Afghan women are fighting for their rights under the Taliban regime. It’s time the international community joined them.
This article appears in the Fall 2024 issue of Ms., which hits newsstands Sept. 24. Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get issues delivered straight to your mailbox.
Afghanistan has plummeted to last in global rankings of gender equity and women’s security since the withdrawal of international forces in 2021. A second Taliban regime, the de facto authority in Afghanistan, has issued increasingly harsh decrees entrapping millions of women and girls in a system of repression that violates their basic human rights, segregates them from broader society and keeps opportunities and independence out of reach. But even as the situation for Afghan women grows more dire, the international community is inching closer to recognizing the Taliban as the legitimate leaders in Afghanistan, leaving Afghan women with diminishing hopes that their oppression will end.
In the past three years, the Taliban have issued more than 100 decrees targeting women and girls. Edicts requiring women to have a mahram—a male close family member as escort—are particularly constricting. These rules prohibit unchaperoned women from traveling more than 45 miles from their homes, entering healthcare centers, being served in coffee shops and restaurants in certain areas or traveling on public transportation.
“The mahram requirement is a huge impediment to women’s life,” says Belquis Ahmadi, senior program officer at the United States Institute of Peace, which is monitoring the edicts. “Who has an extra man to take them everywhere?”
The edicts with the most long-term impacts have focused on systematically stripping women and girls of their right to education. Early edicts initially limited, then altogether banned, university studies for young women. Later edicts halted education for all girls beyond the sixth grade. As a result, in 2023 some 80 percent of Afghan girls and young women were no longer in school. The dreams of millions have evaporated, along with their potential.
According to Ahmadi, “The deepest impact are the schools’ closure. Taliban are only allowing elementary schools for girls, but in some parts of the country, if a girl appears physically mature in elementary school, she is expelled from school by the school administrator at the order of religious police. Anxiety and depression among women and girls are widespread.”
The edicts shut other doors as well. Women have lost economic independence since they are prohibited from holding many respected jobs and may now only receive a salary of up to 5,000 Afghanis per month (roughly $70) for even the most prestigious positions—far too little for women to support themselves or their families. Banned from going to public parks, entering gyms, playing sports, and showing their faces or speaking loudly in public, women and girls are being erased from public life.
“The Taliban claim they are simply applying Sharia law and Afghan customs, but no other Muslim country is doing this,” says Dr. Sima Samar, a women’s rights activist, former deputy president of Afghanistan, and Ms. contributor. “These edicts are not Islamic—they want women to be erased and hidden.”
Afghanistan’s leadership is expected not only to refrain from violating women’s rights but also to establish laws, policies and systems of accountability to ensure women’s rights are respected. The Taliban have utterly failed at both.
The web of restrictions subjugates women to a lower societal standing—where the Taliban believe women belong. The cutting off of educational and economic prospects for women has had disastrous effects, leading to a rise in poverty, reliance on aid, increased domestic violence and forced early marriage. Not only are women and girls unable to escape desperate circumstances, but they also have little hope of justice when they’ve been victims of violence, since the Taliban have disbanded the attorney general’s office and replaced it with an office that monitors its decrees.
The desperate situation was detailed in a May 2024 report by Richard Bennett, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, who slammed the Taliban’s increasingly draconian restrictions and the “institutionalized system of discrimination, segregation, disrespect for human dignity and exclusion of women and girls.”
The report also describes the extreme and harsh ways the Taliban treat those who dare protest: “Women have been subjected to beatings, arrest, arbitrary deprivation of liberty and enforced disappearance.”
Any act the Taliban consider seditious or inciting may be punishable by public lashings or stoning.
The Taliban claim they are simply applying Sharia law and Afghan customs, but no other Muslim country is doing this. …These edicts are not Islamic—they want women to be erased and hidden.
Dr. Sima Samar, a women’s rights activist and former deputy president of Afghanistan
Although the U.N. has not officially recognized the Taliban as legitimate leaders, in December 2023 China accepted a Taliban ambassador to Beijing shortly after posting its own ambassador in Kabul. Given Afghanistan’s geopolitical significance, more states could follow suit as commentators in influential publications like Foreign Policy urge engagement with the Taliban despite their discrimination against women. The U.N. has convened meetings in Doha to explore international engagement with Afghanistan following the 2020 Doha peace agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban that led to the withdrawal of international forces.
Representatives at a third Doha meeting, held on June 30 and July 1, 2024, completely capitulated to Taliban demands. As a condition of their first attendance at such talks, the Taliban secured U.N. agreement to ban civil society participation, exclude women’s rights as an agenda item and keep the meeting focused only on economic development and counternarcotics. Many Afghan and international women’s groups urged a boycott of the meeting. The U.N., to put a patina of equality on a fundamentally flawed event, convened a third, unofficial day that included some women’s civil society representatives, though many declined to attend.
Agreeing to the Taliban’s demands was a betrayal women and the principles on which the U.N. was founded, and it undermines the legitimacy of the Doha process. The international community has effectively pushed to the side half of Afghanistan’s population and signaled to the world that women’s rights are not a priority. More damaging, Doha 3 can in many ways be seen as a political victory for the Taliban, at the exact moment that their gender persecution has become more extreme—leaving them with little incentive to heed international pressure to restore women’s rights. And it moves the Taliban closer to their ultimate goal of lifting international sanctions and unfreezing $3.5 billion in assets.
Any movement toward legitimacy ignores the myriad ways the Taliban’s edicts blatantly violate international laws guaranteeing women’s rights. Afghanistan is party to multiple human rights treaties—including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), considered the international bill of women’s rights as well as the Rome Statute, which makes Afghanistan subject to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. As a result, Afghanistan’s leadership is expected not only to refrain from violating women’s rights but also to establish laws, policies and systems of accountability to ensure women’s rights are respected. The Taliban have utterly failed at both.
Holding the Taliban legally accountable for these violations seems impossible within Afghanistan and increasingly difficult at the international level, especially with diminishing international political will to confront the Taliban over Rome Statute. The Taliban’s discriminatory policies, along with the violent enforcement of these policies, could constitute the crime of gender persecution, which is enumerated as a crime against humanity under the statute. But so far no warrants have been issued, and any convictions would take years to materialize.
To women inside Afghanistan, the simple act of going outside despite the Taliban’s restrictions constitutes a form of resistance.
Belquis Ahmadi, senior program officer at the United States Institute of Peace
The Taliban’s deliberate targeting of women and girls has sparked a movement, originated by Afghan and Iranian women activists, to establish a legal definition of gender apartheid, which could be recognized under a new treaty on crimes against humanity that’s currently under consideration at the U.N. In fact, the special rapporteur’s report was “firmly of the view that gender apartheid most fully encapsulates the institutionalized and ideological nature of the abuses in question” and called on the international community to respond.
Another potential avenue for justice is to bring Afghanistan to the U.N.’s highest judicial body, the International Court of Justice, for violating its commitments under CEDAW. But such a case can be brought only by another state party to CEDAW, and it has been challenging to find a country willing to risk the political fallout of taking a principled stand on women’s rights.
Despite challenges in securing international support, Afghan women continue to demonstrate tremendous resilience, staging weekly protests known as the Purple Saturdays Movement. They have opened underground schools for girls. They gather in houses and post signs of protest on social media, obscuring or cropping out their faces to avoid ever-present surveillance. The internet allows them to take classes, watch fitness instruction and enjoy comedies and music videos, but the Taliban have taken steps to shut down internet access and punish those who participate, threatening that lifeline.
“Their resistance to Taliban policies may seem basic to those outside the country,” Ahmadi notes, “but for them, stepping outside their homes wearing a traditional and widely worn scarf instead of the Taliban-imposed burka is a significant form of resistance. To women inside Afghanistan, the simple act of going outside despite the Taliban’s restrictions constitutes a form of resistance.”
The Taliban are violating the unalienable rights of women and girls, and the international community has a legal—and moral—duty to step in and hold them accountable.
More pragmatically, normalizing the Taliban’s treatment of women could have ripple effects around the world. As Samar warns, “The Taliban’s crimes against humanity will not stay in Afghanistan, as history has shown.” And if the international community seeks to build a better Afghanistan for the people—as it claims to be doing—how can it allow half of those people to be persecuted and dehumanized by the Taliban?
“How could anything be successful with only half of the population?” Samar muses. “How do you ask a bird to fly after cutting off one wing?”
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