The return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan is very bad news for girls and women. For twenty years, they were able to go to school and university and to pursue a career. All that personal freedom comes to an end under Taliban rule. The New York Times wrote about their fate here.
KABUL, Afghanistan — The director of a girls’ school in Kabul desperately wants to learn details of the Taliban’s plan for girls’ education. But she can’t attend the weekly Taliban committee meetings on education. They are for men only.
“They say, ‘You should send a male representative,’” the director, Aqila, said inside the Sayed Ul-Shuhada High School, which was shattered in May by a terrorist bombing that killed scores of girls.
But Aqila and other Afghan educators don’t need to attend meetings to comprehend the harsh new reality of education under Taliban rule. The emerging government has made clear that it intends to severely restrict the educational freedoms enjoyed by many women and girls the past 20 years.
The only question is just how draconian the new system will be, and what type of Islamic-based education will be imposed on both boys and girls. Just as they did when they ruled most of Afghanistan in the late 1990s, the Taliban seem intent on ruling not strictly by decree, but by inference and intimidation.
When schools reopened Saturday for grades seven through 12, only male students were told to report for their studies. The Taliban said nothing about girls in those grades, so they stayed home, their families anxious and uncertain about their future. Both boys and girls in grades one through six have been attending schools, with students segregated by gender in the higher three grades.
When the Taliban were in charge from 1996 to 2001, they barred women and girls from school. After the U.S.-led invasion toppled Taliban rule in late 2001, female students began attending schools and universities as opportunities blossomed. Women were able to study for careers in business and government, and in professions such as medicine and law.
By 2018, the female literacy rate in Afghanistan reached 30 percent, according to a new UNESCO report.
But the Taliban swept back into Kabul and seized power on Aug. 15, and since then they have said they will impose their severe interpretation of Shariah law.
The new government has said that some form of education for girls and women will be permitted, but those parameters have not been clearly defined by Taliban officials.
The Taliban also have indicated that men will no longer be permitted to teach girls or women, exacerbating an already severe teacher shortage. This, combined with constraints in paying teachers’ salaries and the cutoff of international aid, could have “immediate and serious” outcomes for education in Afghanistan, the UNESCO report warned.
Female students will be required to wear an “Islamic hijab,” but with the definition left open to interpretation. At a pro-Taliban women’s gathering last week, many women wore niqabs, a garment that covers a woman’s hair, nose and mouth, leaving only the eyes exposed.
“We are working on a mechanism to provide transportation and other facilities that are required for a safer and better educational environment,” Zabihullah Mujahid, Taliban spokesman and the acting deputy minister of information and culture, said Monday, adding that classes for girls in grades seven and above would resume soon.
“There are countries in the region that have committed to help us in our education sector,” he said. “This will help us in providing better education to everyone.”
While many girls and women in Kabul have embraced Western standards of women’s rights and opportunities, Afghanistan remains a deeply conservative society. In the countryside, even if all women do not necessarily welcome Taliban rule, many are accustomed to customs that kept them at home to cook, clean and raise children even before the Taliban took power in the 1990s.
The acting minister of higher education last week said that women could continue to study in universities and graduate programs, as long they were in gender-segregated classrooms, but on Friday, the new government sent an ominous signal of its intentions. The Ministry of Women’s Affairs compound was converted into offices for the religious morality police, who brutally enforced the militants’ interpretation of Shariah law two decades ago. The building now houses the Ministry of Invitation, Guidance and Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.
Female teachers, administrators and students have been bracing for austere new restrictions. Many say they have begun wearing niqabs and preparing classrooms to accommodate classes strictly segregated by gender. (Many schools also taught boys-only and girls-only classes under the U.S.-backed government.)…
For female students, the sudden end to their academic freedoms has been both traumatizing and paralyzing. Many say the joy and anticipation they once felt when entering classrooms has been lost, replaced by fear and a surpassing sense of futility.
Zayba, 17, survived a devastating bombing at her school in May, for which no group took responsibility, though similar attacks have been attributed to the Islamic State-affiliated group operating in Afghanistan.
Zayba stopped attending school after the Taliban takeover, which she said had robbed her of all motivation. “I like to study at home,” she said. “I am trying to, but I cannot, because I don’t see any future for myself with this regime….”
We seem to enjoy hand wringing over the fate of Afghan women. But, a solution cannot be impressed from the outside, certainly not a military one. And, thankfully, the Afghans are back in control of their own country. How would we like it if other countries moved in to show us how to run our country?
Currently, Afghanistan is being run the way the Afghanis want it run. If they want to play nice with the outside world, then we might have some leverage in moving to a more enlightened future. I doubt that that will be any time soon, as they do not have an economy, no way of creating export goods (other than opium), etc. They have many, many problems to deal with before addressing cultural issues and then they have Islam in the way after that. I wish them luck and I wish we hadn’t chosen to try to force them to become something they are not.
I am old enough to remember when liberals (and I am one) believed in self-determination. Those days seem to be gone.
I guess Jimmy Carter wasn’t technically a Liberal; but. you have to admit: Democrats as well as Republicans bear much responsibility for decades f suffering In Afghanistan:
Brzezinski: …it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.
Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?
Brzezinski: It isn’t quite that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?
https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/how-jimmy-carter-and-i-started-the-mujahideen/213722
“Currently, Afghanistan is being run the way the Afghanis want it run.”
I won’t try to make a case for military intervention, but that statement seems dubious.
The government of Afghanistan is the result of a military putsch. The only way to know if it is the government that the Afghan people want is by holding a free election. The Taliban will likely strip women of the right to vote, that is, if they ever hold an election. Many Afghan women mourn the Taliban’s determination to eliminate their right to get an education and to hold a job. Thousands of Afghan women have careers, but they will be forced to stay home and cover their faces. As a woman, I find the destruction of women’s rights appalling. I feel certain it is not what they want.
I don’t think that most Afghani’s want their country run this way. I think that right now, they have no choice. I think they would like a return to pre-Taliban rule (late 60’s-70’s?) but that is something that they will have to organize on their own. I will say that the USA should not have been there on a “nation building” mission and that as soon as OBL was assassinated, there should have been a military pull out (mission accomplished). The Afghani’s are far worse off because we meddled in their society and it is very sad.
The question is, why are the Taliban so terrified of women. Why is it so necessary for them to suppress women to such extreme extent. Never mind 2nd class citizenship, that would be an elevation, the Taliban reduce women to ciphers, nonentities and mere shadows. The Taliban jackasses were birthed by women, show a little damn respect.
Why is the Catholic Church so terrified of women that they won’t allow them into the priesthood? Why should the Catholic Church have any say in women’s reproductive issues? Catholic Priests are birthed by women? “Religion” has been unkind to women in general. Just sayin”….
I might not be happy with the upheaval in the US right now, but I am at least happy that there seems to be a separation of church/state (for now?). I don’t want a religion as my government.
Huh? The topic is Afghanistan and the Taliban. My above comments do not obviate the Catholic church from its many failings or crimes. Or any other religion for that matter, Hindus, Buddhists, etc.
Afghanistan now has a very conservative religion as their government. There is a reason why there should be a separation of Church/State…but we should not be trying to tell another country how to set up their own government. Religion (in general) has always been unkind to women.
I don’t think we should tell other nations how to run their governments. But we must not give up our belief in human rights.
” I don’t want a religion as my government.”
I don’t want government or education to be my
religion…
Dewey’s Pedagogic Creed statement of 1897:
“Every teacher should realize he is a social servant
set apart for the maintenance of the proper social
order and the securing of the right social growth.
In this way the teacher is always the
prophet of the true God and the usherer in
of the true kingdom of heaven.”
NoBrick wrote “In this way the teacher is always the
prophet of the true God”
And which true Sky-Daddy was being referred to??
No Brick’s reference to Dewey is interesting. Was Dewey suggesting a sort of faith that no truth would lead away from a Christian god? Or was this a more broad faith that the truth is a thing that draws us closer to understanding the nature of any god?
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/10/07/afghanistan-lie-nation-building/
Maybe we should have thought about that when we created the Mujahideen to fight the Soviets….
See above reply:
“it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul….”
Jimmy Carter believed he was doing something good, which turned out to be very bad. That happens a lot. The question is who is brave enough to fix it, and it turns out Joe Biden is. Would not have guessed it.
It is tragic that the US lost sight of its mission in Afghanistan. We started by looking for terrorists and ending up fighting the Taliban leaving destruction and death in our wake. While I feel terrible about the women and girls in the country, our hubris and naivete misled and convinced us we remake Afghanistan into a democracy. What happened demonstrates that our intel was worthless and we had little understanding of the culture. We fell down the same rabbit hole that snared the British and Russians before and wasted trillions.
The present picture of women in Afghanistan seeing their fortunes reversed is actually a reality being felt in Kabul and a few other towns. Regionally, women’s experience over the past twenty years is a thing unique to each community. Taliban controlled areas have been suppressing women’s rights all during the war. Western values have affected other areas, especially the urban areas.
Time alone will tell if the Taliban will be able to control the country as a whole. I suspect that Afghanistan, like Syria, will dissolve into conflict that will prove more damaging to both women and men than the twenty year attempt (half-hearted as it may have been) at nation building. ISIS will try to make some headway and meet with opposition from the Taliban. Al Kaeeda probably will attempt a comeback, or morph into some other form. None of this will be good.
I grieve for the Afghans who found in western values some of the freedoms we hold dear. I grieve also for those who feel their traditions, warped as I might see them, are being torn asunder by a foreign and hostile world. I long for a world where changes take place incrementally, without the paroxysms of violence so characteristic of human existence. But I realistically note the impossibility of entrenched negativity in a society just leaving of its own accord. Male domination will never just up and away of its own volition. Racism must be thrust aside. Xenophobia must be actively opposed. And we all have to give a little. Otherwise, some will come to feel that they have already given too much.
Remember the Afghan girl with the green eyes? I wonder how she is faring now after she was enticed by the Americanized Afghan government to move into a new home in Kabul with a stipend and medical care? Did this uneducated woman (used for propaganda) make it onto a transport out of the country?
https://ricochet.com/1029839/whatever-happened-to-the-afghan-girl/
National Geographic caught up with her a few years back. She was in a refugee camp in Pakistan. I don’t know as she has been in Afghanistan since.
We should also recall that reports out of the White House as the Trump Administration negotiated with the Taliban independent of the Afghan regeime suggest that Stephen Miller thwarted every effort to start helping Afghans out of harms way.
I think the worst form of government is an extremist, theocratic autocracy.
But, the ONLY reason the Taliban returned after twenty years to grab power again in Afghanistan is because of the incompetency of US Presidents, Bush II, Obama, and Traitor Trump, and the US Congress shares that blame.
I do not blame Biden because he inherited this mess just like every president since Ronald Reagan inherited the always-growing deficit left behind for them by the previous president. But what can a president do when the majority controlling one or both houses of Congress refuses to cooperate and do what is right?
That is why I think both Houses of Congress from 2001 through 2021 should bear the brunt of that blame. Cutting taxes. Allowing the US war machine to flourish feeding the growth of fortunes to the bursting point while the deficit continued to skyrocket while millions suffered and died around the world for their corruption and greed.
Still, when did this horrid travesty start? It started with Truman/Congress in the 1950s with the beginning of the Vietnam war, with endless greed, and the mistakes and fumbling that never stopped.
Revealing but not surprising comments here: to most readers of this blog, no evil is greater than the U.S., especially the U.S. military. As this week’s Congressional testimony showed, the top brass in the military favored maintaining a small force (2500 American troops, along with several thousand other allied troops) to preserve the stalemate that resulted in few American and allied casualties but that had the effect of safeguarding to a large degree the 20 year progress of Afghan women and girls. The evil U.S. forces are gone, and Afghani girls and women are back to the 7th century. The far Left in America regards that as an acceptable result of the abrupt American withdrawal.
Maria, as the withdrawal started, Christine Amanpour urged that we keep 2500 troops there to maintain peace. She made a persuasive case. We still have troops in Germany, S Korea, and Japan.
It’s my understanding that the situation in Afghanistan was escalating and that a 2500 force would not have been enough to keep things stable. That was a major part of the determination to leave,
I usually like Christine Amanpour, but if she actually was claiming that the US could maintain peace with 2,500 troops, I have lost all respect for her. The comparison to the other countries doesn’t make sense, since the situations are completely different.
Biden has too much respect for the lives of our service members to put them in such an untenable situation. Unlike Japan, Germany and Korea, we did not defeat the Taliban. Our troops would have been surrounded by over 60,000 hostiles, and we would have had no treaty with them other than the one from the Trump administration. The conditions were that we would leave. With technology today there are many other ways to collect information on Afghanistan other than boots on the ground.
In one of his recent programs, Harry Shearer opened with a brief description of the situation in Afghanistan and the responses of chattering critics, concluding with, “Who knew?” As in: who knew so many Americans were so deeply invested and knowledgeable about the country? I certainly didn’t. But for 20 years, I knew that people were serving, dying, and some, like Eric Prince, were profiting like crazy off this war. That was about all I really knew except for occasional news reports I paid attention to and the seemingly many times I was on flights with soldiers who were returning from the region or going there. And they were as baffled as anyone. But about one thing we were pretty sure. When Americans pulled out, it would not be pretty, it was just a matter of when. Now or in 30 years? And where were the currently outraged for the past 20 years? Please.
In the five years prior to this one, a total of 69 Americans died in Afghanistan. I don’t know how many were wounded or maimed, but we can be sure that the number is significantly higher than that. It always is. Now please tell me, what’s the acceptable cost in life, money, time and lost futures? Are you prepared to spend it? Or should we go on for years as we have, when others pay the costs, and we can pretty much ignore this except for the disruptions it causes our travels. Are you prepared to have your loved one be one of the 69 who might have died in the next five years? What does success look like? Is it to be judged by Americans, Afghanis, or some third party? Somehow questions like these don’t fit nicely into an either/or, black/white simplistic argument to use to preach further simplistic idiocy. Unfortunately, too many Americans have no knowledge about citizenship, governing, history, or how these subjects impact the reality of their lives, not the way they want to or desperately hope to see it.
I also disagree with two other points above. First, to compare leaving potentially 2,500 troops there with Germany, S. Korea, and Japan is, in my view, wrongheaded. They ones in the latter countries are not living in fear of their immediate surroundings, neighbors, and what might happen when they do routine things. They can live with their families, not apart from them. Life would have been very different for those 2,500. The soldiers in Germany, et al are there to protect from an enemy from the outside, not from domestic threats. You can’t compare the two.
Second, this post begins with one of the most egregious fallacies that infects our national identity: the obsession with the ideas that if you’re not for the military, you’re against them and that every person who wears a uniform is somehow a hero. Both arguments have no validity whatsoever, but entire political campaigns are built around this rhetoric. The fact is that members of the military are no better and no worse than anyone else. Some are horrific, some are honorable. Most all of them are somewhere in between. Some serve honorably in battle; some spend their whole careers pushing papers and getting comfortable pensions. We can have a whole argument on this. But don’t give us this “to most readers of this blog, no evil is greater than the U.S., especially the U.S. military” crap. The greatest evil to the body politic, as we have painfully learned over the past five years, is the diminution of concepts like truth, facts, objectivity, decency, and empathy. This attempt to create simplistic labels around this nation’s military is part of that disease.
Harry Shearer has recent programs? Where can I see these?
Le Show programs posted every Sunday on harryshearer.com.
Many of the women in Afghanistan are treated like slaves which is sanctioned by their society’s mores (many of them based on religion) kept in place by the ruling class.
Perhaps it was cruel showing these women what freedom felt like and then, in essence, sending them back to their “hole”.
Women throughout the world need to be lifted up and allowed to live freely in society to explore their passions and contribute to society (not being kept at home to wait hand and foot on the men in their family). Afghanistan is not the only country guilty of undervaluing their female population and keeping them downtrodden.
Melinda Gates (I know, not our favorite person) wrote a fantastic book, The Power of Lift, which explores the role of women throughout society. I’m curious to see some of your reactions to what she has to say,
Right on.
Texanistan girls and women also face a bleak future.
But we (nonTexans) may have more potential influence over the Texiban than we do over the Taliban (maybe).
Then again, unlike Afghanistan with its brief intervals of improvements for girls and women, Texanistan has been on a downward trajectory for a very long time .
Fundamentalist religion is a disease.
We need to conduct a propaganda war to win the hearts and minds of the young people of these fundamentalist backwaters like Afghanistan and West Virginia.
A covert propaganda war. In other words, we need to give the fundy leaders precisely what they most fear.