The Taliban Have Turned Afghanistan Into a Graveyard of Women’s Rights

Afghanistan is marking its second International Women’s Day since the Taliban returned, with half the population incarcerated in their homes and increasingly shut out of work, education, health care, and hunger relief—a situation that some observers now fear could push the country back to war. The dilemma for regional governments, now faced with a crisis that threatens to spill across borders, is how to engage with the group responsible for the appalling suffering without appearing to condone its actions.

In recent months, the Taliban have barred women from universities, banned nongovernmental organizations from employing female staff, and, according to reports this week, have begun annulling divorces and forcing women to return to abusive husbands.

As misogyny, hunger, and poverty intensify—and with Taliban violence encroaching on bordering tribal regions of Pakistan—Thomas West, U.S. special representative for Afghanistan, is considering meeting with Taliban figures, according to a source familiar with U.S. policy on the issue. The hope, the source said on the condition of anonymity, is that the two sides can find some common ground for discussions that might lead to an improvement in conditions for Afghanistan’s 41 million people—especially for the women who have been detained, abused, and killed with impunity as the Taliban have set about erasing them from public life.

The meeting—which could come within weeks, if it materializes—would continue a tenuous dialogue between the U.S. administration and the Taliban, who after 18 months in control of Afghanistan can no longer blame a 20-year war, foreign occupation, or a “puppet” government for the dire state of the country. The United States and other Western governments and United Nations agencies have watched as the Taliban have abused Afghan women and other vulnerable groups with little consequence.

“We have no leverage. We have no influence” with the Taliban, the source said. In Washington, postmortems over the Biden administration’s past handling of the U.S. withdrawal dominate the political agenda while Afghanistan’s present and future continue adrift. “Policy is very politicized, as investigations into the chaotic evacuation proceed. Diplomatic recognition is not realistic. But it doesn’t hurt to maintain contact,” the source said.

A U.S. State Department spokesperson said: “We have no high-level meetings with the Taliban scheduled at this time. We continue to have a policy of pragmatic engagement with the Taliban on our interests and expect to meet with them in the future.”

International Women’s Day, held annually on March 8, is an opportunity to highlight the Taliban’s attitude toward women, which has manifested as atrocious abuse, including extrajudicial killings of women who demand their rights. In a country where women have long endured severe discrimination, their rights to equality, education, property ownership, and protection from violence were at least formalized in the republic’s constitution. The Taliban have nixed all that in favor of their own interpretation of sharia law. Now, Afghanistan is the only country where women are excluded from education above primary school.

The Centre for Information Resilience has documented dozens of cases of femicide, many attributed to the Taliban since the group retook control. The dead include women protesters and activists, teachers, doctors, police officers, and a politician. Some of them were killed by the Taliban while being tortured under interrogation about male relatives believed to be members of anti-Taliban militias; others were killed by their husbands or other family members; and some were gang-raped, shot, stabbed, tortured, or beheaded.

Richard Bennett, the U.N. special rapporteur on Human Rights in Afghanistan, said this week that the Taliban’s treatment of women and girls may constitute a crime against humanity. In presenting his second report to the U.N. on Monday, following visits to the country last year, he accused the Taliban of pursuing a policy of “gender apartheid” and said the “abysmal treatment of women and girls is intolerable and unjustifiable on any ground, including religion.” He said the Islamist Taliban’s decision in December 2022 to ban women from working for charities exacerbated their own interference in the delivery of aid, making women and girls even more vulnerable to violence and exploitation. Harsh treatment of anyone who dared protest the increasingly tight restrictions aimed not only to punish the protesters “but also to deter others from protesting,” Bennett said. Women protesters had been “subjected to threats, intimidation, arrest, and ill-treatment while in detention.”

Despite this litany of abuse, which has been well-documented since the Taliban retook control in August 2021, some countries are treating the group as legitimate—with Turkey, Iran, Russia, and Pakistan accrediting Taliban figures to Afghanistan’s embassies and consulates in a creeping move toward tacit diplomatic recognition. The Biden administration is aware of the optics of legitimizing a group that has reintroduced public floggings and executions without due judicial process; although officials appear to have concluded that repeated verbal admonition and visits by high-ranking U.N. officials have only made things worse. When schooling resumed on March 6 following a winter break, for instance, female students were banned from university classes, the latest discriminatory measure against women. It compounds bans on women attending secondary school, taking the university entrance exam, working in the civil service, leaving their homes, or traveling without male chaperones. This discrimination comes as women have also been beaten in the street for violating Taliban dress codes. 

The potential new round of U.S. talks with the Taliban comes as a leading global humanitarian warns that Afghanistan risks being engulfed once more by conflict if the country remains isolated. Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), told Foreign Policy that war will be the “logical” outcome of systemic Taliban abuses compounded by the refusal of Western countries to engage with them in any meaningful way. He described the situation in Afghanistan as a “horrific freefall in living conditions” and said humanitarian organizations like the NRC “feel very alone” as few governments are willing to brave the negative perception of contact with the Islamists. 

Yet without the participation of women, Afghanistan will be unable to build a sustainable post-war economy. Locking half the population out of social and economic activity in a country where the conditions for conflict already exist could speed the slide to collapse. An uprising of hungry, jobless, and hopeless citizens would strengthen armed opposition groups, including the Islamic State, that are already gaining strength.

For Egeland, engagement is the only way to avoid a return to war. “If only female health workers can attend to women in hospitals and clinics, and you stop educating them in primary school, you will not have health care long term for half of the population; you will have a smaller and smaller economy. You will have, then, more unlivable conditions. That will lead to more refugees,” Egeland said. Prolonging this situation “would mean disengagement or another war. And that went very well, the last war against them. We need engagement. We don’t need disengagement.” 

Like many aid groups, he said, the NRC suspended operations in December 2022 when the Taliban banned women from working in NGOs. Some have since found that working at the district and sub-district levels, as indigenous charities do, enabling them to cooperate with local community leaders rather than national figures who prioritize politics over need. He called on Islamic countries—notably Iran, Pakistan, Qatar, and Turkey—to pressure the Taliban to reverse their “draconian policies against women” and recognize that further deterioration will lead to mass migration that will directly impact the stability of the region. 

With widespread concerns that the United States is planning to reduce aid to Afghanistan, Egeland said: “We are really trying to fight that tendency. It is not going to be the Taliban leadership that starves; it will be women and children and minorities that starve.”