Afghan women have already had to face being restricted from so many areas of public life, and now, in a new 114-page manifesto released by the Taliban, the sound of a woman’s voice outside the home has also been outlawed in Afghanistan – curtailing women’s lives even further. It has been three years of no education beyond primary school age, no employment in most workplaces, no access to public spaces like parks, gyms and salons and no leaving home if not covered from head to toe in Islamic dress. Today, Afghanistan is the most restrictive country in the world for women, and it’s only getting worse.

The publication of this manifesto and the Taliban’s new laws have ignited fears of a crackdown by government officers of the so-called vice and virtue police, who are usually found stationed on street corners dressed in white robes to enforce the country’s morality laws.

“The new laws aren’t new, per se. They represent the ideology that the top leadership of the Taliban regime have worked towards enforcing since they regained authority in 2021. What this codification shows is that there is no ‘new’ Taliban, but in fact a doubling down, a determined and unrelenting systemization, that fundamentally inhibits the participation of women in life outside the home,” explains Payvand Seyedali, country director for Afghanistan at Women for Women International.

The Taliban’s enforcement of what has become a gender apartheid in Afghanistan began years ago. The US troop withdrawal reignited the international debate around Afghanistan and women’s rights and put it centre stage, and the instability caused by this decision opened the door for the Taliban to take back control of Afghanistan in August 2021 – this time promising that women’s rights would be safe. Unsurprisingly, this turned out to be far from the truth. But Afghan women and the rollback of their rights have largely disappeared from international conversations.

“The slapdash 2021 withdrawal has had immense consequences – alongside the withdrawal of troops we also saw a withdrawal of development funding and a cessation in meaningful engagement with the authorities. Afghan women feel abandoned on all sides,” says Seyedali.

Aid to Afghanistan has also been restricted. The UK government cut its foreign aid budgets in 2023, and an internal civil service report revealed that Afghanistan has faced a 76% cut in aid. The report also found that these cuts will “potentially leave some of the most vulnerable women and girls in the world without critical services”. These cuts are currently planned to continue throughout 2024. Seyedali says that adjacent to the conversation on women’s rights is the very practical question of income. “Many Afghan families are hardly surviving and feel that the little they do have is being constantly whittled away. It is a terrible thing to live without hope. Yet hopelessness, together with hunger and, if you’re an Afghan woman, humiliation, is daily life.”

In July 2023, the Taliban ordered the closure of beauty salons in Afghanistan. Salons provided women with jobs, services, and a community space to meet and connect with other women. It was estimated that these closures would result in a loss of around 60,000 jobs (the majority of which were held by women), cutting off their income and a way for them to be financially independent. Just after the announcement of the salon closures, women once again took to the streets in Afghanistan to protest the closures and the wider restrictions on their freedoms. Protestors were met with fire hoses, tasers and guns by security forces while women chanted for “work, bread and justice”. They can also face consequences such as enforced disappearance, arbitrary detention and torture.

Even back in the late 1970s following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, there were various underground networks of women who undermined the USSR-backed government. Female students took part in a huge anti-government protest in 1980, where many were arrested and even killed. Under the Taliban regime, Afghan women opened underground schools for girls – risking their lives as female education was extremely restricted. Over four decades of military occupation will inevitably take its toll on a people, but women are still finding ways to exercise their agency even within an oppressive system.

Afghan women are fighting against the odds and, after the lack of progress from the international community to improve the conditions for women and girls, they’re still coming together to take collective action. There are the protestors who, despite being increasingly at risk, are still taking action to highlight injustices. There are the teachers working in secret schools to continue the education of young girls – women such as Pashtana Durrani and Parashto Hakim. There are the women in exile fighting for a place at the international table, such as Fawzia Koofi (the first female deputy speaker of the Afghan parliament) and Heather Barr (the associate director of the Women’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch). And there are the journalists still working to report on what’s happening on the ground, such as Zahra Joya and her Afghan women-led media company, Rukhshana Media.

“The women and men inside Afghanistan consistently striving for better, for themselves and their families, are absolutely heroic. The international community, and the de facto government, should do everything in their power to support them, rather than allowing ordinary people to be the collateral damage of patriarchy and politics,” says Seyedali.

Images: Getty