Women in Afghanistan: Subverting in Secret
Women protest the Taliban’s decision to cancel the return of high school-aged girls to the classroom, in Kabul, Afghanistan, on March 26, 2022. (Bryan Denton/The New York Times)
Following the troop withdrawal by the United States and its allies from Afghanistan in 2021, there have been many reports of violence targeting women and girls in Afghanistan. While this continues to remain an enduring concern and one that requires collective action and support for Afghan women, it is also true that most attention to the situation on ground as tended to portray women from Afghanistan as helpless victims. In reality, as MADRE noted, there is a kickass network of Afghan women who are organising, mobilising, and engaging collectively for their emancipation.
Resisting silently
With the imposition of curbs, especially on movement and mobility, Afghan women are unable to access public spaces and to lead their lives on their own terms. The Taliban has imposed dress codes for women and shut down high schools – very much in line with their rule during the 1990s. The Taliban has also dissolved critical support institutions such as the Ministry of Women’s Affairs. The repressive policies of the regime have led to the closure of shelters for women as well. Women’s access to education and employment has been entirely curbed, and attempts to access their rights have been met with punishments. However, Afghan women remain steadfast in advocating for themselves and their rights.
Women have led protest marches on the streets, oftentimes being met with brutal suppression. Despite this, however, they continue to work behind the scenes, offering support to each other. They create and open up safe spaces for each other, document b cases of gender based violence, and create spaces for grassroot engagement.
With schools being closed down, Afghan girls are unable to even education, which is a major setback to their futures and can alter the trajectory of professional development they dream of for themselves. To keep their educational journeys going, many young women are receiving support in the form of coding lessons and online classes. Several of these initiatives are run and operated by Afghan and global civil society groups. Recognising that the Taliban doesn’t have the infrastructure to carry out online surveillance or to curb internet use, these girls remain resilient in their acts of resistance by accessing education.
Fighting Gender Apartheid
Gender apartheid in a significant challenge for Afghan women and girls, their advocacy for themselves undoubtedly requiring all the support it can get. However, the global approach to advocacy for Afghan women’s rights is making little to no place for the women’s own efforts on ground. Adopting a punitive stance by targeting the Taliban wit sanctions will not produce meaningful change on ground.
The global campaign must, instead, strive to dismantle the structural violence that enabled the stronghold of the Taliban in the first place. The rollback on women’s rights became a basis for Western military powers to enact what Sara Farris called femonationalism and Jasbir Puar called homonationalism – where the use of military force was justified in the name of endorsing women’s rights. The Taliban’s “barbaric brutality” was used as a basis to keep militarism and occupation alive in Afghanistan – only for the nation to be handed right into their grasp. Endorsing this, the International Criminal Court has announced that he is seeking arrest warrants against the Taliban for the crime of gender persecution, and the international community is creating a new category of crimes under the title of gender apartheid, to bring the Taliban to book – the same femonationalist approach, just without war. The foundation of this pinkwashing enterprise has its roots in a White Feminist campaign for what Ratna Kapur called the first “feminist war in all of history” by tying a “war on terror” to the liberation of women. As Colin Powell himself said in a speech on October 26, 2001, “The NGOs are such a force multiplier for us, such an important part of our combat team.”
This mindset continues to operate through the sidelining of the powerful work the women in Afghanistan are investing to advocate for themselves, to subvert the Taliban’s power, and to assert their freedoms. Attempts to address the Taliban’s violation of gender justice and equity cannot arrive by sidelining the women of Afghanistan and their agency – but rather, by centring it. This would also involve taking accountability for the harm brought into Afghanistan’s social and political landscape by the active complicity of the West and its colonial military industry complex. Through their efforts on ground, Afghan women are not only reclaiming their agency back from the Taliban, but also from the colonial edifice that robbed them of their rights to prop up their militaristic violence.
