‘Gender apartheid’ takes hold in Afghanistan 3 years after US withdrawal

A new Taliban edict banning women in Afghanistan from baring their faces and speaking in public places is spotlighting the betrayal felt by Afghan women and their allies three years after America’s withdrawal from the country.

After seeing major progress in women’s rights during the U.S. war in Afghanistan, Afghan women now face restrictions on their movements without a male relative, and women have to cover their bodies and faces with a thick, heavy cloth while in public. Secondary school for girls is nonexistent, and more and more of their freedoms have eroded.

Parasto Hakim, who runs underground schools for girls, called what’s happening on the ground in Afghanistan “gender apartheid.” Women on the ground say the latest ban is rolling out unevenly, depending on the Taliban fighter or official they encounter. 

But in the days since the new edict came into effect, billboards and banners have been going up throughout the South Asian country dictating how women should dress.

In posts on the social platform X, Hakim said the restrictions will likely expand, possibly even to primary schools. “Afghan women will once again face the worst gender apartheid under Taliban rule, as they did after 1996,” she added.

In the 1,095 days since the U.S. withdrew and the Taliban rapidly took power, Heather Barr, interim co-director of the Women’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch, said women, girls and their families in Afghanistan are slowly giving up hope on the situation changing.

“[Over] time, they give up and they start thinking about who you should marry, and the support you have to try and study at home drifts away in terms of people supplying you with books, people supplying you with computers, internet, and stuff like that.”

Living in that environment, and the impact on their mental health, is the toughest toll Afghan women and girls face, according to Barr.

“You’re stressed and angry at first, but over time, you kind of subside into depression and hopelessness, which I think is what a lot of the women and girls that we talk to are now feeling,” Barr said. 

It’s also getting harder for women under the Taliban regime to see any light at the end of the tunnel, she added. 

“To sustain this belief that you’re going to win in the end. How can you? It’s very hard to kind of stay in that mindset when three years have passed.”

But women in the country are also mounting their own, quiet resistance to the new Taliban edicts — at times risking their safety to express their dissent. 

Women are posting and sharing videos of themselves singing, despite the Taliban’s laws forcing them to stay silent in public.

“Afghan women are defying the Taliban’s ban on women speaking in public by singing out loud. Let’s stand with them and support their powerful voices,” Habib Khan, founder of Afghan Peace Watch, wrote on X. 

In a statement to The Hill, Rina Amiri, the U.S. special envoy for Afghan women, girls, and human rights, said that the Taliban’s relentless, discriminatory edicts are unparalleled.  

“Their institutionalized efforts targeting the women and girls of Afghanistan constitute gender persecution. These extreme policies are self-defeating and reinforce views that the Taliban are pursuing the same approach that made them a pariah in the 1990s,” Amiri said.

The special envoy added the U.S. will use “every tool at our disposal to support Afghan women and girls, including working with and mobilizing the international community to ensure we collectively make clear to the Taliban any progress in normalized relations will be contingent on ending these extreme policies and making significant improvements in the human rights situation in Afghanistan.”

In an interview with LBC, Hakim asked: “isn’t it time to ask the world leaders who handed Afghanistan over to the Taliban — what were you thinking?”

This sentiment is echoed by Women for Women International’s country director for Afghanistan, Payvand Seyedali, who told The Hill that “America, Canada, and the UK seem to have washed their hands — on the ground, we see very little impact from their engagement today.”

“What we saw on American TV during the evacuation was exactly how it felt on the ground — a mad, shocking, nonsensical withdrawal,” Seyedal said. “That chaos still has reverberations we feel today.”

She is also critical of United Nations Under-Secretary-General Rosemary DiCarlo, who recently highlighted Afghan women’s concerns at the Doha III meeting in June this year but had Afghan women excluded from those talks with the Taliban.

According to Seyedali, protests from women’s rights groups led to a hurriedly planned two-hour event the day following Doha III, where select Afghan women were invited with little notice, and no time to consult with wider groups of women. Many did not attend, expressing feelings on media of being a tokenized afterthought.

Seyedali, who is based in Kabul, said the U.N. really “struggles to walk the walk.”

“They seem to be at a loss politically, and disconnected beyond humanitarian engagement. This stalemate comes at an incredibly high cost, draining donor investment with questionable return on investment — especially for women,” she added.

The Hill has reached out to the U.N. about the criticisms. 

Roza Otunbayeva, head of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, said in a statement the new laws “extends the already intolerable restrictions on the rights of Afghan women and girls, with even the sound of a female voice outside the home apparently deemed a moral violation.”

The statement added that, “The international community has been seeking, in good faith, to constructively engage with the de facto authorities.”

Rights groups after the May meeting in Doha strongly criticized the controversial U.N. move to exclude the groups, including women’s rights activists, from the two-day meeting on Afghanistan as the toll for the Taliban government’s participation.

A statement issued by a group of U.S. policy advocates for Afghan women and girls said that despite these egregious violations of women’s rights, there has not been a coherent, coordinated and rights-based response to this crisis from the international community. 

“The response has been piecemeal. It has lacked a commitment to upholding human rights and international law through concrete steps such as measures to hold the Taliban accountable for their abuses. Instead, the international community has engaged in a pattern of gradually accepting the Taliban’s violations of the rights of women and girls. This poses a dangerous trend toward the normalization of such abuses,” the statement added. 

According to Lina Tori Jan, a policy officer at the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, the U.S. can help fund women-led organizations both inside and outside the country to effectively engage with women in Afghanistan.

She added that there are a few steps that can be taken including delivering on the commitments made to the Afghan allies and well as including Afghan women in all policy dialogues in relation to the country.

In a statement to The Hill, a British embassy spokesperson said the U.K. continues to provide humanitarian support to the most vulnerable and press the Taliban on human rights.

“As part of UK diplomatic engagement, we regularly meet a range of Afghan women to ensure our policy and programming reflect their views. Afghan women must have a say in their country’s future governance,” the statement added. 

However, Seyedali said that while they see those who visit from these governments try to speak up and push, “we see a common refrain of chargé d’affaires on the ground advising headquarters — but unable to move the needle.”

According to Barr, there is a kind of “deep rage” at the international community, particularly Western countries like the U.S. and U.K., that were involved in military operations from 2001 on. 

“They feel like you created this situation,” Barr said of the sentiment of Afghan women toward Western governments. “You made the deal with the Taliban in Doha, which we were shut out of. You handed the country over to the Taliban. And now we’re the ones who have to live with it. And you don’t seem very interested in hearing about it anymore.”