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Column by Ishaan Tharoor
“Afghanistan’s people have been brutalized — many are starving and many have fled,” Bush said of the extremist group in Kabul that had given sanctuary to al-Qaeda’s leadership. “Women are not allowed to attend school. You can be jailed for owning a television. Religion can be practiced only as their leaders dictate. A man can be jailed in Afghanistan if his beard is not long enough.”
But 23 years after 9/11, the Taliban hold sway. Their fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic doctrines is the law of the land. Their draconian edicts once more asphyxiate Afghanistan society. And Afghan women, as they were a generation ago, are yet again thwarted from school, restricted in all they can do and banned from revealing their faces and even their voices in public.
The plight of Afghanistan’s women in 2024 provides a grim coda to the saga of the United States’ role in the country since 2001. It’s a tale of tragedy and hubris, misadventures and corruption — and in the final bleak reckoning, a tale of failure.
Successive U.S. administrations poured in tens of billions of dollars into the reconstruction of the country, propped up a perennially fragile, frequently venal Washington-aligned government in Kabul, and presided over bloody insurgencies and counterinsurgencies more than two decades. When the resurgent Taliban swept aside the forces of the U.S.-backed regime in 2021, as U.S. and NATO powers telegraphed their plans for withdrawal, it was a brutal shock for Western policy elites. But for the triumphant Taliban, it was the inexorable redemption of their view of the world and their nation’s history.
Afghanistan’s impoverished population, and especially its women, are paying the price. The country is in the grips of a rolling humanitarian crisis, compounded by decades of conflict and failed development, the downstream effects of the coronavirus pandemic, major economic downturns, and the collapse of the banking sector that came with the Taliban regime’s takeover and its subsequent isolation on the world stage. More than half the country’s population required humanitarian assistance this year.
Unbowed, the Taliban have only entrenched their rule. What social changes were unleashed in the post-Taliban era have been drastically reversed by a regime that sees its lack of international legitimacy as a reason to only double down on its ideological instincts. A ban on girls attending high school was followed by a ban on women attending universities. By 2023, Afghanistan ranked last out of 177 countries evaluated in the Women Peace and Security Index, a global survey of how societies embrace — or don’t embrace — women’s rights, compiled by researchers at Georgetown University.
Last month, the Taliban regime issued a new set of stifling edicts regarding “vice and virtue.” The Associated Press, which saw the 114-page, 35 article document, reported: “It says it is mandatory for a woman to veil her body at all times in public and that a face covering is essential to avoid temptation and tempting others … A woman’s voice is deemed intimate and so should not be heard singing, reciting, or reading aloud in public. It is forbidden for women to look at men they are not related to by blood or marriage and vice versa.”
Article 17 bans the publication of images of living beings; Article 19 bans the playing of music and the transportation of solo female travelers, it reported.
U.N. officials and international rights advocate expressed their outrage. “I want to make clear my abhorrence of these latest measures, which include forbidding even eye contact between women and men who are not related and imposing mandatory covering for women from head to toe, including their faces,” U.N. human rights chief Volker Turk said this week. He added, “I shudder to think what is next for the women and girls of Afghanistan. This repressive control over half the population in the country is unparalleled in today’s world.”
Taliban officials seem impervious to this sort of censure. Zabihullah Mujahid, a top Taliban spokesman, issued a statement denouncing the “arrogance” of outside critics and called for “a respectful acknowledgment of Islamic values.” He said foreign moralizing “will not sway the Islamic Emirate from its commitment to upholding and enforcing Islamic law.”
Of course, as myriad Afghan commentators themselves have argued, the Taliban’s interpretation of sharia law is but one hard-line view and arguably flies in the face of the country’s rich, deep traditions. The regime’s morality police have been known to abuse and attack women contravening their laws, including reports of gang rape of women in prisons. But in some instances, the edicts have not been fully implemented or enforced.
“In the three years since the Taliban takeover, it’s become clear that even if edicts aren’t strictly imposed, people start self-regulating out of fear,” the BBC’s Yogita Limaye noted on a recent trip to Kabul. “Women continue to be visible in small numbers on the streets of cities like Kabul, but nearly all of them now are covered from head to toe in loose black clothes or dark blue burqas, and most of them cover their faces with only their eyes visible, the impact of a decree announced last year.”
Rights activists have branded what’s taken hold of Afghanistan as “gender apartheid” and want to see international bodies take the regime’s leaders to task for implementing it. “The Taliban’s claim that the rights of over half of Afghanistan’s population is an internal matter is incompatible with Afghanistan’s international obligations and commitments and membership of the United Nations,” a panel of U.N. human rights experts noted last month. They added that no foreign governments should move to “normalize” the Taliban regime “unless and until there are demonstrated, measurable, and independently verified improvements against human rights benchmarks, particularly for women and girls.”
For many months, policymakers far from Kabul have struggled to figure out how to coax the Taliban down a different path. The regime is beefing up its economic links with various countries, including China and Russia, even as it exists in purgatory on the world stage. Normalizing relations with the Taliban is a nonstarter for most countries, but shunning the Taliban has not resulted in any positive change in its behavior.
All the while, Afghan women chafe and struggle amid one of the world’s most repressive regimes. “Every moment you feel like you’re in a prison. Even breathing has become difficult here,” one woman in Kabul told the BBC.
