During a recent TV special, a deputy minister of Afghanistan’s Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice referred to the closure of high schools and colleges for female students as a “minor issue” that the “Americans and Europeans have concentrated on” at the expense of a much more pressing one: the recognition of the Islamic Emirate as the official government of the country.
“When our teachers, students, and elders speak in the media, they focus only on female education,” Sayed Ahmad Shahidkhil said, suggesting that Afghan people should instead “concentrate on the issue of recognition, as this is our solid right”.
The two issues, however, are inextricably linked: Top US officials, senior international aid figures, and others have all suggested that progress on the former is likely to encourage progress on the latter.
Shahidkhil’s comments came in the lead-up to two days of UN-led talks between the Islamic Emirate and a group of international envoys from up to 25 countries in Qatar. It is the third such meeting, but the first that Taliban officials have attended.
Condemned by rights activists for not inviting any Afghan women to the talks – which wrap up today in Doha – the UN insisted it was a step-by-step process and that women’s rights would be brought up during the discussions.
It also went to great pains to manage expectations. “This is not a meeting about recognition. This is not a meeting to lead to recognition... Having engagement doesn't mean recognition,” UN Undersecretary-General Rosemary DiCarlo told reporters. “This isn't about the Taliban. This is about Afghanistan and the people.”
The Taliban, meanwhile, have insisted that matters around the rights and education of women and girls are “domestic issues” that should be left to the Afghan people themselves.
"The issue of women's participation in this meeting was that no one other than the Islamic Emirate, which is a system, should represent Afghanistan… It is better that whatever we do inside the country is among ourselves, but outside, we should be united as a single Afghan," Zabihullah Mujahid, spokesperson for the Islamic Emirate government, told a press conference in Doha.
Calls for change from inside Afghanistan
As much as some Taliban officials, including those whose own daughters are currently studying abroad, may insist that the reopening of all schools to female students is not a pressing matter for the Afghan people, the facts show otherwise.
Since the Islamic Emirate returned to power in August 2021, elders in Paktia, Badghis, Kandahar, Faryab, Uruzgan, and Parwan provinces have all called for girls’ high schools to be reopened.
After the Taliban-led government announced the closure of universities for women in December 2022, male university students in the eastern province of Nangarhar walked out on their exams and called on women to be allowed back in. In Kabul, a group of female students staged a demonstration outside the gates of Kabul University when their male counterparts resumed their studies without them.
In the southeastern province of Paktia, where girls’ high schools briefly reopened in 2022, dozens of school-aged girls took to the streets of the provincial capital, Gardez, to protest the Taliban’s reclosing of their schools.
The span of these movements and calls – across the country and including some of Afghanistan’s most populous provinces – is proof that restricting women and girls from getting an education is in fact a pressing issue for the Afghan people.
Rather than figures like Shahidkhil seeming to look down on this “focus”, the continual raising of this issue in the media should be a clear sign that Afghan people, regardless of geography, care deeply about the education rights of their daughters and sisters.
After all, Shahidkhil’s statement was in response to a male law student who asked if the Islamic Emirate had “an alternative for the future crisis due to a lack of female teachers and doctors” – seen as a direct result if the limitations on female education continue.
The issue keeps coming up too in the Afghan media.
When Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob Mujahid, the acting defence minister and son of Taliban founder Mullah Omar, gave his first face-to-face TV interview last June, he was asked a very similar question about female education by an audience member.
Again, the fact that these men were willing to go on national television in Kabul and put themselves at risk by posing these questions to high-ranking officials of the Islamic Emirate – after a well-known education activist was imprisoned on unclear grounds for seven months – should make it clear that this issue isn’t simply going to fade into the background for the Afghan people.
The desperate search for alternatives
Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and many Afghan families are finding any way they can to send their daughters to study abroad.
This is despite a long list of considerable obstacles, including: the ongoing economic crisis, the difficulties Afghans face in securing foreign visas, and Islamic Emirate restrictions that mean girls and women are unable to travel abroad without a male relative. These limitations come with great hardships and often introduce geographical barriers between family members.
There are those parents who send their daughters to Pakistan and Iran to live with relatives while they continue to live in Afghanistan in order to fund their education abroad – even when their daughters risk deportation.
Schools in the Iranian city of Mashhad, across the border from Afghanistan’s Herat province, have reported the enrollment of hundreds of Afghan girls since mid-2022. These include families who have paid hundreds of dollars to people smugglers, and whose daughters and sisters must evade Iranian border guards and gangs who have been accused of shooting and torturing Afghans trying to cross the border.
Then there are those parents who send their daughters to Pakistan and Iran to live with relatives while they continue to live in Afghanistan in order to fund their education abroad – even when their daughters risk deportation.
Islamic Emirate officials can label it an “internal” matter for Afghans themselves to settle, but the Afghan people have spoken in their words and actions, including finding ways to continue providing informal education to girls and women within the country.
And as much as some officials try to minimise the issue, others insist on the importance of quality education for their own children, especially given the fact that during the 20-year rule of the previous Western-backed government, 3.7 million children were out of school due to insecurity, corruption, and social restrictions. Even during that period, 60% of the children not attending schools were girls.
Likewise, several Islamic Emirate officials have made public statements in support of education for all, saying that denying it to any segment of society is “an oppression” and insisting that their “ministers are in favour of” reopening schools.
Earlier this week, education officials in the northwestern province of Faryab stressed how Afghan “society needs both modern sciences and religious sciences”.
When pledging their commitment to education, officials often point to the fact that madrasas (religious schools) remain open for students of all ages, including 380 for girls only, and that private courses and informal home schools still continue to operate.
A self-defeating logic
Even if some Islamic Emirate officials fail to see the importance of the existing restrictions, the huge impact of keeping at least 1.5 million girls from secondary education for more than 1,000 days is abundantly clear.
According to the UN, it has cost Afghanistan more than $5.4 billion, about 2.5% of the nation’s GDP. By mid-2022, the restrictions had already led to a 21% decrease in female employment.
But the greatest irony in the Taliban’s insistence that the education restrictions aren’t a major issue is that, for the international community, from whom the Islamic Emirate continues to seek recognition, the rights of all girls and women in Afghanistan to access education is clearly a priority.
When I spoke to the chargé d'affaires of the US mission to Afghanistan last April, I asked how often her Doha-based team brings up the issue of female education during their interactions with Islamic Emirate officials. She said, simply, “Every time.”
Karen Decker added that reopening the doors of all schools and universities to girls and women was “the only way [the Taliban] get out from under this international attention”.
And she went on to say that one way for the Islamic Emirate to ensure it doesn’t need to rely on foreign countries to prop up the Afghan economy is to reopen the schools and to allow women to return to the entirety of the workforce.
These messages don’t just come from Washington. As Afghanistan is currently the only country in the world where girls and women aren’t allowed to study beyond the sixth grade, the condemnation has been fairly universal.
Last year, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) held a meeting to discuss its member states’ concerns over the closure of universities to women in Afghanistan. And the overall restrictions on female education have been criticised by Qatar, Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates – all countries that have hosted high-level Islamic Emirate officials or allowed for their diplomats to serve in embassies and consulates.
Even Tehran and Beijing, both of which have become close allies of the Taliban-led government, issued a joint statement calling on the Islamic Emirate to “cancel all discriminatory measures against women”.
As Decker told me in April: “You need a workforce that's capable of meeting the challenges in Afghanistan. And you need a government that reflects all Afghanistan... These are conversations we have over and over and over again with them.”
Edited by Andrew Gully.
