“The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women,” first lady Laura Bush said in a 2001 radio address. It sounded so hopeful. Bush detailed the horrific plight of Afghan women under the Taliban before the invasion led by her husband, then president George W. Bush: Women forbidden education or jobs outside the home. Women denied doctors when they were sick. Mothers who faced beatings for laughing out loud and risked their fingernails being pulled off for wearing nail polish.
When the U.S. upended the Taliban’s control, millions more girls entered school in Afghanistan. In the summer of 2017, the country’s first-ever all-female robotics team—six high school students deemed the Afghan Dreamers—earned a trip to Washington and international acclaim on the competition circuit, even if they were still girls “not used to leaving the house without a male chaperone, girls whose peers were getting married,” according to a New York Times piece. Afghan women stepped into government roles: In November 2019, 26-year-old Zarifa Ghafari became the youngest female mayor in the country’s history, serving Maidan Shahr, the capital city of the Wardak Province. Women held jobs again—women like news anchor Beheshta Arghand, who, in a stunning sight, interviewed a member of the Taliban on Afghanistan’s Tolo News channel on Tuesday.
The gains were short-lived, and the progress is now in peril. What happens to the women and girls of Afghanistan now? They are trapped. For months, even before the collapse of the Afghan government at the hands of the Taliban, the terrorist group began shuttering schools for all but the youngest girls. The message: “Teenage girls should be at home helping their mothers.” The all-female robotics team that captivated the world is “extremely terrified” and appealing to Canada for asylum, New York–based international human rights lawyer Kimberley Motley told Canada’s CBC News on Sunday. “They’re in Herat, where now in the universities, they’re turning girls away,” Motley said. “They’re telling girls, ‘Don’t come back to the university.’ Women are showing up for work and are being turned away. These girls are seeing this and watching tearfully as their city is crumbling.”
In an excruciating interview, Ghafari told Britain’s i newspaper that she is at home, fearing attack by the Taliban. “I’m sitting here waiting for them to come. There is no one to help me or my family. I’m just sitting with them and my husband. And they will come for people like me and kill me,” she said. “I can’t leave my family. And anyway, where would I go?”
Despite the Taliban’s feeble attempt at public relations, claiming it would respect women’s rights in the Tolo interview with Arghand, another Afghan anchorwoman, Khadija Amin, said on Clubhouse that the Taliban had suspended her and other women employees from their jobs. These are only some of the well-known Afghan women whose lives hang in the balance. There are millions more whose stories may never be heard as the Taliban once again ascend to power.
The silencing of Afghan newswomen is a loss of truth and information in what is now a terrorist-ruled country, making it all the more brave when Al-Jazeera reporter Charlotte Bellis—the only female journalist allowed at the Taliban’s first news conference—dared to confront officials. “I want to talk to you about women’s rights and girls’ rights, about whether women will be allowed to work and if girls will still go to school,” said Bellis, a New Zealand native. “What assurances can you give to women and girls that their rights will be protected?” An official guaranteed women’s rights “within the limits of Islam,” but the Taliban have never been about Islamic principles; rather they have always operated by their own set of oppressive and barbaric rules—that seems as true today as it did when the war in Afghanistan began 20 years ago.
An anonymous female student in Kabul described the chilling reality for women like her in The Guardian this week. “I should have graduated in November from the American University of Afghanistan and Kabul University, but this morning everything flashed before my eyes,” she wrote. “I worked for so many days and nights to become the person I am today, and this morning when I reached home, the very first thing my sisters and I did was hide our IDs, diplomas, and certificates. It was devastating.”
The U.S. once prided itself on its investments in education in Afghanistan; according to the United States Agency for International Development, which provided funding for the American University of Afghanistan and other Afghan institutions, girls made up nearly 40% of the 9.5 million students enrolled in school in 2020, compared to the country’s 900,000 male students in 2001. Now, however, female students aren’t able to finish what they started. In a cruel twist, many of the evacuees being rushed out of Afghanistan on planes are men. “Afghan men make up most of the interpreters and cultural officers who have worked for the United States over the 20-year war and, in turn, have been granted special access to immigrate,” the Times has reported. “That is one reason relatively few women have been among the thousands of people who have been evacuated from Afghanistan over the past month.”
The same women who helped symbolize America’s influence in Afghanistan are now being left behind as terror strikes. “As a woman,” that anonymous Afghan student reflected, “I feel like I am the victim of this political war that men started.”