The Taliban’s Broken Promises On the Treatment of Women

As soon as it came to power, the Taliban assured the world that it had mellowed considerably since it last ruled Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001. Now, we were assured, the Taliban would uphold the rights of women. Girls would be allowed to go to school, even to university; women would be allowed to work outside the house. But that is not how things are turning out.

According to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, Taliban leaders have contradicted those public promises on rights by ordering women to stay at home. No more working outside the house, as was promised only a few weeks ago. Some brave women have held rallies in Kabul to protest this state of affairs – to no avail. The Taliban also promised it would allow girls to attend school up to, and including, university. But all over the country the Taliban has been preventing girls over 12 from going to school; apparently the group has decided that, after all, education for girls should not go beyond elementary school. That will make these girls fit for little else than motherhood and housework, which is just what the Taliban wants. The girls and women of Afghanistan have tasted twenty exhilarating years of semi-freedom. Now the doors to the dungeon have been closed again with a vindictive thud.

“In contradiction to assurances that the Taliban would uphold women’s rights, over the past three weeks, women have instead been progressively excluded from the public sphere,” she told the Human Rights Council in Geneva.

The Taliban had repeatedly said that today’s Taliban is very different from the one that existed in 2001, before the Americans arrived. Women, they claimed, will be treated better than they were before. They would, the group promised, be allowed to go to school, even to university. But so far all the signs indicate – see Michelle Bachelet’s report just above — that the group doesn’t mean it, and never did.

Why should the donors who have just pledged more than $1 billion to Afghanistan condition that aid on the Taliban keeping its original promise to allow girls to continue attending school, just as they have done for the past twenty years, up to, and including, university? No appeals to the rights of women will have any effect; money, and its withholding, is the only way to make the Taliban keep its promises. And in the same vein, why not link donors’ aid to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan to the rights of Afghan women to work outside the house?

#4. The Taliban’s Promise Not To Seek Revenge On Its Opponents

Bachelet has pointed to other broken pledges by the Taliban on granting amnesty to former civil servants and security officers linked to the previous government, and prohibiting house-to-house searches.

The UN has received multiple allegations of searches for those who worked with US companies and security forces while some UN staff have reported increasing attacks and threats, she added.

Credible allegations of reprisal killings of some former Afghan military members have also been received, she said.

And one can see, on-line, videos of Afghan soldiers being decapitated by Taliban troops, who then proceed to ghoulishly parade around holding aloft the severed heads of those they promised the world, just a few weeks ago, would not be harmed.

Bachelet called for a mechanism to monitor rights in Afghanistan. “ I reiterate my appeal to this Council to take bold and vigorous action, commensurate with the gravity of this crisis,” she said.

It’s only been two weeks (I am writing this on Sept. 14) since the final withdrawal of American soldiers from Afghanistan, and a few weeks since the Taliban made its pledges about not preventing girls from studying, or women from working, and solemnly insisting that it would not harm civil servants and soldiers of the previous government. And already all of these pledges have been repeatedly broken. It’s time for the aid donors to withhold their aid to Afghanistan until the Taliban begin to keep those promises, to stop their house-to-house searches for “enemies” to execute, to allow girls to go to school and women to go to work. Appeals to decency won’t work. The threat to withhold aid money, on the other hand, about which the Taliban care very deeply, will concentrate their minds wonderfully. Let’s give it a try, and see what happens.