March 28, 2024
Don’t Betray the Women of Afghanistan
Normalizing Relations With the Taliban Normalizes Female Suffering
A human rights calamity is unfolding in Afghanistan. Since retaking power in mid-2021, the Taliban have implemented more extreme policies against women than any other regime in the world. Taliban leaders have issued over 90 edicts limiting women’s rights: they have banned women and girls from attending university or school beyond the sixth grade, restricted their access to health care, prohibited them from leaving home without a male guardian, and revoked many of their social and legal protections. Every new restriction on Afghan women strengthens the Taliban’s dictatorial grip on the entire Afghan population and feeds extremism in a society already occupied by dozens of terrorist groups. Although the Taliban are fighting the terrorist group known as Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K), they allow some 20 other terrorist groups to operate freely in Afghan territory.
Normalizing relations with the Taliban before they reverse their anti-women policies would amount to pretending as if those two decades of progress never happened.
Yet even though Afghanistan is the only country in the world that prohibits women’s education, some analysts are urging the United States to normalize ties with the Taliban, including by reopening a U.S. embassy in the country. These proponents argue that by doing so, Washington would improve its ability to monitor assistance programs and engage with Taliban leaders in the country, including to press them to moderate their policies. But taking steps to normalize relations with the Taliban before their leaders halt their systematic persecution of women would be a gross betrayal of the millions of women and girls whose lives the United States helped to transform over two decades. During the Taliban’s previous stint in power, from 1996 to 2001, they closed schools to girls, forbade women to work, and targeted women with extreme forms of punishment, including public floggings and executions.
Read the full article from Foreign Affairs.
More from CNAS
-
Why Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran are teaming up
Video
Probably the most surprising thing about the war in Ukraine is that Russia is getting a ton of help. North Korea and Iran are sending it millions of rounds of ammunition and l...
By Andrea Kendall-Taylor
-
How to Revamp Chinese Students’ American Education
Commentary
The PRC today operates the largest and most sophisticated propaganda apparatus in human history....
By Bill Drexel & Grace Gao
-
U.S. military must reinforce Guam's crumbling infrastructure
Commentary
In Guam, one is quickly struck by the juxtaposition of crystal-clear waters with crumbling infrastructure and abandoned cars strewn across the small Pacific island. Following ...
By Taren Sylvester & Evan Wright
-
Understanding China-Philippines' dangerous South China Sea face-offs
Podcast
The situation in the South China Sea is more worrying than that in the Taiwan Strait, says Indo Pacific security expert Lisa Curtis, former top US official and now Senior Fell...
By Lisa Curtis
