In May 2022, nine months after the Taliban retook power in Afghanistan, I visited a girls’ secondary school that was still open in the north in spite of a ban on education for girls above sixth grade. Communities in the area, which has a long history of valuing education, had refused to comply. I met with a group of 11th-grade math students who told me about their hopes for the future. “I don’t want to end up trapped at home and condemned to a domestic life,” one female student told me. “I want to finish school and become a teacher so that I can help my family and others.”
I ended that visit to Afghanistan with hope that perhaps the situation would not become as dire as I — and many Afghans — feared. But when I returned a year later, everything had changed. The school was closed. Instead of attending lessons, the student and her classmates were forced to stay at home, their teachers transferred to a primary school. Now, among the many other challenges facing girls and women under the Taliban’s rule, a mental health crisis has gripped the country. Girls report anxiety, depression and hopelessness, and there have been reports showing an alarming surge in suicides.
It is against this backdrop that the United Nations will convene a third meeting of international special envoys in Doha, Qatar, next week to discuss a political path forward for Afghanistan. The Taliban have accepted the UN’s invitation to join. (They declined to attend February’s meeting.) After discussions with the Taliban, the meeting’s agenda will focus on fighting narcotics and helping the private sector — and does not include human rights or women’s issues, and neither women nor Afghan civil society representatives will be included.
When the Taliban retook power in August 2021, their leaders initially said that education for girls above the sixth grade would be suspended until conditions were suitable under Islamic rules. Now, more than 1,000 days later, school remains off limits for girls older than 12, and restrictions on education have expanded to universities. The Taliban now say education is “an internal matter,” and it remains unclear when — or if — schools will reopen to girls.
Denial of education is just one of many Taliban decrees against women. Female civil servants were instructed not to report to work when the Taliban retook power. Women are now barred from working at nongovernmental organizations and humanitarian agencies, including the United Nations. Some female-owned businesses, like beauty salons, have been shuttered. Women and girls need to be accompanied by a male relative to travel.
The net result is that today, women and girls have been virtually erased from public life, deprived of their most basic rights. Afghan women began describing the Taliban’s policies as gender apartheid in the 1990s, and they and many others, including me, want such policies to be criminalized under international law.
The Taliban’s institutionalized oppression is devastating not only for the current generation of Afghan women and girls. If left unchecked, it will inflict irreparable harm on future generations of Afghans as well.
Despite all of this, Afghan women and girls are pushing back. Some have protested in the streets to demand the restoration of their rights, risking arrest, detention and violence. In the face of shuttered schools, girls with access to the internet, who are a minority, are taking classes in English, math and science, and female entrepreneurs are moving online, finding creative ways to circumvent restrictions on their movement. “We did not create the Taliban, but we are the ones who have to live with them in control,” one woman told me. “There is no other choice than to find ways to survive and learn.”
It would be easy to leave these women to carry on their struggle alone, citing the excuse that the international community has done enough damage in Afghanistan and should stay out of the nation’s affairs. But that would be a grave disservice both to those women and girls showing defiance and to many others who do not have the economic capacity to fight back. We have an obligation to meet their bravery with increased protection, support and solidarity.
The international community must insist on reversing the restriction of Afghan women’s and girls’ rights, on women’s meaningful participation in decision making and on accountability. Having these issues explicitly on the agenda in Doha would still be an important first step.
The New York Times
