How can we help protect Afghan women from the Taliban? - opinion

• Published date: 29 September 2021
• Author: AHMED CHARAI

The persecution of Afghan women is pervasive and pitiless. Women have been systematically and summarily dismissed from their government jobs, even from completely apolitical posts that do not involve contact with the public, such as water-filtration engineers. Schoolgirls cannot study after the age of 12. Female teachers have lost their jobs, because only men can teach boys. Several university students have called me from the provinces to express their concern about their uncertain future.

Some of the Taliban's prejudices are surprisingly petty. In some provinces, where the climate is hot and dry, the Taliban force Afghan women to wear both burkas and socks to cover their feet. (In their earlier government in the 1990s, socks were not required for women wearing sandals.) While the socks soon become dirty and uncomfortable, the Taliban say they are guarding against the sexual temptation posed by exposed toes.

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The Hazara people, an ethnic and religious minority in Afghanistan, are among the Taliban's main targets. They are physically distinctive, speak a different language and, too often, singled out for abuse by the shorter, Pashtun-speaking radicals now in power.

For two decades, the Taliban have been biding their time in Pakistani madrassas, debating, arguing, planning. In those long years, they learned no moderation.

Taliban fighters and commanders who know only war and weapons cannot accept the social and economic changes in Afghan society, especially the financial independence of educated women and the hard-won prosperity of non-Pashtun ethnic groups. To ask the Taliban to respect women or the rights of minorities, is to ask them to preserve the gains of the regime that they toppled. It is against both their ideology and their inclination to do so.

In Mazar-e-Sharif, the capital of Balkh province, which borders Uzbekistan, several dozen women and men were also present last week in Darwaze-Jamhori Square, east of the city's majestic blue mosque. Under the large ceramic portrait of Commander Massoud, the best enemy of the Taliban, the new masters of the city, the traffic was dense and street vendors prepared their stalls.

A group of a dozen young women, aged between 20 and 30, began chanting slogans in the name of freedom to demand a government that included women. Tense, they knew that the protests had to be declared...