What we get wrong about the Taliban’s ‘gender apartheid’

“This is a great opportunity,” US President George Bush declared days after the twin tower attacks on 9/11. An ambulance chaser at his core, Bush was a Caesar sitting atop the Roman Empire of our time, deciding how to manage his good fortune.

He debated whether to invade Iraq for a few days until eventually declaring Afghanistan to be the recipient of this ‘opportunity’. It didn’t matter that the country had nothing to do with the day the planes hit. The Taliban, we were told, were barbaric in their brutality and the Afghan people were practically begging for Rome to invade.

Twenty years and trillions of dollars later, the empire would be defeated by the same poorly equipped tribesmen they had tried to replace. In the citadel of Caesar, the Taliban had staged a palace coup.

Since then, women’s rights groups have argued that the halcyon days of the empire were preferable to the self-rule of these barbarians. While the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor has announced he is seeking arrest warrants against the Taliban for the crime of gender persecution, this is not enough for them. A new crime must be concocted for what is happening to women in Afghanistan — that of gender apartheid — and the country must be targeted again this time by measures just short of war.

A war of care

In 1958, President Nixon welcomed Afghan Prime Minister Mohammad Daoud to Washington and remarked that his country was ‘unconquered and unconquerable’, perhaps not realising quite how prescient this statement was to be. On August 30, 2021, the longest war in American history came to an end with the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. The capital had fallen to the Taliban without a single shot fired.

There were many reasons for the failure of the conflict which will likely exercise military strategists for years to come but what is clear is that America’s hubris had stretched to Olympian heights.

Cofer Black, the head of counterterrorism for the CIA, had said in the lead-up to the war, “When we’re through with them, they will have flies walking across their eyeballs”. But this was almost something ‘they’ should be saying and so it had to be countered.

For that, Laura Bush was dusted off and pulled out of anonymity to lay the groundwork for the first ‘feminist war in all of history’ and pay lip service to the rhetoric of women’s liberation. “The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women,” she lied. The invasion was not only an act of militaristic revenge against those who had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, it was actually an act of care.

If Laura Bush could close her eyes and tap her red slippers three times, she’d wish for all Afghan women a life of unveiled freedom while drones hunted their men like the flies who would one day walk across their eyeballs. Unfortunately, it did not take long for the Bushes to realise they weren’t in Kansas anymore.

A ‘feminist’ failure

The earliest pictures of the invasion showed the predictable colonial exercise of Afghan women taking off their veils and smiling at American forces. “Because of our recent military gains,” Laura Bush declared, “in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. They can listen to music and teach their daughters without fear of punishment.”

The problem was that this was not the way it was in ‘much of Afghanistan’ despite media reports which seemed to indicate that all Afghan women were being fed grapes to the sound of ukuleles. The journalist Anand Gopal was one of the few who ventured out of the ‘Kabubble’ of aid agencies and think tanks to other parts of the country. He reported on those he called ‘The Other Afghan Women’:

In Sangin, whenever I brought up the question of gender, village women reacted with derision. “They are giving rights to Kabul women, and they are killing women here,” Pazaro said. “Is this justice?” Marzia, from Pan Killay, told me, “This is not ‘women’s rights’ when you are killing us, killing our brothers, killing our fathers.” Khalida, from a nearby village, said, “The Americans did not bring us any rights. They just came, fought, killed, and left.”

It is undeniable that the Taliban were (and remain) oppressive to urban, middle-class, and educated women to whom their edicts are nothing short of abhorrent. Women are not allowed to attend secondary school, work or even walk in public which is unjustifiable under any tenet of law and religion.

However, it is also true that the Taliban enjoyed a lot of support among rural women for ending exploitation in the form of forced marriages and granting them inheritance rights often denied to them by cultural norms. And this tallies entirely with the fact that the Taliban’s return came not only from their resilience and strategy but also mass public support from the populace, especially from the countryside and also from women. In the Western imagination, the pro-Taliban Afghan woman does not exist, but in reality, she very much does.

During the war, the women’s NGO machine was not only perceived to be corrupt, nepotistic, and elitist but more importantly, it ended up being a spear carrier for the military-industrial complex. This was pretty much admitted by Secretary of State Colin Powell in a speech on October 26, 2001. “The NGOs,” he said, “are such a force multiplier for us, such an important part of our combat team.” The enduring image of this vampiric vanguard for the occupation would be aid workers teaching Pashtun tribeswomen abstract art as a form of emancipation while the US armed forces were bribing warlords with Viagra knowing they were using it to rape young boys. Hardly a golden era of human rights.

Fear and debt

The two most powerful tools of empire are fear and debt. Traumatised by its loss to the Taliban, the Americans have leveraged both of these through a calculated scheme of international isolation and theft.

Over 20 years, the US spent an average of $50,000 per Afghan per year on the war. A staggering figure. Yet in 2020, half the population lived below the poverty line with most living on an average of $2.15 a day. This is after a war in which the US had dropped leaflets by plane which read: “Get Wealth and Power Beyond Your Dreams. Help Anti-Taliban Forces Rid Afghanistan of Murderers and Terrorists.”

The occupation fattened the Kabul elite and NGO class while starving the poor — is there any wonder they refused to fight for their invaders? To take the sting off the trillions wasted, after the loss of Kabul, the Americans immediately blocked the Afghan central bank’s international reserves, amounting to $7 billion, while imposing sanctions on the Taliban.

This prompted 71 economists, including Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, to write a letter to President Biden in August 2022 to allow Afghanistan to reclaim its international reserves — its own money — saying:

Without access to its foreign reserves, the central bank of Afghanistan cannot carry out its normal, essential functions. Without a functioning central bank, the economy of Afghanistan has, predictably, collapsed…by all rights, the full $7 billion belong to the Afghan people…and returning anything less than the full amount, undermines the recovery of a devastated economy, where millions of people are starving…it is both morally condemnable and politically and economically reckless to impose collective punishment on an entire people for the actions of a government they did not choose.

I would argue it is also morally condemnable to punish a people for the actions of a government they may have chosen, especially when the punishment is in the form of theft. Biden eventually allowed half of this amount to be released to help address critical needs in Afghanistan but the other half remains in the hands of the invader. While the guys in uniform may have left, the guys in pinstripes are using bills instead of bombs to control the country.

Gender apartheid

As part of the policy of isolation, women’s rights activists continue to be secular sidekicks to the failed military intervention. They have been busy drumming up international support for the Taliban to be convicted of a new crime under international law — gender apartheid.

The fact that the Taliban may already be guilty of a crime under international law (gender persecution as a crime against humanity) is apparently not enough to deal with the ‘seriousness’ of what is going on. Instead, a new crime must be created for whom the criminals have already been identified — Afghanistan and maybe later Iran — and against which the international community must act. This urgency did not exist for the women and girls of Gaza who were left to die at the hands of a feminist foreign policy which starved, mutilated, and murdered them.

The countries that plan to file a case at the International Court of Justice against Afghanistan’s ‘gender apartheid’ are Australia, Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands, notorious supporters of Israel’s actual apartheid. The terminology is also too clunky to be workable; coopting racial apartheid onto gender roles does not fit, weakening at once the claims of racial apartheid and the ways in which we conceive of a crime which hinges on the notion of race and not gender.

Austrian academic Anthony Löwstedt has argued that the term ‘apartheid’ should not be used at all for the Taliban’s violation of women’s rights, because they are not an invading racial minority and the demographic dynamics are totally different. “In real apartheid,” he says, “people are ethnically cleansed and replaced: politically, economically and physically, and new power is ultimately established by invaders from afar … In Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, on the other hand, old power was extended.”

UN Women has admitted that the term is meant to be ‘triggering’, to spur shock and galvanise action by states as well as banks, and sporting entities. The UK has since said it wants to put pressure on the International Cricket Council to intervene in matches with Afghanistan. It is fashionable to jump on this bandwagon because Afghanistan has few friends in the West, unlike other states where women’s rights are routinely violated. In my view, any organisation lamenting the condition of Afghan women which does not lay at the feet of the US the condition that they return to the country the money that has been stolen is not a coherent one.

Additionally, the ICC prosecutor’s handling of the entire issue of Afghanistan has been disgraceful and heavily criticised. Karim Khan, upon assuming the post, immediately decided that the Court would ‘deprioritise’ investigations into American conduct in Afghanistan and instead focus only on crimes committed by the Taliban and the Islamic State-Khorasan. ‘Deprioritising’ meant not looking into the war crimes committed by the Americans at all, erasing their conduct entirely from his investigation and any accountability. That is why these arrest warrants should not in any way be welcomed — the Court has proved how easily it can be manipulated. They are a case of selective justice if there ever was one.

A policy of engagement

Currently, the Taliban itself is not cohesive in its policies. There is a battle of ideas going on within the group itself between the Kabul moderates and the Kandahar hardliners about all of these issues. The moderates strongly oppose the decisions taken on women’s education in particular. This is clear in the most recent comments by the Taliban’s deputy foreign minister calling for girls’ secondary schools to reopen stating that their closure goes against sharia. It is for this reason that Hassan Abbas, in his fantastic new book, The Return of the Taliban, advocates for a policy of engagement:

My recommendation — knowing full well this is going to be controversial — is to increase engagement with the Taliban. In fact, engaging in conversations with them on what is required by the international community for them to be formally recognised is perhaps the only way forward in the muddled reality we have now. My argument is that any effective, sustained and meaningful engagement with them has the real capacity to empower the relatively pragmatic and moderate elements among them. Not engaging is going to support the view of hardliners that the world is against them — and consequently they will rise further within the organisation.

This engagement would involve countries already engaging with the Taliban such as China, India, Pakistan and the Gulf states to reach out and use diplomatic measures to facilitate their eventual recognition. The measures could involve Muslim countries sending their judges to train the Afghan judiciary on the law as well as a progressive interpretation of it within the framework of Islam. Abbas supports a carrot rather than stick approach as the best way to empower moderates in the Taliban, and at least some prominent UN officials agree.

For a country against whom the world’s superpower has used a stick for a long 20 years, I think it is time we listen. The Taliban, in crossing the Rubicon and defeating Caesar, have proven they must be allowed to rule anew. Not all roads after all lead to Rome.

Header image created with generative AI