The Taliban’s Gender Apartheid Regime

Two decades of advances for women have disappeared in 13 months.

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A rare rally by women in Afghanistan, on the eve of the anniversary of Taliban takeover. (Photo by Nava Jamshidi/Getty Images.)

After enduring a quarter century of revolution, occupation, and civil war, the people of Afghanistan began laying the foundations for nationhood two decades ago. The return of the Taliban to power in August 2021 ended all of the progress that had been made. Now the country is falling into sectarian conflict, magnified by the turmoil of economic freefall, natural disasters, and public health crises. 

It has turned into one of the world’s biggest human rights crises over the course of just 13 months, and Afghan women have borne the brunt of the Taliban’s tyranny.

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  1. Avatar photo
    NashLives

    This has nothing to do with this article, but just wanted to say to whoever reads these comments, the dispatch logo looks great on the new site!

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    Paul Britton

    How will they know I like this article if there’s no “like” button?

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      Anne W (Raw5254)

      I miss that, too. I don’t always comment, but I’d like them to know when people think an article is good.

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    Paul Reichardt

    Thanks for the article. The specifics are all necessary information to absorb, but generally speaking there’s nothing new here about the nature of the Taliban we didn’t already know. There aren’t any illusions to dispel in that regard.

    Notwithstanding the fine content by the author, the larger editorial subtext is of course is an indictment against the American withdrawal and those of us who supported it. Fair enough, but it was still the right thing to do and long overdue.

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      Paul Reichardt

      Regarding the new Dispatch platform—I see that my name was changed and seems uneditable. Perhaps I can take the opportunity to adopt a new commenter persona…naaah.

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      1. Nickson

        Tap “Account” and then “Edit.” It looks like the default is to make your email username the handle.

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        Ben Connelly

        You can edit it

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  4. Safety Cone

    The equivalency comparison would be better made between American children and Afghani women.

    If American women feel abandonded by the Conservative community they are misinformed.

    The suggestion that as full functioning citizens with the identical rights afforded to all who aren't children, that women haven't been incredibly effective as individuals or as a group voting block in shaping public policy is factually untrue.

    Conflating the description of gender apartheid in Afghanistan to include the American experience is to strip the phrase of any useful meaning.

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      Mudskipper

      I don't feel abandoned by the Conservative community, largely because I've never felt they had my back in the first place.

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  5. Kroneborge

    Where in the US are there unheard women?

    As for the Afgan women they will need to take up arms for thier freedom.

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  6. Kroneborge

    After Biden and the United States abandoned Afghanistan the only way I see this turning around is arming and teaching these women to fight (probably should have been doing that for 20 years). That's the only way they will get their freedom back.

    Instead of committing suicide take up arms and be willing to fight and if necessary die for your freedom.

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    CJ

    If the advances for women and girls in Afghanistan have disappeared that quickly, it's because most of the population is fine with them going away, the same way most of the population was apparently fine with the Taliban coming back into power, which is why resistance collapsed so quickly and they swept to power in a hurry. Not all of the people are OK with this, obviously, but enough, and too many.

    Ultimately, this is why just giving up and leaving was a good policy, regardless of the political advantages in bashing Trump and/or Biden for the withdrawal. There was little we could have done to change people's willingness to stand up for their freedoms that hadn't already been tried. Without the active support of the population, the Afghan government was toast, and spending more blood and treasure defending it would have been absolutely pointless.

    The Afghan people will have to endure another decade under these fanatics before they offend enough people to create real resistance. Hamid Karzai once called it an unlucky country. That takes the blame away from the people who make it unlucky.

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    1. Seth Halpern

      Agreed. The US never figured out how to solve the historical legitimacy problem where the Taliban retained a longterm advantage. Moreover we treated the Afghan army essentially as a dependent branch of the US/NATO military instead of emphasizing their self sufficiency.

      In line with the naive "end of history" assumption, we assumed that if we knocked off the bad guys a primitive society would modernize itself with comparatively little prodding. Then we largely ignored it for years.

      BTW we're finding out now in America in 2022 that social breakdown is not just a Third World phenomenon and is not so easy to fix.

      As to how to help Afghan women, I'm at a loss how facilitating "dialogue" with the Taliban would help. I would say that enabling dialogue with eachother is much more important. Perhaps there are ways Afghan women can create some leverage against their men, but the risk of incurring deadly retaliation is presumably forbidding.

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      Cogitatio

      Or it is because there are enough Taliban willing to enforce their will upon the populace through violence and the threat of violence. It does not take a majority of a population to bring the remainder in line. It does require that there be no defenders willing to take up arms. We provided the backbone and support structure for those defenders, and then President Biden pulled the rug out from under them.

      With respect, "giving up and leaving" was not a good policy. We remained in Germany for decades, and are still there. Same for South Korea. Time allows for societal change to become inculcated. We had little more than a brigade of combat troops in Afghanistan at the end, which was easily maintainable.

      What has been accomplished is that we wasted the blood and treasure we shed, and are allowing the Taliban and Al Qaeda to reestablish secure training bases once again. We also undercut the world's confidence in our ability to follow through with our agreements, defend our allies, and generally function as the leader of the Western nations.

      The Afghan people are likely to suffer for many, many decades. The Soviet Union was able to oppress its population for far longer than a decade. They only collapsed because of economics. The people of Afghanistan do not have a modern economy, and are more like North Korea in that respect. The regime is unlikely to collapse over economics, unfortunately.

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        DougAz

        Germany and South Korea had long standing cultures and civilizationz to rebuild.

        Afghanistan never had either one. It's always been a medieval Islamic chaos of fighting tribes.

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        CJ

        The comparison to Germany and South Korea is not a valid one because we were not being shot at on the regular by people in the countryside in those countries after occupation began.

        Sure, that the Taliban are willing to use violence to keep people in line helps. But so was the Soviet-backed government of the 80s, which provoked much stronger resistance. At the end of the day, there's plenty of guns and ammo lying around Afghanistan, and plenty of "big men" who had sufficient cult followings to at one point have their own private armies. None of it mattered, because the government was corrupt and despised.

        A brigade of US troops would not have made a damn bit of difference on a national scale if the Taliban decided to go on the offensive, which is what they threatened to do (and cause US casualties) that prompted Trump to plan the pullout and Biden to carry it out. You say we gave the Afghans backbone, which is completely correct. Where was their own backbone?

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    Cyprian

    With the disastrous withdrawal ordered by President Biden, we now have about zero leverage in this area. Heckava job Joe!

    N.B. No like button, so this is to let the author know that I liked his post! Well done.

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    1. Nickson

      I mean, I guess we can re-hash the fact that Pompeo negotiated the withdrawal, https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Agreement-For-Bringing-Peace-to-Afghanistan-02.29.20.pdf, without involving the Afghan government; the Trump administration negotiated for the release of 5,000 of the most hardened Al Qaeda and Haqqani fighters; and drew down troop levels to 2,500. Then Trump boasted publicly that Biden couldn’t reverse these steps. But I guess that would disturb your narrative.

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      DougAz

      Biden’s withdrawal was a fabulous success. I could easily go on about the wasted cowardly effort of Bush-Cheney and the inept cowardly Generals who, after 7 years managed 20,000 troops tlin Afghanistan. A shameful useless nothing.

      FDR, with no C17, C5s had 250,000 men fighting the Nazis.and Japanese army.

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    3. Ed.Southall

      No disagreement here, just wanted to point out that Naheed is a women who can speak to this issue with credibility. Click on her name at the top of the article.

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        Cyprian

        Thank you.

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  9. Genny

    While I understand the culture wanting women to cover up -- men can have difficulty with sexual self-control -- I don't understand how these cultural restrictions benefit their society. Leaving women out of the workforce means the country will limit its economic attainments. Economic ability is a measure of power in the world, so, in effect, Afghanistan is saying they want to remain a small and weak nation.

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      CJ

      How many men (particularly YOUNG men, look at Afghanistan's population pyramid) do you think would happily trade a small amount of economic opportunity for the power to rape and murder and enslave women without meaningful consequences?

      I say "small amount of economic opportunity" because in Afghanistan, like in other developing countries, the population is ballooning so much that the vast majority of young people have zero real chance for economic opportunity. A developed economy in Afghanistan was a pipe dream in the immediate future. So they can be poor farmers in the countryside or poor laborers/craftsmen in the cities with women they have to respect, or they can be the same with women they can abuse the s**t out of.

      As you say, men can have difficulty with sexual self-control. The solution to that isn't to make women cover up, it's for men to hold themselves accountable en masse. But that can't be forced, and if it's counter-cultural it takes centuries. Even in America my wife will just get random catcalls from a-holes when she's just walking down the street, and when I do things like visit construction sites I have to listen to guys talk about how they would violently rape the few women that visit the site.

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      1. Genny

        Most women understand that it doesn't matter how covered-up they are, some men will still have difficulty with self-control, since control comes internally and not externally, but a level of public modest dress is beneficial to all societies since most people experience a visual component to their sexual desire.

        You make Afghans sound very bloodthirsty.

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          CJ

          "You make Afghans sound very bloodthirsty."

          Quite the opposite, I think. That's a violence that lives in most males in most cultures. I don't think it's at all worse in Afghanistan than in the US. But youth unemployment is a lot less in the US than it is Afghanistan, since our population pyramid isn't so skewed. Angry at that society they were born into which didn't give them fair opportunity, these guys are going to do what angry men do here in the US all the time, the same as they do in Norway or in Japan: take it out on women.

          If we had as many poor and dispossessed young men in the US, I would expect a similar desire to roll back women's rights and make women tradeable property/meat again. We certainly already have people like that, and they're not really hiding it. That we haven't reached Afghan levels of wanting to destroy women's progress is just because the number of NEET young men we've got is still small. But it's growing, as we see noted all the time in conservative media. No one disputes that, just the reasons why.

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  10. Israel.D.Gale

    Where's the "like" button for this article?

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