Gender Apartheid Forcibly Displace Afghans
In 2021, the premature withdrawal of NATO forces from Afghanistan enabled the Taliban and other regional and global terrorist groups to topple the democratically elected government of Afghanistan. One of the key achievements of the international community between 2001-2021 was the empowerment of Afghan women and girls. Thanks to American taxpayers under four U.S. administrations, for example, a record number of Afghan girls went back to school or enrolled in public and private universities across Afghanistan.
Moreover, the Afghan government established a ministry of women’s affairs, coordinating and implementing gender-sensitive policies aimed at developing women leadership. This soon delivered results, as an increasing number of qualified Afghan women were appointed in leadership positions, including as ministers, deputy ministers, and ambassadors. At the same time, the Afghan Parliament used to convene with a higher percentage of female representatives, 27.3 percent, than the legislative bodies of many of the most established democracies, including the U.S. Congress (15.2 percent) and British Parliament (19.7 percent).
Consequently, public health increasingly improved in the years before 2021. In 2002, only 9 percent of Afghans lived within a one-hour walk of a health facility. By 2016, that figure had jumped to more than 57 percent of the population, enabling women to seek and receive medical treatment. At the same time, the number of trained midwives present at birth more than tripled, reducing maternal mortality rates. In 2013 alone, more than 150,000 babies were delivered by skilled birth attendants.
Tragically, however, since 2021, the Taliban have passed over 100 decrees and edicts, denying Afghan women their basic human rights, including secondary education, tertiary education, medical education, employment, and freedom of movement, among other fundamental personal freedoms. The United Nations Human Rights Council in its 57th session during September 9-October 2011, 2024, expressed “serious concern about the grave, worsening, widespread and systematic oppression of all women and girls in Afghanistan by the Taliban.” The Council added that the militant group “has put in place an institutionalized system of discrimination, segregation, disrespect for human dignity and the exclusion of women and girls through, inter alia, so-called laws such as the recent so-called ‘Law on propagation of virtue and prevention of vice’, edicts, policies and practices targeting women and girls.”
Despite widespread international condemnation of the Taliban’s severe restrictive measures, amounting to gender apartheid as a crime against humanity to be recognized and punished under international, in a latest directive, the Taliban’s leader has just banned medical education for women. With male doctors and nurses banned from treating female patients and with women no longer able to get medical education to do so, Afghan women and girls are now given only one choice: death! This is effectively gender-based genocide, which the international community is morally and treaty-obligated to reverse immediately.
In a recent tweet, outgoing U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken finally called out the Taliban’s gross human rights violations, targeting Afghan women. “The U.S. condemns the Taliban’s discriminatory edicts, which jeopardize the rights and lives of Afghan women and girls,” he said. Most Afghans, including women rights’ activists, strongly reacted to the long-delayed condemnation of the Taliban’s gender apartheid by the outgoing Secretary of State, urging the incoming Trump administration to help rationalize the status quo in Afghanistan, posing tangible threats to the U.S. homeland security, regional stability, and international peace.
For now, however, Afghans have been leaving their places of origin in large numbers, not only due to generalized violence and extreme poverty but also because of the Taliban’s enforcement of gender apartheid. Some eight million Afghans have been displaced since 2021 with thousands, including women and girls, fleeing Taliban-ruled Afghanistan to neighboring Pakistan and Iran. Spending their lifetime savings, most displaced Afghan families enroll their daughters in schools or universities in neighboring countries. Others hope that their daughters will use the basic facilities and opportunities available in Pakistan and Iran to access education opportunities in developed countries and eventually a legal path to resettlement for a secure future.
