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I’d like to report a missing person. Actually, more than a million of them, missing for a thousand days.
In September 2021, the Taliban prohibited girls from attending school beyond sixth grade in Afghanistan. The following year, they expanded the ban to universities, blocking women students from finishing their advanced education.
These bans are on top of other severe restrictions on women and girls to work, to travel, and to even leave their homes. It’s the most serious women’s rights crisis in the world and has been condemned by international experts as “gender apartheid.”
The absence of girls and women from secondary and university education is obviously a tragedy for the individuals concerned. Women throughout Afghanistan describe their situation as isolation and suffocation, drawing comparisons to “living in prison-like conditions.”
But the policy is also a punishing blow to the country as a whole.
“Afghanistan will never fully recover from these 1,000 days,” my colleague and expert Heather Barr says. “The potential lost in this time – the artists, doctors, poets, and engineers who will never get to lend their country their skills – cannot be replaced.”
Missing people, missing talents, missing dreams, missing lives.
This happens in no other country. Afghanistan is the only state in the world that bars girls and women from secondary and higher education. Only the Taliban thugocracy is so viciously anti-women that they hinder their country’s advancement and progress by blocking half the population from participating in society.
It’s like running a marathon and deciding to saw off one of your legs before the race begins.
There are brave girls and women defying the Taliban by attending underground schools, but clearly that can’t overcome all the losses, both personal and to society as a whole. We need to see more effort from the outside world, as well.
At the end of June, UN experts and envoys on Afghanistan will meet in Doha, Qatar, to continue to discuss the international community’s approach to Afghanistan. It’s an opportunity to stand with Afghan women and avoid doing anything that might look like trivializing the serious human rights crisis or legitimizing the Taliban regime.
Afghan women have been clear about what should be done. The international community should hold the Taliban accountable for their crimes against women and girls. They must not, for example, invite them to UN-organized meetings. No one should lift sanctions on the regime until there’s verified improvement in human rights, especially women’s rights.
Anything less risks normalizing the widespread terror of the Taliban regime.
