Five Years Into the Taliban’s War on Women

Under armed occupation, gender apartheid has become the governing order in Afghanistan—and the world is increasingly learning to live with it.

I was a child the first time the Taliban told me I did not belong in a classroom. I am an adult now, and they have told me the same thing twice. The second time, I was not a child hiding a schoolbook under my clothes. I was a woman who had built a company, a newsroom, and a life that answered to no man’s permission. On August 15, 2021, an armed movement that has never won an election, run a hospital, or built a school walked into my country and declared that everything Afghan women had built no longer counted. Five years later, they are still there, and the world has largely moved on to other headlines.

I have not. I will not.

Let me be precise about what this is, because language is the first casualty of every occupation. The men ruling Afghanistan are not a government. They are not, as diplomats like to say, a “de facto authority.” That phrase is a courtesy they have not earned and Afghan women cannot afford. They are a religious extremist militia that seized a country by force and has spent five years administering the systematic destruction of half its population. I will call it what it is.

Here is what they inherited and destroyed. Between 2001 and 2021, Afghan women did not wait for anyone’s permission to become people. We became judges, close to 270 of them, ruling in courts that would not have let us testify a generation earlier. We became members of parliament, provincial officials, ministers, generals. We built businesses, newsrooms, clinics, schools. I built mine, a media career and a company that let me walk into rooms my own mother was never allowed to enter, rooms I still remember the first time I sat in them, understanding exactly what it had taken to get there.

Nearly a million girls sat in secondary classrooms their own mothers never saw from the inside. None of it was handed to us. It was seized, year by year, by women who understood that power conceded slowly is still power lost. In 2021, men with guns and no governing experience took it all back in a matter of weeks: my company, my newsroom, my seat at every table I had earned, along with the parliament seats, the judgeships, the clinics and classrooms thousands of other Afghan women had spent two decades building. That is theft, carried out at rifle point, and dressed up in religious language its own leaders do not apply to themselves.

Here is the part that should make you angrier than anything else: the men enforcing this system do not believe in it.

Senior Taliban officials, negotiators, ministers, the men who signed the decrees banning Afghan girls from school, have spent the last five years quietly enrolling their own daughters in schools and universities in Doha and Peshawar. One of the men who helped design the architecture of Afghan women’s erasure has a daughter who became a doctor abroad, trained in the exact profession his government forbids Afghan girls at home from ever pursuing.

This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary political sense. The regime that has looked directly at its own policy and decided it is fit for other people’s daughters—not their own.

Their financial conduct tells the same story. A movement that claims religious purity as its governing logic has spent five years entangled in the opium and methamphetamine trade, in mineral deals with China cut behind closed doors, and in a mining economy worth an estimated one to three trillion dollars that flows almost entirely to a small circle of men from a handful of provinces, while the country they govern ranks among the hungriest on earth. Call it what you want. I call it a mafia that memorized scripture.

And they have not brought the peace they promised in exchange for our rights. Afghanistan under this regime has become exactly what the world feared and what the Taliban swore, in Doha, it would not become: a sanctuary for the armed groups threatening the entire region. The United Nations Security Council’s own monitors describe a country where ISIS-Khorasan recruits and trains with a freedom of movement it never had before, where al-Qaeda’s regional network treats Taliban-run Afghanistan as safe harbor, where Pakistani militants cross the border at will. Afghanistan and Pakistan are now, by any honest description, at war along that border, with airstrikes killing hundreds of civilians in a single incident this year.

The men who told Afghan women that stability required our silence have delivered neither stability nor safety, but instead a regional powder keg—with our rights as the down payment.

Meanwhile, the machinery of persecution grinds on with bureaucratic precision. Close to one hundred edicts and directives now govern what an Afghan woman may study, wear, say, and where her body may be seen. This year alone brought two edicts that history will not forgive. One set no minimum age for marriage at all, stripping a girl of any legal standing to object the moment she reaches puberty. The other, a criminal code signed by the Taliban’s supreme leader in January, formally reintroduced slavery into Afghan law, using the classical term for slave and dividing the population into four tiers: religious scholars, elites, a middle class, and a lower class, each facing different punishments for identical crimes.

Afghanistan is now the only country on earth to have legalized chattel slavery in the twenty-first century, and it arrived stamped with a supreme leader’s signature rather than smuggled in the shadows. Every woman who once sat on a judge’s bench under the republic has been removed and replaced by men with no legal training, ruling by these edicts instead of law.

The human wreckage is tangible. Fourteen million Afghans facing acute hunger this year, a third of the country, with malnutrition among children reaching crisis levels in a dozen provinces. The maternal mortality rate has risen to roughly 638 deaths per 100,000 births, among the worst on the planet, driven in large part by a healthcare system now starved of the female doctors, nurses, and midwives it needs, because the regime spent five years making sure fewer are ever trained. Afghanistan is projected to lose more than twenty thousand female teachers and health workers by 2030 to a ban that guarantees its own hospitals will one day have no women left to staff them. Child marriage rates have climbed as much as twenty-five percent nationally and, in provinces like Helmand, now claim nearly two out of every three young women before adulthood, girls sold into marriage as families run out of options. The mental health catastrophe is so severe that nearly seven in ten Afghan women describe their own mental state as “bad” or “very bad,” and roughly one in twelve knows a woman or girl who has attempted to end her life.

These are the intended output of a machine built to remove women from public existence.

Then their is the terror campaign against anyone who once wore a uniform for the government the Taliban destroyed. Despite a publicly declared amnesty, investigators have documented at least 110 killings of former Afghan security personnel since 2023 alone, men hunted, tortured, and executed years after they laid down their weapons, their families left with no recourse and no justice. Add to that the more than five million Afghans expelled or forced back across the border from Iran and Pakistan since 2023, sixty percent of them women and children, arriving in a country that offers them nothing but the same regime they fled, and you begin to understand the scale of what these past five years has actually cost.

Here is what I hear now, five years in, from women still inside the country. Their testimony matters more than my analysis of it. I hear about a former civil servant teaching her daughter algebra behind a drawn curtain because the girl refuses to stop learning. I hear about a physician running an informal referral chain so patients can still find one of the country’s dwindling female doctors. I hear about women who have turned their own living rooms into classrooms, clinics, and law offices, whatever the moment requires, because waiting for permission stopped being an option years ago.

What I have not heard, not once, in five years of these conversations, is a woman asking me to feel sorry for her. They report. They organize. They keep records the world will need one day, whether the world is interested in them yet or not. They are not victims. The country’s women are running a resistance network the rest of us have the luxury of hailing as “remarkable” and “resilient” from a safe distance.

In August 2021, the international community made Afghan women a promise: recognition and engagement would be conditioned on their rights being protected. Five years on, that promise is dead, and almost no one has said so out loud. I’m not telling you this as a victim. I tell you this as someone who has spent five years in exile rebuilding a media company, a podcast that reaches Afghan women in their own language, and a network of advocates in capitals that would rather issue a statement than change a policy.

I have watched the International Criminal Court issue arrest warrants for the Taliban’s supreme leader and its chief justice for the crime against humanity of gender persecution, and I have watched European governments host Taliban delegations in Brussels within the same year, quietly negotiating deportation deals with the very men that court has charged.

Here is what the world still refuses to understand, five years on. This wasn’t inevitable. It was never simply cultural, religious, or a fate Afghanistan was destined for. It was a choice, made by identifiable men, financed by an economy they control, and protected by a diplomatic community that keeps mistaking engagement for leverage.

And still the women continue to resist. Mothers teach algebra behind drawn curtains. Former judges run legal clinics from their living rooms. Women-run clinics operate on borrowed time and donor scraps because they refuse to close. Afghan women journalists still file stories in two languages so no government, anywhere, gets to say it did not know.

Real solidarity would not be complicated if the world actually wanted it.

It would mean the ICC warrants are followed by sanctions that bite, not statements that expire. It would mean an immediate end to deporting Afghan women back into the hands of men an international court has charged with persecuting them. It would mean funding the underground schools and women-led networks directly instead of hosting conferences about them. It would mean refusing to legitimize a regime that cloaks itself in religious language while shipping its own daughters abroad for the very education it denies everyone else’s.

And it would mean finally giving what has happened to Afghan women a name the law recognizes: gender apartheid. Codified, prosecutable, and impossible to shrug off as culture.

I do not know when I will go home. I know that Afghan women rebuilt a country’s courtrooms, classrooms, and clinics once already, out of the ashes the first Taliban regime left behind, and did it faster than anyone thought possible. We are still standing five years into the second attempt to erase us—hungrier, angrier, and far from finished. We built it before. We will build it again. The only open question is whether the rest of the world will finally stop rewarding the men trying to stop us.

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