justice as the foundation for long-term stability, so those crimes would not recur.

Jacobsen: The unavoidability of issues around justice becomes a personal narrative of fate or destiny in a way. What motivated you to found the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan, and what were some of its most significant achievements as well?

Nadery: As an activist during my time at university — for which the Taliban imprisoned me — I believed, along with a group of young students, that long-term stability could only come if power in the country were considered legitimate. We saw that the former king ruled through traditional means of legitimacy, and for an extended period, there was stability. After that came coup after coup, and the legitimacy of governments was constantly questioned.

As an activist, I advocated for the role and representation of the people in decision-making processes. I believed firmly in the value system of rule by the people and accountability to the people by power holders. When the opportunity came after 2001 — during the interim government and the introduction of elections — the main issue became how elections could confer legitimacy on power and make power holders more accountable to the population.

One way to improve legitimacy was to ensure that elections were credible, clean, and impartially conducted. Elections are needed to confer the legitimacy required for power to be considered credible and lawful, and to make power holders recognize that they came to power through the vote of the people and are accountable to them. A free and fair election was essential for future stability.

A group of us came together and asked how we could improve that process. The only way was to add layers of monitoring, observation, and public oversight. That is how we decided to form the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan. In 2005, when I was leading it during the parliamentary elections, it was remarkable to witness the sense of euphoria. We had 10,000 volunteers across the country monitoring the polls and reporting in real time. I gave media briefings twice on election day, both holding the Independent Election Commission accountable and informing the public.

From that point on, the organization became a consistent voice for democratic and electoral reforms. In 2009, we monitored the presidential election that became highly contested. We were the first to say there were irregularities. Some international organizations initially claimed it was free and mostly fair, or at least acceptable. I disagreed and released our report the day after the election, stating clearly that there was fraud and that it needed to be addressed, and that standards should not be lowered. It became a significant issue. Others later joined in, and an electoral crisis ensued because the sitting president refused to acknowledge the fraud. I became one of the palace’s primary critics for speaking openly about it.

By the time I left in 2015, the organization had become a full-fledged force, stronger even after my departure. I served as its volunteer chairman and, during elections, shielded the team when necessary. As a commissioner of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, I had more protection than many of our volunteers and staff. The organization continued strengthening democratic accountability by monitoring parliamentary work and other electoral processes, and by expanding civic education and youth participation.

Tragically, after I left, the Taliban assassinated the executive director who succeeded me and became the public face of the organization. He was a strong democratic voice, and losing him was another painful day in a long list of sacrifices for a democratic Afghanistan — a legacy that was tragically cut short in 2021.

Jacobsen: During your tenure with the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, how did you approach investigations into wartime abuses? I assume most do not take these positions lightly — investigating wartime abuses is not work for the weak of spirit or will.

Nadery: We handled several types of human rights abuses. First, there were day-to-day violations that people brought to us through complaints. We had a complaints, monitoring, and investigation department that examined general human rights abuses ranging from torture and violations of due process to infringements on freedom of expression, abuses by local power holders, domestic violence, and violence against women. Our monitors and investigators carried out that work.

The second type involved conflict-related violations — breaches of international humanitarian law, the laws of war. These included actions by the Taliban, Afghan government forces, and, particularly in the early years after 2001, by international forces — the United States and NATO coalition forces. We investigated civilian casualties by sending trained investigators into the field where incidents occurred. They corroborated accounts, interviewed witnesses and victims, facts and evidence, examined the direction of fire, traced bullet and missile trajectories, determined responsibility for civilian casualties, and verified every fact through cross-examination and analysis. We compiled reports, usually published publicly, and also engaged in advocacy, briefing international and Afghan forces to press for changes in conduct or rules of engagement when those rules contributed to civilian harm — including rapid air support in situations where ground forces had limited retreat options.

The third category was the investigation of past crimes connected to transitional justice. One of the significant projects I led was known as the Conflict Mapping Report — a roughly one-thousand-page historical investigation into atrocities committed over 23 years of conflict by multiple warring actors, including Soviet-backed forces, the communist regime, the Mujahideen, the Taliban, and, in the early post-9/11 period, international forces. Our teams spent weeks and months in provinces and villages documenting and reconstructing events, building evidence that, in many cases, reached a prima facie standard sufficient for judicial consideration.

We trained our investigators extensively. I brought in international investigators with experience from Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, and South Africa to provide specialized training before our teams returned to the field. We took great care to verify and cross-examine each fact. The result was a roughly one-thousand-page report, though only a redacted version exists internally, and it was never published due to political pressures and the changing dynamics of the conflict.

Jacobsen: From your vantage point, what did the Soviets get right and wrong? What did the Americans get right and wrong? What did NATO and international forces get right and wrong? What did Afghan actors — the Taliban, the Mujahideen, and human rights defenders — get right and wrong? I am thinking here both in terms of explicit aims and actions, and also what parties neglected or failed to take responsibility for.

Nadery: This could be a few days of conversation. Recently, I drew some parallels between the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Russian invasion of Ukraine — specifically in the behaviour of Soviet forces then and Russian troops now. There are many parallels: similar patterns of conduct, similar organizational culture, and similar doctrines of war that seem to have persisted.

Jacobsen: One difference is the absence of North Korean troops this time.

Nadery: In Afghanistan, during the Soviet period, there were troops from Eastern Europe and Vietnam. There may have been North Koreans as well, though I did not document that directly — but that is a separate issue. What matters for your question is the conduct and doctrine of the war.

The Soviets fundamentally miscalculated by attempting to impose an entirely different governance structure — a centralized, secular, tightly controlled political system — onto a population whose religious identity at the time was largely pacifist and Sufi in character. In 1978, Afghanistan was not an Islamist society in the way it later became under the Mujahideen and then the Taliban. It was a Muslim society shaped by Sufi traditions, in which faith was personal and devotional rather than politicized. People prayed, did good, and saw their relationship to God as individual rather than imposed. The Soviets even attempted to restrict that religious practice, which was deeply counterproductive.

Militarily, the Soviets also relied on massive bombardment of villages. If there were a small pocket of resistance, they would sometimes destroy an entire town. Their advisers pressured Afghan communist officials to respond collectively and brutally to local resistance. In one district in eastern Afghanistan, for example, approximately 1,200 civilians were rounded up and executed, then buried in a mass grave. These actions fueled even larger uprisings and drove more people into the resistance.

What the Soviets did get right included expanding educational opportunities, women’s rights, and national infrastructure, such as electrification, although the scale of violence and repression completely overshadowed these gains.

As for the Americans, they also committed grave mistakes. At times, they responded to Taliban attacks with rapid and overwhelming airstrikes that caused civilian harm. This, in a different technological era, mirrored the same structural problem: responding to localized resistance with disproportionate force.

Those actions created even more enemies. Beyond the bombings, there was a large wave of arrests and detentions — not entirely arbitrary, but often based on very thin intelligence. Some detainees were sent to Guantánamo Bay; many more were held in Bagram and other facilities without sufficient evidence.

The United States and its allies neglected the fact that Afghan society had already endured nearly a decade and a half of war during and after the Soviet invasion, including deep trauma and distrust among communities. When forces acted on unverified reports from one community against another — conducting raids, arrests, and humiliations at the local level — people who had no connection to the Taliban suddenly became targets. Detainees were sometimes held without trial in remote military outposts — the so-called firebases — and some were transferred to Guantánamo, while others were held for long periods without due process. These practices significantly contributed to Taliban recruitment. Many people did not support the Taliban initially; they were simply villagers caught in the middle and pushed toward the insurgency by these actions.

Another major mistake was failing to act decisively against abusive warlords and power brokers — the “bad actors within the gang,” as I call them. In many areas, the United States behaved like an empire while simultaneously denying it. When decisive action on accountability, justice, or oversight of resource use was required, the response was often, “It is a sovereign issue — you deal with it,” even while intervening forcefully on less consequential matters.

In terms of development, there were serious missteps. Enormous amounts of funding were dispersed across countless small projects — thousands of training programs — instead of prioritizing major national infrastructure, such as dams, a unified electricity grid, or water systems, that could have supported a domestic economy. The result was a highly dependent economy rather than a sustainable one.

A further strategic error was building an Afghan security force in the image of the United States — technologically sophisticated, extremely expensive, and ultimately unsustainable for a country as poor as Afghanistan. More pragmatic regional models from South or Central Asia could have been adapted, with earlier and more consistent investment in sustainability.

There is a long list of such mistakes. But there were also many things the United States and its partners did right. They created space for Afghan society to practice and enjoy freedoms. Afghans are a freedom-loving nation, and that space allowed freedoms to flourish and be reclaimed. A new generation became highly educated. Civil society grew — although it is now severely restricted under the Taliban. Free media expanded dramatically. Poverty declined for a period, and the economy grew many times over. The health sector also improved significantly. These achievements deserve recognition alongside the failures.

Afghan women have been completely erased from public life. They have no rights. More than eighty decrees, edicts, and regulations have been adopted to restrict, control, and eliminate nearly every aspect of their lives. It is gender apartheid. While there is no binding international legal definition of “gender apartheid,” I clearly see the three essential elements of the crime of apartheid being applied by the Taliban against Afghan women — and, increasingly, against the rest of society.

Afghans do not have freedom of religion. Religious minorities cannot freely practice their faith. There is no freedom of assembly; you cannot legally register or operate a social or political organization. There is no freedom of speech and no free media. Demonstrations cannot be organized, slogans cannot be raised, and demands cannot be expressed without punishment.

Cultural rights are also denied, though they receive less attention. Artists are forbidden from painting living beings; painting a human or an animal can result in punishment. Cinema has been entirely banned. Musical concerts do not exist, musical instruments are destroyed when found, and anyone possessing them can be punished.

The right to education — a core cultural and social right guaranteed under international conventions — is fundamentally restricted. Women and girls are banned beyond grade six, and even for boys and men, the content and conditions of education violate state obligations under international human rights law. The state is failing its responsibilities under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

I could continue. To sum it up: this is the darkest time for a people, and Afghanistan is the darkest terrain for human rights and freedoms in modern history.

Jacobsen: Thank you very much for your time and the opportunity, Nader.

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