The Ordeal of Being a Woman in Today’s Afghanistan

By: Salman Rafi Sheikh

In a December 2011 survey by the global antipoverty organization ActionAid, 90 percent of the women contacted in Afghanistan said they were worried about the return of a Taliban-style government. Thirteen years later, their fears have come disastrously true. The third anniversary of the Taliban’s violent takeover in August 2021 was celebrated via legal means: the latest so-called ‘Vice and Virtue’ laws decreed on July 31 not only impose severe restrictions on personal freedom of everyone but specifically target women, making them second class citizens legally to the point of not allowing them to speak in public.

Ever since taking over, the regime has passed laws that restrict education for women. If you are a girl living in Afghanistan, you cannot, according to the laws, get an education above the sixth grade. If you are more than 12 years old, you are automatically disqualified from attending school at all. As a result, UNESCO estimates show that 1.4 million girls are now out of school, creating what the UN recently called “gender apartheid.”

“Afghanistan is the only country in the world to prohibit access to education for girls over the age of 12 and for women, UNESCO said in a statement. “This situation must concern us all, the right to education cannot be negotiated or compromised. The international community must remain fully mobilized to obtain the unconditional reopening of schools and universities to Afghan girls and women.”

Accounting for the girls who were already out of school, the number now stands at almost 2.5 million deprived of their right to education. Collectively, that represents, according to UNESCO, 80 percent of Afghanistan’s school-age girls. This is in addition to several other restrictions. Women are already banned from participating in radio and television shows alongside male presenters. In July 2023, female beauty salons were forced to close. In August 2023, women were banned from entering the Band-e-Amir National Park. In October 2023, women were banned from holding directorships within NGOs. In February 2024, the Taliban decreed that women appearing on TV must wear a black hijab. Although men, too, face several restrictions (e.g., they are banned from shaving their beards), women are particularly disadvantaged because of their systematic erasure from public life.

Why does depriving girls of education, confining them to their houses, and preventing them from traveling without male companions, matter to the Taliban? When the Taliban initially closed schools in March 2022, they said they would re-open them once they brought the education system into conformity with ‘Islamic laws.’

As irony would have it, forces that contributed to the Taliban’s takeover and subsequent consolidation of power are either established democracies i.e., the US and its NATO allies, or those professing to be democratic – Pakistan – rather than theocratic. Partly, therefore, these states stand responsible for empowering a militant group and forcing almost 49 per cent of the population into a situation they did not choose to be in.

The regime’s subsequent decision to permanently ban education for girls above the sixth grade did not result from their inability to develop an ‘Islamic education’ system; it resulted from the precarious nature of the regime itself. That is because UN reports since 2021 have consistently shown the Taliban’s Afghanistan as the world’s largest safe haven for terror groups, including the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), al-Qaeda, and the Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K).

Were the Taliban to not impose these restrictions on women, they risk framing themselves as too moderate and liberal a regime. They cannot afford to be less Islamic because it comes with serious consequences. Being too liberal could destabilize the regime from within insofar as it contains many hardliner factions such as the Haqqani Network. If the regime becomes internally divided, it risks losing its grip on the severely divided country along ethnic and sectarian lines. If infighting emerges, it would allow the Taliban’s rival militant groups, such as the IS-K, to push for dethroning them. In other words, even though the Taliban had agreed in the 2020 Doha Pact with the US to respect women’s rights and freedoms, they are now using restrictions on women to keep their regime stable.

Therefore, if you are a woman living in today’s Afghanistan, your rights will be sacrificed for the sake of the security and stability of the Islamic Emirates. More importantly, if you are a woman living in Afghanistan, you can be sure that no international support will come to your rescue. If countries like Pakistan helped the Taliban regain power and countries like the US legitimized them by entering into a pact in 2020, countries like China have established formal ties by appointing and receiving ambassadors to and from Afghanistan. The European Union, on the other hand, remains numb on the issue insofar as the only issue that matters for European countries is the ‘effective management’ of Afghan refugees. To make matters worse, the Taliban regime banned, in June 2023, international NGOs from providing education to girls. Regional countries, including China, Russia, and Pakistan, are today more interested in stabilizing Afghanistan than in human rights and/or women’s rights. Beijing, in fact, has assured the Taliban of its ‘no interference’ policy via-a-vis Afghanistan’s internal matters, including its ultra-orthodox cultural practices.

Within Afghanistan, however, the ‘Moral Police’ established as part of ‘Vice and Virtue’ laws have the authority to monitor, on an everyday basis, people’s compliance with the regime’s laws. If you belong to the Moral Police and find a woman traveling alone, or speaking in public, you have the authority to ‘discipline’ her.

The ‘Moral Police’ was established by the Ministry for the Propagation of Vice and Virtue, a ministry that existed during the Taliban’s previous regime in the 1990s. Back then, women were publicly beaten for failing to abide by the laws by ministry officials roaming the streets. If you are a woman living in Afghanistan in 2024, the Taliban’s time machine takes you back to the 1990s. The purpose of this time machine is to help everyone in Afghanistan live a Shari’a-based life so that everyone qualifies for heaven in the afterlife. The Taliban time machine, therefore, helps you prepare for your transport into the future regardless of whether you want that or not and regardless of whether you are a woman who happens to be “feeling invisible, isolated, suffocated, living in prison-like conditions.”

Dr Salman Rafi Sheikh is an Assistant Professor of Politics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan. He is a long-time contributor to Asia Sentinel.