After four years of Taliban control, the Security Council is meeting on Afghanistan, and there is still no clear U.S. policy.
Four years after the Taliban’s return to power, I struggle for words. Since August 2021, I have spoken and written on many different platforms and in many different rooms, trying to explain what is happening. But how do you describe something that feels like the slow suffocation of your people?
Perhaps one way is that in Afghanistan, the Taliban has criminalized womanhood itself.
Meanwhile, the U.S., who negotiated and helped bring the Taliban to power, has stood by.
In the last four years, the Taliban have erased women from public life, strictly controlling them through hundreds of repressive decrees and ordersopens in a new tab. The Taliban have barred women from working and walking freely. Women cannot appear in public without a male chaperone. Our rights to education, employment, movement, assembly, expression, and cultural and religious participation have been stripped away one by one.
Even a woman’s voice is forbidden, banned in last October’s Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice Law.
Women’s private lives also face Taliban control. If a woman disobeys dress codes, their male relatives can be detained up to three days, effectively coercing them to police women’s behavior. Further, the process of “madrassafication” has transformed the education system to indoctrinate childrenopens in a new tab with male supremacist and extremist ideologies.
We cannot excuse this with cultural or religious relativism. This is the deliberate and systematic discrimination and oppression of women. Women of Afghanistan call it gender apartheidopens in a new tab and campaign for its codification in international law.
How can we fathom this? Some days, I feel completely numb. Most days, I am burning with rage. I no longer know what to tell my loved ones back home. I don’t have words for the women messaging me from inside Afghanistan, or the ones stuck in limbo in refugee camps abroad, waiting for a safety that never come.
The Frontline of Defiance
Despite the risks, the women of Afghanistan, both inside and outside the country, are the frontline of defiance to the Taliban. They have protested in the streets and organized underground networks to deliver aid, document human rights violations, and demand justice.
But they do so at steep costs. Women in Afghanistan who defy the Taliban face arbitrary arrest, imprisonment, torture and other ill-treatment, and public shaming. Others face online harassment and trolling by the Taliban’s cyber soldiers, and fear their families inside Afghanistan could face persecution.
Unfortunately, the rest of the world has failed to match the courage and resolve of Afghanistan’s women or live up to their own legal and moral commitments to them. Most egregious is the U.S.
Four years after withdrawing, Washington does not even have an official foreign policy toward Afghanistan—it remains “under review.”
Yet the U.S. could do so much to show solidarity with Afghanistan’s women.
First, the U.S. could finish its review and establish a clear foreign policy on Afghanistan. Importantly, any Afghanistan policy must center women’s human rights, and ensure transparency, inclusivity, and accountability. These principles are not only moral imperatives—they are strategic ones. Any political, diplomatic, and counterterrorism conduct in relation to Afghanistan is flawed and ineffective if it ignores the Taliban’s oppression of women because subjugating women is central to the Taliban’s rule and its potential to serve as a training haven for armed groups.
The Administration must also consult Afghanistan’s women, inside and outside the country, as leaders and advisors on policy decisions, recognize their political agency, and amplify their work resisting Taliban human rights violations.
Meanwhile, Congress must ensure the Administration follows the Women, Peace, and Security Act, requiring women’s participation and protection in all aspects of foreign policy. Lawmakers must also strictly monitor enforcement of the Leahy Law so U.S. intelligence and security engagement with Afghanistan does not fund Taliban forces.
Saving lives now
Above all, Washington must welcome people escaping Taliban persecution.
The Administration must expand and expedite—and Congress must fund—visa processing for people from Afghanistan, while restoring asylum-seeking rights and maintaining and fully funding refugee programs. They must urgently issue and process Special Immigrant Visas for people who worked for the U.S. government and P1 and P2 visas for refugees at high risk. Pass the Enduring Welcome Act and redesignating Afghanistan for Temporary Protected Status for people already in the U.S. so they aren’t sent back to the Taliban’s rule is also essential. Importantly, the U.S. must recognize gender and nationality as protected groups for refugee and asylum law.
These relatively simple measures would save lives now.
Unfortunately, the Trump Administration is doing the opposite: slashing refugee programs, banning Afghanistan citizens from coming to the U.S., and downplaying the Taliban’s violations to pave the way to deport people to Afghanistan. The U.S. must reverse course and use immigration policy to protect, not endanger, the Taliban’s victims.
