Camryn Munday Published 16 March 2023
In 2011, an international poll sponsored by the Thomson-Reuters Foundation reported that Afghanistan was the ‘most dangerous’ place on earth to be a woman. Ten years later, not much had changed—August 2021 saw the U.S.’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s subsequent return to power, resulting in an alarmingly quick collapse of women’s rights. U.S. President Joe Biden’s lightning-fast withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan garnered a wide array of reactions. Some chastised it as hasty and chaotic while others felt the U.S.’s retreat was twenty years overdue. Regardless of one’s critique or praise of Biden’s withdrawal, it is evident that Afghanistan’s women have borne the brunt of the Taliban’s rapid reinstatement.
21 December 2022: Security denies female students entry into Kabul
At the hands of the Taliban, Afghan women are the only women in the world banned from attending high school and post-secondary school. Afghan women are denied their salaries and barred from work in most sectors—they must stay at home. The Taliban has curtailed women’s access to public spaces and requires them to wear the hijab at all times. Even the Ministry of Women’s Affairs—once a key player in the promotion and protection of women’s rights in Afghanistan— has been transformed into the “Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice,” colloquially known as Afghanistan’s infamous “Morality Police” that enforces the Taliban’s restrictions upon women. “We are erased,” says Afghan activist Mahbooba Seraj to the U.N. Human Rights Council. “Women of Afghanistan do not exist for the Taliban.”
To understand the reasoning of the Taliban, it is crucial to keep in mind that the extremist group has a notoriously strict interpretation of Shari’a law—one that is “worrying” to a majority of the world’s more moderate Muslims. This interpretation permits violent punishments for violating Shari’a law—for instance, floggings, amputations, and even public execution by hanging or stoning. Women are subjected to violence under the Taliban’s interpretation of Shari’a law; women report Taliban members beating them with electrical cables when they “found girls or women wearing Western-style pants” beneath their regime-enforced outer garments. Violations such as these reflect a larger impending women’s rights catastrophe: “the Taliban are intensifying these assaults in response to women’s rights campaigns,” reports the United States Institute of Peace.
When violence and oppression are justified by extremist and zealous religiosity, it becomes more difficult to pinpoint how best to combat the issue at hand. Indeed, it is an overly simplistic solution to urge humanitarian or peacekeeping organizations to intervene in Afghanistan. Such organizations are undeniably effective in providing short-term security for oppressed women but would likely be unsuccessful in negotiating with the Taliban. In other words, aid from a UN intervention is beneficial but would not usher in the degree of change Afghanistan needs to re-establish women’s rights. The option of negotiating with the Taliban is further complicated by the principle of refusing to negotiate with terrorist entities: a principle that many democratic countries adhere to.
Likewise, it would be largely futile to send the American military back to Afghanistan to confront the Taliban, seeing as a twenty-year occupation proved unsuccessful in establishing long-lasting women’s rights (not to mention a durable democratic regime) in the country. The U.S. did not make an effort to ensure the rights of women when it negotiated the terms of its 2021 withdrawal. Kate Bateman of the United States Institute of Peace says that America “abandoned women and girls” and treated women’s rights abuses “as an issue for Afghans to resolve for themselves.”
The horrific maltreatment of Afghan women and the U.S.’s failure to ensure women’s rights in Afghanistan should override the U.S.’s policy of non-negotiation with terrorists. The U.S. ought to negotiate with the Taliban on behalf of the women of Afghanistan, seeing as the U.S. is to some degree responsible for relinquishing power to the anti-woman regime. It is worthwhile to note that interacting with the Taliban does not equate to the U.S.’s moral approval of the regime; it is merely a necessary step in negotiating with the entity that clearly has control over the territory. Indeed, to prevent an even greater women’s rights catastrophe, the U.S. ought to engage diplomatically with Afghanistan’s Taliban.
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