“In this instance, should those who believe in the rights of women sit down with those who do not, potentially risking legitimizing groups like the Taliban, in the hope that through dialogue they can influence them?”
There is a shrine in the village of Karez, 50 miles to the northwest of Kandahar City in Afghanistan, the land the West is trying to forget. It commemorates a hero who rallied the Pashtun fighters during the Battle of Maiwand in 1880, one of the key battles of the Second Anglo-Afghan War, a war fought by British-Indian forces attempting to keep Afghanistan free from Russian influence. According to folklore, a hero took the Afghan flag after the flag-bearer had fallen and urged the Pashtun warriors on. Today, there are still schools, clinics, and other public institutions in Afghanistan named after this brave Pashtun. This hero, credited in decisively swinging the battle, was a woman. And she became known as Malalai of Maiwand. She is the spiritual predecessor of the many brave female soldiers, policewomen, and civil servants who worked alongside coalition forces, such as those in the Female Tactical Platoon, who partnered with American special forces, searching and questioning women and children on high-risk nighttime missions.
However, most of the platoon has now resettled in the United States, and the Afghan delegation attending the recent United Nations (UN) conference on Afghanistan in Doha, Qatar, from June 30th to July 1st, did not contain any women. Afghanistan was represented by members of the Taliban, who have brought in a raft of restrictions on women, including bans on the education of girls, bans on being out in public without a male escort, and decrees on strict dress codes. The conference occurred days after Afghan women accused the Taliban of sexual assault after arrests for “bad hijab.” Whether to include the Taliban in meetings set up to advance international engagement on Afghanistan raises important questions, ones made even more important due to the geo-political transition we are living through.
The fragmenting of the prevailing system of international rules-based order that emerged from the nuclear ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the signing of death warrants in Nuremberg, built on the foundations of the United Nations Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is accelerating. We are moving into a multi-matrixed world, in which states are developing complex new relationships with various and sometimes contradictory partners on security, trade, and energy. Alliances are entered into with both states and non-state actors. At the same time, the last prophets espousing the hubristic belief that Western democratic liberalism is the single best way of living (and will be adopted by all who are exposed to it) are now preaching to empty benches. Surviving in this multi-matrixed world will bring interests and values into conflict, as well as force harsh calculations. Foreign policy realists will assert that now—more than ever—we must deal with those whose values come into conflict with ours, while some will, all the while, argue that our supposed values have always been lightly held when it comes to Western foreign policy. In this instance, should those who believe in the rights of women sit down with those who do not, potentially risking legitimizing groups like the Taliban, in the hope that through dialogue they can influence them?
One experienced campaigner for women’s rights who thinks dialogue is the best approach is Sunita Viswanath. Viswanath, who lives in the United States, is the co-founder of Women for Afghan Women. When she visited Afghanistan in 2022, she met with the leader of a women’s non-governmental organization (NGO). This aid worker, whose name is withheld for her safety, opposed the Taliban but recognized that it was necessary to negotiate with the group to secure the safety of the women her charity supports. During the visit, she spoke of her awareness that things could change quickly, and, since then, they certainly have. In December of that year, women were banned from working in NGOs. In 2023, women were banned by the Taliban from working with UN agencies. Viswanath was told by the aid worker, “Whatever else they may be, the Taliban are Afghan…they gave us back our dignity, and we are no longer an occupied land.” While going on to express her pessimism and concerns for her safety she indicated, “I am glad that we Afghans will finally have the fight we need to have amongst ourselves. My Islam gives me all the rights I need. Theirs takes my rights away. Which Islam will win? We will see.”
Viswanath has urged the United States and the Taliban to engage in dialogue. Because the Afghan people are left with little choice now but to accept Taliban rule, the West ought to stand with Afghans as they have difficult conversations and figure out which version of Islam will win out in Afghanistan, she argues. The UN emphasizes that the Doha conference is part of a process of engagement and does not imply normalization or recognition of the Taliban. The hope on the part of organizers is that this process moves Afghanistan to a place where it meets international obligations, including crucially when it comes to the rights of women.
Viswanath believes sanctions, which include asset freezes and travel restrictions, benefit the most extreme strains with the Taliban, strengthening anti-Western feeling and silencing more moderate influences. In Doha, the Taliban repeatedly pushed for the easing of sanctions that have been in place since 1999. The Taliban is separated into multiple factions. Some are political strategists who have been in exile for decades. Others are uneducated fighters from rural areas. Some are hardline Islamists, and others are young men concerned more about their TikTok profiles and acquiring the latest iPhone than religion or governance. All are part of a complex web of tribal allegiances that are more important than national loyalty. It is likely that under the pressure of the dire economic and humanitarian conditions this uneasy alliance will fracture leading to another cycle of violence.
Not everyone agrees with Viswanath. The Purple Saturdays Movement, a grassroots campaign advocating for the rights and freedoms of Afghan women founded in 2021, has issued a strong condemnation of the conference. In an email exchange (due to security threats, their members cannot conduct interviews online) with Aisha from the movement she told me that the conference was viewed by many of her colleagues as a step toward legitimizing the Taliban. (1) Purple Saturdays wants to send a clear and unequivocal message to the UN and the global community: “Do not whitewash the Taliban.” As Fawzia Koofi, a women’s rights activist who was the first female vice president of the Afghan Parliament, put it in a recent Guardian op-ed, “by excluding women’s participation at the Doha meeting, the UN and others in the international community have enabled the Taliban to try to silence our voices outside Afghanistan, too.”
A perceived lack of “respectability” for women can lead to death. The more conservative Taliban components enforce a misogynistic pre-Islamic honor-based culture (Pakhtunwali) and a strict Deobandi interpretation of Islamic law. Life for a woman in Afghanistan often involves a dangerous dance around honor and respectability. The dance obscures the gap between what she lets the society around her see and who she really wants to be. For those that do not do the dance and instead defy the fundamentalist ideals of respectability, the consequences can be severe. There is a narrative that the women of Afghanistan are passive victims, silent to their fate from beyond the veil; however, that has never been the case and is not the case today.
In December of 2020, a journalist and women’s rights campaigner was gunned down in eastern Afghanistan, just one in a string of targeted killings. She was called Malala Maiwand, named after the folk hero. She was killed on her morning commute to work as a reporter in Jalalabad. Her death came a month after Elyas Dayee, a leading journalist in Helmand, and Yama Siawash, a well-known former television news presenter in Kabul, were killed in separate car bombings. This violence was clearly a deliberate attempt to silence prominent female voices in journalism. A survey by Reporters Without Borders, found that fewer than 100 women remained working in Afghan media after the Taliban returned, noting that of the 510 women who used to work for eight of the biggest media outlets and press groups, only 76 (including 39 journalists) were still doing so. This number has undoubtedly shrunk further since the survey was conducted. Yet, despite the risk to their lives some still are refusing to be silenced.
Artist Rada Akbar encourages the world to see the strength in Afghan women. Her work documents female resistance to the Taliban. Her celebration of Afghan women, called “Abarzanan” (“Superwomen”), features Malalai Kakar, a police officer who fought against crimes committed against women. It also includes Khalida Popal, a female soccer player who secretly played in the late 1990s and later spearheaded efforts to start a women’s national team. The exhibition takes inspiration from the 12th-century empress Gawhar Shad, who promoted the arts. Even before the Taliban returned, Akbar would have to ask herself, “Will I be alive tomorrow?” “By killing some of us, they will force the rest of us to be silent” she said. When the Taliban returned, Akbar was evacuated to France.
Sharia law outlaws visual representations of humans and deities, prompting the Taliban’s destruction of the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001. In 2021, the Taliban began destroying the graffiti art of Shamsia Hassani, famous for her female empowerment pieces. Like Akbar, Hassani is trying to change public perception of Afghan women, hoping to convey their strength. Her graffiti pieces typically feature a young woman with closed eyes. Before 2021, this young woman could be found all over the walls of Kabul. As the risk of using the buildings of the city increased, Hassani began to use photographs of buildings, instead of the buildings themselves, as the canvas for her art, in what she called her “Dreaming Graffiti” project.
The Pashtun people, long before the Taliban, used another art form to express resistance and document the lives of Afghan women: the oral tradition of couplets known as landays. In the legend it was a landay that Malalai used to rally the Pashtun warriors at Maiwand. Landays are sung aloud, lilting from word to word in a kind of two-line lullaby that can belie the acerbic nature of their content. They are often witty, even lewd. They deal with the most profound and existential issues facing Afghan society, both in the past and in the present. Older landays are reworked to include references to drones, the Internet, and mobile telephones. While the context changes the common truths remain common across the ages. They deal with war; separation and migration; tribal and national pride; grief, and love. They express anger, sadness, humor, love, and longing.
Throughout the Taliban’s rule from 1996 to 2001 and the post-2001 war, female poetry groups met in secret, at great risk, to recite landays.
Mirman Baheer, a literary organization in Kabul, encouraged women via radio to call in from all over Afghanistan. In 2010, a poet using the name Rahila Muska called from a hospital in Kandahar. After discovering her poems, her brothers had beaten her for bringing dishonor to their family. She burned herself in protest and died soon after. These women are keeping alive a key part of their culture and recording a history of Afghanistan that will not be found in the memoirs of soldiers and Western state builders. They are some of the thousands of small acts of resistance happening out of our sight. This now also includes the teachers secretly holding classes for girls in light of new restrictions on educating girls and women.
After Razia Barakzai was told her government job was over, she knew she should protest and be heard. Since then, she has been actively involved in marches in Kabul, where countless women have demanded the right to work and receive an education. She was one of the women behind #AfghanWomenExist, which highlights that fear is driving Afghan women away from social media. It is not just in physical space where Afghan women are being silenced but also fighting back. Aisha tells me that Purple Saturdays uses social media platforms to highlight human rights protests and articles. This allows them to bypass traditional media channels and reach a global audience directly, and to do so using encrypted messaging that enables activists to communicate without fear of reprisal.
In a multi-matrixed world, it will be tempting to place interests over values. It is, however, key that those who represent international organizations and governments understand that our interests are determined as much by our core values as they are our need for security and economic growth. At the same time, we should be pragmatic enough to recognize that there is a difference between dialogue and normalization, and there are as many ways to live as there are people. Difficult trade-offs are often necessary. Without talking with the Taliban, aid agencies cannot operate. And if they cannot operate, the situation will worsen, and Afghanistan will become even more closed off. When asking these questions, we should be mindful that the focus does not shift from those whose voices are most important to self-indulgent hand-wringing that shifts the focus back to ourselves. As such, I ask Aisha what those outside of Afghanistan can do, and she tells me: “…only a few organizations are actively supporting Afghan women from outside the country. This support, while invaluable, is not enough.” She believes that more international organizations need to step up and join the effort to address the challenges faced by Afghan women. For the rest of us, at a minimum, we can seek out these brave voices, listen to them, and amplify them. Speaking of her fellow protestors, Barakzai states: “The true owners of this country are these warrior women, who are like a lamp in the darkest days.”
In the words of artist Omaid Sharifi, the Taliban is “afraid of two major things, art and the women of Afghanistan.” By listening to the latter, and witnessing the former, we ensure voices others try to silence are heard.
Andy Owen is a former soldier who writes about the philosophy and ethics of war, as well as geopolitics. He has been published in TIME, Aeon, The Spectator, The New European, and The Critic. His fictionalized memoir, Land of the Blind, which tells the story of the intelligence war in Afghanistan, was released earlier this year.
Endnotes
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Her last name has been withheld to protect her safety.
