Marking the 36th month of Taliban occupation of Afghanistan, the question of liberty, education, and life of young afghanis girls seems sombre and a forgotten cause for the West. Thousands of accounts of prolific writers with sophisticated pieces of articles imprinted in prestigious publications shed lights over the afghanistan women’s conditions in the aftermath of the Taliban taking over of Kabul that has been unfolding following the Ghani government’s departure on August 15, 2021.
As the conflicts emerged in Eastern Europe in Kyiv and later in the Gaza strip, the international media shifted its attention to these crises, dropping the curtain over the question of afghani women. Within just a few months, the fate of millions of young women and children was placed in the hands of Wahhabi terrorists a infamous compromise over the glistering values of human rights, liberty, and justice left afghani girls robbed of her destiny.
This triumph of fundamentalism, stretching from East Asia to northern Africa, serves as a powerful reminder that “liberty conditional to the state of regime, without a cultivated intellectual mass liberty foregoes quicker than it availed at the first place”. The tale of Afghanistan no different in this case brings attention to four interconnected reasons that have perpetuated the plight of young girls in Afghanistan, encapsulated in the Farsi phrase “Keraamat, Forsat, Aamoozesh, Aazaadi” which translates as “Dignity, Opportunity, Education, liberty” that has been the centralized theme one needs to pay attention. Undoubtedly, these elements are interconnected and go hand in hand in the absence of one pillar realization of the true state of liberty remains elusive, and the plight of young girls protracted unabated.
In the pages of Afghan women’s history, the Great Resistance during the battle of Maiwand against the Britishers on 27 July 1880 showcased the indomitable spirit of the Afghan people, which can never be confined in a tyrannical cage. Inspired by the Afghan spirit, Malalai became a tale that has lit up the lamp of hope and despair for thousands of Afghans for centuries. When the soldiers were crumbling and a foreseeable defeat of Afghanistan seemed destined, she rushed to the battlefield with the banner, reinvigorating the spirit of the soldier’s hearts. Her words echoed before her honorable departure as a martyr: “If you do not fall in the battle of Maiwand, then, by God, someone is saving you as a symbol of shame.” This raises the question of whether this spirit of resistance still exists, given that the Taliban’s three years in power have not seen any large-scale popular uprisings?
During inspection of resistance especially from the women’s side, it is not centralized and ineffective due to the grounded fact of violence that has been injected through direct means of violence, social violence, intellectual violence, dogmatic violence, and economic violence, compelling and maintaining the state of survival in most places to resist any temptation of unification for a greater cause. The nature of the Taliban state reconciles with the attitude of its subjects.
With the increased surveillance across the metropolitan cities has further scrutinized the women’s activities. In the month of April earlier this year around 80,000 CCTVs were installed in Kabul to monitor the anti-Taliban activities. Popular protests are not spontaneous actions but rather well-organized and planned endeavors that have occurred in Sudan in 2019 and Iran in 2022 reporting mass participation of women challenging the traditional societal norms.
In Sudan Revolution of 2019 has become the synonymous with Woman revolution that overthrew the Former Sudanese President Omar Bashir’s government that has ruled since the 1989 coup d’etat, various factors garnered the attention of the civilians from economic stagnation, denial of liberties and freedom of expression drove the women’s out from the home to the forefront of the revolution. Freedom, dignity, and justice were the focal points of the revolution for the women who joined the revolution despite the discontent from families.
The aftermath of the 2022 women’s revolution under the banner of “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” in Iran shook the Islamic Regime, the shadow of Masha Amini engulfed as a storm that brewed after a long time since the Persian Awakening in 2009. From burning hijab to cutting down hair celebrated as an act of bravery and defiance to the Islamic laws that undermined the core of liberty, “dignity”.
Characterization of protest as an emblem of dignity echoed from the streets of Tehran when thousands of women marched against Guidance Patrol of the Islamic regime in Iran. Attaining a breakthrough Tehran regime dissolved the moral police in 2022 a symbolic triumph of the revolutionaries bending the Islamic rule from collective joint efforts of men and women in Iran.
The Iranian Spring left little imprint on afghani women and society in its entirety. The expectation of a potential spillover of protest contained by the Taliban engulfed the scholars with the question “Did the women of Afghanistan have consented to the Faustian bargain with the Taliban” in exchange for normalcy. How did Sudan and Iranian women’s garnered the resistance with open defiance to the laws of the land for Dignity, Freedom, and Liberty? This question holds a central socio-reality of Afghan society that defines it along the lines of “literacy”.
A woman-centric pragmatic approach has shown success in cultivating grounds that challenged the Islamic Republic of Iran. Owing to the available data, one may undertake that the literacy rate for Iranian girls above the age of 15 has risen from 36 percent in 1976 to 85 percent in 2020 despite hurdles and barriers. A similar trend was noticed in Sudan which has a 56 percent literacy rate among women.
Education shapes the attitude toward protest as highlighted by Hall, Rodeghier, and Useem in the paper “Effects of Education on Attitude to Protest” published in the American Sociological Association postulating that education affects the attitude towards protest in different dimensions from tactic to character of the protest simultaneously increasing opposition to government repressions.
With its limitations, it serves as a direction of inquiry as to whether the afghani women’s educational backdrop scaled down the opportunity of rebellion against the Taliban regime. In Afghan socio reality that seems to be the case as 1 in 5 women in Afghanistan attains literacy that is far lesser in comparison to Sudan with 2.7 out of 5 and Iran 4.5 out of 5 has been the epic center of dissension of the ruling regimes in recent years.
In the survey conducted by CFR highlighted in 2019 just 13 percent of Afghans held a positive view of the Taliban despite that a popular spring hardly surfaced against the Taliban since 2021. Various methods of protest have unfurled at a small scale throughout Afghanistan.
Matiullah Wesa a social activist in The Pen Path lead initiative for girl’s education in Post Ghani Afghanistan was arrested and released in 2023 October after several months of detentions in prison under the charge of “propaganda against the government”. Small groups of Afghan women privately held a protest in March 2024, similar incidents occurred in a timely in Afghanistan, “in total at least 221 acts of protest by women in the last two years” reported by Rukhshana Media yet a distance from posing a practical challenge to the Taliban regime.
This projection further unravels the dim path for women as Taliban diktat in 2022 imposed the ban on girls from attaining education after grade 6th closing the doors for millions of young girls to come out from the shadows of misery.
With no education rights the opportunity to earn bread vanishes which has opened the pandora box of social evils precipitating the continuation of the “Sale of female children”, “Child marriage”, and “Flogging of women” in breaking the rules.
Pretentious attitude over this fact may neglect the grave repression of social justice that women were deprived of through legal statutes, moral policing, and extensive promotions of the theocratic dogma’s intrusions in the social life of the women. Cases of stoning to death, undeclared legal compliance with family honor notably marrying the rapist, and honor killing.
In early July 2024, a video surfaced on social media that appeared to show a gang-rape of an afghani woman in a Taliban jail one of the horrendous portrayals of the disconnected reality the afghani women are living.
Marrying the rapist one of the dehumanizing yet not uncommon practice in Afghanistan’s socio-political reality that continued under Former President Karzai, Then Ashraf Ghani, and now the Taliban. One such case was of Gulnaz that appeared in 2009 where the cousin’s husband raped her leaving her pregnant, despite that the Afghan government charged Gulnaz with “zina” which translated as moral crime sent her behind bars for two years before in 2011 receiving Presidential Pardon on the condition of forging a marriage with the rapist cousin husband. These were the cases that garnered international support after attracting enough international media coverage.
The Afghan girl’s labyrinth toward access to education, dignity, and opportunity holds the beginning of peace. The contestation for the right to education will be the necessary agenda to realize, without the right of opportunity within and abroad the dignity of life will not be preserved. Thus, the Faustian bargain that Russia, China, and some groups in the West constantly engaged in establishing economic relations will ensure the prolongation of Afghan girls’ miseries.
The dignity of being a female is sabotaged when social traditions compel the young girls disguised to be boys to earn a living for families that have lost all their male members. As per the scholars, this practice has been in continuation for nearly a century and became pronounced during the five years of the brutal rule of the Taliban from 1996-2001.
The intensified practice of Bacha posh a practice of dressing young girls as boys pronounced as a means to provide females with an opportunity to out from the ghastly life in conditions of stagnated economic conditions, brutish socio-legal repression of females, heightened sectarian violence leaving Afghanistan beleaguered. With the diminishing prospects of survival for the females in Afghanistan who often fell victim to prostitution and restrictions of travel, perpetuating the shadows of the past as they unravel in this Taliban 2.0.
With each human the definition of liberty holds a separate explanation from speaking one’s mind to simply climbing a tree, from earning bread during the day to getting sleep at night, these notions of liberty with all its shapes, colors, and nuances are intertwined with the dignity of self. In failure to preserve dignity total liberation remains out of reach.
The forefront of female education will be inchoate in the absence of the three other pillars, in spite of this a proclamation of international legitimacy will limit the threat to the survival of the Taliban regime, allowing it to suppress dissent without any constraints. With all its characteristics the Taliban continuing the silencing of these young girls and millions yet to be born during these unfortunate times in Afghanistan underscores a desperate plea for action.
They wait for an international coalition that extends beyond negotiating economic cooperation, but urging the government in Kabul to reinstate women’s rights with all means necessary to ensure a glimmering future prospect stretching from the fields of employment, and education guaranteeing the dignity of life.
