The liberation of Afghan women: a force from within

It has now been four years since chaos and despair were unleashed in the Afghan capital, Kabul. On August 15^th, 2021, the US and Allied forces, who had been occupying Afghanistan for two decades, frantically retreated from Kabul as Taliban troops regained control of the city.

Since the Taliban, the Pashtun fundamentalist group notorious for its human rights abuses towards women and girls, is once more denying them basic freedoms, Western leaders have reiterated their commitment to supporting Afghan women and girls. In practice, many Western governments have suspended their resettlement schemes, slashed essential funding for NGOs providing critical services, and excluded Afghan women from diplomatic relations with Taliban leaders.

The absence of effective action to safeguard Afghan women and to promote their agency to achieve long-lasting gender reform reveals the hypocrisy of the Western “liberator” agenda. The US and UK governments, in particular, outwardly condemn the Taliban for its persecution of women and girls. Nevertheless, they are failing, as they did during the military occupation, to effectively promote gender equality in Afghanistan, and are weaponising the quest for the liberation of Afghan women to pursue a policy of imperialism.

Ultimately, the only way for women’s rights to be reinstated in Afghanistan is for our governments to actively protect their human rights and empower Afghan women to take the lead in shaping their futures.

Afghan women under a gender apartheid

Under the Taliban, Afghan women have been erased from public life. The 2024 vice and virtue laws ban women from singing, reciting or reading aloud in public, and demand that they veil their bodies when outside. Hana, a 17-year-old student, shares with the Malala Fund that “the fear and the anxiety are overwhelming” when leaving the house, which she can no longer do unless a male family member accompanies her.

The dreams of young Afghan girls have been crushed by a ban on schooling beyond the primary age and significant restrictions on employment. As of 2025, 1.5 million Afghan girls remain out of school, leaving a whole generation of young women with little to no education.

Even women who continue to run their own businesses despite the Taliban restrictions are finding it increasingly challenging, with no freedom of movement. This is the case of Fatima, an Afghan clothing designer, who, speaking to the Malala Fund, expressed how she “feels trapped and isolated” as she can no longer work outside of her home and interact with clients or retailers.

Furthermore, all frameworks and policies to protect women from gender-based violence have been dismantled, and the Taliban declared it would resort to public stoning and flogging of women accused of adultery last year.

The Taliban’s restrictions on women’s lives are so intolerable that a report by Amnesty International revealed that the Taliban’s persecution of women and girls qualifies as a crime against humanity, and that their policy of segregation can be deemed as a “gender apartheid”.

The West's response: all talk, no action

Western governments and Western-led organisations, such as the United Nations and the European Union, have severely condemned the Taliban’s discriminatory policies and vowed to stand up for Afghan women. The UN Secretary-General António Guterres promised that the organisation would “never be silent in face of unprecedented, systematic attacks on women and girl’s rights”. However, the West is doing very little in practice to assist Afghan women.

From delays in the provision of adequate legal documentation by the UN Refugee Agency for Afghan refugees to the suspension of refugee resettlement programmes in the US and in the UK, there are now very few, if any, legal routes to safety for Afghan women.

Because of these delays and now closures of resettlement schemes, Afghan women have been left stranded in neighbouring countries such as Pakistan and are at risk of deportation back to Afghanistan, where they face poverty, violence and unprecedented restrictions on their rights. As of June 2024, over 1,088,000 Afghans were returned to Afghanistan from Pakistan.

Furthermore, donor countries in the West have slashed their funding for organisations which provide Afghan women and girls with essential services, such as health services, skills-based programmes and underground and online schools. According to the United Nations Sexual and Reproductive Health Agency, due to recent cuts by the Trump administration to USAID Programs, between 2025 and 2028, there could be an estimated 1,200 additional maternal deaths in Afghanistan.

Furthermore, as diplomatic relations with the Taliban have slowly resumed, the UN has been under fire for engaging in a first round of talks with the Taliban in February 2024, excluding Afghan women, a move which has emboldened the Taliban administration, according to the Purple Saturdays Movement, an Afghan-based women’s rights group.

Women's liberation: a story of Western hypocrisy

The promise of liberation and support for Afghan women, combined with the lack of concrete action, is a symptom of what professor Ahmad Qais Munhazim at Thomas Jefferson University describes as “homo-humanitarianism”, thus the practice of the West to promise support for Afghans solely on the grounds of their gender and sexuality rather than based on their humanity.

Western governments pledge to assist Afghan women above all other citizens, not because they are genuinely concerned with their fate, but because a fabricated commitment to their cause serves the West in painting itself as the liberator of Afghan women.

Ultimately, by shaping itself into a liberating force, the West can claim to sustain a moral and political high-ground over the Afghan people, thereby granting it the power to continue dictating the fate of Afghanistan via a policy of imperialism.

Hence, the US and UK’s show of humanitarianism is an instrument, as it was during the occupation, to exert political leverage over Afghanistan. Indeed, under the NATO-backed military operation launched in 2001 in the name of the “War on Terror”, the Bush administration justified its violent mission in Afghanistan in part to “save Afghan women” from the Taliban.

It became clear fairly quickly that Afghan women were just a pawn in the game of Western imperialists, who needed a moral justification for their immoral operation. Indeed, ironically, the US and Allied forces generated more insecurity for Afghan women through military violence, and as observed by researcher Meryem Lakhdar, contributed to the Taliban’s uprising by stimulating an anti-imperialist sentiment which encouraged Afghans to accept the Taliban as a more effective governing body.  

Consequently, far from “saving Afghan women”, a policy of indiscriminate violence combined with a systematic negligence of the socio-cultural barriers to gender equality, a concept perceived by many Afghans as a Western doctrine forcibly imposed on them, generated the socio-political circumstances for the Taliban to rise to power and further undermine women’s rights.

Afghan women on the frontline against the Taliban

Whilst Western advocates for the liberation of Afghan women cannot be trusted to restore justice for them, there is hope to be found in the strength of Afghan women themselves, who are actively resisting the Taliban in every aspect of their daily lives.

The “Bread, Work, Freedom” movement is a prime example of Afghan women demanding their right to work in light of the Taliban’s restrictions on employment for women. Despite their freedom of movement having been restricted, many women have set up their own microbusinesses at home and continue to manage them online.

The ban on education for women beyond the primary age has led to the launch of secret online schools and Universities for Afghan women to continue with their studies. Nine to Noon shares the story of a young Afghan woman, Zuhal, who set up an online University after she was forced to give up on her dream of becoming a doctor with the revival of the Taliban. She believes that Afghan women must show the world that they are “strong and resilient” by confronting “this darkness with education” and building a future for themselves.

Beyond this, Afghan women and girls are speaking up online about their experiences, clashing with armed Taliban members in the streets and actively negotiating with local Taliban leaders. What’s more, women activists, women’s rights defenders and journalists are pushing for the UN to codify gender apartheid as a crime against humanity.

Achieving liberation: a two-way street

At the forefront of the fight for their rights, it is undeniable that the true liberators of Afghan women are Afghan women themselves. The role of the international community, and in particular of Western powers, in the liberation of Afghan women should be (and should always have been) to actively uphold human rights and support Afghan women as agents of their own future.

The former should be achieved by providing Afghan women and girls with legal routes to safety through the reinstatement and improvement of resettlement programmes and the restoration of humanitarian aid for NGOs in Afghanistan; the latter by channelling funds primarily towards women-led grassroots organisations, which can respond more adequately to the needs of the local community and include women’s voices in negotiations with the Taliban.

It is time that our governments stuck to their promises and values, and endorsed a complementary approach of this sort to ensure the dismantlement of the Taliban’s gender apartheid and to provide Afghan women with the necessary tools to shape their own futures.