By Noah Rothman
Monday, May 09, 2022
Amid the Biden administration’s bloody, headlong rush to
Afghanistan’s exit doors, the president gave Afghan women the courtesy of at
least acknowledging the miserable fates to which he was consigning them. “We’ll
continue to speak out for basic rights of the Afghan people, especially women
and girls,” Joe Biden said, “as we speak out for women and girls all
around the globe.” It would be wildly insufficient if this White House
responded to the inhumane circumstances they left behind in Afghanistan with
talk alone. But Afghanistan’s women aren’t even getting that much.
On Saturday, Taliban Supreme Leader Hibatullah
Akhundzada issued a decree once again imposing the burqa on Afghan
women who dare to venture out in public. The return of mandates around the
“traditional and respectful” head-to-toe covering, which is necessary “in order
to avoid provocation when meeting men who are not mahram (adult close male
relatives),” represents a dramatic reversal of freedoms Afghan women had
enjoyed for two decades. Indeed, given that the average age of Afghan women
is just under 20-years-old, that liberty is all many Afghans
have ever known. And given the Taliban’s short reign, from 1996 to 2001, most
Afghan women’s living memories of compulsory head and face coverings are
probably quite limited.
Although the burqa was not an uncommon sight in rural
Afghanistan under its elected government, it wasn’t common in the nation’s
cities. For now, reports suggest that most women in relatively urbane Kabul
have disregarded the edict. But they fear the Taliban’s
religious police will soon become more active enforcers of this rule and more
enthusiastic punishers of rule breakers. Still others expect that this
draconian restriction on how women can behave in public is only the beginning.
As Akhundzada stressed in his decree, for women who have no important business
outside the house, it’s “better they stay at home.”
This latest rollback of freedoms for Afghanistan’s women
follows the Taliban’s effort to curtail the freedoms enjoyed by Afghanistan’s
girls. On March 23, the Taliban announced that the
long-anticipated reopening of Afghanistan’s schools for young girls would not
move forward as planned. “We inform all girls’ high schools and those schools
that (have) female students above class six that they are off until the next
order,” the relevant Taliban-led ministry said in a statement announcing the
indefinite closure of girls’ schools, which were set to begin educating young
women again on that very day. The regime noted that it would take some time to
figure out how educating young girls could comport with “Sharia law and Afghan
tradition,” and they still haven’t made much progress in the intervening weeks.
In some parts of the country, girls’ secondary schooling
facilities have remained open despite the Taliban’s decision
to impose a de facto ban on educating women. Students at those schools face
regular harassment from Taliban officials, and teachers are made to enforce
strict dress codes that only allow for a student’s eyes to be seen. The
Taliban’s sumptuary laws are so capricious that they are difficult to follow.
“Our sleeves should be large to hide our elbows and the shape of our arms,” one
student told Human Rights Watch researchers. “But then we were
reprimanded because when we write on the board, our sleeves roll back, and our
arms are revealed.”
In November 2021, each of the 24 women occupying a seat in the U.S.
Senate sent a letter to the White House reminding Biden that he had “committed
to press the Taliban to uphold the rights of women and girls,” and they
expected to “enable those efforts through legislation and engagement with your
Administration.” Since then, the Biden administration has shown little
willingness to do more than issue perfunctory statements of opposition to the Taliban’s
conduct, and the president himself has not spoken out as he said he would.
The Taliban assured the world that it would not engage in
these kinds of assaults on the dignity and rights of women when it was still
trying to persuade the international community against sanctioning its new
regime, but these were lies. Like the regime’s pledge not to pursue violent
reprisals against the Afghans who worked with Westerners or served the
elected Afghan government, these promises were made to be broken. But the White
House cannot dwell on the Taliban’s duplicity because its logic for withdrawing
all troops from Afghanistan rested on the notion that the Taliban could be
trusted.
“The Taliban has committed to prevent terrorist groups
from using Afghanistan as a base for external operations that could threaten
the United States or our allies, including Al Qaeda and ISIS-K,” Secretary of
State Antony Blinken told an incredulous group of lawmakers
last September. That statement of faith in the Taliban’s willingness to
maintain the West’s tempo of counterterrorism operations struck even Obama-era Defense officials as nonsensical, but what
else could Blinken say? That NATO’s withdrawal from Afghanistan not only made
the world less safe but that it paved the way for the abuses we’re now forced
to witness?
It was a lamentable but foreseeable outgrowth of the
Biden administration’s willingness to sacrifice the Afghans to the Taliban that
it would not be able to make good on its commitment to even speaking out
forcefully against the regime’s inhumane conduct. To do so would be to hang a
lantern on the Biden administration’s complicity in those abuses, even if only
because this White House presided over the regime’s restoration. The
administration’s approach to the torment of Afghanistan’s women and girls has
been to treat it like a political problem to be managed, not an attack on basic
human dignity to be condemned loudly, forcefully, and often.
“I’ve been clear that human rights will be the center of
our foreign policy,” Biden said in the breath that immediately followed his
promise to speak out on behalf of Afghanistan’s women. The Taliban, it seems,
aren’t the only ones who have been lying to you.
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