Since the return of the Islamic Emirate, Afghanistan’s already fragile healthcare system has deteriorated, with stark inequalities for women and rural populations. The system faces a severe lack of funding, inadequate infrastructure and a critical shortage of qualified professionals, which has been exacerbated by prohibitions targeting women since 2021. These failings are felt most acutely in rural areas, where resources were already limited. With the population’s health hanging in the balance, Jelena Bjelica and the AAN team reached out to rural women in 19 provinces to gain their insights on the healthcare services available in their area and their ability to access them. The women highlighted numerous challenges, including having to make the difficult journey to often distant district or provincial centres to receive treatment. Many women reported a scarcity of medicines and highlighted the financial burdens families face when caring for sick and frail members. The high cost of healthcare often leads to difficult decisions, such as women postponing their own visits to health centres and placing their trust in traditional cures, including herbal remedies and the use of amulets provided by local mullahs.You can preview the report online and download it by clicking here or the download button below.
Following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021, the country’s healthcare system shrank in terms of both the number of functioning health facilities and medical personnel. At its peak in the late 2010s, the system had comprised more than 3,000 health facilities. By 2024, this number had halved, with just over 1,500 still functioning. Since US President Donald Trump’s sudden order to stop US foreign aid on 20 January 2025, as of 18 March, an additional 206 health facilities have suspended their operations (ReliefWeb) Since 2021, the healthcare workforce shrank as some medical professionals left during the 2021 exodus of better qualified or better connected Afghans and as donors withdrew their on-budget support for the new authorities in Kabul.
The limited availability of health facilities across the country, coupled with staff shortages – particularly specialist doctors and female health workers – forces women to travel long distances in search of basic health services. In the midst of the ongoing economic crisis, families also have to find the financial resources to journey to distant provincial centres or even the capital to seek medical treatment.
In this context, a series of prohibitions targeting women promulgated by the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) since it re-took power in August 2021 has made independent travel difficult, and in some areas, impossible, especially over long distances. In particular, a ban instituted in December 2021 on women and girls travelling “long distances” without a mahram (a close male relative) is often implemented to women travelling independently at all. Along with several related restrictions that followed in 2022, easy access to healthcare for women has been rendered nearly impossible. These systematic prohibitions, coupled with traditional social barriers, have fostered a climate of fear and oppression, severely restricting women’s autonomy.
A headcount of how many Afghans accessed healthcare services in 2024 suggests that a deteriorating public health system, coupled with severe restrictions and an ongoing economic crisis, has resulted in only 4.1 million out of approximately 15 million Afghan women – less than a third – being able to access healthcare and that of those, most were accessing reproductive and maternal health-related services (ReliefWeb). That represented a decline: in 2023, about 4.55 million Afghan women accessed health services (UNOCHA).
The life expectancy for Afghan women has decreased in recent years. Not only are they living shorter lives, but they are spending fewer years in good health, according to World Health Organisation (WHO) data. In 2021, life expectancy at birth for women fell to 61 years, down from 63.2 in 2019 (WHO), while the healthy life expectancy for women dropped to 51.3 years in 2021, down from 52.8 years in 2019 (WHO).
The available data paints a grim picture concerning Afghan women’s well-being, yet rarely do we hear from women directly on this issue. Recognising this gap, our research aims to shed light on the situation by amplifying the voices of Afghan women.We interviewed 22 women living in rural areas across 19 provinces to gather their perspectives on the healthcare services available in their regions and their ability to access them.
This report offers first-hand accounts of what it means to be a woman seeking healthcare in rural Afghanistan today. It opens with two brief overviews based on desk research: the first is of the healthcare system in Afghanistan until August 2021 and the second is about the state of the healthcare system since the re-establishment of the Emirate. The research findings, which include extensive quotes from our interviewees, constitute the central and main part of the report.
Edited by Roxanna Shapour and Kate Clark
You can preview the report online and download it by clicking here or the download button below.
Statement by UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell on the third anniversary of the ban on secondary education for girls in Afghanistan
UNICEF/UNI764384/AziziOn February 10 2025, Ramzia*, 15, is drawing at home. She has been out of school for the past three and a half years. She was in eighth grade when girls were banned from school.
NEW YORK, 22 March 2025 – “As a new school year begins in Afghanistan, it marks three years since the start of the ban on girls’ secondary education. This decision continues to harm the future of millions of Afghan girls. If this ban persists until 2030, over four million girls will have been deprived of their right to education beyond primary school.
“The consequences for these girls – and for Afghanistan – are catastrophic.
“The ban negatively impacts the health system, the economy, and the future of the nation. With fewer girls receiving an education, girls face a higher risk of child marriage with negative repercussions on their well-being and health.
“In addition, the country will experience a shortage of qualified female health workers. This will endanger lives.
“With fewer female doctors and midwives, girls and women will not receive the medical treatment and support they need. We are estimating an additional 1,600 maternal deaths and over 3,500 infant deaths. These are not just numbers, they represent lives lost and families shattered.
“For over three years, the rights of girls in Afghanistan have been violated. All girls must be allowed to return to school now. If these capable, bright young girls continue to be denied an education, then the repercussions will last for generations. Afghanistan cannot leave half of its population behind.
“At UNICEF, we remain unwavering in our commitment to Afghan children – girls and boys. Despite the ban, we have provided access to education for 445,000 children through community-based learning—64 per cent of whom are girls. We are also empowering female teachers to ensure that girls have positive role models.
“We will continue to advocate for the right of every Afghan girl to receive an education, and we urge the de facto authorities to lift this ban immediately. Education is not just a fundamental right; it is the pathway to a healthier, more stable, and prosperous society.”
As new school year starts in Afghanistan, almost 400,000 more girls deprived of their right to education, bringing total to 2.2 million
The Atlantic
March 17, 2025
The stain of betrayal in Afghanistan is now on Republican hands.
Later this week, the Trump administration may impose travel restrictions on citizens from dozens of countries, supposedly because of security concerns. According to early reports, one of the countries on the “red” list, from which all travel would be banned, is Afghanistan. Sixty thousand exhaustively vetted Afghan visa applicants and refugees, who risked their lives alongside the Americans in their country as interpreters, drivers, soldiers, judges, and journalists, and who now face imprisonment, torture, and death at the hands of the Taliban, will have the golden doors to the United States shut in their face.
As the Taliban closed in on Kabul in the summer of 2021, then-Senator Marco Rubio co-authored a letter to President Joe Biden urging him to “ensure the safety and security of Afghans who have worked closely” with American intelligence agencies: “Abandoning these individuals” would be “a stain on our national conscience.” After the Afghan government fell and tens of thousands of Afghans rushed to the Kabul airport, trying desperately to be evacuated with the last American troops, Rubio excoriated Biden for leaving Afghan allies behind to be killed. Then-Representative Mike Waltz warned that “our local allies are being hunted down.” Kash Patel accused the Biden administration of “the stranding of US personnel and allies.” The Republican majority of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a damning report on the fall of Afghanistan, said that Biden’s “abandonment of our Afghan allies, who fought alongside the U.S. military against the Taliban—their brothers in arms—is a stain on [his] administration.”
As for then-ex-President Donald Trump, he was incredulous, telling Sean Hannity on Fox News: “We take the military out before we took our civilians out, and before we took the interpreters and others we want to try and help? But by the way, I’m America first. The Americans come out first. But we’re also going to help people that helped us.”
On Inauguration Day, President Trump signed executive orders pausing foreign aid and refugee processing. He turned off the flow of money to private agencies that helped Afghans start new lives in America and shut down the State Department office set up under Biden to oversee their resettlement. Since then, the number of Afghans able to enter the U.S. has dwindled to zero. The travel ban will make the halt official and permanent. All of the outrage at the Biden administration’s betrayal of our Afghan allies from the very Republicans who now command U.S. foreign policy will go down as sheer opportunism. The stain will be on them.
“All these fucking people had a lot to say about what was going on in August 2021,” says Shawn VanDiver, a Navy veteran who leads AfghanEvac, a coalition of organizations that help resettle Afghan allies in this country. Politically, Biden never recovered from the chaotic fall of Kabul and the terrible scenes at the airport, climaxing in the suicide bombing at Abbey Gate that killed 13 American service members and 170 Afghans. Biden deserved blame above all for failing to take seriously America’s obligation to vulnerable Afghans who had placed their trust in this country. But during the years following the debacle, AfghanEvac and other civil-society groups worked with the Biden administration to bring nearly 200,000 Afghans to America—a little-known fact that partly redeemed its failures. Now Trump is compounding Biden’s earlier sins, this time in cold blood.
VanDiver and his colleagues are scrambling to persuade their contacts inside the administration to exempt Afghans from the coming travel ban. Many of his military friends are stunned that the president they voted for is betraying Afghans they had to leave behind. “I wonder if President Trump knows that Stephen Miller is ruining his relationship with veterans because of what we’re doing to our Afghan allies,” he told me. According to VanDiver, Rubio and Waltz—now the secretary of state and the national security adviser, respectively—are sympathetic to the veterans’ appeal; but Miller, the hard-line homeland-security adviser, will have the final say with Trump.
Forty-five thousand Afghans have completed the onerous steps to qualify for Special Immigrant Visas as former employees of the U.S. government in Afghanistan and are ready to travel. Fifteen thousand more Afghans, most in Pakistan, have reached the end of refugee processing as close affiliates of the American war effort. They’ve been waiting through years of referrals, applications, interviews, medical exams, and security vetting. Some of them have plane tickets. Another 147,000 Afghans are well along in qualifying for Special Immigrant Visas.“We did make a promise as a nation to these people that if they stood beside the U.S. mission and worked with us, that they would have a pathway to come build lives here,” a State Department official, who requested anonymity because of a policy against speaking to journalists, told me. “If we don’t keep the promises we make to our wartime allies, then our standing globally should be questioned by any other future potential allies we might have.” Afghans who finally reach the United States, the official continued, “are so incredibly grateful to have the opportunity to be in this country. They believe in the promise of this country.”
One young Afghan couple—I’ll call them Farhad and Saman, because using their real names would expose them to danger—are both veterans of the Afghan special forces, and they spent years serving and fighting alongside U.S. Army Rangers and other special operators. After the American departure, they were hunted by Talibs and took shelter in safe houses around the country, while family members were harassed, arrested, and tortured. In 2023, with the help of a small group of American supporters, the couple crossed the border into Pakistan and found lodgings in Islamabad, where they waited with their small children for their refugee applications to be processed. Last summer they were interviewed by the U.S. embassy and passed their medical exams; but security screening took so long that, by the time it was completed, their medical exams had expired. On January 2 of this year, they passed their second medical exams and were told by the International Organization of Migration that they would soon depart for the United States. “But on January 24, we realized unfortunately that Donald Trump is in office and everything is stopped,” Farhad told me by phone. “It was at the very last minute, the last stage. I didn’t expect that this would happen. It made a very bad impact on me and my family.”
Recently, stepped-up Pakistani police patrols and raids made the couple flee Islamabad to another region. Their 3-year-old daughter and infant son don’t have visas, and Farhad’s and Saman’s visas expire on April 17, with no prospect of renewal. Fear of being stopped at a checkpoint keeps the family inside their small apartment almost all the time, while their daughter wonders when she’ll be able to start school. They ask neighbors to buy food for them at the bazaar. The Pakistani government has begun to issue warnings over loudspeakers at mosques that local people who rent property to Afghan refugees will face legal consequences. “I’m stressed that the U.S. government is not going to relocate us and will not help us to continue processing our case,” Farhad said. He has sent letters of inquiry to embassies of other countries, with no reply. “I’m worried that eventually somehow I’ll be deported to Afghanistan, and deportation means I’ll be caught by the Taliban and killed. My wife will not be excluded. She will face the same consequences. I’m overwhelmed sometimes when I think what will happen to my kids—they’ll be orphans. It’s too much for me to take in.”
When Republican leaders were shaming the Biden administration for abandoning this country’s Afghan allies, they sometimes used the military phrase brothers in arms. Now, as those same Republicans in the Trump administration are betraying the same Afghans all over again, Farhad used the phrase with me. “I fought like brothers in arms with the Americans in uniform for six years, shoulder to shoulder, everywhere,” he said. “If this travel ban happens, the question is, what about the six years of friendship and fighting together? What about helping your friends and allies? That’s the question I have.”
‘What About Six Years of Friendship and Fighting Together?’
Until recently, the Taliban was a movement that wrote little about itself, in contrast to others – especially foreigners, but also Afghans – who have written so much about them. This was rooted partly in their reticence to discuss their movement and partly in a need to focus on fighting, when social media was their primary focus as it drove their propaganda effort. However, since their return to power in August 2021, they have begun to pivot towards creating a narrative about themselves. The Islamic Emirate is deploying state resources to this end, supporting the publication of numerous new books. In this report, AAN’s Sharif Akram summarises nine books written by prominent Talibs published in the last three years and discusses the narratives that emerge from them and the image of the Taliban they try to project as a people’s movement grounded in faith.
A second part in this mini-series on Taliban narratives will look at films, documentaries and audiobooks.
Introduction
When we first came to Kabul in August 2021, people were terrified of us. They viewed us as strange creatures. I remember one man asking me if I was Afghan or Pakistani. Why? Because for twenty years, the media had been propagating lies about us. They portrayed us as Punjabis [Pakistanis], as brutal men with no respect for rules. We’d had no chance to speak for ourselves. People had been completely brainwashed. Now it’s necessary for people to know who we are and why we fought. These are the essential questions that the Emirate must answer.
These were the words of a Taliban official working in Kabul who spoke to the author in April 2023. He was expressing a common sentiment, that the movement had been, as another official, a member of the Islamic Emirate’s Cultural Commission explained to the author, “introduced to our people and the world by our enemies.” After two decades of ultimately successful insurgency, the Taliban have embarked on a different endeavour – creating narratives about themselves. This is an important milestone because, in terms of books and other publications, the Taliban have, until now, been viewed pretty solely from the perspectives of outside observers. Since coming to power again, they have felt the need to explain themselves to other Afghans, who are either unfamiliar with or hostile towards them. Hence, a cascade of books in Pashto, Dari and occasionally English have been published since August 2021 about the movement, its leaders and the war, all sponsored and promoted by the state.
That such writing was not done earlier is a function of what had to be prioritised, either running the country while continuing to fight the Northern Alliance, pre-2001, or organising rebellion and insurgency, thereafter. The world knew little about the movement on the eve of the United States invasion in 2001[1] and it maintained its reclusive nature after it launched its first attacks against the US in the early 2000s. Being secretive helped avoid enemies tracking them down, while enigma remained part of the Taliban ‘brand’. However, as the insurgency expanded and grew in strength and power, the Taliban did make sporadic attempts to record and archive their wartime experiences, detailing the lives of their fighters and the suffering of their families in the conflict, showing that they understood early on the importance of narratives in winning the war[2]While they remained focused on military warfare, the increasing effort they devoted to psychological warfare during the last decade of the insurgency represented a huge shift, perhaps inspired partly by similar efforts from jihadist groups elsewhere.
In countering the narratives of the Islamic Republic and US and NATO, and spreading their own propaganda in turn on social media, the Taliban had some successes (see for example this Empirical Studies of Conflict paper on Taliban’s use of social media). Their emphasis was, by necessity, very much on addressing immediate practical needs to do with the war effort, such as promoting their cause and focusing on the military aspect of the conflict, rather than on systematically documenting the history of the movement and the war it was fighting. In terms of documenting the insurgency at this time, their efforts were patchy and random and had limited influence on their intended audience. They were mainly led by a small group within the movement’s cultural commission (coupled with a separate and more resourceful media wing under the auspices of the Haqqanis). They had limited resources at their disposal and lived in constant fear of being targeted by US or NATO forces.
Since the re-capture of power in August 2021, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) has seized the opportunity to define itself through documenting its perspectives on the movement and the war and is putting resources into this effort. On 24 October 2024, the Ministry of Information and Culture announced that it had established a major new directorate under the name of the General Directorate for the Protection of Jihadi Values, which was tasked with documenting and safeguarding the history of the war. It will presumably have access to considerable state resources and build on the fragmented data previously collected by members of the Cultural Commission.
There have also been a number of books published by prominent Taliban members and supporters since August 2021 and these are the subject of this paper. The author has analysed the content of nine books that recount the history of the Taliban movement written by Talibs or their supporters, including its origins, the ideological and historical factors that led to its emergence, the fall of the Taliban’s first emirate in 2001 and what they see as their jihad against US and NATO forces.
This report opens with a summary of the books, before analysing their narratives. The author then discusses IEA attempts to construct an identity for their movement and the ways in which writers have documented the war they fought. The report also explores what lies behind these efforts to create the movement’s own narrative and how these narratives have been received and viewed by other Afghans.
All translations from the Pashto or Dari texts are by the author.
The books reviewed
Abdul Satar Saeed, Knowing the Emirate: A Brief Introduction To the Emirate and A Description of the Emirate, Kabul, Hurryat Publishing House, 2023 (Pashto and Dari)
This is the most significant work by the prominent Taliban writer, intellectual and poet, Abdul Satar Saeed. It systematically documents the history of the Emirate and the context from which it emerged. Knowing the Emirate has been widely distributed and promoted, and translated into Dari; it has been reprinted five times in the past two years, an extremely rare indication of popularity for a book published in Afghanistan. The author, writing in eloquent Pashto, provides an account of how the Taliban movement was formed, based on his first-hand observations and discussions with those involved. The book denies the allegations that the movement was created with the help of Pakistan and explains how the global and local political landscape influenced it early on. It delves into the organisational structure and political bases of the Taliban and portrays the group as having saved Afghanistan from disintegration caused by the civil war.
Muhajir Farahi, Twenty Years in Occupation: Memories of Jihad, second edition,Zahid Welfare Foundation, 2022 (Pashto, Dari and English)[3]
Muhajir Farahi, a prominent member of the Cultural Commission and current Deputy Minister of Information and Culture, here describes the activities of the Taliban during the early 2000s in Afghanistan’s southern region. It presents personal accounts of battles with a focus on the heroism of Taliban members. It also explores the tactics the Taliban employed against the US and the NATO coalition and describes the support of local communities for the insurgency. The book discusses the financial status of the movement and the channels through which it secured financial resources over the last two decades.
Shamsul Haq Samim, Malawi Said Muhammad Haqqani, unknown publisher, 2024 (Pashto)
This book looks at the life of Said Muhammad Haqqani, a senior Taliban leader from Kandahar. Haqqani held numerous roles within the Taliban during the first Emirate, including deputy foreign minister and later ambassador to Pakistan. In the formative years of the insurgency, he was the deputy head of the movement’s important Cultural Commission. The book is a collection of essays from scholars and writers on Haqqani’s life and accomplishments. The book was compiled and edited by Haqqani’s son, Shamsul Haq, and has been well received within Taliban circles. Zabihullah Mujahid, who was directly appointed and mentored by Haqqani as the insurgency’s spokesman, contributed a foreword to the work.
Abdul Satar Saeed, The Third Omar, Third Omar Publishing Agency, 2021 (Pashto and Dari)
Saeed documents the Taliban’s history through a biography of its first supreme leader, Mullah Omar. Saeed refers to Mullah Omar as the “third Omar,” after Omar ibn al-Khattab and Omar ibn Abdul Aziz, two Islamic caliphs renowned for their bravery and justice[4] The author said he started collecting the material for this book during the insurgency; it is primarily based on conversations with senior Taliban leaders who were comrades of Mullah Omar. The book traces Mullah Omar’s life, from his childhood to his death in Zabul. Saeed also included Mullah Omar’s public announcements, decrees and interviews and a chapter of reflections from those who knew him personally, including non-Afghan authors such as the Syrian Al Jazeera journalist, Tyseer Allouni, Egyptian Islamic scholar, Hani Al-Siba’i and the director of the famous Haqqania Madrasa in Pakistan, Mawlana Anwar ul-Haq.
Shuhrat Nangial, Great Reformer, Grand Warrior: From the Pulpit to the Battlefield, from Wars to Assemblies, Kabul, Jalal Foundation, 2022 (Pashto)
This book is by a renowned historian of the Afghan-Soviet war and former head of Jalaluddin Haqqani’s media wing during the 1980s and 1990s. It is published by the Jalal Foundation, which was established by the Haqqanis and works outside state structures. It explores the life of Jalaluddin Haqqani, founder of the so-called Haqqani network, tracing his life from childhood, focusing on his time as a jihadi commander during the Soviet occupation and later his role as a peace broker among the various factions of the mujahidin that were engaged in the civil war of the 1990s. The book not only emphasises Haqqani’s qualities as a military leader, but also portrays him as a mediator for peace. A grand ceremony launching the book was held at the Academy of Sciences, attended by numerous scholars of literature and history, many of whom wrote reviews of the work. Notably, it was not written by a single author but was a collaborative effort, with multiple contributors – including non-Taliban authors – sharing their impressions of Haqqani.
Javed Afghan, The Storyteller Herself Was Martyred: Stories of Tragedies, unknown publisher, 2023 (Pashto and Dari)
In his first book, Javed Afghan, the head of the state-run Afghan Film Organisation and a member of the Taliban’s Cultural Commission during the insurgency[5], recalls tales of night raids, drone strikes and Taliban heroism through first-hand personal stories collected from various provinces. The book offers perspectives from fighters and civilians, highlighting their struggles and sacrifices during the conflict. The stories in the book are often dramatic and emotional. They include stories from women describing their experiences during the war, as per the book’s title.
Javed Afghan, Behind thePrison Bars: The Battle for Liberation and Memories of Prison, unknown publisher, 2024 (Pashto)
This book captures the personal stories of Taliban members imprisoned during the insurgency, primarily in the notorious Bagram Prison, run until 2013 by the US military, which the author characterises as ‘Afghanistan’s Guantanamo’(see AAN’s dossier of reports on Bagram prison). It details their arrests and the harsh treatment they faced during their imprisonment. The narrative is designed to stir strong emotions, as it describes the torture and suffering endured by the prisoners. It also highlights the emotional strain on the families who visited them. The book features accounts of the imprisonment of several high-ranking Taliban figures, including member of the Political Commission Anas Haqqani, Deputy Chief of Army Staff Mali Khan Dzadran and IEA spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid.
Zia ul-Haq Hassan, The Morning After the Raid, unknown publisher, 2022 (Pashto and Dari)
This former Taliban fighter has written an autobiography describing his experiences during the insurgency in his home province of Wardak[6] The book describes the operations of US forces in Wardak, the killing and wounding of civilian and the bombing of homes. The second chapter focuses on the heroism of Taliban fighters and the third describes the ‘miracles’ attributed to the martyrs, recounting supernatural occurrences surrounding the deaths of Taliban fighters in Wardak.
Hasibullah Hewadmal, Stars That Have Fallen Out of the Orbit of Life: Biography, Deeds and Memories of Sheikhabad Valley’s Martyrs, Dajmir Dawoodzai Publishing, 2024 (Pashto)
Hewadmal, a resident of Wardak province who graduated from Literature and Human Sciences faculty of Laghman University and is currently a government employee, focuses on Taliban fighters who were killed during conflict in Shaikhabad a valley in Wardak’s Sayedbad district. The book details the backgrounds and memories of 165 fighters who were killed in the conflict. It explains their motives for joining the Taliban and focuses on their heroism before describing their deaths.
The emerging narratives
The nine books selected for this report can be divided into three groups. The first group comprises two works – Saeed’sKnowing the Emirate and Farahi’s Twenty Years of Occupation that deal with the history of the Emirate and the political history of the movement. The primary focus of these two books is how and why the Emirate was established and how it evolved.
Farahi’s book places emphasis on the Taliban’s status as a people’s movement, representing the Afghan people and supported by them:
In the initial days, we only had a few Russian-made Kalashnikovs, rockets and motorcycles. But as our jihad continued, our mujahedin received money from the people. They were helped by the mujahed nation.
Saeed’s book presents the Taliban as key players in the global geopolitical arena and emphasises their refusal to follow the US-led world order that emerged in the aftermath of the Cold War.
The Islamic Emirate arose during the peak of America’s global position at a time when, after its victory in the Gulf War, the US claimed there was a unipolar system and referred to the 21st century as ‘the American Century’. In the new global order of the United States, no system other than Western liberal democracy was allowed to hold power anywhere on Earth. In particular, the Islamic system, which had long been seen by the West as its primary rival, was not allowed to hold power.
He argues that the US’s hostility toward non-liberal and non-democratic ways of life, stemming from its position as the sole superpower, was a key factor behind its hostile stance towards the Taliban and eventual invasion of Afghanistan. This hostility arose because the first Islamic Emirate refused to adhere to the standards set by the West and instead chose to pursue an Islamic model of governance.
When [the US] saw the firm commitment of the Islamic Emirate to its religious principles and the implementation of sharia law, they began to oppose it. This opposition initially began with one-sided, poisonous propaganda and later escalated into the creation of political, economic and other challenges, alongside strategies aimed at isolating the Emirate. Human rights, women’s freedom, narcotic cultivation and other issues were used to criticise the Islamic Emirate.
Saeed considers the hosting of Osama bin Laden and the subsequent September 11 attacks as mere pretexts for the US to invade Afghanistan.
Before the Emirate’s rule, Sheikh Osama arrived in Afghanistan during the reign of Burhanuddin Rabbani, at the invitation of several jihadist commanders from Nangrahar and with the agreement of the Rabbani government. The US did not make much mention of this issue during the Rabbani government’s rule, but when Kabul and the eastern parts of the country fell under the rule of the Islamic Emirate, the US began pursuing this issue under the pretext of opposing the Emirate. They gave Sheikh Osama widespread attention and presented him as the greatest threat to the US and the world.
He gives his explanation as to why the first Emirate refused to hand Bin Laden to the US:
It stated that the US must first present evidence and documents to prove the allegations against Sheikh Osama. If he had indeed committed such actions that violated Islamic laws, then an Islamic government existed in Afghanistan with courts and legal procedures that could handle the case because no one is above the law. However, the US was arrogant and demanded that Sheikh Osama be handed over without any conditions or evidence. This demand was not in accordance with any legal standards.
The second group of books – Nangial’s Great Reformer, Grand Warrior, Saeed’s The Third Omar and Samim’s biography of Malawi Said Muhammad Haqqani – are histories of the movement told through the biographies of two prominent figures. These books are based on interviews with the Taliban leadership, personal observations, etc.
Nangial’s book is an attempt to portray Haqqani as a strong military commander who contributed greatly to the defeat of Soviets and later the US and NATO. It emphasises his actions both as a military commander and as a neutral person brokering a peace agreement among the warring mujahedin tanzims [political-military faction] in the 1990s. Nangial describes Haqqani as a unifying figure who did not seek to monopolise the jihad against the Soviets for a single tanzim, but sought to unite all mujahedin under a single cause.
Mullah Jalaluddin Haqqani organised the resistance and jihad not on an ideological or organisational level, but as a national Islamic uprising within the framework of a popular uprising. … Therefore, in the centre of [his] Dzadran tribe, no flag of any organisation or group was raised, no invitation was made in the name of a tanzim or a leader, no call for recruiting into a [particular] tanzim was heard. In this way, the jihad in the Dzadran region was protected from the harm of party politics and factionalism.
Nangial also attributes Haqqani’s war against the US to his unwavering belief in an independent Afghanistan, prompting him to take up arms against any invader, whether Soviet or American.
In Haqqani’s view, there is no good foreign invader, no matter if their slogans seem noble, appealing, or different. Their goals and essence are the same, and the outcome, even for their puppets in the countries they invade, is nothing but treachery, betrayal and hostility. For him, the meaning of any foreign invader in the dictionary of faith and belief is the same and resistance to them is an obligation. Fighting any foreign invader is an inseparable part of his faith and of his Afghan identity.
The Third Omar provides a comprehensive account of Mullah Omar’s life, portraying him as the leader who rescued Afghanistan from the chaos and civil war of the 1990s. It outlines the situation in Kandahar and across Afghanistan in 1994, detailing the brutality and oppression of the mujahedin factions. Mullah Omar’s rise to power is thus portrayed as the dawn of a calm and safe period in Afghanistan’s history after years of violent chaos. The book highlights that Mullah Omar’s decisions, both personally and politically, were guided by Islamic principles rather than “worldly or material” knowledge. The author notes:
Mullah Omar, as a true believer, was a man committed to the teachings of Islam, considering sharia the highest principle in both his personal and social life. During his rule, he would first evaluate governmental actions in the light of sharia, consulting Hanafi scholars on the permissibility or impermissibility of decisions. He would not take any action until he received a fatwa confirming its permissibility. In contrast, the decisions of contemporary political figures and groups are often driven by personal desires, reason, material gains, or research centres and they do not regard Allah’s religion and sharia as ultimate and credible sources.
The author attempts to portray Mullah Omar as a miraculous figure, whose limited religious and political knowledge proved to be no disadvantage because of his deep faith in God and commitment to sharia, which guided both his governance and the insurgency
As with the first group of books reviewed, the biography of Mullah Omar culminates in the defeat and decline of a global superpower and the victory of a pious and righteous movement’s over it. The idea of the Taliban as a ‘people’s movement’, based on strong faith in the divine, that defeated an evil empire. is noticeable here too.
The third and possibly most interesting group of books are the four based on oral histories and interviews with ‘ordinary people’. They include one autobiography. These books, especially those recalling the night raids, drone strikes and killings of civilians, could be accused of sensationalising the tragedies they present. They deal with the human side of the war, rather than its military aspect and aim to present the fight against the US and NATO as one in which the entire nation participated, not only the Taliban. In documenting the civilian casualties caused by US and NATO troops, the movement aims to expose what it sees as the hypocrisy of the US, in that the US used the rhetoric of human rights to condemn others whilst committing extreme violations of these rights itself. The Taliban, claimed the author of The Morning After the Raid, have exposed “the true side of the people who claim to have championed human rights and to be beacons of progress and development.”
The stories of civilians killed and the destruction of their homes and property are vividly portrayed in these books, which clearly implicate the US and Republic in targeting civilians. Here, again, the Taliban are presented as a people’s movement, a running narrative in all the books reviewed. To this end, these authors pay considerable attention to the support Afghans provided to the Taliban during the war. They recount many occasions in which civilians helped Taliban fighters evade night raids and search operations, gave them information on Afghan military movements and provided financial support.
The pain of Afghans who lost family members is another common theme. In The Storyteller Herself Was Martyred, the author recounts the following story:
The Afghan nation has experienced both bitter and sweet moments over the last two decades, but the bitterness was probably far greater. The price of blood became so devalued that an animal and a human became indistinguishable. Those who called themselves the leaders of the nation only showcased the good side while hiding resentments from the public. We heard the voices of people villages in Andar district [Ghazni province] and we now share these with you.
We were sitting with a number of elders in Gabari village. I asked the eldest, “Uncle, how much did your village suffer damage over the last 20 years?”
He fell silent when he heard my question and turned his face away. His silence continued; I thought some bad memories had probably made him unable to speak.
Another man who introduced himself as the son of the first elder said, “We were subject to dozens of raids and bombardments. Over 40 of our fellow villagers were martyred and a large number of others wounded.”
The author here recounts his entire conversation with the village elders. Moving from his position as outsider-interviewer, he becomes an active participant in the story, a technique that allows him both to express his feelings and share in the stories of others. This style, which is both personal and immersive, is popular in Pashto literature. The author of Behind the Prison Bars deploys a similar technique to narrate the story of a prisoner receiving a family visit:
After a brief silence, Qari Sahib [who was imprisoned in Bagram] said, “In my last visit, my little son, Rafiullah, came to see me. I don’t know if it was my seventeenth or eighteenth visit. He was very young when the Americans captured me, only about a year and a half old, but when I saw him this time, he had grown. When the translator came and said, “Your time is up, let’s go!” my son, who had grabbed hold of my prison clothes, asked, “Father, where are you going? I’m going with you too!”
I said, “I have to go!” and I cannot say what happened next. I cried even more, and for the first time, I saw tears in the guard’s eyes. The room became chaotic and I told my family I would be free soon, by the grace of God. About a month and a half later, I was released.”
As he finished his story, Qari Sahib’s voice changed and his tears became even more obvious.
I, too, was silent for a moment and then bade him farewell.
Alleged miracles performed by Taliban fighters are another recurrent theme in these works. The inclusion of these supernatural occurrences is intended to portray the fighters as divinely blessed and thus imply that their cause was divinely approved and supported. In The Morning After the Raid, the author claims that the blood of a Taliban fighter killed in conflict with US troops pooled on the ground and formed the word, ‘Allah’. Later, the author reports that a family who hosted Taliban fighters experienced many blessings: “The family said that when the mujahedin were there, there was abundance in everything; even the sheep and cows gave milk more than normal.”
Women are also mentioned in the books, although only as wives, daughters or mothers and never as fighters. The author of The Morning After the Raid, for example, recalls:
The invaders, after killing the father of an innocent family, turned their weapons on his two young daughters and gunned them down. The elder daughter of Mualim Nur Agha had recently become engaged in Goda Khil village and the marriage was planned for the following month. She had waited for the celebration of her wedding with many hopes and dreams, not knowing that the so-called defenders of human rights would not let her dreams come true. Her hands, that should have been painted with henna, were painted instead with her own blood.
Behind the Prison Bars, deals with the tales of prisoners and their experiences of torture.
During the Western invasion, the biggest human rights defenders of the world (!), America and its allies, built prisons in and outside of Afghanistan such as Abu Gharib, Guantanamo, Bagram, Pul-e Charkhi, 90 and 40 directorates [of the NDS} and many other torture houses in provinces and capitals in order to detain the Afghan Muslim youth, to torture, beat and imprison the defenders of Islamic values, Afghan traditions and national norms. Due to the massive torture, many of the prisoners went mad. Their mental health would be severely damaged and many, who had been caught during the raids, wished themselves dead.
What do the Taliban seek to achieve through these books?
The Taliban feel that history in Afghanistan has been highly politicised by previous regimes in power. This is now something the movement itself is now trying to counter. Those taking power – from the communists and mujahedin to the first and second Emirates to the Republic – have always rejected the legacy of their predecessors, labelling them as puppets or enemies of the nation. The Taliban now follow the same pattern, but with greater intensity, as one official explained:
There is no impartial history writing anywhere in the world. But Afghans have gone to extremes. The communists, who invited the Soviet occupation and imposed a foreign ideology, labelled freedom fighters as puppets and rebels, while they portrayed themselves as heroes. Then the Republic came and labelled the Emirate with the same names. They considered Amanullah Khan a hero for going against the norms of the people, while they themselves came [to power] on American tanks. They wrote books, made films and included this in school curriculums. This was very unfair.
One of the authors reviewed, Javed Afghan, writes:
It is a sad continuation of our historical mistakes that we have not documented the stories of the unjust invasions and their cruelties for future generations. I accept that Afghanistan has a 5,000-year-long history, but why haven’t we made fair efforts to preserve it? Why has our country been repeatedly invaded? Why are the stories of Afghan heroism, sacrifice and courage tied to unknown individuals?
How are these efforts viewed by the public?
The Islamic Emirate is actively seeking to shape the public’s perception of their history, particularly in relation to their conflict with the US-led coalition and the identity of their movement. They have not only been focused on documenting their version of history, but also on actively disseminating their newly polished narratives to the public.
One of their highest-profile initiatives has been book-reading competitions, organised by provincial Culture and Information Directorates since 2022. The Ministry of Education has also hosted similar competitions and seminars where participants would read a book assigned by the ministry and take a test on the material. Those with the highest scores were rewarded with various prizes, including cash, motorcycles and computers. These competitions have been held in nearly every province but seem to have been particularly frequent in areas where the Emirate lacks strong community support. In Panjshir province, the provincial Directorate Of Information and Culture organised such programmes not only in the provincial capital, Bazarak, but also in districts like Hesarak and Rukha where support for the National Resistance Front (NRF) has presented a problem for the Emirate.
Such book-reading competitions, along with major launch ceremonies for many of the books and high-quality printing (which is largely paid for by the state) are all part of a strategy to promote these newly published books to a larger and more diverse audience. One person who participated in a competition to read Saeed’s work, Introduction to the Emirate,said:
My perception about the Emirate had been different, but after reading this book, it changed. I understand what the Emirate is, why it was formed, whom it fought and why it rules Afghanistan. I really understand this. Like myself, most people sitting in this gathering may not have comprehended these issues. We want the Islamic Emirate to held more such programmes and explain its goals, strategy and why it is ruling. The Emirate fought for 20 years with basic weaponry against the most advanced militaries of secular states. The Emirate beat America and the 48 countries of NATO who never thought the Islamic Emirate would rule Afghanistan ever again.
However, based on conversations with booksellers in Kabul, these efforts have not yet been as successful as their architects hope. It appears their primary readership are Taliban members and their sympathisers. As one bookseller pointed out: “Most of the books produced by the Taliban are bought by people who look like the Taliban, or by the Taliban themselves. Very few non-Taliban, such as university students, purchase them.”
Several factors contribute to this limited readership. One significant issue is that most of the material is written in Pashto, and although there have been some attempts to expand into other languages, for example, Saeed’s book has been translated into Dari, the majority of the books are available only in Pashto. Secondly, the content is highly politicised and the authors are obviously closely aligned with the Taliban’s agenda, which appeals to Taliban supporters but is less attractive to others.
The situation is different in areas where the Taliban enjoy more support. For instance, Saeed’s book, of which over 5,000 copies were printed, sold well in some provinces in the south and east. A bookseller in Paktia province said he had sold 100 copies of Saeed’s Knowing the Emirate in less than a month, while in Kabul they still have copies left after a year.
As a general rule, as well, reading books is not a particularly popular pastime in Afghanistan, which is why the author will also be reviewing television documentaries and films, which get a wider audience. Nonetheless, written text are texts of ‘record’, more likely to be studied and to form part of what becomes accepted – or contested – history.
The importance of listening to Taliban voices (as well as others’)
The Taliban’s main narratives have been carefully crafted to challenge mainstream portrayals of the movement and present their struggle as righteous. They focus on countering dominant narratives that seek to undermine their cause, asserting that their fight was not only just, but necessary. At the heart of these narratives is a deep sense of their own moral integrity. They emphasise that this is a ‘true’ jihad, one that no one should doubt. They frame their own history through stories of heroism, sacrifice and resistance to oppressive tyranny that was so bad, it could not be ignored.
They have also tried to present their struggle as divinely approved. Through tales of miraculous events and descriptions of the piety of their leaders and fighters, they seek to convey that their armed struggle was not just a political act, but a sacred mission supported by higher forces. In contrast, they depict the West’s democratic ideals as hypocritical lies, the tools of an evil enemy. They argue that their cause is not only morally superior but also a necessary defence against this evil. They stress that theirs was a popular struggle, not the work of foreign powers or partisan self-interested groups. It was a national fight for freedom, led by local leaders deeply inspired by injustice and a desire to free their people.
Despite the Emirate’s efforts, the degree to which their narrative will be accepted by other Afghans remains to be seen. Javed Afghan, author of The Storyteller Herself Was Martyred, asks the same question:
Why can’t we stop the younger generation from embracing the culture of foreigners? Why are yesterday’s invaders and killers today’s heroes? The truth is, we have nurtured the garden, but we have been negligent in harvesting its fruits.
Most readers will be aware that it is important not to treat these writings as neutral history or objective journalism. In the same way as most other regimes and movements, the Taliban are driven by a desire to shape and control the narrative about themselves. Consequently, the books reviewed lack the critical distance needed to provide an objective account. For example, it is rare to find an acknowledgement in these texts of the death and suffering experienced by Afghan civilians due to the Taliban’s use of IEDs and suicide attacks.
When wars end, the victors write their story, focusing on their heroic acts, while the defeated are typically silenced. But it is often the civilians – the ones who suffer the most between the different sides – whose stories go untold. The war in Afghanistan is far from a simple story and no full account of the conflict can be written solely by one side. The Emirate’s narratives are a new thread in understanding Afghanistan, important because they have rarely been written down before, but still, one thread among many.
Edited by Jelena Bjelica, Letty Phillips and Kate Clark
References
References
↑1
The first books to shed some light on a reclusive movement were William Maley’s Fundamentalism Reborn? Afghanistan and the Taliban (1998), Ahmad Rashid’s Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (2000) and Antonio Giustozzi’s Afghanistan’s Endless War: State Failure, Regional Politics and the Rise of the Taliban (2001). Other important books published at a later date were Alex Strick Van Linschoten and Felix Kuehne, An Enemy we Created: The Myth of the Taliban-Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan and Anand Gopal’s No Good Men among the Living: America, the Taliban and the war through Afghan lenses. For a fuller list of books , especially those published at later dates, see AAN’s Bibliography.
↑2
To this end, the Taliban established a Cultural Commission (Farhangi Kamisun) in 2004 and tasked it with documenting alleged war crimes committed by US and Afghan government forces, countering the narratives of their enemies and disseminating information. From the early 2010s, the Taliban began broadcasting radio programmes, producing DVDs and running websites about themselves. Towards the end of the insurgency, members of the commission also began to work on a book about the life of their late amir and one of the movement’s founders, Mullah Muhammad Omar, which was completed just before the takeover in 2021.
↑3
The first edition of this book was published just a few months before the August takeover.
↑4
Omar ibn al-Khattab (r 634-44) was the second leader of the Muslim community (for Sunni Muslims) after the Prophet Muhammad and is known as ‘al-Faruq’ because of his discernment of right and wrong. Omar ibn Abdul Aziz was the eighth Umayyad caliph, ruling from Damascus (r 717-20) and is credited with establishing significant government reforms, making the administration more efficient and egalitarian.
↑5
Javed Afghan also played an active role in running the Taliban-owned radio station, Voice of Sharia, during the insurgency.
↑6
Hassan is also a former member of the Cultural Commission. He is currently serving as the director of the Invitation and Guidance department of the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice at the Paktika Police Headquarters.
Revisions:
This article was last updated on 15 Mar 2025
Taliban Narratives (1) Books: “Who we are and why we fought”
A number of new books recount the horror America created and then left in Afghanistan. Can anyone grasp the realities of occupation and the “war on terror” if they haven’t been on their receiving end?
The first time the Taliban asked Omari to place a bomb beneath a convoy of American soldiers, he was happy the detonator used a motorcycle battery rather than a cell phone battery because the latter often blew up in people’s faces. He buried the bomb in the sand moments before four American Humvees passed over it, and hiding in tall grass he watched as a door flew over his head and American bodies fell to the ground. It was 2011, he was sixteen, and he had been seeing Americans for seven years of what was then a ten-year occupation. The first time he saw them, they were friendly in their silly gear and armadillo backpacks, openly peeing on the side of the road; the next time, rounding up old men in black-and-white turbans, forcing them to kneel, and hitting them with the butts of their rifles; another time, pulling off the headscarf of an old woman who was begging to know why the Americans had detained her son.
But it was the buzzing of drones flying overhead that finally drove him to look for a way to join the Taliban and defeat the invaders. The drones left him “unable to sleep” and “foretold of night raids, of foreign soldiers who descended on ropes from the dark night sky,” dragging people away to one of the twenty-five detention sites in the country. Those people “quivered like children” when they came back, if they returned. Near the end of Sune Engel Rasmussen’s devastating book Twenty Years: Hope, War, and the Betrayal of an Afghan Generation, Omari, now in his twenties, is so traumatized by the American occupation and war that his brain periodically freezes. He can’t remember the words he wants to say.
Rasmussen learns these details of a young Talib’s experience because of his attention and precision but also because of the techniques of immersion journalism. This type of reporting requires journalists either to constantly shadow their subjects or to reconstruct their stories through long interviews and the obsessive accumulation of facts. It is a form viewed by many journalists as the pinnacle of the craft, one that elevates mere reportage to literature.
The major American works of immersion journalism—such as J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground or Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family—often center on pressing social issues like race or poverty or immigration, which means that the authors’ subjects are vulnerable people, ones the journalist knows society ignores or misunderstands. Foreign correspondents have similar instincts. They long to humanize—a word criticized as much as it is used—the people they have lived among and gotten to know, especially when those people are victims of an occupation or war. For many, there is perhaps a deeper hope: that the humanization of these foreigners will somehow make war against them less likely.
Rasmussen, a Danish-born correspondent for TheWall Street Journal, is now based in London covering European security. Before that he spent some ten years reporting from Kabul during the United States’ twenty-year war in Afghanistan. His Twenty Years joins an ever-growing body of work on the occupation, alongside Craig Whitlock’s The Afghanistan Papers, Carlotta Gall’s The Wrong Enemy, Carter Malkasian’s The American War in Afghanistan, Andrew North’s War and Peace and War, and Vanessa Gezari’s The Tender Soldier. This isn’t an unwelcome glut; America’s many failures in Afghanistan mean there is still so much to learn.
The books, in fact, seem in conversation with one another. Rasmussen’s follows Anand Gopal’s magnificent No Good Men Among the Living, in both chronology and intent. That book, published in 2014, was perhaps the first major work to show the war from the perspective of Afghans, and it was a rebuke to newspaper reportage driven by American announcements and talking points. Gopal’s Afghan voices offered a more scathing indictment of American malfeasance, but Rasmussen has the advantage of reporting up until the Americans’ August 2021 withdrawal. He can deliver a character such as Omari, who laughs at peeing American soldiers in year one and has brain damage by year twenty. His book promises the whole arc.
Like Gopal, Rasmussen provides an impressive range of figures to follow. His second primary character, Zahra, is Hazara, part of the country’s Shia minority; her family had fled to Iran during the Afghan wars in the 1990s, twelve days after she was born, and returned after the American invasion. Omari’s story is a battle for “national self-determination,” Rasmussen writes, but Zahra’s is a “personal war against the conservative norms of her society,” though these clichés fall away as the book progresses. While still in Iran, Zahra’s loveless family married her off at thirteen to a man named Hussein, who raped her so brutally on their wedding night that she woke up in the hospital. Hussein, who also turned out to be an opium addict, beat her daily, even during her first pregnancy, causing physical and mental impairment to their child. Later, after they returned to Afghanistan and became a family of four, Hussein set fire to their one-room house while Zahra and her children were sleeping inside. When Zahra begged for a divorce, her children were taken from her and given to her in-laws (though eventually they were returned). A bout of depression almost killed her. Then she escaped—from the countryside to the new Kabul.
There, in the city Omari will later call “sin incarnate,” Zahra begins to work. She becomes a TV show host, a theater actor, an activist, and a published author. “Sometimes people deserve to be stars,” one of her colleagues says, “and she was a fucking star.” Rasmussen conveys the increasing disconnect between the more traditional countryside and the city through Zahra’s story, the way that those in Kabul tended to benefit more from the American presence than those in the provinces. But he never presents Zahra as simply a beneficiary of the Americans’ modernizing success. Her numerous and varied achievements seem particular to her will and talents, but also to the length of the occupation, which forces people to take on many roles in order to survive.
That is especially true of Fahim, who, at the time of the American invasion, worked at his father’s pharmacy in Kabul. His family was doing well enough that he was able to take extra lessons in English, so when a friend gets him an interview at the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Kabul, he is immediately hired and assigned to translate for a unit of Scottish soldiers, and then for the US Special Forces. Through these connections he learns that the Western forces have initiated a program called Afghan First, intended to buy goods for the occupation—bedsheets, boots, bottled water—from the Afghans themselves. Fahim and a friend get in on it, eventually winning, improbably, a $120 million contract to supply fuel. (American defense contractors were also making millions, of course.) This was the free-market economy the Americans implanted in Afghanistan, “before the country’s political and legal institutions were ready for it,” as Rasmussen writes. The absence of such institutions encouraged corruption, which undermined the new state.
Like Zahra, Rasmussen’s fourth major character, Parasto, was born outside Afghanistan, but when her family returns post-Taliban, they allow her to thrive within a relatively tolerant home. Her family practices an Islam different from the one practiced by the Talibs; where they see God as vengeful, Parasto, Rasmussen writes, is taught to see God “as kind, forgiving, and motivated by love.” Under the American regime, Parasto joins the 1.7 million Afghan girls going to school, and Rasmussen infuses her boundary-breaking with a sense of foreboding. She sits on the couch with her legs crossed like a tomboy, speaks loudly, and doesn’t care about boys. “If only you had been a boy,” her grandmother once said, but Parasto vastly prefers Beyoncé’s version, “If I Were a Boy.” She also loves Jane Austen, Orhan Pamuk, Che Guevara, and Ahmad Shah Massoud, the anti-Soviet and anti-Taliban resistance leader, and she dreams of joining the front lines. Instead she joins the “anti-corruption secretariat” in the office of President Ashraf Ghani, the second president of the rapidly disintegrating country.
This is how Rasmussen’s characters end up, by the time of the American departure—as a woman in the president’s office, a young man in the Taliban, a businessman benefiting from a wartime boondoggle, and a mother of two living a life the Taliban will surely destroy. Rasmussen may have intended the four to represent “the broader divisions running through Afghanistan since 2001,” but their unpredictable stories overwhelm such simplicities.
With each character, Rasmussen almost has to start all over again from the beginning, explaining how the Mujahideen rose up against the Soviet army in the 1980s, armed with surface-to-air missiles from the Americans; how after the Russian departure the country devolved into a bloody civil war; how the Taliban rose to cleanse the country of corruption, warlords, and vice, turning it into an Islamic emirate in 1996; how they enforced an unusual “ultraconservative interpretation of Islamic law,” sequestering women behind walls and inside the blue burka; how they allowed al-Qaeda safe harbor in caves, refusing to extradite Osama bin Laden even as he built training camps and hit American targets; how armed resistance by Tajik and Uzbek fighters in the Northern Alliance had begun to challenge the Taliban’s rule just before the attacks of September 11. The repetition of this history might seem like a flaw of the book, but in another way it’s haunting. The blue burka, the turbaned fighter, Ahmad Shah Massoud’s handsome face, that moonlike landscape—these images were once such a large part of our lives, and how strange it is now that they are gone.
In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, the Americans accumulated mistakes and crimes in the very first year, and those missteps damned the occupation for the next twenty. Many Afghans had fantasized about a new nation based on their own memories of a better time in their country rather than an imitation of the West. “For many Afghans, the arrival of the Americans and their NATO allies inspired hope of a return to a more liberal order of the past—in the 1970s,” Rasmussen writes. Omari’s father, who had once adopted the Mujahideen’s anti-Soviet, anti-imperialist stance before joining and quitting the Taliban, felt that “if the Americans could bring peace and prosperity to Afghanistan, he had no issue with them.”
But the Americans arrived with a crucial and possibly willful misunderstanding about the Taliban (and how much ignorance or spite caused the Americans’ blunders is always a question). The Americans believed that if the Taliban harbored international terrorists like al-Qaeda, that meant they were international terrorists, too. As Rasmussen writes, despite its anti-Western ideology, “the group had never carried out an attack against a Western country.” Some Talibs were even open to participating in a negotiated settlement with Hamid Karzai, the new interim president. The Americans refused this rapprochement. The Bush administration wanted to play the punisher. The Taliban escaped to Pakistan and waited.
Another major failure was not catching bin Laden. The Americans compounded this humiliation—after the humiliation of his September 11 attacks—by turning it into a vague crusade to prevent Afghanistan from again becoming a haven for terrorists. The pledge to prevent another September 11 would become the excuse to enter a forever war. The Americans “were there to hunt every last terrorist in the country,” Rasmussen writes, but bin Laden’s Arab fighters had disappeared, and “there were very few terrorists left to be found.” That left the Afghans, whom the Americans rounded up, often in alliance with rapacious Afghan warlords. This effort could be called clownish if it weren’t so deadly. In Gopal’s book, for example, the Americans keep confusing Muslim first and last names, hauling innocent people to prison at the Bagram Air Base and Guantánamo.
As the Afghan academic Amin Saikal writes in How to Lose a War: The Story of America’s Intervention in Afghanistan, a “sense of euphoria” in Washington muddled American strategy. Saikal is an emeritus professor of Middle Eastern and Central Asian history at Australian National University, as well as the brother of Mahmoud Saikal, Afghanistan’s representative to the United Nations between 2015 and 2019. How to Lose a War draws on sources including his brother and Karl Eikenberry, the US army general and ambassador to Afghanistan from 2009 to 2011. Readers may be skeptical of this influence, but Saikal’s central argument is a persuasive one: that the Americans’ twin messianic obsessions, promoting democracy and “destroying” terror, condemned the American enterprise from the start.
The Americans were so cocky, Saikal writes, that they initially waged war on the cheap, insisting on a “light footprint” approach. “By 2002, the Bush administration had spent $4.5 billion in Afghanistan,” Rasmussen notes. “Less than 10 percent went to recovery or even to building the new Afghan forces.” Money eventually flooded into the country in other ways, to private contractors or warlords turned magnates. “The money that did reach Afghans,” Rasmussen writes, “created an economic system based less on fair competition and merit than on corruption, nepotism, and the strong grip of old-time power brokers.” The Americans set Afghanistan up to be a nation of lawless grift, even as they shifted focus and military resources to the invasion of Iraq.
By the middle of the 2010s, under President Barack Obama, the “Afghan war” had reached its squalid stage. In Kabul warlords and businessmen lived in glitzy mansions, Shakira played on the TVs at the gyms, and journalists and aid workers got drunk in the gardens of various upscale restaurants. In the countryside, the Taliban mounted its comeback, and a reluctant Obama sent 30,000 new troops as part of General Stanley McChrystal’s counterterrorism surge. These were the years of night raids, bombed weddings, “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and soldiers peeing on Afghan corpses. In one incident, some soldiers at Bagram carelessly threw Qurans onto a pyre of trash, setting off riots. In another, the army sniper Robert Bales, who had done three tours in Iraq and been injured twice, got drunk on whiskey and Diet Coke, watched the revenge movie Man on Fire, and then went out and killed sixteen Afghan civilians. By the late 2010s foreigners traveled by helicopters because the roads were too dangerous. But there was a Cabaret feeling to it all—as the countryside became more dangerous, Kabul became more cosmopolitan.
Government corruption was by now endemic. Karzai’s own family members began to seem like bandits pulling off a heist (in fact his brother was involved in a bank heist). Both Rasmussen and Saikal criticize the Americans for insisting on a centralized system of government in a country of divided provinces and local leaders; the Americans could only imagine a government in their own image. They continued to pump more money into the country to sustain the erratic Karzai and then the ineffectual Ashraf Ghani, as well as a still-flailing Afghan military and police force. The Taliban, flourishing, bombed hotels and universities in Kabul. Then two new antagonists arrived: the Islamic State and Donald Trump.
In 2018 President Ghani, recognizing the Taliban as a “legitimate political stakeholder in Afghanistan,” invited them to peace talks. The Taliban rejected this offer, deciding instead to respond to overtures from the Trump administration. Representatives from the two agreed to meet in Doha alone, without the elected Afghan government. “The Americans had brought the war to Afghanistan draped in ornate language about democracy, nation-building, and human rights,” Rasmussen writes.
Now, in order to exit the war, they prioritized outreach to the Taliban over the autonomy of the Afghan government, which had been democratically elected—albeit in elections plagued by fraud—according to a constitution the United States had helped write.
The deal was made in February 2020, and the withdrawal deadline set for May 2021. Between the deal and May 2020—amid the pandemic—the Taliban went on the offensive, unleashing some 4,500 attacks.
It was President Joe Biden who “scrapped Trump’s original withdrawal date” and moved it to September 11, 2021, the twentieth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center. Rasmussen writes memorably that “the Americans were ready to hand [the Afghans] over to the Taliban according to a timetable that seemed, most of all, designed to serve American sentimentalism and public relations purposes.” In July of that year the Americans turned off the electricity at Bagram and slipped out of the country without warning. Yet the Americans kept promising the Afghan people, people like Parasto and Zahra and Fahim, that the Taliban would not storm Kabul, and everyone kept taking the Americans at their word, which makes Twenty Years’ final scenes even more terrifying. After all the Americans’ mistakes, these Afghans still believed in the lives they were living.
The problem with immersion journalism is its implication that it can tell the whole story, that the writers can fully know their characters if they do enough reporting, spend enough time. As a journalist myself, I am skeptical that anyone can fully access another’s experience. But I am even more skeptical that anyone can fully understand the realities of occupation or the “war on terror” if they haven’t themselves been on the receiving end of it. The facts may be the same, but the knowledge comes from a different place. That may have always been true, but I wonder if it’s truer now, with the emergence of new drone and booby-trap weaponry, and with the increasing extremity of wars between ruthless DIY terror groups and unhinged nuclear powers. Maybe only a specific population can fully convey what this era of hyperatrocity is like: the Iraqis, the Afghans, the Syrians, the Palestinians.
Rasmussen, to his credit, recognizes his limitations. By the end of Twenty Years he acknowledges the abyss between his imagination and the experiences of the people he writes about. As Kabul falls, he leaves us at the rim of the chasm, mid-terror, with no release or closure. I found this passage so painful I almost hated Rasmussen as much as I admired him for it. There is the businessman Fahim watching his fellow Afghans clinging to the wheels of departing airplanes, one falling from the sky. There is Omari, now on the battle sidelines, bored and useless (“At the end of the day, I’m nothing”), and Parasto, forced to leave her country (“All I am is ashes”). And there is Zahra, in heels on a Kabul street, who learned of the Taliban’s arrival and “took her shoes off and ran.”
Agreat shame of the withdrawal was the large number of Afghans associated with the occupation whom the Americans left behind. Many of them went to the chaotic Kabul airport every day trying to get on some random airplane, some of which had been sent by private equity investors or Hillary Clinton or foreign correspondents frantically pooling their resources to save their fixers, translators, drivers, and loved ones. “Two years after the fall of Kabul,” Rasmussen writes, “roughly 150,000 Afghans who failed to get evacuated were stuck in Kabul awaiting a decision on their SIV [Special Immigrant Visa] application.” Some died. In the six months after the fall, he writes, “at least five hundred former government officials and members of the Afghan security forces were killed or forcibly disappeared.” Hundreds of civilians were killed in the first year.
All of the statistics are startling. According to the Watson Institute at Brown University, the war in Afghanistan killed at least 240,000 people, a great majority of them Afghan and many of them civilians. Of that count, roughly 2,300 US service members were killed, as well as over five thousand allied soldiers and private contractors. Countless more civilians and combatants on all sides have been sentenced to lifelong injury and trauma. The US spent $145 billion to rebuild Afghanistan, more than they spent on the Marshall Plan after World War II (even adjusting for inflation), and a separate $837 billion for the military effort. When they left, they abandoned $7.2 billion worth of military equipment, weapons, drones, ammunition, jet fighters, and helicopters. After pumping all that money into the Afghan economy, one of the first things the Americans did on their way out was maintain sanctions on the Taliban and freeze their currency. Afghanistan “sunk into the biggest humanitarian crisis in its recorded history,” Saikal writes, and 95 to 98 percent of the country suffered from “record levels of hunger.”
As expected, the Taliban have reimposed what Saikal calls the “wholesale Islamization of the country according to its own particular Taliban-centric interpretation and application of Islam, which has no parallel in any other Muslim country.” Girls are banned from school after sixth grade. Women again need to be accompanied everywhere by a male relative. You can no longer play live music at your wedding. Kabul is no longer a “cosmopolitan” place.
In the countryside, however, “a more common mood was relief, tinged with profound loss.” The killing and “disproportionate American punishments,” like razing hamlets for dubious reasons, sent many people into the arms of the Taliban. Rasmussen writes poignantly of a pomegranate farm where, “for the first time since 2005, farmers could now water their fields at night,” which was important because it saved them water. It is in such details of basic survival that wars are lost, though the Americans likely never knew about the pomegranate farmers. Saikal recalls former secretary of defense Robert Gates writing in his 2014 autobiography, “We had learned virtually nothing about the place.”
Being privy to Rasmussen’s Afghan lives feels like a belated obligation, as does learning their perceptions of their occupiers. Parasto found bin Laden’s justification for killing Americans—that the Americans had been killing people for decades—morally abhorrent. But she also believed that Americans went to war on similarly errant grounds. She knew that Madeleine Albright once said the sanctions-induced deaths of half a million Iraqi children had been “worth it” to contain Saddam Hussein in the 1990s. She knew Barack Obama had argued in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech that war could be “not only necessary but morally justified,” and that he ordered a surge of troops into her country and launched a drone campaign that killed at least nine hundred civilians across the Middle East. Parasto drew the conclusion that, “like al-Qaeda, America justified the killing of civilians—even if unintentional—in pursuit of a bigger cause.”
Saikal, the Afghan academic, believes that bigger cause is American supremacy. He calls it a “doctrine of power” that “as the mightiest state on earth, the US should exert its economic and military power to rebuff its adversaries and export American democracy” to the world. The “subterranean geopolitical objective…was to target America’s main adversaries,” like Saddam Hussein. But the war in Iraq, for example, wasn’t only about Saddam, just as dropping the nuclear bomb wasn’t only about Japan. Invading Iraq was meant to turn it into a friendly ally that could then counter Iran, and to strengthen the US position, Saikal argues, “as the only global power, with the idea that the twenty-first century would be dominated by America, not any other power, particularly China.”
But those wars did embolden America’s adversaries—not only the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the Islamic State, but also Iran, Russia, and China. This thoroughly failed outcome may be why Rasmussen searches for a more abstract explanation for American decisions. “Modern American warfare has generally been waged not against states, but against ethereal dark forces and beliefs: for ‘freedom’ against ‘evil,’ light against darkness,” Rasmussen writes, which makes Americans sound less Christian than mentally ill: the Americans as killer mystics, deranged tarot card readers. Humanizing Afghans wouldn’t make a dent in a worldview that hardly seems to be about people at all.
The third anniversary of the Afghan withdrawal passed in August 2024 with little notice. It was obscured by the joyful Democratic convention, at which candidate Kamala Harris extolled her support for America as the world’s “most lethal fighting force,” making her opponent, Donald Trump, look almost like a peacenik. At the anniversary ceremony, President Biden commemorated the deaths of thirteen American soldiers who died during the withdrawal (more than 170 Afghans also died), a tragedy that had kicked off the long decline in his approval ratings. “From the deserts of Helmand to the mountains of Kunduz, and everywhere in between,” Biden said, “these women and men worked alongside our Afghan partners to protect our nation.” Until the end of his presidential term, while engaged in two new catastrophic wars in Gaza and Ukraine, Biden repeated that same mantra, that the goal of the war in Afghanistan had been to prevent another September 11. After reading Rasmussen’s book, it was startling to be told this bewildering war had anything to do with American safety. It is also illuminating to remember that our leaders imagine the price of American safety to be the ruination of so many other people’s lives.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban celebrated the anniversary with parades. Ordinary Afghans said they were simply happy that there is no more war, TheNew York Times reported. But the young fighters, ones similar to Omari, were restless in their “American-made combat boots,” looking for a place to go. “We are all ready to continue our jihad in Palestine!” one says in the article. “No, it’s Pakistan’s turn,” says another.
This Issue
March 13, 2025
Suzy Hansen is the author of Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World. (March 2025)
Progress on women’s rights and representation is stalling. And the prospects for improvement appear bleak
Forbidden from speaking outside their homes, Afghan women have used social media and the press to tell their stories. Unable to protest peacefully without facing violence from the authorities, women have embraced creative forms of resistance, depicting their experiences and demanding change in poetry, paintings, and film.
This year’s International Women’s Day is marked by a sense of foreboding, even despair. Progress on women’s rights and representation is stalling: the number of women in parliaments grew last year at the lowest rate in a generation, and the global financing gap for gender initiatives remains wide. At a time of widespread democratic backsliding – and with US President Donald Trump freezing foreign aid, including for gender initiatives – the prospects for improvement appear bleak.
No one understands the consequences of such setbacks better than women and girls in Afghanistan, where some of the world’s most severe gender-based rights violations are occurring. And yet, Afghan women also offer compelling reasons for hope and powerful motivation – especially for those of us who enjoy rights, freedoms, and opportunities they do not – to keep fighting.
Creative means of resistance and the need for support
Afghan women have long had to find imaginative ways to resist and circumvent harsh repression. In the late 1990s, as the Taliban consolidated control of the country and imposed regressive policies, women established underground schools, community centres, and health clinics. Since the Taliban’s return to power in 2021, Afghan women have renewed such initiatives. For example, they have set up secret schools, which girls – who are now prohibited from education past the sixth grade – can attend in person or online. Where such classes are not accessible, mothers often educate their daughters at home, using their phones or tablets to access the necessary materials.
Forbidden from speaking outside their homes, women have used social media and the press to tell their stories. Unable to protest peacefully without facing violence from the authorities, women have embraced creative forms of resistance, depicting their experiences and demanding change in poetry, paintings, and film. Sahra Mani’s moving documentary, Bread & Roses, which provides a glimpse into Afghan women’s efforts to resist Taliban repression, has earned international acclaim.
Admiring the courage or sympathising with the plight of Afghan women means little if we do nothing to keep them on the global agenda.
We are from Afghanistan, but we were fortunate to have the opportunity to restart our lives in a new country, where we can advocate for our sisters back home without fear for our personal safety. But the heroines of Bread & Roses, and countless other Afghan women activists, face mortal danger every day. It is thus imperative that we do not stop at listening to their stories. Admiring their courage or sympathising with their plight means little if we do nothing to keep them on the global agenda. That is why, at the upcoming United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), we will be calling on the international community to take three critical steps to support Afghan women.
First, Afghan refugees must have credible and timely options for safe and permanent resettlement. When the Taliban returned to power, hundreds of thousands of refugees – including Afghan nationals who had worked with American or NATO forces during the war – fled to neighbouring Pakistan, where they applied for their promised US visas. Many have waited for years for their chance at resettlement, often facing arbitrary detention and harassment in the meantime.
Far from accelerating this process, Trump has suspended the US Refugee Admissions Program. This has put Afghans at elevated risk of deportation – tantamount to a death sentence for many – by the Pakistani government, which has expressed frustration at the lengthy relocation timeframes. A credible pathway to permanent resettlement in safe locations must be established as soon as possible.
If the Taliban seek to deny women a seat at the table, as they have so far, the international community must push back.
Second, the international community must give Afghan women the resources they need to effect change within Afghanistan. Afghan women have the vision, tenacity, experience, and commitment needed to make a difference. But, since the Taliban’s return to power, donors have been afraid to support them. Far more financing must be provided to Afghan women-led programs, including those facilitating dialogue between Afghan women at home and in exile.
Finally, women – and civil society more broadly – must be included in any political dialogue or peace process related to Afghanistan. If the Taliban seek to deny women a seat at the table, as they have so far, the international community must push back. Afghanistan’s future, and the region’s stability, depends on it.
This year’s CSW meeting will mark the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, the world’s most progressive blueprint for advancing women’s rights. When it was created three decades ago, the women involved were filled with hope that the fight for gender equality had reached a turning point. But despite progress in some areas – including women’s labor force participation, political representation, and financial inclusion – the declaration’s promise remains unfulfilled. Now is the time to draw on the creativity, leadership, knowhow, and courage of a new generation of women activists – not least those in Afghanistan.
Living in the remote, mountainous Daikundi province in central Afghanistan, the Khawari family is part of the Hazara community, one of the most persecuted ethnic groups in the region. The family’s day-to-day life is coloured by tragedy: while enrolled at Kabul University, Zahra, the eldest daughter, killed herself after her thesis was repeatedly rejected by her supervisors. Named after an indigenous plant that survives in the harsh climate of the region, Ilyas Yourish and Shahrokh Bikaran’s searing film is anchored by the family’s resolute quest for justice.
From the beginning, Kamay contextualises Zahra’s death within a bloody history of ethnic violence. Back in the 19th century, more than half of the Hazara population were massacred during the reign of Abdur Rahman Khan. Nearly 200 years later, systematic brutality and discrimination continue, now with the Taliban as perpetrators. As the Khawari family make difficult journeys through rough country to Kabul, the film inhabits this atmosphere of claustrophobia and fear. The camera often gazes at the open road through the windscreen of a cramped car or bus, a recurring composition that embodies the uncertainties and dangers that pave the Khawaris’ path.
Alongside the biases of the justice system, Kamay emphasises the psychological toll endured by the tormented family, an anguish that no judicial documents can assuage. The voice of Freshta, Zahra’s younger sister, rings throughout the film. As she speaks to her departed sibling as if she were still alive, detailing her grief and her trepidation about going to college, Freshta’s contemplations are also directed towards the audience.
Encapsulating the beating heart of the film, Freshta’s unmoored thoughts convey the void left behind by trauma, a permanent wound that will be passed on from one generation to another.
We last published a dossier of reports about women in July 2021, just before that momentous event for Afghanistan, the collapse of the Islamic Republic and re-establishment of the Islamic Emirate. Those reports testified to how Afghan women’s efforts to overcome discrimination are nothing new. However, their struggles have only grown in magnitude as the Emirate has imposed increasingly tough restrictions on women and girls’ education, work, dress and movement. Typically, officials defend the rules by saying they are divinely ordained and any outside criticism is an interference in a domestic issue. The policies represent a sea change in how the Afghan state deals with its citizens. This dossier brings together our reports charting the experiences of women and girls since the takeover. It also features recent research on the perceptions of Afghan men towards the restrictions, as well as analysis both of aspects of international law that activists would like to see deployed against the Emirate and the international responses to Emirate policies on women.Our earlier dossier, Dossier XXX: Afghan Women’s Rights and the New Phase of the Conflict, was published on 29 July 2021.
In general, we try to include Afghan female experiences or views in all our reports, whatever the subject matter. However, we also publish reports dedicated to exploring the lives of women and girls, Emirate policy towards them and international responses. It is these reports which feature in this dossier. In putting it together, we have grouped reports into four categories:
Reports investigating the experiences of Afghan women or girls in relation to a particular sector, for example, education, or an issue, for example, marrying off young daughters as a family’s response to economic desperation. These reports are grounded in interviews with those affected and the wider context. That could be historical comparisons, the economic or political dimensions, or translation and analysis of relevant laws.
Reports about international responses to Emirate on policy on Afghan women and girls, for example, to the Emirate bans on women working for NGOs and the United Nations.
Analysis of international legal instruments which activists and some foreign states want to see deployed against the Emirate, for example, the crime against humanity of gender persecution, or the proposed crime of gender apartheid.
Reports from our ‘The Daily Hustle’ series which hone in on the experience of a particular woman or girl, for example, peddlers illegally trying to sell goods on the streets, the girl who when barred from secondary school and unimpressed by the religious teaching in madrassas, persuaded her father to set up their own madrassa, or the woman blocked from teaching by corruption under the Republic now running a successful tailoring business. Included, as well, are Daily Hustle reports about particular men with a relevant story to tell, for example, the poor labourer who, with his wife, decided to invite a distant relative, who was widowed, and her children to live with them.
Reports are listed within these four categories in reverse chronological order, starting with the most recent.
Reports about the experiences of Afghan women and girls in a particular sector
Few aspects of Islamic Emirate rule in Afghanistan have received as much criticism as the sweeping restrictions on the lives of women and girls. Yet in response to this condemnation, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) claims that it has actually improved women’s lives by enforcing women’s rights guaranteed by sharia. These include a woman’s right to inheritance, which is clearly specified in the Quran but rarely upheld in Afghanistan. Letty Phillips and Rama Mirzada, with input from the AAN team, have spoken to Afghan women and family members to explore whether the IEA’s efforts are encouraging women to claim their rights to inheritance in the face of long-held customs and widespread perceptions that even asking for this right is shameful.
Since taking power in August 2021, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) has introduced increasingly severe restrictions on the rights and freedoms of Afghan women and girls, that have reverberated across families and communities. The new rules have bolstered traditional male roles as women’s ‘gatekeepers’, determining what they can and cannot do. At the same time, these laws have also undermined men’s roles as supporters and facilitators of the ambitions of their female family members – in particular their daughters, but also wives and sisters. Overall, they have taken choices away from families, putting more power over Afghans’ personal lives into the hands of the state and its officials. In this report, Martine van Bijlert and the AAN team explore the effects of the restrictions on women as seen through the eyes of men. They explore how the Emirate’s rules have affected family dynamics and the lives of both men and women – not because it is often considered that men are more articulate or because the harm is more pronounced or important when also felt by men, but because the exclusion of women from public life affects everyone. It can disrupt families, fray communities and undermine both men and women.
The ban on girls’ secondary education, together with other policies by the Islamic Emirate, have severely affected the lives of female teachers across Afghanistan. This is seldom truer than it is in Shughnan, a mountainous district in Badakhshan province where men and women have long specialised in teaching, working in their own district and beyond. AAN’s Fabrizio Foschini has sought to understand what’s happening in this fragment of Afghanistan, one of the lesser known of the country’s many faces.
The order by the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA), Hibatullah Akhundzada, to cut the salaries of women on the public payroll to just 5,000 afghanis (70 US dollars) a month was a bombshell. The Amir’s order was short and ambiguously worded, driving anxiety and speculation: did it apply to all women working in the public sector – bureaucrats, teachers, doctors, policewomen, prosecutors – who go to the office every day? Or only those the Emirate has barred from coming to work, but who, up until now, have been paid in full? Jelena Bjelica and Roxanna Shapour (with input from the AAN Team) have been hearing from women who are or were working in the public sector about the Amir’s order and how it has affected their lives and family finances. They told AAN about the difficulties they already had making ends meet and their concerns about how they would weather the financial pressure if their salaries were cut.
Since coming to power, the Taleban authorities have issued many edicts, decrees, declarations and directives limiting, restricting, suspending or banning basic freedoms for women and girls. Afghan women are no longer free to go to public parks, gyms and other public spaces and are banned from boarding planes and leaving the country on their own; they cannot attend university and secondary schools for girls have also closed their doors; national and international NGOs and the United Nations have been instructed not to employ Afghan women. The AAN team has spoken to eleven young women who were either working or studying before the bans to find out how they are living and surviving in this suddenly, highly-restrictive environment. AAN’s Jelena Bjelica summarises what they told us about their everyday lives since the Taleban came to power.
Sixteen months since its takeover of Afghanistan, the Emirate has imposed sweeping new restrictions on women’s lives, kicking female students out of universities and education centres, and banning women from working for Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs). The bans have come on top of the continuing closure of girls’ high schools, the banning of female civil servants from offices, curbs on women’s independent travel and what they can wear, and denying them access to parks, gyms and public bath houses. In this second report in a three-part series exploring how Afghan women’s lives have changed since the Taleban takeover, Roxanna Shapour and Rama Mirzada consider the responses of Afghan women and their male relatives to the Taleban’s cataclysmic encroachment on their rights: How do you keep going when you have no hope?
Fifteen months after the Taleban returned to power, Afghan women have seen their country and their lives dramatically alter, as jobs evaporated, restrictions were announced and families sank into poverty. To better understand how these changes affect the day-to-day lives of women and which changes are at the forefront of their minds, AAN conducted a series of interviews across the country. In this first of a two part series by Roxanna Shapour and Rama Mirzada, women speak about the impact of Emirate policy that seeks to marginalise women and erase them from public life – the consequences for household economies, their dreams of education and personal and professional growth and the power dynamics within the family. Many have described how their independence has been undermined, along with their sense of self-worth and self-confidence, and how they are now struggling to maintain a sense of personhood.
The collapse of the economy has led families across Afghanistan to make desperate decisions, including, for some, giving young daughters in marriage in exchange for a bride price. To gain more insight into this, AAN’s Ali Mohammad Sabawoon sought to interview fathers of young brides. He identified about a dozen such men, but most felt too ashamed and remorseful to talk about it. The four men who did speak described the pressures that had led to their decision, one they never imagined they would have to make, and the emotional turmoil that accompanied it. Unfortunately, for all four men, the difficult decision to marry off their daughters did not end up solving their problems (with input from Kate Clark).
It has been three weeks since the Taleban announced a new order, prescribing a strict dress code for women, that they should not leave the house without real need and if they do, should wear what is termed ‘sharia hijab’, with face covered entirely, or except for the eyes. The order made a woman’s ‘guardian’ – her father, husband or brother – legally responsible for policing her clothing, with the threat to punish him if she goes outside bare-faced. In this report, we hear from women about how they and their families have responded to the order and to what extent the new rules or guidelines have been enforced. Dress codes may seem less consequential than other changes, such as sending women workers home from government offices, hindering women’s travel or stopping older girls from going to school. Still, instructing women to cover their faces in public seems symbolic of the Emirate’s apparent desire to turn Afghan women into entirely invisible, private citizens again, argues Kate Clark, with input from Sayeda Rahimi.
The Taleban’s abrupt decision to keep girls’ secondary schools closed, despite promising for months that they would re-open, has caused distress to girls, parents and teachers alike. The Taleban’s justification was confused, with various officials giving different reasons for the closure, from lack of teachers to inappropriate school uniforms. Eventually, a formal announcement cited the need for a “comprehensive plan, in accordance with sharia and Afghan culture.” Guest author Ashley Jackson has been looking into what happened behind the scenes that lead to this policy reversal and argues that the ultimate cause may have had less to do with religion than the unpredictable nature of Taleban power politics.
In the last of our three reports on the Taleban and education, especially of girls, we turn to what seems to be a relatively new trend. Guest author Sabawoon Samim has been looking at views of girls’ education within the Taleban movement and finds it notable that some Taleban are now seeking out school and even university education for their sons and their daughters. He looks at how and why a significant membership of a group that banned girls’ education when it was last in power appears to be changing its attitude towards schooling. The series editor is Kate Clark.
In trying to understand Taleban policy on state education, especially for girls, our first report heard from people around the country. They painted a picture of primary schools for boys and girls, and boys’ secondary schools having generally re-opened after the Taleban captured power on 15 August, but of girls’ secondary schools opening only very patchily. The Taleban have said they want to re-open schools for older girls when the environment can be made safe; many fear this could mean a de facto, ongoing closure. In this second report, AAN’s Kate Clark and guest author Said Reza Kazemi try to set current Taleban policy on schools in context: tracing the evolution of Taleban thinking on education historically may answer the question of why the Taleban have been so uneasy about girls going to school.
Taleban policy towards women and girls is one of the prisms through which the movement has been studied – and judged – ever since the Taleban first came to power in the mid-nineties. A touchstone for many Afghans and outside observers was whether, after capturing power nationally in August 2021, they would allow girls to go to school. Girls’ primary schools did indeed reopen, but schools for older girls have done so only patchily. This is far more than the Taleban allowed during their first Emirate when they banned girls’ schooling altogether, but also far less than many Afghans want and are used to. In a series of reports, the AAN team has been looking at Taleban practice and policy on schooling, especially for girls. In this first report, which draws on research from our ‘Living under the new Taleban government’ series, we try to get a clearer picture of where Afghan children are managing to go to school, and where they are not. (The series editor is Kate Clark.)
Kate Clark and the AAN team
26 January 2022
Reports about international responses to Emirate on policy on Afghan women and girls
The 1-2 May 2023 gathering in Doha, hosted by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, brought together the representatives of 21 countries – the five permanent members of the Security Council, major donors and regional players, plus the European Union and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. They spent two days talking about how to engage with the Taleban, who have now been in power for 20 months, but are still unrecognised as Afghanistan’s government. The gathering took place in the shadow of the extension of an Islamic Emirate ban on women working from NGOs to the UN and a chaotic few weeks for the UN. AAN’s Roxanna Shapour and Kate Clark have been sifting through Guterres’ press statement and the various reactions to the gathering. They ask some questions about the gathering in Doha – and try to answer them.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres is due to host a two-day meeting on Afghanistan with foreign envoys, beginning tomorrow, 1 May 2023, in the capital of Qatar, Doha. The Taleban have not been invited. AAN understands from sources from invited countries that the idea for the meeting emerged from visits to Kabul in January by senior UN officials trying to negotiate with the Islamic Emirate on its ban on NGOs employing Afghan women. UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed, in particular, came away with the sense that there needed to be a political plan for dealing with the Emirate. In recent days, however, the Doha meeting has become mired in controversy over her reported suggestion that the representatives would be looking into the question of recognising the Taleban’s government. This suggestion was swiftly and categorically denied by the UN Secretary-General’s spokesperson. The Taleban’s extension of their ban on employing Afghan women to the UN, made almost a month ago, has only complicated everything further, as AAN’s Kate Clark reports (with input from Roxanna Shapour), including appearing to throw the UN into disarray.
Anyone who lived in Afghanistan during the first Islamic Emirate will find the current stand-off between the Taleban and NGOs – and now the United Nations – over the issue of women working familiar. There is the same clashing of principles: the Emirate’s position that women must largely be kept inside the home to avoid the risk of social disorder and sin, and the humanitarians’ that the equitable and effective delivery of aid is impossible without female workers. The choices on the humanitarian side also feel familiar, and all unattractive: comply, boycott or fudge. AAN’s Kate Clark has spoken to people who were working in the humanitarian sector in Afghanistan in the 1990s, and who continue to follow Afghanistan, to get their insights into the similarities and differences – and what, possibly, might help.
In the spring of 2023, a campaign was launched to create a new international crime of gender apartheid. Campaigners argue that the oppression of women and girls is so total and severe in Afghanistan and Iran that it is akin to the systematic and hierarchical racist oppression practised by apartheid South Africa. Their hope is that gender apartheid will be included in a new Crimes Against Humanity Convention, which happens to be scheduled for negotiation in the coming years. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) shows no sign of moderating its policies towards Afghan women in the face of widespread global criticism, which it dismisses as foreign interference in domestic and religious matters. AAN’s Rachel Reid considers the campaign, the legal issues and how codification might happen.
Afghanistan has been warned that its violations of women’s rights will trigger a referral to the United Nation’s highest court – the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – unless it changes its policies. The initiative, taken by Australia, Canada, Germany and the Netherlands and supported by 22 other states, centres on alleged violations of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) to which Afghanistan is a signatory. According to the procedures of the court, the Afghan government is offered a chance to resolve the dispute, failing which, the ICJ will take up the case. A spokesman for the Islamic Emirate immediately dismissed the allegations. While the court lacks enforcement power, it is not without teeth and a judgement against the IEA could lead to additional sanctions against the Emirate, as well as political pressure on those actors inclined towards normalisation. Rachel Reid provides an overview of the process, its potential impact and pitfalls.
Since their return to power in August 2021, the Taleban have enacted successive laws and orders which apply to women and girls, but not to men and boys. Earlier this month, United Nations experts reported their assessment that these measures violated women and girls’ rights to education, work, freedom of movement, health, bodily autonomy and decision-making, peaceful assembly and association, and access to justice and amounted to ‘gender persecution’. One of the experts has also asked the International Criminal Court to consider whether the crime against humanity of gender persecution was taking place in Afghanistan. In this Q&A, Ehsan Qaane unpacks the term as it exists in international law, and in that light, analyses whether the court might consider Taleban restrictions on women as amounting to gender prosecution and whether an investigation could lie within its mandate.
Today’s Daily Hustle features a young woman who we last heard from in June 2023 when she was running a home school for girls in her village. Now, a year and half later, she has been ordered to close it. Even before the fall of the Islamic Republic, many Afghan girls had no access to education – whether because of conflict or local conservative mores, a lack of female teachers, or because functioning schools did not exist. After the Republic fell, communities in these areas were hopeful that schools might open – or reopen – now the conflict was over. But for older girls across Afghanistan, this was not to be. One of the first things the Taleban did after they took power was to ban older girls from education. Many families in rural Afghanistan have also struggled to get even their younger daughters an education because no schools were ever built in their areas. However, they may be local NGO-supported home-based or community-based schools. In 2023, we spoke to one young Afghan woman who had set up such a school. Hamid Pakteen spoke to her recently and she had bad news.
Hamid Pakteen and Roxanna Shapour
16 February 2025
In this instalment of The Daily Hustle, AAN’s Rohullah Sorush hears from a woman who did most of her growing up under the first Islamic Emirate which banned girls of all ages from going to school. She came late to education, but strove to be a good student and managed to graduate from high school and secure a teaching qualification. Then, administrative corruption and bureaucracy under the Islamic Republic blocked her path into teaching and she had to put her dream of being an educator on hold. Instead, she began a tailoring business, working from home, in order to support her family. It is a reminder that barriers to Afghan women and girls fulfilling their dreams predate the current government’s restrictions on their work, education and movement.
Rohullah Sorush and Roxanna Shapour
7 December 2024
Some tales of generosity and compassion, of tragedy, heartache and life-changing decisions, span the generations. One such story is Ruzi Khan’s, a day labourer from Helmand province, who has opened his home to a destitute widow and her six young children. While the widow is his distant cousin, her late husband was the son of a Hindu boy who moved to Khan’s village in the 1960s with his mother and step-father and later converted to Islam. Ruzi Khan has spoken to AAN’s Ali Mohammad Sabawoon for the latest instalment of The Daily Hustle, and tells how, faced with a family in distress, he and his wife, while struggling to feed their own children, decided they could not stand idly by in the face of the suffering of others.
Ali Mohammad Sabawoon and Roxanna Shapour
10 November 2024
For decades, Afghanistan has had a huge diaspora who, if they can, travel home to visit family and keep connections to their homeland alive. Since the re-establishment of the Islamic Emirate, many Afghan women are apprehensive about returning to the country for a visit. They worry about the Emirate’s restrictions on women and how this might affect their experience of return. In this instalment of the Daily Hustle, a medical student tells Rama Mirzad about returning to Kabul for a summer visit for the first time since she left Afghanistan to study six years ago. She tells us of homesickness, the joy of seeing her family and why in the end she has resolved not to return again to Afghanistan.
Going on a picnic and spending time with your family, enjoying Afghanistan’s natural beauty, is a favourite pastime for Afghan families, especially in springtime. However, since the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) has imposed many restrictions on women and older girls, public parks in the country have largely become no-go areas for them. AAN has been hearing from one girl about the hoops she had to jump through to get permission from her father to go on a family picnic and how the simple pleasures of life, like spending the day with your family in northern Afghanistan’s lush green hills, are not so simple anymore.
After the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan closed girls’ high schools, thousands of older Afghan girls were left behind from education. With not much to do except help with the household chores, many families decided to enrol their girls in a madrasa so that they could pursue their religious education. Many older girls, who had already had extensive religious education in their high schools, found the quality of madrasa instruction fell short of the mark. AAN’s Ali Mohammad Sabawoon has spoken to one girl who decided to take matters into her own hands and, with her father’s support, establish a madrasa.
Ali Mohammad Sabawoon and Roxanna Shapour
2 June 2024
After the Islamic Emirate banned older girls from education, many girls found alternative avenues to continue their studies, find intellectual stimulation – and even, as this Daily Hustle found out, make a living in the private education sector. AAN’s Rohullah Sorush hears from one young Afghan woman about how, even in the face of overwhelming setbacks and personal tragedy, she has managed not only to succeed in her learning endeavours but to thrive with the love and support of her family.
Rohullah Sorush and Roxanna Shapour
24 November 2023
After the Taleban came to power in August 2021, the flow of international funds into the country that helped prop up the economy declined precipitously, and a significant number of people lost their jobs. Women, facing new legal restrictions on work from the Islamic Emirate, have been hit disproportionately hard by unemployment. With few options available to them, an increasing number of women, especially widows and single heads of household, have taken to selling goods from handcarts in an effort to earn a living. AAN’s Sayed Asadullah Sadat has heard from three female street vendors. Their arresting accounts of how the lack of paid work or forced unemployment, driven by the Emirate’s mounting restrictions on women working outside the home, have pushed them into joining the ranks of their male counterparts as street pedlars in Kabul.
Sayed Asadullah Sadat and Roxanna Shapour
22 July 2023
The Taleban made their move against education for older girls about a month after they took over Afghanistan when they ordered secondary schools for boys to re-open, but made no mention of girls. Since then, there have been a few instances of false hope, notably in March 2022 when the government reneged on its promise to reopen girls’ secondary schools. Yet even before the fall of the Republic, many Afghan girls had no access to education – because of conflict in their area, or local conservative mores and a lack of female teachers, or because functioning schools did not exist. In this latest instalment of the Daily Hustle, we hear from one young Afghan woman about how elders in her community managed to open home schools for girls and appointed her as a teacher. That was five years ago. Now, there are rumours that the Taleban will close her school down.
The word most often used by Afghans to refer to widows is bisarparast (without someone to take care of you). In Afghanistan’s highly patriarchal society, where men are expected to be the breadwinners and opportunities for women to work are relatively few, being a widow is likely to be socially and economically precarious. They are often stigmatised, passed over for jobs and considered burdens on their families. One of the legacies of almost a half-century of war in Afghanistan it the high number of widows – there are no official statistics, but news reports put their number at two million or more. The position of widows without sons is even more insecure, especially since the Taleban takeover has intensified the requirement for women to have a close male relative to act as a chaperone (mahram) and legal guardian. The subject of our latest Daily Hustle is such a widow, an older woman who never had children and who has learned to live on her wits to survive widowhood, economic upheaval and her marginal status in society.
Afghan women who were studying at university or working for NGOs have now had a few weeks to take in the implications of two decrees issued by Taleban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada which denied them a university education and banned them from working for NGOs. The announcements had come as successive blows to women who had already seen their rights and freedoms rolled back by the Emirate since it came to power in August 2021. For the latest instalment of The Daily Hustle, our series that features individual accounts about one aspect of daily life in Afghanistan, we hear from two women who used to go out to work, but since the latest decree, are no longer going.
For many Afghans the first year of Taleban rule was marked by uncertainty and anxiety over the country’s sudden change in fortunes. Virtually every area of daily life, from banking and shopping to travelling around the country to marriage celebrations has been affected. We wanted to find out from a variety of people how an aspect of their daily life had changed and how they were negotiating this changed landscape. In this first instalment of a new series, AAN guest author, Rama Mirzada, writes about what it has been like for her, a young woman, to overcome her fears, and the anxiety of her family, at her leaving the house to enrol in an English language course.
Rama Mirzada
15 October 2022
Deepening Discrimination: A dossier of reports about Afghan women
Zoie O’Brien – BBC News, Suffolk and Alice Cunningham – BBC News, Suffolk
Nageena, 17, said the day the Taliban took over, she witnessed people being killed and fled [Jamie Niblock/BBC]
Women from Afghanistan have shared their stories of living under Taliban rule for a new exhibition.
Window to the Soul Afghanistan launched on Friday, at Jerwood DanceHouse in Ipswich, and will be displayed for four weeks.
The project team spent the last year creating a secure platform for women still in Afghanistan, and those who had left, to share their stories of life before and after the Taliban
Nageena, 17, who fled Afghanistan and moved to England three years ago, worked on the project and said she missed her home.
The exhibition includes artwork made by people who still live in Afghanistan [Aziza]
The Taliban, a hardline Islamist group, took control of Afghanistan in 2021 and under its rule women and girls have been subject to strict and oppressive laws.
Nageena and her family fled Afghanistan the day the group took over, which she said was “a very bad day”.
She still has family there and said her female relatives, over the age of 12, were not allowed to attend school due to the Taliban’s ban.
She stressed the importance of education and said it was “not only about what boys and men can do”.
Now living in Suffolk, Nageena is studying a college hairdressing course, but she admitted she still thought about her home.
“I miss my country because it is my home, but I can’t go home,” she continued.
“When I think about my country I feel very broken in my heart and it’s very sad for us.”
She said the exhibition had made her feel brave and that she was capable of anything.
Hannah Aria said the exhibition was about “using art for social justice and human rights advocacy” [Jamie Niblock/BBC]
Hannah Aria is a local artist who helped set up the exhibition.
“I started off working with refugees in Ipswich,” she explained.
“As you gain more connections with people, you connect with the stories and then you want to do something positive to help.”
She was introduced to a contact in Afghanistan and through them, met others who shared their stories.
The exhibition makes use of virtual and augmented reality to tell the stories of “people from Afghanistan in an amazing game-like format”, Ms Aria said.
She added the exhibition aimed to apply for more funding to expand it further and tell more stories in the future.
“We want to change the world,” she said.
Rona Panjsheri said it was important to share Afghan women and girls’ stories who did not have a voice in their own country [Jamie Niblock/BBC]
Rona Panjsheri, from Afghanistan, also worked on the project and said talking about women in Afghanistan made her emotional.
“It’s really sad to talk about them, all negative things, [but] there are some positive things that I am really proud of them [for],” she explained.
“They stand up and they still have a little hope three years after Afghanistan fell at the hands of the Taliban. “We hope that one day they get free and we talk more positive things about Afghan women and girls.” She added that women and girls in Afghanistan “have no freedom of speech”, therefore it was important to “keep telling their stories”.
Few aspects of Islamic Emirate rule in Afghanistan have received as much criticism as the sweeping restrictions on the lives of women and girls. Yet in response to this condemnation, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) claims that it has actually improved women’s lives by enforcing women’s rights guaranteed by sharia. These include a woman’s right to inheritance, which is clearly specified in the Quran but rarely upheld in Afghanistan. Letty Phillips and Rama Mirzada, with input from the AAN team, have spoken to Afghan women and family members to explore whether the IEA’s efforts are encouraging women to claim their rights to inheritance in the face of long-held customs and widespread perceptions that even asking for this right is shameful.You can preview the report online and download it by clicking here or the download button below.
Since the re-establishment of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) in August 2021, officials have consistently rejected all criticism of its policies on women and girls. “Significant steps have been taken in securing Afghan women’s rights,” said a spokesman for the Ministry of Propagating Virtue and Preventing Vice and Hearing Complaints – commonly referred to as Amr bil-Maruf – in its 2023 public accountability session. The basis of this claim was Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada’s December 2021 Decree 83/1, which gives women the following six rights: an adult woman cannot be forced into marriage; a woman cannot be given in marriage to resolve a blood feud; prevented from receiving her inheritance; or treated unfairly compared to her husband’s other wives; a widow cannot be forced to marry her husband’s brother or anyone else and if she marries again, any new husband must give her a mahr.
The IEA appears especially concerned with Decree 83/1’s fifth provision, on a woman’s right to receive inheritance under sharia. “If brothers do not give inheritance to their sisters, the sisters have the right and have been authorised by the Islamic Emirate to complain and write petitions and get their rights. No one has the audacity and authority to deny the inheritance rights of our sisters,” said the Amr bil-Maruf spokesman in that August 2023 session.
Yet any women wanting to take up this right must contend with a culture that considers it shameful for a woman to ask for her share of her father or husband’s or other relative’s wealth – as set out in the Quran – when they die. “A woman claiming her rights to inheritance is not usual,” said Enan, an Afghan woman employed by an NGO working on legal issues, “and when a woman does this, it’s like she’s shaking the sky.”
The authors had heard reports that more women are raising claims to their inheritance rights under the Islamic Emirate than during the Islamic Republic, so set out to find out whether the Emirate is enforcing Decree 83/1 and supporting women’s requests to inherit. In November and December 2024, the authors spoke to ten women as well as some other family members, involved in inheritance disputes. Our report begins with a survey of women’s inheritance rights in Afghanistan throughout the twentieth century, before hearing as to whether things have actually changed.
Edited by Kate Clark and Roxanna Shapour
You can preview the report online and download it by clicking here or the download button below.
Afghanistan Peace Campaign
Democracy and society