Taliban fighters entered Kabul on 15 August 2021 as the Afghan government collapsed and US troops scrambled to complete their withdrawal from the country. A year later, the group declared the date an annual national holiday.
In the five years since, the Taliban’s “increasingly draconian policies have made Afghanistan one of the world’s gravest human rights crises, particularly for women and girls”, said Human Rights Watch.
Among United Nations members states, only Russia has announced it formally recognises the Taliban regime, but “international condemnation is not enough”, said HRW.
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On “The Proud Day of August 15”, as the day has become known, Afghans are likely to see parades of the Taliban’s “suicide bomber squad on motorbikes and American equipment left by Nato forces”, said Christina Lamb in The Times.
Yet the country remains “on the brink of famine”. Around 4.7 million Afghans are facing “life-threatening malnutrition”, and almost 19 million are “in the grip of acute hunger or worse”, according to the World Food Programme. Afghanistan remains the only country in the world to ban girls and women from secondary school and university, while “morality police” patrol the streets seeking infringements of dress codes. The Taliban has even “banned women being seen at windows”, and recently “scrapped the minimum age for child marriage”.
Five years into its rule, the Taliban continues to expose the “wishful thinking of Western political and military leaders who insisted the movement had changed”, said the Lowy Institute think tank. The West has a “wilful blindness” towards the regime and is “quietly lowering the threshold of behaviour it is prepared to accept”.
“Tellingly”, the United Nations now refers to the “relevant authorities” in Kabul rather than the “de facto authorities”, in effect “narrowing the linguistic difference between the regime and a recognised government”. Warnings of the widespread repression under the regime are still “accurate”; what has changed is the “willingness of the world to act on them”.
Britain’s hesitation to evacuate eligible Afghans who worked with British officials in the country is “typical” of the UK’s “attitude to its obligations to Afghans generally”, said an editorial in The Independent. According to an internal government review conducted in February, 7,000 people have been found to be eligible for resettlement and “still likely to be at risk from Taliban retribution”, yet Britain has scrapped plans to evacuate them. Made worse by a “catastrophic data breach in 2022”, “obfuscation and delay”, Britain has been “dragging its feet in protecting those who served alongside our troops in Afghanistan”. It, like other countries, must “discharge its obligations to our Afghan allies, promptly and in full”, as a “matter of national honour”.
The US, in particular, “has a moral responsibility to not simply look away,” said Mursal Rahim, who fled Afghanistan in 2021, in The New York Times. Since leaving Kabul, the US has “increasingly disengaged from the country and its people”, closing the embassy, withdrawing diplomats and leaving “sharply reduced assistance” for Afghans coming to America. The situation in Afghanistan no longer “commands America’s attention as it once did”, but to continue in this vein risks accepting that the “systematic erasure of Afghan women is no longer its concern”.
What next?
It may be unpopular, but “Afghanistan’s future depends on greater international engagement” with whoever is in charge, said Tobias Ellwood, former chair of the Defence Select Committee, in The Telegraph. But importantly, “engagement does not mean recognition”. The goal is to ensure that Afghanistan, and its population of 40 million people, is “stable, secure and prosperous enough”, but that “will not be achieved by shouting from afar. It begins by re-engaging with those who govern Afghanistan today.”
“Far too little” is being done to protect girls from child marriages, and promote education, said former PM Gordon Brown in The Guardian. Other countries in the region have had some success. Pakistan’s Sindh province has criminalised marriage under 18 and introduced “penalties for those who facilitate it”. Bangladesh has also tightened its birth registration system to make it harder to conceal a girl’s age.
Changes to the UK government’s new immigration and asylum bill are positive recognitions of the problem. “But we must go further.” We must establish a fund in support of Afghan girls who are threatened with child marriage. It should offer them “bursaries to continue their education, if necessary outside their home country”. This may only be a “small gesture” after five years of Taliban rule, but “it is our moral duty to help them”.
