By Rukhshana Media editorial team
As the solar new year 1404 begins and Afghanistan approaches nearly four years of Taliban rule, woman are asking if there’s any hope left.
While the extremist group may mean different things to various groups of people, for women, it represents an absolute evil. How it has managed to govern with such terrible outcomes for almost four years is not the burning question, but rather is it likely to remain in power?
From a public perspective, there appears to be no visible resistance in society capable of delivering a decisive blow to the Taliban’s foundations. This then raises its own question – are our current forms and methods of resistance effective? And if the status quo persists for another year or even several years, what will its consequences be for our society, culture, and social and political history? Moreover, where will this leave the women of Afghanistan?
It’s not possible to address all these dimensions, but a clearer understanding of the current situation is needed in order to understand and dispel the illusions plaguing the fight to protect girls and women.
First – The illusion of Afghanistan’s women being a priority for the global community
While activism for women’s rights exists both inside and outside Afghanistan, the core change drivers are often seen as being based outside Afghanistan, particularly in Western countries. The efforts largely in the diplomatic circles of Western nations are based on the assumption that human rights and women’s issues are a priority for these countries. It is often thought that advocacy in the Western corridors and forums, its governments will be pressured to take effective action against the Taliban and to defend women’s rights in Afghanistan.
This belief was not entirely misplaced in the early days of the fall of Kabul. The West’s attachment to Afghanistan after two decades of conflict and engagement was embedded in their psyche as somewhat of a priority.
However, nearly four years have passed since that fateful day in August 2021. In this time, the world has experienced massive and dramatic transformations. Especially among the Western powers.
US President Donald Trump’s administration in the United States has significantly shifted the West’s focus toward issues that were not considered priorities in the past.
Social-political conflicts, economic crises, and an emphasis on economic and military power have redirected public opinion and government action in such a way that human rights and women’s issues in countries like Afghanistan have been pushed to the margins. It could even be said that they no longer hold even symbolic importance.
Believing the world today is the same as it was in 2021 is an illusion. Western governments face a slew of similar internal issues not least of all a cost-of-living crisis, the threat of economic recession, trade wars, the rise of right-wing movements, and the encroaching strength of Russia and China.
Now, economic growth and managing domestic crises are the main priorities of these governments over and above any efforts to stabilize non-Western countries abroad. It would be destructive self-deceit to continue to treat the West’s interests in foreign aid are even close to what they were four years ago. Shattering these illusions and understanding the changed reality is essential to break free from any misguided next steps.
Second – The illusion of support from political opponents of the Taliban for women’s demands
Many political efforts and platitudes have been launched, especially outside Afghanistan, to oppose the Taliban with women’s freedom often raised as the primary concern.
However, the reality is that many of these initiatives use women’s issues rhetorically. Political opponents to the Taliban appropriate moral support for women’s demands to benefit their own agendas, without any concrete action in favor of women.
These opponents lack a unified political umbrella and little effectiveness in the political arena with no genuine will among them to stand firm to support women’s demands and rights. What they have done in nearly four years is merely a spectacle of accepting women into their gatherings, attempting to show that, unlike the Taliban, they don’t oppose women.
Given what the oppression and discrimination women face, they require more than these superficial displays. Solidarity with women demands struggle, resistance, persistence, and sacrifice – something akin to the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement in Iran, where men and political forces mobilized to defend women’s rights, fighting and struggling even to the death.
This is not to dismiss the importance of the presence of women in political groups and movements. However, if we assume such movements will significantly advance women’s demands, it is an illusion that wastes our energy for fighting and undermines the capacity for action and focus.
The “absolute evil” that governs Afghanistan is too malevolent to be overcome by lip service. Women need greater unity, cohesion, and focus, and should direct their efforts not at mobilizing ineffective political forces, but at mobilizing society and garnering support from the general public and various social groups.
Third – The illusion of fighting through spectacle
After the Taliban’s violent suppression of peaceful street protests, women commonly began to gather in closed spaces, sharing statements, slogans, and visual demonstrations online.
The dissemination of these videos and images on social media contributed to the spread of this pattern of protest behavior. But it also helped fuel an illusion that this is true resistance that can destabilize the misogyny of the current situation.
But in a situation where the Taliban holds all the power of a government, with thousands of morality police swarming every public space, alongside security forces, mosque clerics, and government propaganda machinery, all continuously working to remove women from society, these online protests not only fail to bring about any real change, but they may redirect the already stifled energy for struggle towards merely symbolic gestures.
Symbolic actions can only have a relative impact when there isn’t a truly practical course of resistance active in society. In short, opposition to the existing real life situation must extend beyond virtual spaces and superficial gatherings. Otherwise it risks feeding a cycle of self-obsession, and an illusion of struggle.
Facing the painful reality
In the current situation, the main issue for women is not merely political demands. The very existence of women outside of child-bearing is under threat, with the physical erasure of women from society on the one hand, and a cultural erasure for generations to come.
The ban on education alone has annihilated generations of women from the power of knowledge. With secondary school, high school, and universities closed to women for the past three years, already hundreds of thousands of women, if not millions, have missed out on graduating with some level of education. This exclusion alone is a full-scale “cultural genocide.”
Coupled with the exclusion of women from medical knowledge, from NGO work, the cessation of aid, and the endless restrictions on women’s ability to leave their homes have directly and indirectly led to the deaths of countless, nameless women, whom the Taliban authorities have no concern in protecting, especially in rural areas.
Beyond that, the ever-deepening economic crisis unfolding in Afghanistan translates into violence within households, with women and girls being the primary victims. This wave of death with cries that go unheard and whose dimensions remain willingly unseen by those in power cannot truly be resolved through symbolic displays of resistance and more words of concerns from political parties.
With each passing year, a genocide of women increasingly reduced to being protected only for reproduction has taken on deeper and more terrifying dimensions. Their plight is more painful and critical than ever.
The struggle against this situation requires methods and actions that, at the very least if they do not bring about change, shed light on the disappearing humanity and potential of half of Afghan society.
Part two this article will present the need to change the forms and methods of struggle against this absolute evil.
