The warm welcome that Donald Trump received from Arab leaders was striking. Those encounters dominated headlines for days, and some stories are still sparking debate. There were the fleet of jets sent to escort Trump’s plane, which was seen as a contest for his favour. Others focused on Qatar’s US$400 million gift of a 747 plane—so extravagant an offer that U.S. officials reportedly didn’t know how to accept it at first. Major contracts and investment pledges by Arab states also grabbed headlines.
To many Afghans, the Arab-Islamic identity of these states is striking. The wife of the Emir of Qatar shaking hands with American men drew attention, as did the Emirati girls’ hair dance for Trump. Qatar’s actions resonate deeply in Afghanistan due to its role in facilitating the Taliban’s return. The contrast between the Emir’s wife at a state ceremony and Afghan women silenced by Taliban rule raised a key question: How different is Qatar’s record on women’s rights and civil liberties from that of the Taliban?
Qatar is rich and powerful
The emirate of Qatar, with its immense wealth and active diplomacy, has become a highly influential player in the politics and economy of our region. The main source of this power is its vast natural gas reserves and the world’s growing thirst for energy. In this tiny country — at 11,580 square kilometers, it is slightly larger than one-fifth of Herat province — lies the third-largest gas reserve in the world. While Russia and Iran possess larger reserves, Qatar has been more successful in extraction, export, and sales due to its strong ties with consumer nations around the world.
These resources have brought relative prosperity to its small native population, estimated to number between 400,000 to 600,000 out of a total population of three million. It has also and made the ruling family fabulously wealthy. Access to education and healthcare has improved over the past decades, and today, nearly all Qatari citizens are literate. Yet, despite its vast wealth and resources, Qatar ranks lower in human development than some smaller European countries like Latvia, Croatia, and Estonia. Even Saudi Arabia and Bahrain perform better in this regard.
According to the World Bank, Qatar’s per capita income was US$128,918 in 2023, twice that of Saudi Arabia and one-and-a-half times that of the United States. But this enormous income has not translated into overall public well-being. Qatar’s rulers have lagged behind some of their regional counterparts, as well as all developed countries, in meeting the United Nations’ criteria for human development.
In the UN’s latest Human Development Index, Qatar ranks 43rd. This index considers three broad indicators: life expectancy, education, and income. However, if we assess based on indicators like freedom of expression, the right to vote, gender equality, freedom of belief, property rights, the right to form organizations and political parties, equity in capital distribution, and access to economic opportunities, Qatar would fall to near the bottom of the list, very close to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
The core divide between Taliban critics and the emirate model is over political and civil rights. Still, some Taliban leaders hope to replicate Qatar’s economic model in Afghanistan.
The people of Qatar are not free
Qatar has experienced staggering economic growth, resulting in a nation filled with shiny and impressive looking material manifestations of the modern world. In contrast, the relationship between the state and the people is semi-Taliban in nature, and this relationship has not fundamentally changed since the founding of the emirate.
Like 19th-century Afghanistan, Qatar’s borders and ruling family were shaped under the shadow of both British wrath and protection. Mohammad bin Thani, the first ruler of Qatar who ruled from 1851 to 1878, was a contemporary of Amir Dost Mohammad Khan. During his second reign, Dost Mohammad Khan governed Afghanistan from 1843 to 1863 with British backing, and his sons, grandsons, and extended family ruled until 1928. In 1929, power passed from Dost Mohammad Khan’s descendants to the family of his brother Sultan Mohammad Khan Telai, known as the Mohammadzai, who ruled until April 1978.
In Qatar, the Mohammad bin Thani family has ruled throughout all these years. Now deeply entrenched and privileged, they make up the core of the so-called “native Qataris” and maintain a monopoly over all political, economic, religious, and cultural sectors. Apart from the estimated 500,000 native Qataris, the rest of the country’s population of three million are foreign workers and investors who are considered third-class residents, virtually all living without the benefits of citizenship.
Even in small Qatar, l conflicts amid rival tribes have continued over the years. The Al Thani family has excluded others from the country, deprived them of power and economic resources, and in some cases, mass-denationalized them.
For example, between 1996 and 2005, Qatar’s rulers revoked the citizenship of more than 6,000 members of a rival tribe (Al Ghufran). Thousands of these indigenous tribe members are now stateless, wandering across the Arabian Peninsula. Qatari authorities claim that some of the tribe’s elders attempted to overthrow the Al Thani family in 1996.
Women and religious minorities face Taliban-style discrimination and punishment
In the same time that they were stripping members of the Al Ghufran tribe of their citizenship, Qatar’s rulers introduced limited reforms aimed at allowing political and social participation for members of their own tribe and other non-disenfranchised tribes. Among those reforms was the introduction of municipal elections. In 1999, Qatari men and women were granted the right to vote, but the first election did not take place until nearly two decades later. No female candidate won in that sole election for the Consultative Council (a quasi-parliament). The Emir later appointed two women and one, Hamda bint Hassan Al Sulaiti, is the deputy speaker.
The presence of Ms. Al Sulaiti on the council, along with some controlled civil liberties for women and others, makes the Qatari emirate appear somewhat different from the Taliban regime, but the difference is not fundamental. In Qatar, civil rights are violated under the pretext of Islamic law. The morality police flog people; stoning remains a legal punishment; and the sword of takfir (declaring someone an apostate) and execution are wielded as methods to police beliefs and suppress dissent. Opposing the Qatari emirate is met with imprisonment and repression, much like criticizing the Taliban’s Mullah Hibatullah.
Human Rights Watch and other international watchdog organizations regularly publish reports documenting rights violations and the suppression of dissent in Qatar. According to Human Rights Watch’s 2025 report, workers’ rights are widely violated while the abuse of foreign labourers sometimes amounts to conditions akin to slavery. The organization has also identified systemic discrimination against women and girls, corporal punishment (flogging) of those accused of moral crimes, suppression of free speech, and arbitrary revocation of citizenship for dissenters as major human rights concerns in Qatar. In a recent press release, the organization stated that Bahá’ís in Qatar face religious discrimination, and members of that faith are imprisoned or deported because of their beliefs.
The Taliban’s glance toward the Qatari model
Gender- and tribe-based discrimination, public corporal punishment, and suppression of free expression are the defining features of the Taliban emirate, which link it to the Qatari caliphate.
Despite the Taliban leaders’ sermons praising poverty and dismissing material wealth, they are actively trying to merge economic growth, political despotism, and cultural backwardness, much like Qatar and other Arab emirates. To ensure the survival of their regime, many Taliban leaders view Qatar as an important model. In this model, the country’s residents are classified into foreigners, citizens with no political or civil rights, citizens with limited rights, and a privileged elite with extraordinary entitlements. In Qatar, the Al Thani family is considered the first-class citizenry, holding all key government positions. Most of the population consists of foreigners with no citizenship rights. Hundreds of thousands from tribes allied with the Al Thani family are second-class citizens, including women and religious or sexual minorities who are deprived of basic civil and political freedoms despite being citizens.
When the Taliban returned to power in 2021, they announced the cancellation of all republican laws and the elimination of all legal and political structures developed since the fall of the monarchy in Afghanistan. Some Taliban officials even expressed a desire to revive royal-era regulations. What links the Taliban to monarchism is their view of state-society relations, categorizing citizens around a ruling family or class. In the Taliban’s worldview, the core of power is the “religious scholars” of Kandahar, and all other Afghans are ranked based on their distance — social, sectarian, familial, tribal, linguistic, ethnic, or cultural — from this core.
Culturally, both the Qatari emirs and Taliban leaders are more regressive than Afghanistan’s constitutional monarchs. With the exception of the mujahedeen and the Taliban, all Afghan kings and heads of state since 1919 are believed to have practiced monogamy, including Amanullah Khan, Nader Khan, Zahir Shah, Daoud Khan, and the PDPA leaders. (It is said that Burhanuddin Rabbani also had only one wife, and I do not know whether Sibghatullah Mojaddedi. Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani were monogamous.) In contrast, the Taliban are widely known for practicing polygamy. Mullah Omar had two or more wives, and although Mullah Hibatullah reportedly encourages his commanders to limit the number of wives, the foundation of his rule is based on polygamy, which means he likely has multiple wives.
Qatari emirs, like the Taliban, are also polygamous. Qatar’s young ruler, Sheikh Tamim Al Thani, has three wives. A ruler’s treatment of women reflects the cultural and social condition of the country. A polygamous ruler who parades teenage girls to dance for Trump while his courts handle stoning and flogging cases, and while women’s rights remain subject to male guardianship, is not a model for freedom. Democracy-seeking Afghans should not be fooled by the symbolic presence of women in such regimes. The Taliban, too, have no issue with token female appearances. If their regime persists, we might one day see the wife of a Taliban emir in Kandahar, or a female head of the prime minister’s office in Kabul, welcoming powerful foreign guests and shaking their hands.
But Afghanistan is far larger and more complex than Qatar. The retreat of Dost Mohammad Khan’s descendants and later his nephews from hereditary rule was not voluntary but driven by social pressure. The Taliban cannot turn Afghanistan into another Qatar, because doing so would require dragging the country’s political and cultural fabric back to the era of Habibullah Khan, Abdur Rahman Khan, and Dost Mohammad Khan. They may do everything in their power to push Afghanistan backward, but a society that has overcome the autocracy of Abdur Rahman Khan and Nader Khan will also leave Mullah Hibatullah behind.
Younus Negah is a researcher and writer from Afghanistan who is currently in exile in Turkey.
