Taliban's latest cruelty creates surprising cracks

Are we seeing the first real cracks in the Taliban's veneer of absolute power?

The extremist group's cruel obsession with denying women and girls any agency over their lives has condemned Afghanistan to exist on the margins — a fundamentalist, Islamist patriarchy devoted to removing any trace of the female gender from the public eye. Women and girls had already been excluded from secondary schools, as well as government jobs, and in November, from parks, gyms and swimming pools. But with their recent bans on women attending university and working for non-governmental organizations, which play an abnormally large role in the economy, perhaps even the Taliban have gone too far. 

There have been rumblings of disagreement among the leaders for a while now — we cannot forget the shootout in the presidential palace in Kabul in September 2021 — but this may be different.

At a time when the regime is seeking to engage with other governments in order to stabilize the aid-dependent economy, the group's actions are at once barbaric and counterproductive. These decrees, from the Taliban's reclusive supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada, have caused some division in the lower ranks. Getting access to the Fund for the Afghan People — a Geneva-based foundation that holds $3.5 billion of Afghan central bank reserves frozen by the US — to provide liquidity to the banking sector, support exchange rate stability and pay for critical imports like electricity is now even more remote.   

Unfailingly brave, women and girls have been protesting the Taliban's repressive measures since they retook power in Afghanistan in August 2021 on the heels of Washington's decision to withdraw its military at any cost. And what a cost. Facing a second freezing winter since the US-backed government collapsed, 97% of Afghans are living in poverty and two-thirds are in dire humanitarian need. The UN has estimated that excluding women from the workforce is costing the already-beleaguered economy $1 billion per year.

Afghan men are now also taking action over the bans. Not just in the capital, but in more conservative cities like Kandahar and Herat. University lecturers have resigned and male students have walked out of their classrooms in support of female scholars. A professor in Kabul destroyed his diplomas live on TV, stating: "From today I don't need these diplomas anymore because this country is no place for an education. If my sister and my mother can't study, then I don't accept this education." Like the female demonstrators, these men have been met with Taliban violence, though for women, just leaving the house without a male escort can be deadly. 

As tech entrepreneur Sara Wahedi, who has been unable to return to Afghanistan since the Taliban came to power last year, noted in a tweet, "we may be witnessing the beginning of a revolution." Still, we are a long way from the kind of mass mobilization over women's rights in neighboring Iran.

Now may be the time, though. But Afghans cannot do it alone, and there cannot be another military occupation. That would be a criminal repeat of the failures of the past. As the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction notes, prior to collapse of the government, international aid contributed to around 40% of gross domestic product and 75% of public expenditures. The Taliban has shown it cannot govern the country — beyond its draconian, misogynist policies — which has made the delivery of assistance increasingly difficult, especially now that women are banned from NGOs.

As a priority, the US and its partners in the two-decade-long military occupation of Afghanistan must move beyond their policy of strategic neglect toward a more positive approach — one guided by Afghan experts not tainted by the corruption of former governments. At the time that President Ashraf Ghani's government collapsed, the inspector general had 65 open investigations into corruption and bribery, procurement and contract fraud, theft, money laundering and other misuses of aid funds.

This should be a collective effort, in the way nations have come together to support Ukraine in its battle against Russia's brutal war, without boots on the ground. The two situations could not be more different — Ukraine has a cohesive, stable government and close ties with those who have supported the development of its military since Moscow's illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014. Afghanistan has the Taliban. But this model is still worth considering. Some first steps could include an intensive, coordinated lobbying campaign to draw together UN member states to support Afghanistan civil society and elevate this crisis beyond gender ministries to the very top of government. 

And it is time to toughen sanctions against those Taliban leaders who are still, inexplicably, allowed to travel freely. There are also calls for the expulsion of their family members from Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the European Union, where their daughters go to school and university and women are not subjected to the restrictions imposed back home. The Afghan Women Leaders Forum — chaired by Margot Wallstrom, the former foreign minister of Sweden and including Fawzia Koofi, the former deputy speaker of the Afghan parliament and Fatima Gailani, the former president of the Afghan Red Crescent — want the repression of Afghan women to be recognized as a crime against humanity and dealt with via an international legal framework.

They have urged the United Nations to convene an urgent Security Council meeting, acknowledging the gendered impact of armed conflict and the need for women to participate in disarmament decision-making. This point cannot be stressed enough. The US went into Afghanistan in 2001 saying that along with the fight against terrorism, it was seeking to protect the rights of women. Two decades later, women are trapped in the same prison. Unless they are involved in talks at the highest level, this cruel cycle will begin again. 

From the time the administration of former President Donald Trump signed a "peace deal" with the Taliban in February 2020 that set the stage for the withdrawal of US troops — an agreement his successor Joe Biden decided to honor — Afghan women knew that all the advances they'd made in education, at work and in government were under threat. Just how quickly those gains were eroded has been agonizing. Listen to them — it is the only way forward.

Disclaimer: This article first appeared on Bloomberg, and is published by special syndication arrangement.