Imagine a country where everything — everything — about how your life unfolds depends on your gender. If you’re a girl, you’re banned from all education once you finish the sixth grade. As an adult woman, you are banned from many jobs — you and your children may go hungry as a result. You cannot leave the house without a male family member chaperoning you.
Places where women used to gather and talk or seek help — beauty salons and domestic violence shelters — have been closed by order of the Taliban. You can only go to the doctor if a man takes you there. You and all women around you are banned from taking part in sports, going to a gym, or to the park. Girls are mostly confined at home, doing housework until they are told to get married. Many marry and become mothers very young. Some resist and fight back — taking to the streets to protest or opening secret schools. They face arrest, torture, and detention.
Men and boys? None of this applies to them, although they can also face arrest and torture if they dare criticize the rules. They can also be punished — sometimes brutally — if “their” women and girls step out of line.
This isn’t a dystopian novel. This isn’t a story from history, either. It’s Afghanistan right now, and the Taliban’s crackdown on women and girls is steadily deepening.
The Taliban regained control of Afghanistan on August 15, 2021. On August 14, millions of girls were in school. More than a quarter of the members of parliament were women. Women were government ministers and judges and professors and helicopter pilots. Women were singers and painters and conceptual artists and actors. There was a girls’ orchestra. All of that is gone now.
There’s an important lesson here: The trajectory of human rights — especially women’s rights — does not move in just one direction. Things can go backward. They did so three years ago. In front of the rest of the world, the Taliban have continued dismantling all rights for women and girls, creating a system of persecution, segregation, and almost total seclusion for women and girls.
Afghanistan is a powerful example — but far from the only example — of how human rights can slip away in the blink of an eye, no matter how hard people fought to gain them. This could happen to anyone reading this now. Afghanistan is setting the bar for how bad — how dystopian — things can be for women and girls. Politicians around the world seem appalled by the Taliban, but not so much as to do something about it.
But is there really anything anyone can do? The Taliban have proven to be relentless in reducing women and girls to reproductive and domestic servants.
There are no easy answers, but there are answers.
With growing clarity, we know what does not work. Raising concerns about women’s rights in diplomatic meetings with the Taliban, as diplomats have assured us for years that they do without fail, does not appear to have had any positive impact. Holding high-level meetings — like the recent Doha 3 meeting — where the Taliban smiled for the cameras and looked important, and Afghan women were nowhere to be seen, are actively harmful.
Afghan human rights defenders, and organizations like Human Rights Watch, have increasingly called for an approach that doesn’t treat the Taliban like naughty schoolboys who should see the error of their ways, but instead holds them to account for their crimes. Governments should say clearly that there is no place for Taliban abuses and they should never treat Taliban officials as leaders in good global standing.
Government leaders should demand that Afghan women be invited to all international meetings on Afghanistan and speak out quickly and forcefully in support of threatened or attacked Afghan women’s rights protesters and other rights defenders. When meeting with the Taliban, diplomats should skip the smiling photo ops and avoid places that make the Taliban look important — better to meet in Kabul or Doha without photos — and ensure that women are well represented in their delegations, including, whenever possible, Afghan women.
Governments should work together to use international law and institutions to increase pressure on the Taliban. They should support the International Criminal Court prosecution of Taliban leaders for committing the crime against humanity of gender persecution.
Governments should seriously consider including gender apartheid as a crime in the proposed crimes against humanity treaty. They should also bring a case against the Taliban for failing to abide by the UN convention on women’s rights before the International Court of Justice. And the UN Human Rights Council should renew the mandate of the UN human rights expert on Afghanistan and create a new mechanism to collect and preserve evidence of crimes committed in Afghanistan, including against women and girls.
A dire humanitarian crisis is continuing in Afghanistan; almost 24 million people need food and other assistance. Part of the reason people can’t get by — especially women and women-headed households — is because the Taliban are barring women, including women aid workers, from their jobs. Donors can help by continuing to send funds and directing those funds specifically to women and girls — to programs targeted to them, including underground efforts to assist, protect, educate, and mobilize women and girls. They should also welcome to their countries the brave women and girls making dangerous journeys to flee Taliban abuses.
Afghan women’s right defenders are risking everything to fight for their rights. There are ways that every country around the world can help make the present and the future less dystopian for Afghan women and girls, and less dangerous for women and girls everywhere. They just need to decide to act.
