By Brianda Romero Castelán

On August 15, 2021, the Taliban recovered control of Kabul after the United States decided to remove its troops from Afghanistan. That day, two pictures went viral as symbols of the imminent erasure of women from public spaces. In them, men are covering images of women with white paint. Real Afghan women, however, are nowhere to be seen. Only carefully crafted portraits of Western-styled models appear in the scenes. I saw this as a metaphor for how women’s rights in Afghanistan have been represented for years. The U.S. government boasted about the progress achieved for women’s equality in Afghanistan while papering over the reality of the women living in war-torn communities. 

For the past three U.S. administrations, the dominant narrative held that the International Coalition’s presence in Afghanistan guarded women from a regime that denied them fundamental human rights.[1] As we approach the first anniversary of the fall of Kabul, news of women’s rights lost to Taliban rule remains an incessant reality.[2] Though it may be tempting for observers to assume that occupied Afghanistan offered a haven for Afghan women, this text seeks to remind the reader that promoting women’s rights was not part of the reasoning behind President Bush’s decision to invade Afghanistan in 2001—nor was it ever a priority during the twenty years that the American occupation lasted.[3] The localized benefits that the U.S. presence may have brought to relatively privileged women do not compare to the direct and indirect damage that two decades of conflict caused to the most vulnerable ones.

In 2001, two months elapsed between the approval of the joint resolution that provided the legal rationale to invade Afghanistan and the emblematic radio address of then-First Lady Laura Bush, where she claimed for the first time that the invasion would have a protective effect on women.[4] U.S. efforts for female empowerment in the Middle Eastern country were thus an afterthought, designed to garner support for an armed conflict in response to the 9/11 attacks that had no end in sight.[5] It worked! After Kabul fell, backlash against President Biden from both sides of the political spectrum quickly followed. A popular critique was that American forces should have remained to preserve women’s rights against the threat of the Taliban.[6] 

Using women’s rights to justify protracted occupations is not a novel practice. The United Soviet Socialist Republic had done so during its occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, and previously throughout Central Asia.[7] By the early 1990s in Afghanistan, women’s attendance at school was obligatory, the majority of those enrolled in the University of Kabul were women, veiling was outlawed, and men and women had equal opportunities to run for office.[8] Nevertheless, the Soviet invasion is not considered a source of female empowerment. The Afghan Civil War harmed women with high civilian casualties, slim economic prospects, and rising sexual abuse.[9] 

Should we perceive the American invasion any differently? Perhaps we could ignore the underlying causes of American involvement in women’s rights initiatives in Afghanistan if, unlike the Soviet invasion, American intervention had ensured better, sustainable standards of living for Afghan women.[10] After all, the United States spent more than $780 million on these efforts. Did it work? 

The evidence says no. In 2011, ten years after the war started, TrustLaw polled international women’s rights experts and determined that Afghanistan was still the worst nation in the world to be a woman. The data showed that the female illiteracy rate was 87 percent, and around 80 percent of women experienced forced marriage before the age of sixteen.[11] Many years later, in 2018, 35 percent of Afghan women reported experiencing intimate partner violence in the previous year—the second-highest rate globally.[12] These figures could be interpreted as the legacy of the previous Taliban regime. Readers may think that social changes take time to materialize and that, perhaps, the situation was slowly improving. However, official statistics paint a grimmer picture. In 2019, younger men were less likely to support gender equality than older men.[13] Moreover, by 2020, Afghanistan was still one of the three lowest-rated countries in gender equality; the country’s performance on this index dropped significantly during the American invasion.[14] Also in 2020, the United Nations (UN) Assistance Mission in Afghanistan documented a record number of civilian women deaths due to the armed conflict, with pro-government forces causing at least 34 percent of those casualties.[15] 

In other words, Afghanistan was not experiencing a cultural shift in favor of women’s rights, and, overall, women were not safer during the American occupation. On the contrary, gender equality was deteriorating by several measures. This was to be expected. Armed conflicts are fertile ground for human rights abuses and humanitarian harms. Since the early 2000s, UN reports concluded that women suffer disproportionately during and after war.[16] Injecting financial resources into gender equality programs cannot undo this reality.

To be sure, there were some improvements during the American occupation. Primary and secondary school enrollment for girls grew from 10 percent to over 30 percent. Life expectancy increased by nearly ten years for women, exceeding the average global increase of five years over the same period.[17] By the time the United States left, women also represented 27 percent of the Afghan Parliament.[18] However, those who benefited from healthcare, education, and political freedom were overwhelmingly middle-class and upper-class urban residents.

Meanwhile, 71 percent of the Afghan female population lived in rural areas, where violent confrontations, civilian casualties, and income deterioration were constant.[19] For those women, the American presence was a blight, not a blessing.[20] The disillusionment with the results of the American presence, and the way it decided to abandon Afghanistan, led female activists like Mahbooba Seraj, founder of the Afghan Women’s Network, to say that the American withdrawal gave her an “absolute sense of relief.”[21] 

To the untrained eye, $780 million may seem like an enormous amount of money. However, in their piece for Foreign Policy, Jamila Afghani and Yifat Susskind called out American hypocrisy by pointing out that U.S. policymakers used women’s rights to justify perpetuating the war on Afghanistan, while spending one thousand times more on military expenditures than on gender equality initiatives.[22] In other words, the United States invested one thousand times more in activities that harm women by their very nature than in those that help women. In that light, the results described above should not be surprising.

The final sign that Afghan women were a pretext and not a priority for the U.S. government was women’s absence in the negotiation of the U.S.-Taliban peace deal, reached in February 2020. This agreement determined the conditions under which American troops left Afghanistan in 2021. Women’s rights groups demanded a seat at the negotiation table to no avail.[23] Organized Afghan women had expressed their desire for peace and even launched protests for it in Helmand in 2018; however, they reproached the United States for exchanging human rights for a quick withdrawal.[24] They called for the settlement to recognize women’s sacrifices during the war, as well as their potential contributions to rebuilding the country, and to embed in the peace deal the normative changes that ensured women’s rights in Afghan law.[25] The final deal focused on orderly departure and preventing terrorist attacks. It did not mention gender equality or the elimination of gender violence once, even though targeted killings of women tripled in 2020 compared to 2019.[26]

Now that the Taliban regime is back, opinion leaders in America discuss how the U.S. government could save women’s rights in Afghanistan vis-à-vis the new regime. Some keep imagining that a continued American presence would have safeguarded women. In that debate, what is missing again is Afghan women. It relies on the false premise that they are passive victims needing protection and ignores the damage American presence caused to women’s lives. The fact is that the United States did not invent the women’s movement in Afghanistan. Afghan females obtained the right to vote a year earlier than their American counterparts.[27] The key to emancipation from repressive gender norms under the Taliban must come, first and foremost, from these same women. 

The United States must ensure that it will never again use women’s lives to validate its geopolitical objectives. American voters in the future should recognize that, where repressive regimes jeopardize women’s rights, two wrongs cannot make a right; foreign military intervention cannot sustainably promote gender equality. At the same time, the U.S. government now has the responsibility to genuinely help women as they recover from twenty years of war and resist Taliban oppression. 

In April 2021, President Biden affirmed that America would back Afghan women through humanitarian and diplomatic support.[28] America is indebted to Afghan women, and it has finally chosen appropriate means of repayment. Just last March, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) announced that the United States had spent $720 million in aid for Afghans since August 2021 and explicitly said that those funds should reach girls.[29] Nevertheless, it did not specify how it would achieve that, considering the increasing needs of the Afghan people. The Afghan government’s revenue heavily depended on foreign aid. After the Taliban took power, the international community froze most of the country’s assets and blocked its economy, pushing Afghan men and women into a desperate situation.[30] To revert this catastrophe, the United States and its allies will need to find a way to collaborate with the Taliban administration and get the Afghan economy working again, while maintaining international pressure in defense of human rights. More importantly for women and girls, the acute humanitarian situation in Afghanistan demands that substantial resources reach local women’s organizations, especially in the areas most affected by the conflict. They should be the ones to identify women’s needs and define how funds should be spent. Lastly, if the United States is truly concerned about the Taliban’s treatment of women, it should support multilateral and non-governmental organizations that can provide credible oversight—something the United States itself is now clearly unable to do. 

About the Author

Brianda Romero Castelán is an M.A. in Global Affairs candidate at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. She is a Kerry Fellow and Fulbright Scholar. Her interests lie in the intersection of development and human rights. Brianda previously worked in foreign affairs and economic promotion with the Government of Mexico, and she holds a B.A. in International Relations from Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.

Endnotes

1. “Text: Laura Bush on Taliban Oppression of Women,” The Washington Post, November 17, 2001, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/laurabushtext_111701.html; April W. Palmerlee, “The Situation of Women in Afghanistan,” U.S. Department of State, March 28, 2002, https://2001-2009.state.gov/g/wi/9118.htm; “User Clip: Rep. Carolyn Maloney wears burka on House floor (discussing Taliban treatment of Afghan women),” C-SPAN, https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4645885/user-clip-rep-carolyn-maloney-wears-burka-house-floor; Edwin Chen and Maura Reynolds, “Bush Says War on Terror Led to Women’s Freedom” Los Angeles Times, March 13, 2004, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-mar-13-na-bush13-story.html; United States Senate, “Afghan Women and Girls: Building The Future Of Afghanistan. Joint Hearing before the Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South and Central Asian Affairs and The Subcommittee on International Operations and Organizations, Human Rights, Democracy, and Global Women's Issues of the Committee on Foreign Relations United States Senate,” Government Publishing Office, February 23, 2010, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-111shrg61655/html/CHRG-111shrg61655.htm; Rose Gordon Sala, “Sec. of State Clinton: U.S. continues to stand by Afghan women,” NBC News, July 9, 2012, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/sec-state-clinton-u-s-continues-stand-afghan-women-flna871811; Cherith Norman Chalet, “Remarks at a UN Security Council Briefing on Afghanistan,” United States Mission to the United Nations, July 26, 2019, https://usun.usmission.gov/remarks-at-a-un-security-council-briefing-on-afghanistan/.

2. Human Rights Watch, “Afghanistan: Taliban Deprive Women of Livelihoods, Identity,” Human Rights Watch, January 18, 2022, https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/01/18/afghanistan-taliban-deprive-women-livelihoods-identity; United Nations, “Experts decry measures to ‘steadily erase’ Afghan women and girls from public life,” UN News, last edited January 17, 2022, https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/01/1109902.

3. "The US War in Afghanistan: 1999 – 2021," Council of Foreign Relations, 2021, https://www.cfr.org/timeline/us-war-afghanistan.  

4. “Joint Resolution to authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States,” 107th Congress, October 19, 2002, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-107publ40/html/PLAW-107publ40.htm; “Text: Laura Bush on Taliban Oppression of Women,” The Washington Post.

5. Tazeen M. Ali, “The 20-Year Media Spectacle of Saving Afghan Women,” Religion and Politics, September 14, 2021, https://religionandpolitics.org/2021/09/14/the-20-year-media-spectacle-of-saving- afghan-women/.

6. Barbara Sprunt, “There's a Bipartisan Backlash to How Biden Handled the Withdrawal from Afghanistan,” NPR, August 17, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/08/16/1028081817/congressional-reaction-to-bidens-afghanistan-withdrawal- has-been-scathing. 

7. The USSR’s push to “emancipate” Muslim women in Central Asia can be traced back to the Bolsheviks. Kassenova and Rukhelman explain that, right after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the USSR took over central Asian territories and conformed the republics of Kazakhstan, Kirgizia, Turkmenia, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. The researchers contend that “the imposition of Soviet power proved highly disruptive to the traditional ways of life in these republics, which had been dominated for centuries by Muslim beliefs and practices.” Lacking an indigenous proletariat as the support base of the new regime, the region’s women became surrogates for that proletariat. The “emancipation” of Central Asia’s women, whom Lenin saw as “the most enslaved of the enslaved,” became a central pillar of the Soviet efforts in the region. This pattern would be repeated in Afghanistan. According to Nunan, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, official Soviet feminist groups like the Committee for Soviet Women (CSW) took the opportunity to export women’s emancipation models envisaged for Central Asia communist countries in the 1930s—particularly the hujum model that had been applied to Uzbekistan—to Afghanistan. This included outlawing the use of the bail and pushing for women’s economic and political participation. In June 1982, Afghan women’s groups were even flown from Kabul to Moscow to “discuss their liberation” with the CSW. Moreover, the USSR supported the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) and backed the government of Nur Mohammed Taraki who, in the words of Samar, began utilizing women’s rights as a political tool. This author contends that, rather than bringing about long-term empowerment for women, the PDPA regime promoted superficial changes and implemented its programs by force. The party also portrayed statistics in manipulative ways. For instance, it emphasized the high rates of Afghan women enrolled in universities and ignored that part of it was the result of decreasing numbers of Afghan males enrolled, as many had left Kabul to escape execution by the ruling communist regime. Like the United States, the USSR also decided to abandon Afghanistan when it became clear that it did not have a chance at vanishing the Mujahideen and the financial burden of the conflict started to weigh too heavily on the Soviet economy. Also like the United States, the USSR did not consider women’s rights in the conditions it negotiated for withdrawal, nor did it attempt to soften the impact that the fall of the communists and the rise of the Taliban would have on women’s lives; Nargis Kassenova and Svetlana Rukhelman, “The Thorny Road to Emancipation: Women in Soviet Central Asia,” Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, last modified March 8, 2019, https://daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu/insights/thorny-road-emancipation-women-soviet-central-asia; Timothy Nunan, “Under A Red Veil: Staging Afghan Emancipation in Moscow,” The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 38, 2011, pp. 30-34; Sima Samar, “Feminism, Peace, and Afghanistan,” Journal of International Affairs 72, no. 2, September 2019, https://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/feminism-peace-and-afghanistan.

8. Aisha Ahmad, “Afghan Women: The State of Legal Rights and Security,” Policy Perspectives 3, no. 1, 2006, pp. 28.

9. Ahmad, “Afghan Women: The State of Legal Rights and Security,” pp. 28, 29.

10. Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Fatima Faizi and NajimRahim, “Afghan Women Fear the Worst, Whether War or Peace Lies Ahead,” The New York Times, April 18, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/18/world/asia/women-afghanistan-withdrawal-us.html.

11. Amnesty International, “The World’s Worst Places to be a Woman,” Amnesty International, June 17, 2020, https://www.amnestyusa.org/the-worlds-worst-places-to-be-a-woman/.

12. “Global Database on the Prevalence of Violence Against Women,” World Health Organization, https://srhr.org/vaw-data/data?region=&region_class=&countries%5B%5D=AFG&violence_type=ipv. 

13. “Women and Men Call For Peace and Gender Equality, Reveals Promundo and UN Women's Study on Gender Relations in Afghanistan,” Promundo, January 2019 https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/women-and-men-call-for-peace-and-gender-equality-reveals-promundo-and-un-womens-study-on-gender-relations-in-afghanistan-300785399.html.

14. “CPIA gender equality rating (1=low to 6=high): Afghanistan,” The World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IQ.CPA.GNDR.XQ?name_desc=false&locations=AF.

15. Afghanistan: Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict Annual Report 2020, UNAMA, February, 2021, https://unama.unmissions.org/sites/default/files/afghanistan_protection_of_civilians_report_2020_revs3.pdf. 

16. “Resolution 1325,” United Nations Security Council, last modified October, 2000, https://peacemaker.un.org/node/105; “Women Suffer Disproportionately during and after War, Security Council Told during Day-Long Debate on Women, Peace and Security,” United Nations Security Council, October 29, 2003, https://www.un.org/press/en/2003/sc7908.doc.htm.

17. “Life expectancy at birth Afghanistan, female (years) - Afghanistan” The World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.FE.IN?end=2017&locations=AF&most_recent_value_desc=true&start=2001.

18. “Proportion of seats held by women in national parliaments (%),” The World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SG.GEN.PARL.ZS.

19. Afghanistan Living Conditions Survey: 2016 – 17,” Islamic Republic of Afghanistan Central Statistics Organization, 2018, https://washdata.org/sites/default/files/documents/reports/2018-07/Afghanistan%20ALCS%202016- 17%20Analysis%20report.pdf, 25.

20. Anand Gopal, “The Other Afghan Women,” The New Yorker, September 13, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/the-other-afghan-women.

21. A Martinez, “Afghan Woman Says It's A Relief That The U.S. Is Gone. That Chapter Is Over,” NPR, August 31, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/08/31/1032738353/afghan-woman-says-its-a-relief-that-the-u-s-is-gone-that-chapter-is-over. 

22. Jamila Afghani and Yifat Susskind, “Afghan Women Aren’t liberated by Humanitarian Catastrophe,” Foreign Policy, January 2022, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/31/afghanistan-united-states-aid-women-taliban-humanitarian-crisis/.

23. Masooma Rahmaty, “On International Women’s Day, A Closer Look at the Missing Voices of Women in Afghan Peace Talks,” IPI Global Observatory, https://theglobalobservatory.org/2019/03/international-womens-day-missing-voices-women-afghan-peace-talks/.

24. Malaka Gharib, “'This Is Not The Way': Afghan Women Push Back On U.S.-Taliban Peace Talks,” NPR, https://www.wjct.org/uncategorized/2019/03/this-is-not-the-way-afghan-women-push-back-on-u-s-taliban-peace-talks/; Mohammad Stanekzai, “Afghan women launch rare protest for peace in Taliban stronghold,” Reuters, March 29, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-protests/afghan-women-launch-rare-protest-for-peace-in-taliban-stronghold-idUSKBN1H50UU.

25. “For the Afghan Peace Process to Work, Women Must be Involved,” United States Institute for Peace, October 29, 2018, https://www.usip.org/publications/2018/10/afghan-peace-process-work-women-must-be-involved.

26. Heather Barr, “A crucial moment for women’s rights in Afghanistan,” Human Rights Watch, March 5, 2020, https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/03/05/crucial-moment-womens-rights-Afghanistan; Masooma Rahmaty, “The Exclusion of Women’s Voices from Afghan Peace Talks Remains the Norm,” IPI Global Observatory, March 30, 2021, https://theglobalobservatory.org/2021/03/exclusion-womens-voices-afghan-peace-talks-remains-norm/.

27. Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Fatima Faizi and Najim Rahim, “Afghan Women Fear the Worst, Whether War or Peace Lies Ahead,” The New York Times, April 18, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/18/world/asia/women-afghanistan-withdrawal-us.html.

28. “Remarks by President Biden on the Way Forward in Afghanistan,” The White House,  last edited April 14, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/04/14/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-way-forward-in-afghanistan/.

29. USAID, “United States Announces Additional Humanitarian Assistance for the People of Afghanistan,” USAID, March 31, 2022, https://www.state.gov/united-states-announces-additional-humanitarian-assistance-for-the-people-of-afghanistan/.

30. Ellen Ioanes, “US policy is fueling Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis,” Vox, January 22, 2022, https://www.vox.com/2022/1/22/22896235/afghanistan-poverty-famine-winter-humanitarian-crisis-sanctions.